Dork Hero: Fibonacci

The Medieval mathematician Fibonacci (Leonardo Bonacci) was born in Pisa in 1170. He introduced the Hindu-Arabic numeral system to Europe. 

Thanks, dude.

-Matt

Tabletop Roleplaying Review: Eldritch Skies

    The first thing you’ve got to know is that chances are, you’ll be reading a newer edition of this book, and it’s meant to be for the “Savage Worlds” rule system. The blurb on the back says it’s for “Cinematic Unisystem,” and that all the rules are contained within, but I’m assuming this is an oversight from when the new edition was printed. You will need “Savage Worlds” if you wish to use the book as is. That said, I don’t think it would take much effort at all to convert this over to any number of game systems, and dropping out any mechanics, it would work just fine as an alternate universe sourcebook for “Call of Cthulhu.”

    That bit of bookkeeping out of the way, let me get on with it.  “Eldritch Skies” is a slightly pulpy Science Fiction game that uses H. P. Lovecraft’s writings as a basis.  It strips away a good deal of who and what came after Lovecraft, trying to stay only with what the man himself wrote (which still includes the creations of some others, like The King in Yellow and the Serpent People).  Lovecraft often read like Gothic horror, but the content was often more in line with Science Fiction, so this works surprisingly well.  The cosmic horror is still present, but it is not as gloomy.  Humanity’s place in the universe is tenuous and unassured, but it isn’t destined for some immediate, ugly end.  This might be a bit odd for many, more used to “Call of Cthulhu’s” darker, constant existential danger.  An “Eldritch Skies” series need not end with everyone dead or insane.  It could very well end up with folks in some pretty good places.  But the universe will still be a dangerous place, filled with extremely alien threats, and like all life forms, Humanity’s time will pass.

    In “Eldritch Skies,” the events of various Lovecraft stories, particularly ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth,’ ‘At the Mountains of Madness,’ and ‘The Shadow Out of Time,’ and some others have happened. The governments of the world became aware of aliens and the forces of the so called Mythos. They became aware of Deep Ones, the Great Race, the Elder Things, and more.  And they began to explore the weird technologies, and weirder ‘magics.’  It didn’t take long for history to take a new path, culminating in the achievement of interstellar flight in 1996. The default time for this game is 2030.  Humanity has been in space for some time.  We’ve discovered some worlds, set up some colonies, made some enemies, and learned some new lessons.  We share the dark with the malevolent and the apathetic.  We scrounge resources and hunt down ancient artifacts to learn new sciences.  It’s a big, dark, weird universe, and it doesn’t care.  There is no light at the end of the tunnel; nobody waiting to rescue us or show us the way.  Some of the life out there doesn’t even seem to know we exist, and that might be the best possible situation.

    I love this setting.  Lovecraft’s more Science Fiction side has often been my preferred, and those few authors who lean in that direction tend to make me happier.  I like space based Science Fiction where the aliens are really alien.  And I enjoy that while this game is dark, and there are dreadful dangers, it is not without joy or hope or excitement.  It is much more how I actually see the universe, empty of the divine, but open for those willing to reach.  And that’s a great place for roleplaying.  It’s the stuff of drama and character.

    Since first hearing about this book a few years back, my imagination has run wild.  It’s a setting I very much want to visit.  I’d love to play, but I’m much more likely to run something in it. There is so much potential, so much to explore.  And that it’s rooted in one of my favorite author’s work, but taking it in such a different direction than is normally done...That’s exciting.

-Matthew J. Constantine

Tabletop Roleplaying Review: Diaspora

    In spite of being into the hobby of Tabletop RPGs since I was a lad back in the 80s, and in spite of being a science fiction nerd, I have never played the grand old game of “Traveller,” not only one of the first commercially available rpgs, but THE Science Fiction game. It’s squarely set in the Asimov/Heinlein/Clarke/Niven side of things (less woo, more tech). I always meant to get around to trying it, but never did. Then a few years ago, I saw a review of “Diaspora” from VSCA Publishing. It grew out of a group’s enjoyment of Traveller, but hunger for a different style of play. They’ve used the Fate system, which I’ve heard a lot about, but haven’t used at all. Generally, it looked like a very group storytelling focused, harder Science Fiction game than is typical; and that made me curious.

    I’ve skimmed it a few times, reading a couple chapters several times over the years since I bought it. But this time around, I decided to get serious and really read it thoroughly. And that became a strange trip. Early on, reading about system creation and character creation, I kept thinking; “stop everything! I want to grab some friends and start playing this game right now.” But then, as I got into the ‘mini-game’ sections about melee, space, and social combat...my excitement kinda died, and reading the final section of the book was almost an afterthought.

    The system and character creation segments are great, and I very much want to use them in a game at some point. What makes it different from many games I’ve seen is that it’s such a group effort. The group, including the referee/game master/what have you, all take part in the creation of the setting you’re going to play in (a small collection of linked star systems called a ‘Cluster’).  Each person takes some ownership over a system, and as a table, you all make choices and forge the relationships between those star systems.  This is where tech levels and resources are figured out.  A player roles for certain numbers, but then interprets those numbers in whatever way makes sense.  There is a great little example, where they present a set of rolled statistics for a system, then show multiple variations on what that might mean.  You could easily have two players roll exactly the same numbers, but come up with completely different systems when they interpret what those numbers mean.  I like that a lot.

Then, with those systems as a background, you all create your characters. And part of character creation involves linking yours to another, so that while not every character has a direct connection to every other character, the group as a whole is linked in some way (like a chain).  I also really like that the characters don’t start out as low level schlubs who have to crawl and beg and fight to be able to gain enough power to do anything of note.  You’re playing characters that are important people, interesting people, shapers, doers, legend makers.  If you take the a skill at what they call ‘apex’ level (and you will take one at that), you’re not just good at something, you’re legendary.  You’re the neurosurgeon who was brought in when the president had a brain tumor.  You’re the actor who keeps winning the top award for performance in the 3D Vids.  You’re the barroom brawler who rose to be Zero-G boxing champion of the Antares system.  You’re the soft-spoken politician who swept the planet in a grassroots campaign of reform.  Essentially, you’re playing important people.  Not necessarily famous, but important to how the future of the cluster is shaped.

Then the game lost me.  Once it got past the creation of the setting and the characters, it gets into plug-in mini-games for determining various types of conflict.  I didn’t care for any of them, particularly, and I don’t care for the extremely ‘plugged-in’ feeling of them.  It’s almost like in a lot of older computer rpgs, where your party icon might be wandering around a large map, then you come across a monster and it zooms in to a little tactical map and do a totally different kind of game.  I didn’t like it in computer games.  I really don’t like it in a tabletop game.  Combat tends to be one of my least favorite parts of a game, because in a lot of systems it stalls the story.  These plug-in games seem to do that on another level.

So I did what I find myself doing so often. I mentally edited things.  I started looking at it like a salad bar; take what I like and leave the rest.  There’s so much good stuff about ‘the table’ having control.  A lot of stuff encouraging group connection and determination.  The way system and character creation is done, you might not even have a game master when you sit down to the table.  And I could see the game master job changing hands multiple times during a campaign.  That’s kind of exciting.  I like when players and their characters are drivers of the story and plot.  But I don’t see myself running or getting together a group for Diaspora as it is.  I think it will be like some other games with interesting mechanics I’ve read.  It will inform how I run a different game.  It does make me interested in other Fate games, as the mechanics for that seem very easy and intuitive.  I’ve heard very good things about “Mindjammers,” and could see using some of the better elements of “Diaspora” with that or a game like it.

-Matthew J. Constantine

Tabletop Roleplaying Review: RuneQuest 2nd Edition

    I cut my teeth on “Worlds of Wonder” from Chaosium, which used their Basic Roleplaying System. That’s the same core game mechanic (rules) as “Call of Cthulhu,” “Stormbringer,” and of course, “RuneQuest.”  And I know that I used to flip through the "RuneQuest" books when I was first starting out, looking for little ideas and variations I could use in my own games. But I don’t think I ever really embraced the game or its world, Glorantha.

    When I heard that the folks at Moon Design were working with Chaosium, including some of the original developers, to bring back the classic edition of the game, I figured I had to chip in, so I supported their Kickstarter campaign. My hardcover copy recently arrived and I’ve been picking through it for the last week.

The first thing I noticed is that this game is very much of its time. Now, I don’t mean that to be too harsh, but as I read through it, I was reminded of a lot of the things about early roleplaying games (rpgs) that were problematic or frustrating for me. Thankfully, the core mechanic of this game is fairly easy and intuitive. But explanations can get a bit obtuse, and frankly, the game is far, far more ‘crunchy’ than I enjoy. (Crunchy is a term applied to games with more complicated, often math heavy rules). There are still some pretty strong traces of strategy games and miniature combat rules floating through the book.  That’s fine for folks who are into that kind of thing, and the gods know, "D&D" is still sick with it.  But it’s not my thing, and I don’t feel like it’s as present in some of the other Basic Roleplaying System games ("Call of Cthulhu" being the one I’ve had the most experience with). I kept finding myself thinking; “well, I wouldn’t use that,” or “I’d cut that whole bit out.” Not that there’s anything wrong with modifying rules to fit your style, I just found myself doing more mental editing of these rules than I’ve done to any in a long time.

    The second thing that struck me about "RuneQuest" that I really didn’t remember from reading it as a lad is that it’s a Bronze Age game, not a Medieval game. It’s a very, very High Fantasy Bronze Age game.  Magic and gods are real, frequent, and important to everyday life. There are parts of it that feel almost like Tolkien’s “Silmarillion,” they’re so out there. And while there are obvious callbacks to Tolkien and European mythology, the setting has its own vibe going on. There are hints of Sumerian and Greek, bits of maybe Mesoamerican, and other stuff that’s just pure fantasy. In this High Fantasy/High Magic world, there are lots of different intelligent species, and things we’re not used to being intelligent that can talk and do other things. It’s certainly not my usual type of Fantasy setting, having more of Narnia than expected. But it could be interesting for a change of pace. It’s probably the closest to a "Dungeons & Dragons" game I’d likely run (well, maybe "Earthdawn"…). But at least it doesn’t have levels and alignments.

    Overall, "RuneQuest 2nd Edition" is a nice little look back at the early days of gaming, and a much better alternative to "D&D." But it’s also a reminder of how far games have come, and I don’t know how likely I am to ever run it. Too much number crunching, too much paperwork, and maybe a bit too much regimentation. Still, I find the Glorantha setting intriguing. It’s very much not the kind of Fantasy I tend to like, and very much not the sort I’d be inclined to run a game in. But it has enough of that ‘old school gaming’ vibe, without the terrible base mechanics of "D&D" (or "Rolemaster," or some of the others of the era). I don’t know. Maybe, if I had a group of friends who wanted something more in the vein of 70s rpgs...Maybe I’d give it a go. I’d still probably strip some of the more unwieldy bits.

-Matthew J. Constantine

Comic Review: Wonton Soup

    A couple years ago, I read James Stokoe’s awesome “Godzilla: Half-Century War” and knew that here was a comic artist/writer to watch. A lot of comic artists think they can write and are totally wrong, so it’s nice to see one who actually can. With “Wonton Soup” Stokoe lets his imagination and bent sense of humor off the chain. Someone called it a mix of “Iron Chef” and John Carpenter’s “Dark Star.” OK. I’ll give him that. But I also see a lot of the kinda cruel humor of “Lexx,” too.

    The story is about a couple of space truckers, one a prodigy chef who’s left school to taste life, the other a spaced out sex fiend losing himself in narcotics and anyone (or thing) that’s willing. They go around getting into trouble, eating and smoking whatever they can get their hands on. It’s stoner comedy, with meta references and a wild sense of fun (tinged with some bitterness).  The art is surprisingly vibrant for black & white, with Stokoe’s usual sense of strange.

    My only complaint about the book is that it’s sort of food porn, but the food is all Dr. Seuss nonsense.  I mean, it makes sense in the context of the story, but part of me kept wanting the cooking scenes and food parts to be more serious and real. Probably a completely unfair expectation, but I couldn’t help it. I found the sometimes extensive food porn parts less exciting because I couldn’t sample anything or use any of the techniques myself. Silly, huh?

    Years ago, I worked with an artist to write a short comic called “ProxyFight.” We worked long and hard on the six pages. Both of us were fans of “Lexx” and other weird science fiction films, TV shows, and books. Reading “Wonton Soup” made me so nostalgic for my time working on “ProxyFight” and all the other stuff the artist and I had planned to follow up that short with. Alas, that never happened, but I still have those memories.  By far the best collaborative experience I’ve had. It made reading "Wonton Soup" oddly personal.

-Matthew J. Constantine

Comic Review: American Barbarian

“I’m heading out to kick some more ass, but I need an army...Anybody want to come with me?”

    If you enjoy the wilder side of comics, you have to look to Tom Scioli.  Clearly an artistic descendant of Jack Kirby, Scioli’s storytelling is balls-out crazy. I first came across his work on Godland, a wild take on The Fantastic Four.  But after meeting him at a convention, I had to read The Myth of 8-Opus, which was marvelously weird.  And then...And then he took on Transformers VS G.I. Joe.  Holy Mother of Crap. I’ve been sitting on American Barbarian for a while, now.  But this week, it was time.

“I’ve got God’s balls right here!”

    Like some kind of 70s, Saturday morning cartoon, jacked up on some hard drugs, and pumped up with unchained comic book imagination, American Barbarian tells an odd tale. The red, white, and blue haired warriors who have traditionally defended a good kingdom have produced an ultimate incarnation.  When a giant, evil, Egyptian Pharaoh with tanks for feet roars across the world, only one man can stand in his way.  Well, one man and a bunch of other weirdos he recruits for the efforts.

“R-E-V-E-N-G-E-!-!-!”

    It kept reminding me of weird stuff like the Thundarr The Barbarian cartoon and Killraven comics.  But with Scioli’s particular brand of over the top weirdness. It’s a refreshing bit of fun that absolutely revels in the comic book medium, blazing with colorful splash pages and likes of insane dialog.  A must read.

-Matthew J. Constantine

Comic Review: Battling Boy

    Paul Pope is one of those names in the comic field I’ve heard bandied about for many years, but I don’t think I’ve ever read anything from him.  I saw Battling Boy go by once upon a time and purchased it with little reason. I finally picked it up this week and gave it a go.

    Playing with various comic tropes and variations on classic characters has become almost a subgenre in itself.  This one takes us to a world kinda like our own, but with a dieselpunk twist. A major metropolis (here called Arcopolis) is under siege by a chaotic wave of various monsters. It is protected by a Rocketeer-type hero, but things don’t go well. In the meantime, the son of a Thor-like god-hero is nearing his coming of age, and is sent down to this troubled world to become a man. Pretty simple, but it works. There are a lot of little nods to comic book traditions.

    The art is weird and a bit ugly, but in a charming way. And it’s colorful, with a peculiar color palette. It works fairly well for the story and setting, especially when it comes to the monsters. There is some clever work in the dialog and a pretty good story. If I can complain about anything, it’s that the book doesn’t feel complete. I don’t just mean that it’s open for continuation, but that it feels like it should have been half again as long, with a bit more of a conclusion.  Still, it’s good and worth a read.

-Matthew J. Constantine

Comic Review: Old City Blues 2

    Giannis Milonogiannis takes us back to New Athens, 2049. More cases of cyber-crime hit the city, and the Special Police have to figure it out and take it down. The second volume of this old-school style cyberpunk comic series is more of the same. But that same is some very enjoyable stuff.

    The writing is quick and confident. The art leans far more into the realm of manga/anime than I like, but not so far that I couldn’t make my way through. A lot of Cyberpunk anime draws pretty blatantly from William Gibson specifically among genre titans, and this does the same. I was frequently reminded of Count Zero and some stories from Burning Chrome.  Evil megacorporation; scientist pushing things too far, cyber-psychosis, the slums, cyborgs, and some explosions. But it’s all handled well, and worth reading for genre fans.

-Matthew J. Constantine

Book Review: Old City Blues

    I’m a longtime Cyberpunk nerd.  William Gibson, Blade Runner, the works.  Giannis Milonogiannis dives into the classic tropes of the genre, filtering it through the Cyberpunk anime of the 80s and 90s, without picking up too many of the latter’s bad habits.

    The story is pretty typical of this sort of thing.  Cops VS corporations, corruption and cyborgs, and of course, A.I. and transcendence. But it’s all a lot of fun to read, and with a good use of rough artwork to create a mood. And the setting, a post flood, reconstructed Athens, Greece is certainly different.

    The stories are efficiently told, without seeming too rushed.  It took me back to some of the things I enjoyed in Cyberpunk years ago. If you’re into it, too, check out Old City Blues.

-Matthew J. Constantine

Book Review: Cthulhu’s Reign

    “When the stars are right…”  Throughout the ever expanding Lovecraftian circle of weird fiction, there is an impending doom.  People who set themselves against the powers of the Great Old Ones and various cosmic menaces are fighting a holding action, a war of delays.  Eventually, the Universe will shift and Humanity as we know it will fall.  In some versions, we will become so alien ourselves that we will simply meld into the inhuman world to come.  In other versions, we will be swatted away like gnats.  But that doom lurks inevitably in our future.  With the Darrell Schweitzer edited anthology Cthulhu’s Reign, that future has come.  Here are stories set during or after that ending of all our tomorrows.

    After recently reading the really solid anthology Rehearsals For Oblivion, I was surprised and happy to find another anthology filled with solid stories. Not every one was a classic, but I don’t think there was a dog in the bunch. I’m not a fan of authors playing with tense, I’ll admit. So Mike Allen’s ‘Her Acres of Pastoral Playground’ didn’t thrill me.  I’m a traditionalist.  I like third person or first person, past tense; and first person only when done well.  But that’s my own literary prejudice.  Anyway, many of the stories were quite good, capturing very different moods and different versions of life under the crushing heel of apocalyptic revelations.  Brian Stableford’s ‘The Holocaust of Ecstasy’ is probably the weirdest, most out there of the stories.  Fred Chappell’s ‘Remnants’ leans further into the realm of outright science fiction than you often get with Mythos stories, which I enjoyed.

    If you’re into Cosmic Horror or Apocalyptic Fiction, this book has plenty to enjoy.  It’s a different take on themes Lovecraftian, a different angle to enjoy the Mythos from.  And there are lots of interesting ideas in it for readers who also enjoy tabletop roleplaying in the sandbox of Lovecraft and his disciples, as I do.

-Matthew J. Constantine

Book Review: The Purple Sapphire

    There’s been a lot of back & forth about H.P. Lovecraft being racist. There was a kerfuffle a while back about getting his bust removed from the World Fantasy Award. Was Lovecraft racist? Yeah. Read his letters. He says some awful stuff. Stuff that was fairly in keeping with guys like him, from his background and geography, at his particular point in history. And that racism leaked into his fiction, mostly in the guise of sinister, swarthy foreigners. You could read a lot of his work and unless you’re looking for it, miss those dashes of racism. The same can not be said for other writers. Robert W. Chambers, who wrote the fantastically haunting collection of short stories “The King in Yellow,” for example, also wrote the terribly racist (not to mention goofy and overwrought)  “The Slayer of Souls.”  And then there’s John Taine’s “The Purple Sapphire.”  Wow. Lovecraft’s racism seems to me to have been the product of a sheltered upbringing, a dreadful time in American race relations, and general ignorance. John Taine’s racism seems similar to that classically British, condescending contempt for all people not “like us.”  

    In this particular book, the racism is directed primarily, and persistently against Asians, particularly Tibetans. There is so much talk of them being “filthy,” “dirty,” “covered in filth,” etc. that I thought there might have been some kind of cultural reference (Taine’s culture) that I was missing. But I don’t think so. In the author’s eyes, as seen through his characters’ eyes, Tibetans are dirty, ugly, filth covered sub-humans. And I’ll tell you, that gets mighty old, mighty quick. I’m used to swallowing a bit of old timey bigotry. It’s unfortunately part of the package when you’re a fan of the pulps and movie serials of the early 20th century. But this book goes beyond the usual levels. It reminded me of when I tried to read “Heart of Darkness,” but was defeated by the rampant hatred of non-whites that was clearly coming from the author, and not just a character. At the end of the day, the racism was enough to spoil this book. But it didn’t stop there.

    Getting past the chauvinism, it’s also a pretty terrible book. At nearly two hundred pages, there’s almost no story. There are long, tedious sequences of characters talking in a strange, stilted way that feels like a mid-level melodrama from the dawn of sound in motion pictures. You can tell the author thinks he’s writing clever dialog. But unless it’s packed with amazingly witty references that went over my head, it’s not clever. It’s just stilted and lame.

    The only saving grace this novel has, if it has one, is that the female lead is surprisingly useful and competent. I was struck on numerous occasions by how unlike many contemporary female characters she was. None of the characters were especially interesting or well realized. But she was on an even level with the two male leads. So, there was that. And that alone.

    To sum up; this book sucked.

-Matthew J. Constantine

Musings on the Lovecraftian Universe: Part 1

    What follows is not meant to be a scholarly exploration or dissertation. S.T. Joshi and others far, far more qualified and eloquent than myself covered any territory I might wish to navigate. Instead, it is simply my random thoughts about the Mythos (some call it the Cthulhu Mythos; Lovecraft called it Yogsothery; I’ll almost certainly use different names on different occasions). In part, this is to solidify or hash out some of my own interpretations that might appear within my fiction and in Lovecraftian roleplaying games I might run. And in part, as with all these blog posts, I hope (usually fruitlessly) to instigate some conversation on the topic. I called this “Part 1” because I assume I’ll want to revisit the subject at some point.

    You will no doubt notice that my ideas of the Mythos are heavily colored by the Call of Cthulhu tabletop roleplaying game. Absolutely. And I also don’t worry too much about ‘canon.’ This is true. Like Lovecraft, I tend to pick and choose, lift what I like, drop what I don’t, and re-combine it into something more to my liking. Any writer, or artist, or musician does the same thing. They’re not always honest about that. I stand on the shoulders of giants (and dwarfs, and mortal men).

    First up, some thoughts on hierarchy, gods, monsters, and the nature of the Universe. Lovecraft postulated a specific type of universe in his fiction. He broke with a good deal of horror tradition by putting forth a universe where there was no Divine.  The God of the Bible is a myth, and nothing more.  He takes that one step further and puts Humanity in a universe where we are completely alone, just a biological infection clinging to life on the surface of a rock ball, hurtling through a soulless void.  For some, that idea would be bad enough (I actually find it exhilarating and liberating, but that’s another post).  Lovecraft then populates the universe with beings so alien, so powerful, so mind blasthingly outside of our understanding that they seem to be gods; are worshiped by some as gods.  But they are not gods.  The gods of our mythology are at best made up, and at worst, masks pulled over the more terrifying reality.

    There seem to be different strata of these things. Some are powerful on a multiverse level, others are galactic scourges, others dominate worlds, and yet others slink in the shadows, hunting for scraps. Cthulhu, the most famous of these things, is to my mind nothing more than a very ancient, very powerful, very strange being from another world. Likely part of or a last remnant of some ancient, ultra-alien civilization. Some say he is trapped, but I think it more likely that he simply sleeps, under the ocean (or in a pocket dimension) in a weird city, filled with alien architecture. And while he sleeps, psychic projections of his dreams have tainted Humanity, especially the more sensitive and artistically prone, leading to cults and myths and even some ‘revealed’ knowledge. But Cthulhu isn’t the chief of these aliens; he isn’t a god, he isn’t the ultimate evil. Whatever he has planned, no matter how unfathomable to humans it might be, it is still the plan of a thinking being. He/it may not conform to the physics we understand, but he conforms to some deeper, physical truth we haven’t grasped. Like all the ‘beings’ in the Mythos, he exists in the Universe and follows its rules. The rules only seem to be broken due to our lack of understanding. Once again, I cite Arthur C. Clarke, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”  In the case of Cthulhu (and many of the other alien beings/species in the Mythos), there is some technology, some scientific understanding that is either beyond our current understanding, or more troubling, beyond our capability to understand (at least with our current physical brains).

    Now, where I’ll probably get controversial is with my take on a few of the others.  Hastur, Shub-Niggurath, Yog-Sothoth, and Azathoth, in particular. I think of these not as beings; not as consciousnesses, but as embodied concepts or forces. Azathoth is blind creation, the Big Bang.  When an atomic bomb is set off, it momentarily communes with Azathoth. Azathoth lives in every star, in the heart of every atom. The ‘Blind Idiot God’ is simply manifest creation, spewing forth into the void. Hastur, on the other hand, is manifest entropy; the chaos of ultimate dissipation; the winding down and crumbling of all things. Shub-Niggurath is the manifestation of biology, of organic life. She is the drive behind certain types of matter coming together and forming into basic life forms, evolving into more complex forms, and spreading throughout the Universe. She is the drive for survival inside all life to its cellular core. And Yog-Sothoth is, in a sense, the binding agent. He is physics; he is reality; he is spacetime. These manifest concepts occasionally coalesce into things more rightly thought of as beings. They become avatars of their associated ‘god.’ The King in Yellow is a shadow, a reflection of Hastur. He is a concept, become flesh. A bringer of chaos and madness; a Typhoid Mary of Entropy. The Black Goat in the Woods is a similar residue of Shub-Niggurath. And when a so called wizard tries to gain Outside knowledge from Yog-Sothoth, he or she taps into an avatar of the concept, perhaps seeing weird glowing spheres or monstrous tentacle things. If, at the core of all reality, there is a burning mass of something, with things dancing around it playing insane music, then that thing is but a bleed-off of the idea of Azathoth; something of flesh and blood (even if it isn’t flesh and blood as we understand it).

    Compared to those manifestations of concepts, beings like Cthulhu, Dagon, or Tsathoggua are almost (I stress almost) comprehensible. Though defying our common understandings of life, they still seem to be individual things, things that are the result of something similar to evolution some kind of environment somewhere else in the Multiverse.  And on a much more relatable level are species not too dissimilar to our own. I don’t just mean Ghouls and Deep Ones, which seem entwined with us in some way; offshoots of a close branch on the evolutionary tree, or something produced by genetic tampering. But things like the Flying Polyps, the Elder Things, the Mi-Go, or the Great Race of Yith are not so unlike us as to be incomprehensible.  They are alien, with alien thoughts and alien feelings.  They may be technologically and culturally very different, possibly much more advanced, but they are just other creatures, such as ourselves, clinging to the faces of planets, trying to survive in a universe that carelessly grinds us all into dust. Their plans, schemes, civilizations, and kingmaking is no less pointless than our own. Perhaps we will never share enough common reference points to be able to satisfactorily communicate or cooperate with them, but we could potentially operate on roughly the same level with a bit of time and development. I suppose the same could be said for Cthulhu and others more on his level, but the scale of time and development would likely be in the billions of years, as opposed to hundreds or thousands.

    Codifying the Mythos is tricky, and perhaps ultimately pointless. It is malleable and changes with each author who dabbles in it. I think that’s part of what makes it so wonderful and strange. The Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game, by the nature of its game mechanics, needed to do just that; to solidify and classify the unimaginable. There are times where that makes some sense in the game, but I feel that once you go beyond species like the Mi-Go or the Deep Ones, you’ve really entered the realm of Clarke’s ultra-tech, where rules of what is and could be break down. How does that play out in a story?  How does that work in a game?  That is up to the author, I guess.

-Matthew J. Constantine

Book Review: Rehearsals for Oblivion: Act I

    Robert W. Chambers wrote a lot, but very little of particular note. It is sad, looking at his work, that he spent most of his efforts creating dated and forgettable fluff, rightfully lost to the ages. But those few worthy nuggets are in his collection, “The King in Yellow.”  H.P. Lovecraft was a fan of Chambers’s weird tales, and borrowed some elements that went on to become core to the overall Lovecraftian (often called Cthulhu) Mythos. The King in Yellow is a figure, possibly an avatar of a Great Old One, and the titular horror at the center of a corrupting play that drives readers, viewers, and actors mad. There are many reasons, but Hastur and The King in Yellow creeped into my mind and became among my favorite bits of the Lovecraft Circle (along with obvious, rock star Nyarlathotep; Shub-Niggurath; and Yog-Sothoth). I especially enjoy the idea that Hastur is manifest entropy. The King in Yellow becomes then an agent of madness, corrupted destiny, and dissipation.

    As I usually note in such reviews, anthologies are, by their nature, a mixed bag. Editor Peter A. Worthy has assembled a pretty darned good collection of tales here. There are a few poems, which I’m totally unqualified to speak to those. I’m essentially tone-def toward poetry. But many of the short stories are very good. Haunting, creeping with strangeness, and touched with occasional bits of beauty. It’s what I want from a book about The King in Yellow.

    Not to say there aren’t a few stories I didn’t love. But I think this is an excellent anthology. My only frustration with the volume is that it’s called “Act I” and the blurb on the back intimates that it is but the first volume in larger collection of stories about the King. Alas, I see no indication that there has been, nor will be an “Act II.” The publishing company, Dimensions Books doesn’t seem to exist anymore (I can’t find any sign of it online, anyway). If Mr. Worthy could assemble such a strong anthology on such a challenging subject, I’d love to see what else he might do. That aside, if you’re a fan of the ever expanding Lovecraft Circle, or if you just like a healthy dose of unsettling strangeness in your horror tales, check this one out.

-Matthew J. Constantine