Thoughts on Running “Horror on the Orient Express”

    I recently did something I’d been debating for a long time. I plunked down the $75. for the new edition of Chaosium’s classic Call of Cthulhu campaign, “Horror on the Orient Express.” I got one of their ‘damaged’ copies which saved quite a few precious pennies. And it’s in fine shape. Looked like it could have come right out of the delivery box at a store. A slight crinkling on the box near one corner is all that could be seen as ‘damage.’ And the box is a monster. It’s over-full, with a daunting amount of material to sift through.

    Here’s the thing, though. I’m not really a pre-made adventure guy. Since I started running roleplaying games when I was a lad, I’ve almost always written my own stories, and improvised the rest. I’ve read published adventures from companies, but usually to get ideas. I’ve played in some, but the best ones didn’t seem pre-made, because the game master (storyguide, DM, whatever) made it his own (I have, sadly, not had a female GM to the best of my knowledge/memory). Once, long ago, I ran the haunted house scenario from the Call of Cthulhu basic book, but I guess I re-worked it enough that the one player familiar with the scenario didn’t recognize it for what it was until the climax. So, I’m worried about the idea of running not just a published adventure, but an entire campaign. The reports I’m seeing on this game is that it takes a year or more to go through the whole thing (real time). That’s huge.

    The obvious thing to do, and what I likely would do, is to run a shorter published campaign or some adventures to get a handle on the process, and on how I would make them my own.  But there, I’m still running into my old problems. I’ve been bad about connecting with the gaming community in my area ever since I moved here 8 years ago. And I haven’t managed to do a good job of convincing my friends to try it (other than a brief, dramatically failed attempt a couple years ago). Yet, the draw of the hobby keeps me going; keeps me hoping and spit-balling.

    So, start small, huh?  OK.  This new version of the campaign has several side adventures that are scattered across time, going all the way back to ancient Rome.  One of the first is set in Victorian London.  That got me to thinking, maybe I could run that side adventure as a kind of preamble.  That’s a start, I guess.

    And, with a scenario set in the late 1800s that leads into the greater Orient Express campaign, it got me to thinking about connections.  One of the challenges that face a lot of RPG groups when a scenario or campaign begins is ‘why are we all together?’  But the Call of Cthulhu RPG takes place, typically, in a time when social groups were common; gentlemen’s clubs and the like.  That presents a solid way to join the characters together.  Add in a few bits, and it’s not too hard to have them be members of a group that’s large enough to use for replacement characters (should the nearly inevitable event of character death/madness happen).  A few more bits, and you could have a club with some ties or interests in the occult.  In the case of “Horror on the Orient Express” it even gives a link across the years between the events of the 1800s and the primary campaign in the 1920s.  And of course, Professor Smith, as another link between the eras, can be linked with the social club.

    Now, the 1890s and 1920s were hardly times of enlightenment.  Women (all women over 21) didn’t get the vote in England until 1928.  But, while that was the reality, and I don’t like to completely shy away from real life evils, making some things a bit more pleasant for potential female players is also a concern.  Since Call of Cthulhu typically favors more intellectual and artistic characters, and those people tend to be on the forefront of social progress, I got to thinking that making an element of the characters’ social club women’s suffrage would be interesting.  I think adding some era-grounded politics will help set the stage.  Especially since there are some red-herrings about communists and the like in the campaign.  Because I always like to dream bigger than I should, it also might work to help set the stage for a future campaign.  If “Horror on the Orient Express” turned out well, I’d love to follow it up with another London based campaign, “Tatters of the King.”  Again, I’m getting ahead of myself, but I love to plant seeds in one story that might bloom in a future story. So, even if I have no idea how this trip on the Orient Express might go or how it might end, I figure I’d try to drop in a few bits to introduce themes from “Tatters of the King.”

    I have no idea if I’ll eventually run this campaign or not.  No idea if it will go the distance, or if it will be successful enough to demand a follow-up.  For now, it’s just a lot of reading and dreaming.  

-Matthew J. Constantine

Book Review: The Rim of the Unknown

    When I was a lad, and first getting into the works of H.P. Lovecraft and other weavers of weird tales, Frank Belknap Long’s name quickly entered my literary world. His story “The Hounds of Tindalos” was one of my favorites from the circle of Mythos writers I tapped into. Years of shopping at my favorite book store (Pro Libris on 3rd Street in Bangor, ME) netted me a lot of Lovecraft related books and collections by authors from that ever growing circle, including several by Long. Like so many of the books I hoarded, I never got around to reading them. Until now.

    With “The Rim of the Unknown” I got a sampling of his work from the late 20s through the mid 50s. A few were clearly of a Lovecraftian bent, especially 1927’s “The Man with a Thousand Legs.” While others felt more like a Ray Bradbury pastiche, like “Fuzzy Head.”  Many of the stores featured the Atomic Age fear (of nuclear annihilation) and hope (of a new, superior breed of humanity) that so marked the mid 20th century Science Fiction. Several of the stories had the Twilight Zone style “twist” endings (“The Cottage,” I’m looking at you!). And there were several stories with that 50s assumption that space flight would just be a thing we did; no big deal.  He also wrote a lot about families and family dynamics.  This seemed a bit odd, considering he was not a family man.  He got married around the age of 60, but never had children.  

    My favorite stories were the ones that tended toward the weirder, more “big idea” Science Fiction side of the spectrum.  “The Trap” was has a very Twilight Zone feel to its plot and resolution.  But the core concept of the alien in it is something kind of special, and I think puts it firmly in the Lovecraft Mythos.  At the end of the volume there are three companion stories that I really, really enjoyed.  “The Great Cold,” “Green Glory,” and “The Last Men” were all written in the mid 30s, and all take place in an extremely distant future of the type envisioned in books like William Hope Hodgson’s “Night Land.”  So far into the future, the Earth is nearly unrecognizable, and what we consider the “natural order” has been disrupted. In this case, Humanity has fallen, to be ruled over by alien (not extraterrestrial) intelligences descended from what we once saw as lowley. Each story looks at Humans living under the yoke of millennia of controlled breeding and institutionalized servitude, and how a thread of what makes us who we are might survive.

    The thing I probably most came away with from this anthology is that Frank Belknap Long was, perhaps, not a great writer.  He was creative.  He was certainly prolific.  But while I sit back and wonder why people aren’t reading Andre Norton, or Robert E. Howard, or some of the other really great talents of Weird, Fantasy, Science Fiction and Horror stories, I understand why Long may have fallen mostly into obscurity.  His prose is acceptable, without being especially artful or impressive.  Many of his tales have a very dated feel, not just in language, but in general concerns.  This might work more as a glimpse at the psychology of the day than as a compelling read.  Go read “The Hounds of Tindalos” (not in this volume), for sure.  It’s great.  Much of this...There’s a reason it’s forgotten.  But for fans of the weird tale, for folks into this kind of fiction, it’s worth a read.  You’ll find things to enjoy throughout. 

-Matthew J. Constantine

What I’m Listening To (3/2/14)

    Though I still find myself listening to M.I.A. while riding the bus, I’ve been listening to a bunch of other stuff while at home.  Due in part to starting up a Call of Cthulhu game, and because I like it, I’ve been cycling through a lot of 20s music, from some Jelly Roll Morton to Eddie Cantor to Josephine Baker.  I knew I had a good deal of music from the time, but I was surprised how easy it was to assemble a 4 hour playlist, especially considering many of the songs are rather short.  Along with the 20s music (some of it 30s), I raided my soundtrack collection, pulling tunes from Cloud Atlas, The Cell, and even Once Upon a Time in the West.  And I’ve been on YouTube listening to some weird electronica in the vein of the sadly unavailable Beyond the Black Rainbow soundtrack.  Black Mountain and Sinoia Caves both share musicians in some complicated Canadian way I don’t understand.  But there are traces of the Black Rainbow sound in there.  More investigation is needed.

    So, here are some of the things I’m listening to this week.

Artist: Die Antwoord
Album: $O$
    Somehow, I stumbled across this group in my net crawling, and found something about them challenging and appealing.  Their Zef style is so off-putting, yet taps into that 80s Cyberpunk spirit I love so much.  "The Street finds its own uses for things."  And the dirty, in your face, middle finger waving music kept me listening.  Are they good?  I don’t think so.  But darn it if some of their tunes aren’t aggressively catchy.  In Your Face, Enter the Ninja, Rich Bitch, and Doos Dronk are all infectious.  And the others keep you going from track to track.  Ninja is actually a pretty good rapper, and Yo-Landi’s weirdass singing works well with the whole package.  This isn’t going to be for everyone.  Even for fans of rap (I’m generally not among them), this stuff is pretty crazy.  This is music I could imagine being performed in a Bartertown bar, with Master-Blaster rocking out in the corner.

Artist: St. Vincent
Album: St. Vincent
    I first found St. Vincent a few years back as a blind buy, and I really enjoyed the album I picked up (Actor).  It reminded me a bit of Laurie Anderson, but there was certainly a unique quality.  Over the last couple years, I’ve picked up more albums (Marry Me, Strange Mercy, and the David Byrne collaboration Love the Giant).  As I listened to more and more of her music, I began to put her in with Devo and well, David Byrne and Talking Heads.  Her music is more experimental and challenging than a simple singer/songwriter.  This is Nerd Rock.  So last week, she put out a new album, the self titled St. Vincent.  Listening to it, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the recent Devo album Something for Everybody.  She even deals with the kinds of emotional dissonance of the digital age Devo touches on.  I’ve listened to the album a couple times through so far, and I’m certainly liking it.  As with the best Nerd Rock, I doubt I ‘get’ half of it.  The music feels smarter than me, if you catch my drift.  It’s not like hearing Celine Dion, where you can guess all the lyrics of the song from the first few lines, or Fergie, where you feel yourself getting dumber while you listen.  I’m going to need more time with it to feel my way through each track.  But my overall feeling is that this is a another winner from a very interesting contemporary musician.

Artist: H.P. Lovecraft
Album: H.P. Lovecraft I
    I always had a taste for the psychedelic music of the 60s and 70s, and the wild imagery they conjure when you let yourself drift off with headphones on.  I’m two steps from Straight Edge and I’ve never dabbled in recreational drugs, but this music still hits a chord with me.  And in the case of the semi-obscure band H.P. Lovecraft, there’s also the added bonus of their tenuous connection to the works of…well, H.P. Lovecraft.  They draw on Lovecraft’s work in much the same way, and with a similar frequency, as Led Zeppelin with J.R.R. Tolkien.  I love the dreamy organ playing, the duel vocals, and the messy guitars.  Wayfaring Stranger and The White Ship are my two favorite tracks.  The White Ship is their epic masterpiece.  It’s a dreamy trip through astral space.  Really listening to it is like meditation, and by the time it ends, I feel more mentally clear than when I started.

    So, that’s some of what’s on my rotation right now.  St. Vincent’s new album has got me in the mood for something a bit different than the harsh, messy rap-beat stuff I’ve been consuming a lot since the beginning of the year.  Maybe, with Spring allegedly on its way, I’ll slide over into the more nostalgic, mellow music I have a tendency to play around this time of year.  I think pulling up H.P. Lovecraft might have been the beginning of that.  Until next time…

-Matt

Matt’s Week in Dork! (2/16/14-2/22/14)

    This ended up being something of a week of rest for me.  Following last week’s crap-ton of awesome crazy, I started this week with a very busy Sunday, preparing and then running my first major tabletop roleplaying session in a long, long time.  I’m always a ball of nerves when it comes to running games, and this was no exception.  In fact, that morning, I was sporting a raging headache and cloudy thinking that made me worry I was going to have to cancel.  Thankfully, it cleared up by around 2PM and the rest of the day and that evening went pretty well.  The next few days, I didn’t do much but zone out and try to sleep.  Reading, sure.  Though I’ve been having a hard time for a while (a few months, I think) with concentrating, thus I haven’t been reading as much as I should.   However, I did knock out a couple Lovecraft-ish tales.  His ‘revisions’ of Elizabeth Berkeley’s The Crawling Chaos and The Green Meadow.  Both stories remind me of Lovecraft’s Dreamlands stories, as well as some of the more flowery and weird writing of C.L. Moore, Clark Ashton Smith, and others.  And I read Hazel Heald’s Winged Death (also with revision from Lovecraft), which was OK.  It had some cool ideas, but it felt a little too much like a wannabe Poe story.  It also features some blatant racism, though from a character we know from the start is an evil bastard.  That was about all I could muster until Thursday morning (the start of a 4 day weekend), when I watched my first movie of the week.

     I was also surprised to find out this week that the HBO show True Detective is apparently dropping a lot of references to one of Lovecraft's inspirations, Robert W. Chambers and his King in Yellow.  This is pretty crazy to me, but pretty awesome.  It's especially weird, because one of the plots in the RPG I'm running (which the party hasn't stumbled upon yet), deals with the King.  Don't know if it will play out, and I don't think anyone in the group is watching the show yet, so it shouldn't be an issue.  It makes me want to watch the show even more, though.

Heroes Two:  Though a pretty good story, this film never reaches ‘classic’ level.  Much of the problem is in the fighting, which though copious, isn’t especially well choreographed.  It looks like they needed to do a few more run-throughs before filming.  That said, I do like the ending, and the weird MURDER VISION that kicks in whenever rebels get whacked in that last fight.  A fine, middle of the road, Shaw Bros. kung fu flick.

The Jazz Singer:  Elephant in the room, first.  Yeah, Al Jolson does blackface in this movie, and yeah, that’s really f’ed up.  I knew it would happen, but it was still horrifying when it finally did, and really sours the whole movie.  Now, it’s not done with the contemptuous maliciousness of Birth of a Nation, but that doesn’t make it OK.  It also  comes out of nowhere and goes nowhere.  Why is it even in the movie?  The only explanation I’ve got for that is it’s what Jolson was known for, so they worked it into the film.  There’s no plot reason it needs to be there.  And I can imagine someone who isn’t familiar with blackface being very confused by why he suddenly slathers on make-up to sing two songs, nobody seems to notice or comment on it, and there are no contextual clues for why it happens.  OK.  All that aside, I was mostly interested in the film because I knew it was a pioneering effort in the addition of sound to motion picture.  It isn’t a full fledged ‘talkie,’ though.  The musical numbers are synched, and occasionally also have synched dialog accompanying them.  However, the rest of the film is a standard silent film, with title cards.  The story, about a Jewish kid growing up in New York City, who dreams of being a jazz performer, is sweet and somewhat emotional.  Honestly, I was shocked at how openly Jewish the story was, too, as I’m a little more used to heavy Christian dominance in pre-60s films.  And in spite of the skin-crawling that accompanied the blackface scenes, the finale where he has to deal with his career or his parents had a lot of heart.  It is sad that, like Birth of a Nation, this momentous occasion in the history of film has to be tainted with some rather egregious racism, but unlike that Ku Klux Klan love letter, the Jazz Singer may be flawed, but does not feel like it comes from an evil place, only a misguided one.

    Thursday night, Ben and I went over to Cinema Arts to check out a special screening of Knights of Badassdom, a low budget comedy about live action role players.  I’d seen the trailer quite a while back, and according to the woman hosting the screening, it had been held up for a couple years due to some legal issues.  The showing was weird, because the audience was full of LARP people, which I did not expect.  I guess it was like seeing the premier of a comic movie at a comic convention.  I don’t think anyone was in costume, though some of the people look like their normal wardrobe is costume.  Still, other than a few people unable to keep their boisterous nerdiness in check, it was a pretty good crowd.  They laughed a lot more than I did, and I guess there must have been a lot of in-jokes I didn’t get.  As a long time tabletop gamer, I’ve been aware of live action gaming from pretty early on.  It’s a weird combination of D&D (ugh!) and Historic Reenacting.  What I was exposed to most was the Vampire LARP people, who tended to be representative of a lot of things I hated about the 90s, and so soured me on the hobby.  Is that unfair?  Perhaps.  But it’s what happened.

I wish I was born in the 17th Century!

Knights of Badassdom:  LARPing (live action role playing) has always been the fringe of the already fringe hobby of tabletop roleplaying games.  Though on more than one occasion, I’ve been sorely tempted to give it a try, I think my short lived career in Lazer Tag was as close as I’ll get.  This movie embraces the hobby, and manages to laugh with it at least as much as laugh at it.  There are some pretty funny bits, but I found the whole to be uneven, too scattered.  It felt a bit like the scrapped remains of several different scripts that somehow came together, but never quite meshed.  Seemingly destined for cult status, it’s not the kind of thing that’s going to sweep the nation.  I’d recommend it to gamers, particularly LARPers, but otherwise…Well, if it hits NetFlix instant, check it out.  There are some funny gags.  And surprising levels of gore.

Death on the Nile:  There’s something grandly cinematic about this movie.  I think the location shooting and the music have a lot to do with it.  Like the classic Bond film in the overall vibe.  The story?  She's not so good.  Agatha Christie’s work has always had more of a made-for-TV vibe, in my mind.  It works in the small doses of episodic television.  The cast, too, feels made for TV.  Older actors who weren’t getting parts in big films (Bette Davis), up and comers (Olivia Hussey), and those actors who achieved fame for one reason or another but were never especially good (Mia Farrow).  All led by an the usually awesome Peter Ustinov, who seems unusually disengaged in the role of Hercule Poirot.  I liked the film, but didn’t love it.  It certainly played on my nostalgia for films of that era (1978), though it didn’t do an especially good job of transporting me to the era it was set in (1920s?).  The film is very uneven.  There are aspects and scenes I like a lot, however the movie as a whole is just OK.  It’s also one of those 70s PG movies that would shock and appall today.  There are some rather gruesome killings in it, including a nasty shot to the face.  Actually, everybody seems to get shot in the head, except for one, who gets his/her throat cut.

    On Saturday morning, I finally got back into Boardwalk Empire after a prolonged break as I was distracted by shiny things.  I’m now about half way through the second season, and it’s so good.  I don’t even feel the irritation toward Michael Pitt I normally do.  What’s that about?  I’ve got the next disk up close to the top of my queue, so I should be able to get through the season fairly soon.  Thanks to running some Call of Cthulhu, I’m really into the 20s stuff right now, and this is a fine show for that.

Evil Under the Sun:  Ustinov is back and the obnoxious Belgian, Hercule Poirot, in this noticeably lower rent sequel to Death on the Nile.  Oddly, a few members of that film’s cast have returned, but playing different roles.  And this time around, it really feels like a TV episode.  Location shooting or not, it doesn’t look or sound in any way ‘cinematic.’  James Mason only is awake in one of his scenes, though for that scene he’s quite good.  Otherwise he looks bored, sleepy, and confused.  Diana Rigg looks like she thought it was going to be a different film and is now killing time 'til her boat leaves.  Maggie Smith and Peter Ustinov are better used in this movie than the first, but still not given much to work with.  And the whole Agatha Christie, “let’s all go have drinks in the lounge, while I reveal all the clues the viewer wasn’t given, and tell you who did it” thing is especially insufferable.  It’s less uneven than Death on the Nile.  Unfortunately, that’s because it never hits any particular high notes, preferring to languish in mediocrity.

    And that’s it.  Like I said, a week of rest.  I was hoping to force myself to get more reading done, but this fidgety lack of concentration thing is hampering things.  I’m doing some more prep-work for the next game session, which sadly looks like it’s going to be a month away.  Blasted people and their busy schedules.  Stupid retail makes social lives difficult.

-Matt

Prodigal Son: Roots

                                                                  Part Twenty Three

    Cue long, exaggerated sigh, followed by a nostalgic musing while I stare off into the distance.  Yes.  It is done.  Or, to use a phrase I think should never be used in another film in the history of ever, “It has begun.”  After all the talk, all the wishful thinking, all the day dreaming, and yes, all the many false starts, the first night of actual roleplaying has been accomplished.  The first full session I’ve run in more than six years (other than that one on one thing with Brad a couple years ago when I was first trying to get serious about this).  I think that’s the longest continuous gap in gaming I’ve had since I started with the hobby as a young lad (pretty sure Reagan was still in office).  It feels good to slay that dragon.  Starting a game is always difficult.  Starting a game with people new to the hobby is a challenge (a very worthy one).  But starting a game after six years was very, very hard to do.  I’m using mental muscles that have atrophied, digging into parts of my brain that haven’t seen the light of day for far too long.  But, it all worked out pretty well.  All the stress and apprehension melted away fairly quickly, and I began to feel the old rhythms.

    Call of Cthulhu always has always felt a bit like coming home.  It uses the Basic Roleplaying system, the game mechanic I got started on.  And it didn’t take me long to fall for it’s 1920s/1930s setting.  After all, Indiana Jones was my hero.  Over the years, it’s meant a lot of different things to me.  I’ve played in several very different games, and I’ve run a bunch myself.  It’s always challenging, but usually rewarding.  This time around, I’m trying something a little more ambitious than normal.  In the past, I’ve almost always done one of three things.  Early on, my games were always set in very cinematic versions of exotic countries.  Then I graduated to The Thing style of relatable, but hopelessly remote locations, with characters from different walks of life thrust together through circumstance (survivors of a plane crash, for example).  Later, in an attempt to get things more grounded and relatable, my games were set in and around Bangor, Maine, my home town and a place I had a good deal of practical knowledge of.  Not this time.  This time the game is set in Arkham, the city is wide open, and I’m juggling more than one story.  In the past, I’ve tended to take just one idea, one creature, one item, and build a story around it.  When that story was over, perhaps I’d do a follow-up, likely connected to the first in some way.  This time, I wanted to do something new.  So, I’ve got a whole bunch of storylines, some fully developed, some only briefly sketched out, all waiting to be uncovered by the group.  And I’m going to let them explore those stories in whatever way they see fit.  Sure, I’ll be dropping hints and hooks, but already they’ve gone off in unexpected directions, and it’s great.  Of course, not ever story will pan out.  Not every clue will lead to something important.  And these story threads aren’t all linked.  They’re not all about the same thing, and they’re not all building to something, like I’d normally do.  Though they may be laced together by the characters (that’s already started to happen), I’m letting the chips fall where they may.

    Going way back, I always knew that Call of Cthulhu shouldn’t be Dungeons & Dragons.  I don’t just mean the system and all its nonsense.  I mean, it shouldn’t be about walking around fighting monsters all the time.  It shouldn’t be opening doors and finding random creatures and artifacts.  It shouldn’t be a video game.  I think that might be part of why I always focused stories on only one core idea or creature.  If the story was about Ghouls, then dang it, Ghouls would be what you got.  Maybe, just maybe, they’d have something extra special and nasty working with them, but 99% of what the game would be about Ghouls and Ghouls only.  This time around I wanted to do things differently, so I conceived two major and unrelated stories, and multiple lesser stories.  I still don’t want this to degrade into some 20s themed dungeon crawl, with rooms full of Deep Ones or legions of Nightgaunts flapping around.  But it’s going to be more monster/thing heavy than I’d normally do.  In fact, in the very first session, a monster was spotted (briefly), an artifact was found, and a bunch of other crazy stuff happened.  Normally, I’d take a lot longer to reveal that much.  And of course, like in all Call of Cthulhu games I run, I need to make sure that the possibility of the complete ending of the world is always an option.  I feel like any given session of the game should be able to result in an apocalypse of some form, be it a plague, open war with the Deep Ones, causing Yog-Sothoth to open the Gates, a visit from Ghroth, whatever.

    So, now that I’ve got my head around the game, now that the first session has happened, I feel more focused, and more like I know what I’m doing again.  Now, I need to target each player and his/her character with some particular excitement and horror, as well as provide opportunities for each to be a valued member of a team.

    I don’t imagine this game will go on for more than 3 or 4 sessions, especially as I’m trying to keep things moving quickly, and will probably be throwing a lot more, and more deadly things at the characters than normal.  So, I’m still thinking about what other games might be good for the group.  I would certainly like to do something more long form, something open ended, where character development can get more play, where stories can take their time to build, and where actions have far reaching consequences.  One especially nice thing about games like Call of Cthulhu is that, assuming characters reach a good ending point still sane and alive, there’s always the option of picking things up again later, even if there are new players in the group.  If folks enjoy this roleplaying thing and want to do more, we’ll talk about options again then.  I hope I can keep this ball rolling.  It’s tough, with everyone having kids and jobs and social lives.  But I think we can do it.

I still love Cyberpunk 2020.

-Matt