Del Toro and Cameron Make Mountains?

Did you hear that Guillermo Del Toro and James Cameron are going to work together to make HP Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness?

You must be kidding!!! No mister, I'm serious, dead serious...

Hell Yeah!!!!....

I would think this is a complete joke if I hadn't read it on like 4 movie related news pages...

And I thought I was excited about the Whisperer in Darkness! movie being released by the HP Lovecraft

I'm not sure if there is a zeitgiest of all things Lovecraftian or if it is because I have been focusing on his work and blogs and podcasts so I am just finding out more about things that were going on all along. Anyway, the rest of 2010 the future are looking quite polyphemus...

White Box

While things have been pretty busy in my two PBEM games (Castles and Crusades Greyhawk as GM, and Call of Cthulhu as a player) - my next goal is to get a pen and paper game going of Swords and Wizardry.

I have a copy of the White box edition in print, so I think I am going to start with that and then tack on appropriate house rules. Here is the list I have so far:

Definitely implementing -

1. Death and Dismemberment Table

2. Aspects/Cliche's - this is going to coincide with a d6 method of task resolution. I'm going to expand a little on a combination of ideas from David Bowman's Delver's Article from Fight On #4, and Matyas Hartyandi's inclusion to the GitRDone article of Fight On #6, and ideas from FATE and Risus.

Strongly Considering -

1. Altered Races (saying goodbye to the Tolkien Themes)

2. Modified Movement and Encumbrance

I haven't decided on the game world yet - I know it will be a Sandbox style game where the players can add background if they wish.

The Fall of the House of Usher and...

Ok, so I've been listening to audiobooks from www.audible.com for maybe 6 months now. Almost all of the audiobooks have been pretty great so far.... except this one. The main problem with this audio-story is that it had been "Produced"!

The production involved playing awful music and sound effects in the background that overwhelmed the timid voice of the narrator. Some of the sound effects were copied and/or repeated incessantly - a strange ghostlike scream was replayed several times with almost no rhyme or reason. thunder and lightning sounds were added to the story. the sounds of high winds drowned out the voice of the narrator. I actually couldn't hear or concentrate on the story.

It was frigging awful!

The story is pretty good, I had read it as a teen but I couldn't remember exactly how it went, and I wish I had stuck to a visual format on this one. Hey, at least it was cheap.

I tried to erase this last audiobook out of my mind by immediately starting in on a new one: "Tales of the Occult". As the title explains this is a collection of short stories dealing with the Occult. This book is read by a clear narrator, with a strong voice, british accent, and with absolutely no background sounds. Ahhhh, so refreshing!

The first tale that I am listening to is The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen. I wasn't sure what to expect from this collection of tales but this story is so good that even if all the others are horrible I will still be satisfied with my purchase. I think I will be blogging more about this story when I finish it.

Lovecraftian Podcraft Goodness

This will be the summer of the weird tale...

Since I started playing in DaddyGrognard's CoC game I've added a couple of extra Lovecraftian focused podcasts to my morning commute (normally I've been listening to RPG circus in addition to various other books in digital format on my 45 min morning commute) During the ride home at night I like to rock out to a little metal.

Here are my newest werid podcraft additions:

Lovecraftian Obsession Podcast (I've been listening to this one since the Shane Magus turned me onto it) - interviews with famous Lovecraftian scholars, authors, and game designers. Some discussion of Lovecraft history and philosophy, debate about certain stories.

The HP Lovecraft Literary Podcast - These guys (who were involved in the creation of that cool silent film "The Call of Cthulhu") tackle each of HP Lovecrafts stories in the order that they were published. Good narration by Andrew Leman on many of these stories. They do some good discussion about the stories and drop some cool facts about his life, friends, inspirations, and other errata. Cool website www.hppodcraft.com - check it out!

Yog Radio YSDC - this one is new to me - they seems like Lovecraft reporters on the front lines... I've only listened to one of these podcasts so I can't comment much on this one.

I'm also about to listen to "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allen Poe this upcoming week. Maybe I will discuss the story on this blog. I used to be really into Poe as a teen - I memorized a couple of his poems by heart during those years and I can still recite parts of

them to this day. Anyway, happy listening if you check out these audio format podcasts!

In Search of Gold

Eldorado

Gaily bedight,

A gallant knight,

In sunshine and in shadow,

Had journeyed long,

Singing a song,

In search of Eldorado.

But he grew old-

This knight so bold-

And o'er his heart a shadow

Fell as he found

No spot of ground

That looked like Eldorado.

And, as his strength

Failed him at length,

He met a pilgrim shadow-

"Shadow," said he,

"Where can it be-

This land of Eldorado?"

"Over the Mountains

Of the Moon,

Down the Valley of the Shadow,

Ride, boldly ride,"

The shade replied-

"If you seek for Eldorado!"

Edgar Allan Poe

You can read about the analysis of this poem here. I've been thinking about Lovecraft, Poe, and other weird fiction writers. Eldorado was one of my favorite Poe poems. I like that it has an efficiency in words that is many times lacking in Poe's poetry.

I might be reaching but this poem of Poe's kinda reminds me of DnD a little. This knight is searching for the a fantastical city of gold (sounds a little like mythic underground cities in some of our games). The gold metaphor could also be spiritual enlightenment, or wisdom which is a little bit like gold = exp... Also it has knights and shades and adventuring....

Forgotten Realms

A lot of old school players really get down on forgotten realms. During the heyday of my gaming this was my favorite world to game in. One of my favorite things about the game also runs completely counter to the Sandbox approach of gaming - it is the Aurora's Whole Realms catalogs and the Volo's Guides.

I used these products ravenously. I found that I almost never used published adventures during the times that I was running forgotten realms. Either (1.) these published adventures involved characters that were in TSR books that were coming out at the time or (2) in order for me to involve my players I had to pull some nasty tricks out of my hat. The only published adventures I used were Undermountain (a delicious megadungeon that I added 10+ levels to), Myth Drannor ( a boxed set of an ruined city megadungeon with broad strokes but almost no detail, and the Haunted Halls of Eveningstar (probably my favorite Forgotten Realms adventure module - I think I will write a blog post all about this module sometime).

However, I used these accessories like crazy:

1. Aurora's Whole Realms

2. Volo's Guide to the Sword Coast.

3. Volo's Guide to the North

4. Volo's guide to the Dalelands.

These books had wonderful items for my players to purchase, wonderful foods for them to have their characters eat, and lots of different inns and taverns to play around in. I didn't have to waste any time coming up with a tavern for the players to sleep at in each town they visited - Ed Greenwood did it all. I didn't have to worry about the price of a red and grey dress for one of my female players (she could pick one out on page 81 of Aurora's).

Anyway, I love settings where the author fills in crazy amounts of non-dungeon related detail. I can use that and then focus my energies on filling dungeons or creating the intrigues of the kings court or creating city adventures for a group of scaly rogues... in other words - the fun stuff.

Generation of Swine

I'm sitting here reading Generation of Swine by Hunter S. Thompson and what is tripping me out is how original this guys brain pattern is. Most people copy the thoughts and style of others in everything they create. Not Hunter.

Here he is riffing about Reagan:

"Reagan's children must be proud of him. With AIDS and acid rain, there is not much left in the way of life and love and possibilities for these shortchanged children of the '80's. In addition to a huge and terminally crippling national debt, and a shocking realization that your country has slipped to the status of a second-rate power, and that five American dollars will barely buy a cup of coffee in Tokyo, these poor buggers are being flogged every day of their lives with the knowledge that sex is death and rain kills fish and any politician they see on TV is a liar and a fool." ~ Hunter S. Thompson

I'm not sure what he would say if he was living in the foul year of our lord 2010... trickle down economics... lol... As I read this book I simultaneously want to laugh and vomit - now that is art. I wish I could have had brunch with him in vegas.

Anyway, the article I wrote about watery magic of vats and pools is definitely getting published - more to come on that soon. I think I am going to work on supplemental material for that article and put it up on this blog - extra spells, maybe some extra random tables.

The LL lord game that I was in flopped... our GM went turn coat on us and started a Mutant Future PBEM game. Who knows, maybe he will come back later. I wasn't feeling Mutant Future, although it received lots of good words on the nets, so in summary I'm back to a single game and I'm the DM. If anyone knows of any old school PBEM games where I could be a player - please let me know. I have some ideas for games that I could run as DM, but I would much rather be a player.