Down in Undertown

The ghouls of the City’s world aren’t undead, but rather a subspecies of humanity whose origins are lost in history. If they were in Ealderde, the Old World, their presence is well hidden, perhaps obscured by legends of vampires and the like. In the New World, after centuries of mistrust and antagonism, the ghoulish community of the City has struck an unease truce with its human neighbors.

Ghouls appear as thin, sometimes almost cadaverous, humans with unnatural pallor and sharp teeth. Ghouls have little to know body hair. Young ghouls have hair on their head, but most have lost it by middle age. Their pupils are larger than humans, and reflect light like those of cats.

Their appearance, though somewhat unsettling, isn't the (heh) bone of contention between them and humanity. It’s their dietary habits. Ghouls are eaters of carrion, and have a taste for human flesh. They do not, as often portrayed in pulp stories eat live humans, or attack them like a predators. The truth, though, is perhaps equally lurid--in addition to their taste for human meat, they require the consumption of human brains periodically. Scientists feel they require some essential nutrients present in human gray matter. Those who don’t consume it in 14-28 days (depending on the individual) begin to suffer from a degenerative, neurological malady.

Ghouls have always lived underground, and tend to come out to scavenge at night. In the City, the underground construction which produced waterworks, steam tunnels, and the subways provided spaces for the ghouls to inhabit. These more modern structures they managed to connect with more older, labyrinthine structures built by the Ancients from some inscrutable purpose. This ramshackle area of ghoul communities is known as “Undertown.”

Undertown is a sovereign city, but has only been able to survive by making connections with the human city above. Ghouls relay grave valuables and things hauled from the underground to policemen, organized crime, and low-level bureaucrats, and no one notices bodies that disappear from potter’s fields, or even the City morgue.

Ghouls produce no physical works of art or literature, as far as is known. Their only material culture is scavenged from the upper world, or looted from graves.  They do however produce strange music, which many find unsettling, but others strangely appealing. They also have been known to put on plays--unsurprisingly comedy’s filled with “gallows humor.”

Occasionally, ghouls get hopped up on fungus from abandoned subways, or drunk on brain’s soaked in the bootleg liquor from their stills, and they go on a bit of a tear, scaring upper-folk and generally make a nuisance of themselves. Then, police and deputized civilians are sent down to crack a few ghoul skulls, and some ealdormen make noise about the “ghoul menace.” Mostly, though, the two peoples remain segregated.and mistrustful, but willing to live and let live.

Infamous ghoulish Vaudevillian Abaddon Blanchefleur in his last performance before his arrest.
(Thanks to Matt, dwelling East of Eden in the Land of Nod for this pic)

Images from the City

The Mundy Guides are a series works detailing locations in the New World.  One of the most famous is The Mundy Guide to the City: A Comphrensive Guide to the Five Baronies of the Metropolis.  The guide is illustrated with photos, artistic reproductions, and comissioned artwork.  Below are some images from the original edition of the work and their captions:

Workmen atop the Baldanders Building, doing repairs.  This eagle-gargoyle was briefly the perch for nightgaunts (thought to originate on the moon) until powerful thaumaturgic wards were installed.

The poster advertising the infamous last performance of Evard Kellar.  Panic at the performance resulted in the deaths of three, the hospitalization (including psychiatric) of at least ten.

Artist's sketch of the famous Cathedral of St. Bernward, designed by so-called "mad architect" Jostan Geoffry (also designer of the Church of Our Ladies of Sorrows in the City).  The largest of the three bell towers was once haunted by a malign spirit that manifest as a hunchbacked dwarf with the head of a crow and eyes that glowed like lanterns.

Posterity Plaza, bneath the "Colossi of Industry."  The site of the yearly "Champion of Innovation" competition, which draws inventors of a both technological and thaumaturgical bent--and spies of foreign nations.

Infiltration Beyond the Wall of Sleep

I saw Inception this weekend and really enjoyed it. Without revealing any spoilers beyond what appears in the trailer and reviews, it’s about specialists that engage in industrial espionage by entering people’s dreams and extracting secrets. Beyond it being a good film, its interesting for the game fodder it could provide.

The film helpfully divides the characters up into “niches”, specialties--or even, one might say “classes”--for us. There’s “the architect” who’s responsible for building the dream environments the mark is to inhabit, “the chemist” who concocts specialty sedatives or the like, tailored to the requirement of the particular job, the “operations specialist” who makes sure things run on schedule, and the real players, who are either good at the con in the traditional way, or by disguise (the "forger").

One could run a “dream operatives” espionage game as presented. It wouldn’t have to be limited by the movie's modern setting--it could be“multi-genre”: the player’s entering wild west style dreams, horror film style dreams, superhero dreams, or whatever.

The another option is suggested by the film's frequent references to the dreams, and dream architecture, as “mazes” or “labyrinths.” The team leader tries out his new architect candidate by having her draw mazes on graph paper...

Maybe, there’s a deep, collective unconscious substrata of dreaming that’s like the “mythic underworld?” Perhaps the the dream-thieves are going into dungeons, killing the monsters of the dreamer’s subconscious and stealing his treasure that's symbolized by gold and jewels, but comes out secrets? Of course, then one could gleeful (or more gleefully) throw in everything but the kitchen sink from movies, TV, comics and literatures--it would all be grist for the collective unconscious mill, right?  I don’t know what that overlay would necessarily add to dungeon crawling other than to allow an “in game” rational for anachronistic jokes, disparte pop culture borrowings, and metagame strategizing, but I’m sure there most be something cool that could be done with it, if those things weren't enough.

Hobo-goblins

Hobogoblins are small, ugly humanoids of somewhat apish proportion, who live as itinerant vagrants or tramps, on the fringes of human society in the New World. They occasionally claim to be seeking work, but most often beg, scavenge, and steal to make a living, hopping freight trains to move from place to place. Mostly they’re considered pests, but they can be dangerous when the situation is to their advantage, so the prudent tend to avoid places where they congregate.

Where hobogoblins came from is a matter of debate. The most widely held theory is that they have always been on the margins of civilization in the New World, but documentary evidence of their existence is scant before the modern era, except for some Native legends of malicious, subterranean folk. Some have suggested they stowed away on ships from Ealderde like rats, but this ignores the considerable evidence that the Old World goblin was long ago driven to extinction. A third idea, not widely held, is that hobogoblins were spontaneously generated by the human mind, and that this is the reason for the belief they’ve always been here, because, in a sense, they have.

Whatever their origins, hobogoblins are now common in the New World landscape. They may be be found skulking around rail-yards, squatting in abandoned buildings, or camping in ramshackle, “jungles”--shantytowns--on the edges of cities, or sometimes in poorly kept city parks. Other the occasional knife, they are seldom armed with more than improvised weapons---pipes or boards for clubs, and thrown rocks as missiles. They also bite.

Hobogoblins can be helpful, particularly to those who can speak their cant. They gather a great deal of information, living on societies fringe, and watching, and their shamans know rituals for warding off vicious dogs, finding shelter from the elements, and calling up freight-trains. No one should ever mistake them for trustworthy, however, and one should deal with them only with caution.

Random Hobogoblin Names (1d100):
01-02 Violets M'Gurk 03-04 Burlap 05-06 Whiskey Bazoo 07-08 Coffin Nell 09-10 Hang-dog Legee 11-12 Fleabitis 13-14 Nimble Jek 15-16 Greenyteeth 17-18 Rotpizzle 19-20 Smolderblunt 21-22 Old Kid Slaug 23-24 Grimey Low 25-26 Dry Gulch 27-28 The Right Reverend Sinister 29-30 Grinless 31-32 One-Eye Elrood 33-34 Jabber Obscuro 35-36 Crooknose 37-38 Silent Zed 39-40 Gentleman Distemper 41-42 Spectacles 43-44 Mad Heck 45-46 Tusker Duke 47-48 Mumbles 49-50 Chauncey Throttlebottom 51-52 Goofus 53-54 Young Hairback 55-56 Ol' Rheumy 57-58 Lack Thumb Hari 59-60 Quicklip 61-62 The Grumbler 63-64 Handsome Bloat 65-66 Furious 67-68 Flash Bastard 69-70 Seldom Gently 71-72 Tobacco Sweetback 73-74 Unreasonable the Lesser 75-76 Bullneck 77-78 Wormy Ned  79-80 Boneyard Meech 81-82 Blundercuss 83-84 Ruckus Quietus 85-86 Thar'n'back 87-88 Brazen Dingus 89-90 Jenkin Miserable 91-92 Little Lord Flapjack 93-94 Bleeding-Gums 95-96  H. Hiram Horribilis  97-98 Simple 99-00 Lonelyhearts Ginny Finn.


Art by Chris Huth.

Something to Do With Death

Far to the south, and west of the City, beyond the southern border of quarrelsome Freedonia, is Zingaro, a nation torn by civil war, and home to a peculiar brand of the Oecumenical faith marked (or tainted) by the mysteries of death. No where is this influence more felt that the strange city of Cujiatepec.

Cujiatepec (or sometimes Cueyatepec) is an old town, older than the City, and founded to exploit rich silver veins by immigrants from Ealderde. Though much of the silver was mined out long ago, the city has held on to its wealth in subterranean vaults, and would be a target for one revolutionary army or another, if not for the cities association with (un)death that causes many to superstitiously give the picaturesque town wide berth.

The cemeteries to the west of the city have been found to have eldritch properties. Most of the dead buried there were somehow mummified, and don’t decay at a normal rate--but that’s the least part of the strangeness. The corpses there interred are transformed in a month’s time into undead. These creatures remain in a torpor until exhumed, but once this is done they’re as active as any zombie, and as intelligent.

The town fathers of Cujiatepec place a stiff “grave tax” on all burials. Families that can’t pay have their loved ones dug up and sold as undead slave labor. The same is done to vagrants or strangers that die in town, and to criminals. The local church supports this practice by suggesting that those dead thus employed are serving penance for sins in life, and earning their soul’s way into heaven by the labor of their soulless bodies. At any given time, a hundred undead may be working in the city as labors or auxiliary police.

It’s rumored that the heretical clergy of the local church long ago discovered blasphemous rites which may allow a ritually prepared body buried in the weird soil of Cujiatepec to retain more of its intellect and personality following transformation.  These differ, it is said, from the usual abdead of Zingaro in that they are animated by unholy energies and wholly malevolent. Some believe that there is a secret lich cabal of such creatures that rules the city behind the scenes and controls its riches.

Warlord Wednesday: Battle Cry

Let's re-enter the lost world with another installment of my issue by issue examination of DC Comic's Warlord, the earlier installments of which can be found here...

"Battle Cry"

Warlord (vol. 1) #20 (April 1979)

Written and Pencilled by Mike Grell; Inked by Vince Colletta

Synopsis: Morgan and his companions lead “a ragtag band of soldiers, adventurers, and mercenaries” north into twilight lands, and toward the Terminator--the cusp between the outer and inner earth--and eternal darkness. There they hope to find Deimos, and Morgan's and Tara’s kidnapped son.

Within his fortress, Deimos watches their approach in his crystal ball, with Ashiya and Joshua nearby. Deimos tells Ashiya that the son will be the key to the defeat of the father. The scrolls of blood have shown him how to use the technology of their ancestors to bring about his vengeance. He uses a knife to take a scrape of skin from the infant boy, then places it inside the sphere of an ancient machine. As Deimos works the controls, Ashiya watches in stunned silence, as the sphere fills with energy, and the speck of skin grows and swiftly develops into a clone of Joshua. Deimos plans to hedge his bets by keeping the real heir to Shamballah in his power, no matter what. He sends Ashiya and the original child away to make his final preparations to greet Morgan.

As the Warlord’s band nears the city, Deimos turns his magic upon them. He causes an earthquake to bring a canyon walls down on them, decimating their group. No sooner have the rumbles of the avalanche died away, then a swarm of bat-fiends attacks the few survivors. Only our four (named) heroes are left alive to storm the castle.

Soon, the heroes are at the Grayskull-esque drawbridge of the fortress. The way is clear, and unguarded, which makes them suspect a trap. Thinking only of finding his son, Morgan moves across the bridge alone--only to have it fall away beneath him. He manages to grab a chain and keep from falling onto the spikes below. Then, his sharp reflexes save him again as the portcullis falls. He’s inside the castle, but separated from his friends. And the bat-demons are coming.

Morgan fights them savagely, but it looks like he might be undone by their numbers, when flaming oils falls on them. Morgan tells Deimos his aim is bad, but Deimos says his minions got too eager--and he wants the Warlords for himself. He taunts Morgan to climb the stairs and enter the open door.

Morgan moves through dimly lit corridors warily, always taunted by the laughter of Deimos. Finally, he enters a room where he finds teh devil priest seated upon a throne. Deimos demands he bow before him. Morgan responds by stabbing his sword through Deimos’s chest, and the chair behind him.

But Deimos only laughs. He can’t die now due to the power of the Mask of Life, which Morgan unwittingly delivered to his disciple, Ashiya. Unfortunately, while the mask gives him life, it doesn’t keep his body from decaying in the sun, so he must replenish himself with human blood.

Deimos tells Morgan that since killing him would be too easy, he’ll have Morgan fight his champion instead. He pulls back a curtain to reveal Joshua held in the grip of another Atlantean device. Morgan tries to rescue him, but Deimos holds him back with flames. Morgan can only watch in horror, as Deimos activates the device, causing Joshua to grow to a full grown man before his eyes.

This is Deimos’s champion--the Warlord’s own son. Morgan can kill him, or be killed himself. “Either way,” Deimos taunts, ”you are destroyed.”

Things to Notice:

• Deimos bears some resemblance to the Wicked Witch in Wizard of Oz (1939): he watches his enemies in a big crystal ball, and he's got winged monkeyish servitors.

Where It Comes From:
Grell reaches into the mythic storytelling tropes well to pull out a little father-son conflict here, which echoes through Greek mythology, Le Morte D'Arthur, Shelley's Frankenstein, and Star Wars. 

The name of the foreboding Terminator region where Deimos's castle lies has nothing to do with killer robots from the future, but instead derives from (the misapplication of) the astronomy term for the dividing line between the bright and shaded regions of the disk of the moon or an inner planet. It also helped, I'm sure, that it has then same Latin root as "terminate," both deriving from terminus, "boundary marker."

Lost Worlds...Found!

Any regular reader of my blog knows I have at least a passing interest in lost worlds, given that I devote one day a week to the exploration of one, and have digressed, at times, into examination of others. So imagine how pleased I was when I discovered a website with an overview of a whole lot of them.

Dinosaur Central’s Lost Worlds of Dinosauria, is both pretty comprehensive, and well categorized. You can browse by era (between 1860 and the present), or by location (Polar region? Other planet? Lost valley? You’re covered). The usual suspects are present--Pellucidar, Maple White Land,Skull Island--but there are also a load of others from more obscure sources (E\ever heard of the Hollow Mountain? Or the planet Nova, home of King Dinosaur? I hadn’t).

It goes without saying that these worlds provide a lot of fodder for pulp gaming, but of course, there’s no reason a lost world can’t be stocked with magical monsters as well as dinosaurs to provide a locale for fantasy gaming, as well.  For sci-fi games, there's always those wonders of convergent evolution the Dinosaur Planet.

So check out the site, and get yourself lost for a bit.