Mummy Brains

Thinking of dabbling in Carcosan sorcery but worried you may still have some pesky shred of humanity lurking in your withered heart? Want to raise an army of Amphibious Ones to smite your childhood enemies but aren’t quite ready to pay the awful price? Grab your Potassium Axe, bro. We’re off to the Radioactive Desert, where Mummy Brains dot the wasteland like cat turds in the neighbor kid’s sandbox!

Mummy Brains can cast rituals with no need for sacrificial hoo-ha, which makes them not only monster, but also artifact and NPC.  The Evil Brain is a venerated concept in comic book sci fi, and one that neatly circumvents Carcosa’s most lurid details. Just put any ritual you don’t want to deal with into the mind of a mummy brain. Plus, questing after a disembodied brain beats a crappy journey to Mordor any day.

Can you prevent Mum-Ra from getting the old gang back together and summoning Nyarlathotep? Who will stop Krang the Konqueror from using his robot body to terrorize the Bone Man village? Will Grodd find the Hypothalamus of Hodag before the Mi-go get their chitinous claws on it? What happens when a zombie eats one?

Honestly, Mi-go and Mummies seem like great opposing factions for this whole dumb experiment. Imagine the opening scene of Temple of Doom, but with Mummies, Mi-go, Jale slave girls, and the PCs all fumbling over a really top-shelf brain cylinder containing the Brain of Nurhachi.

Of course, merely finding a mummy brain won’t make it cooperate. In the unlikely event that it doesn’t try to kill you, it’ll probably want to strike some kind of bargain for something it wants (like a working body, or a really nice brain pillow). In fact, PCs may be forced to bargain with them given their wholesale immunity to pretty much everything. 

Good luck with that.

Cartoon Carcosa

Leaving the (largely overstated) squickery aside, the core aesthetics of Carcosa owe nearly as much to Jack Kirby as they owe Howard or Lovecraft. If I heard you pitch a game that involved mighty-thewed barbarians killing Evil Sorcerers on a distant world filled with robots and mummies and dinosaurs and Space Alien technology, my first reaction would be to kiss you and my second reaction would be to start practicing my Thundarr impression as I rolled up a character named Grodd Wizard-Slayer. 

It's the B-movie aspect, the pulp Sci-Fi disguised as Heroic Fantasy that I love about Carcosa. I know it's ostensibly written as a horror game, with difficult moral choices built right in, and there is plenty in there to support that kind of game. But that’s not what I’m usually looking for in a game. I mean, I effin’ ADORE Call of Cthulhu, but there’s still a pizza and a six-pack on the table when I run it.  And while it’s fun to watch players fall into the occasional philosophical tight spot, wall to wall nihilism just ain’t my go-to style of game. 

On the other hand, riding a triceratops hell-for-leather into a field of soon-to-be-dead robots is totally my style of game. I’ll go one better: using robot blood to warpaint your Triceratops like the side of a mid-70’s conversion van is probably some form of apotheosis moment for me, gamewise.

Is that still Carcosa? Probably. I’ll ask myself that question again once I’ve gone a little further with this dumb idea. 

Note: the above text refers to the original, art-free paperback version of Carcosa. I have yet to invest in the newfangled LotFP version.

Goodnight Moebius

Moebius has inspired me since I first saw his work as a child. The news of his death, especially in the wake of Ralph McQuarrie's recent passing, bums me out immensely.

Contains F-Bomb

I work in advertising, which means my job mostly consists of going to meetings and pretending to take notes while in actuality I'm just drawing monsters and crap like this. I regret not adding more Hapless Stick Figures falling out of Serpent Dude's mouth.

I'm posting this as a precursor to a post about Dante's Inferno and D&D.

d12 reasons to buy Weird Adventures

1. A hardcover binding strong enough to repel a Brain Invader. The book must somehow be secured to head to remain 100% effective.

2. A rich, vibrant setting with multiple instances of “Damn I wanna run this NOW” on every single page.

3. A game book that forgoes character sections in favor a describing a world with enough hooks to inspire a thousand characters.

4. Some of the best plot hooks I’ve seen in gaming. I could run games set around the Fate Exchange or the Boardwalk War for years.

5. Art that ranges from Badass to Totally Badass.

6. The Barrowmen’s Horrify ability finally gives you a way to play the Vault-Keeper from The Haunt of Fear. That’s pretty great.

7. It’s got Hill-billy Giants. And, more importantly, it’s got Hill-billy Giantesses!

8. Efreet Kong. Just deal with that for a second.

9. The tagline for Djinn Cigarettes (“your wish for flavor is granted!”) is just damned good copy.

10. Speaking of copy, the entire book is written in a bulletproof style that I wish we saw more of in game stuff. It’s conversational yet packed with information, and contains enough cheek to stay entertaining. Highly readable stuff.

11. It’s nearly rules-agnostic. It’s written with an eye toward OSR systems but the only mechanical bits are in the monster section and the occasional mention of an NPC ability. I would happily run Weird Adventures in Moldvay, LotFP, BRP, FASERIP, Savage Worlds, FATE, or D20 Modern. In fact I think a Gumshoe-based detective game set in The City or Heliotrope would be pretty spectacular.

12. Alan Moore and Rick Veitch’s  Greyshirt is explicitly called out as inspiration. If you haven’t read it, buy a copy the same day you buy Weird Adventures.

I am immensely impressed by Weird Adventures. Trey does more in 160 digest-sized pages than most settings do in twice the page count. In recent years the only thing that compares is Kenneth Hite’s The Day After Ragnarok. It would be easy for a lesser author to lose control of such a wide array of ideas and influences, but Trey maintains a tight grip on his vision. The atmosphere is heady and focused here. Everything feels cohesive and natural.

Buy this book. Even if you don’t think you’ll run it, Weird Adventures is worth the cover price as a fun read all by itself. But I can’t imagine any self-identified gamer being completely immune to its charms.

This is the stuff of True Adventure, folks. 

The Temple of Gorgolac. Hex 1812

The monster descriptions of Isle of the Unknown generally don’t make many demands as far as setting goes. Given that each hex is 86 miles square, it seems a waste to just have all these weird abominations wandering (or in some cases crawling or even flopping) around their respective hex.

Why not steal a page from the book of Zelda and give some of these critters a nice little dungeon or temple to call home?

The Temple of Gorgolac. Hex 1812

The entrance to an ancient temple is set in a cliff face 150’above the river in hex 1812. The temple was once dedicated to a river god, but is now the lair of a 22’ tall, emaciated bipedal Panda named Gorgolac. The hunger of Gorglolac is said to be insatiable, and all who have sought the enchanted helm rumored to wait within the temple have failed to return.

A shy but peaceful community of mundane Pandas living near the cliff are willing to trade their handmade flutes for small, shiny items.

F Work

Profound apologies for the lack of updates of late. I recently fell into a work-related layer of the Infinite Abyss. I love my job, but I’ve been doing 90-hour weeks since I started this blog, and that is some garbage. Advertising is a brutal business.

Just for fun I put together a DIY version of the Holmes booklet. It’s digest size and has art by Skinner (one of my favorite non-D&D D&D artists) and Pete Mullen (My favorite OSR artist). I designed these to give out to players for a thing I’ve been working on, which I hope to actually have up and running with my regular crew once my ridiculous workload cools off.  I’m not 100% committed to using Holmes. Moldvay has always been my guy. But I had the Holmes in PDF so it was easy.

The wholly expected announcement of 5e made me realize I should just print up a bunch of these and start stashing them in the many nerd-friendly places around town (comic shops, the fantasy section of bookstores, libraries, Metal shows, etc). I’d replace the swiped art with my own, but I'd leave the swiped innards intact. They'd be free. 

 Just doing my part for the Old School Renaissance Revolution.