Season of the Witch

The last day in the month of Redfall is known as Revenant Night. This is an old, pagan festival, never successfully extinguished by the coming of the Oecumenical Church. Folklore holds that the walls between the realms of the dead and the prime material plane thin, so that spirits who have not yet moved on to their plane of final reward can slip back into the living world. This seldom seems to occur in this modern age, but magical practitioners don’t rule it out entirely.

The time around Revenant Night is observed in interesting ways in different parts of the New World. In the City and other parts of the Union, many adults may go masked, and there is something of a superstition against using one’s real name lest it be overheard by malign spirits--though this is more observed in playful fashion today than a fearful one. Children dress in more elaborate costumes and in engage in ritual begging door-to-door.

Out in Heliotrope, witch cultists of the Black Mother are purported to have one of their most important sabbats on this night. Police often raid reported ritual sites, but usually only collar intoxicated young playboys, and naked, would-be starlet, cigarette or hat-check girls. The real power rituals and serious practitioners remain elusive--or either are smart enough to pay off the cops.

In some towns in the Steel League the evening before Revenant Night is called “Eve of Madness,” or the “Night of Misrule.” Some scholars believe this festive night of tomfoolery and petty vandalism has its historic origins in the mind-altering (and perhaps delirium inducing) effects of certain fungi which bloom on grain at this time of year in Ealderde. Others believe it is a psychic release, necessary due to the astrological influence of the Blood Red Moon--a full moon of large size and rust color which occurs around this time.

The Eve of Madness can turn ugly. Murders, sometimes gruesome and senseless ones, occur more often on this night, as does arson, and sometimes there's strange mob violence where the perpetrators seem to be in some sort of trance. This is most common in Motorton, the bustling manufacturing city built atop the mass plague-graves of Old Fort Narrows. Here the Red Dwarf holds sway. This mysterious harbinger of calamity once appeared as a redcap, but now is seen more often as a dwarf dressed dapperly in a crimson suit. It's said that the Dwarf has claimed the night as his own, and has been known to have his henchman bring random people off the street to his Room with Red Velvet Curtains (sometimes just the “Red Room”). Visitors describe the room as found in the basement of a ritzy old hotel--but no one has been able to relocated the building or provide directions to it later.

The Dwarf will sometimes tell his visitor’s future. Other times, he’ll ask them for a favor, or tell them how they can get their heart’s desire. However it starts, it always plays out badly. A meeting with the dwarf is an ill-omen however sharply its dressed.

Gill-Man vs. Wolf-Man

To finish off my Halloween review of all the non-vampiric Universal monsters, we come to the gill-man and the werewolf. Both are zoanthropes, and perhaps as such, both represent fears of nature or man’s own animalistic side, though at that point the similarity seems to end.

The gill-man is elusive. His appearances in media are more rarified, no doubt due to his proprietary, rather than folklorish, origins. In addition to the Creature trilogy, stand-ins make appearances in The Monster Squad, and Monsters vs. Aliens--where interestingly he’s grouped with decade-appropriate monster stand-in colleagues rather than the Universal monster old guard.

The proto-gill-men of Lovecraft’s "Shadow Over Innsmouth" have miscegenation fears in their DNA, which seem absent from Universal’s creature--unless his attraction to human females is a hint at this. In some ways, the Lovecraftian angst underlying the Deep Ones makes them more interesting than a fish King Kong. That’s part of the reason D&D’s Kuo-toa (more Deep One-ish in character) have always been more interesting to me than the other evil fishmen, the Sahuagin (Gill-Men).

I guess Dr. Who's Sea Devils and Silurians might be mined for gill-man inspiration. Anything might help. Gill-man’s got a good look, but little else to give him real monster memorability.

Neil Gaiman has a short-story called “Only the End of the World Again” where Larry Talbot, the Wolf Man, winds up in Innsmouth and tangles with Deep One cultists. This may be as close as media has given us to a Gill-man-Werewolf bout.

Werewolves seem to have what it takes for urban fantasy fiction. Werewolf sex probably seems even naughtier, I suppose, than lovin’ the living dead. In fact--Teen Wolf aside--there’s always been something a little “adult situations”--maybe even exploitation--about werewolves. They don’t just strangle like the mummy or Frankenstein, or give a killer kiss like a vampire--they rend and tear and chew. Werewolves are as much serial killer as wild beast.

Is it any wonder that werewolves are almost as likely as vampires to get the grindhouse treatment? I would suspect only “almost” because vampires maybe give more excuse for nudity, and blood effects are cheaper than wolf prosthetics. But the wolf man gets by, and whatever budget.  Paul Naschy’s got a whole series of werewolf movies where the werewolf's origin involves being bit by a Yeti, and he fights Templars--how’s that for game inspiration! Then we’ve got a werewolf biker film (Werewolves on Wheels), a werewolf women in prison effort (Werewolf in a Women’s Prison); and, if Rob Zombie had his way, a werewolf Nazi-ploitation film--Werewolf Women of the S.S.

Werewolves: the most gameable of monsters, whatever your genre.

Out of the Void

Salvaged photographs all show the same thing. Beings in strange suits, with face-plates empty but for the absolute black of the void. There’s an alien presence stalking the west of the New World...

In the summer of 5880, news of an approaching rogue planetoid swept the globe. The greatest scientists and thaumaturgists worried over charts and formulae, and made dire predictions. From the streets of the City, to the savannas of Ebon-Land, and across the half-ruined cities of Ealderde, people watched the skies, and faced the fearful prospect that the end of the world was near.

The world obviously didn’t end that summer, perhaps thanks to the actions of a renegade scientist and two less than willing companions. The scientist had constructed a rocket and planned to guide it into the planetoid, altering its course. This plan was doomed to failure, according to accepted theory. Thaumaturgists had long been aware that the alien, and hard to placate, elementals of vacuum and radiation were perturbed and driven to madness by the movement of large bodies like the planetoid. Also, astral projection had detected malign energies emanating from the planetoid.  Was this the psychic death-cry of world propagating backwards in time, or something else?

The scientist averred he had novel approach to thaumaturgic shielding. His rocket could run the gauntlet. In retrospect, it may be that his thoughts in this regard were not entirely his own.

The three man rocket blasted off one a summer night on an apparent suicide mission. The planetoid’s course altered and the world was spared. Those who knew of the rocket assumed it had succeeded in its mission, and would never be seen again.

That was before last year, the falling star on Revenant Night (when tradition holds the dead can walk), and the reports of three beings in singed pressure suits, proclaiming the dawn of a new world. That was before towns were found emptied but for shadow imprints burned into walls or sidewalks where their inhabitants had been disintegrated.

Union officials have plotted the course of the harbingers (as they have come to be called). Moving from the Stoney Mountains, they’ve passed through only small towns, some barely worthy of the name. They’ve passed into the Dustlands where strangely the tornado overlords have given them wide berth. Ahead, lies the heart of the Steel League, and beyond that, who knows?

The crater left by the falling star has since been examined. It was found to contain the remains of a rocket resembling the one launched by the renegade scientist eight years ago.

My Top Ten Horrors

In no particular order, here are what probably my favorite horror short stories (though I would imagine I've forgotten something)--just in time for Halloween.  Links to e-texts provided where available.

"The Great God Pan" by Arthur Machen
"Who Goes There?" by John Campbell
"The Voice in the Night" by William Hope Hodgson
"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
"Into Whose Hands" by Karl Edward Wagner
"The Clown Puppet" by Thomas Ligotti
"Pigeons from Hell" by Robert E. Howard
"Don't Ask Jack" by Neil Gaiman
"Whisperer in the Darkness" by H.P. Lovecraft
"Born of Man and Woman" by Richard Matheson

Honorable mentions go to "Dread" by Clive Barker, "Dr. Locrian's Asylum" by Ligotti, "The River of Night's Dreaming" by Wagner, "The Sandman" by E.T.A. Hoffman, "The Repairer of Reputations" by Robert W. Chambers, and "The Second Variety" by Philip K. Dick.  Maybe I should have done a top twenty!

Warlord Wednesday: A Monster Memorial

In keeping with the season, I'd like to honor the various creatures, subhumans, demons and god-things, that have met their final reward through the efforts of Travis Morgan and his friends.  Who could forget these favorites:

The lizard-men Morgan found worshipping his plane in #3:

The tragic werewolf in the tower from #22:

The punk snow giant Morgan ran across in the mountains in issue #25:

The fish-men who bedeviled his submarine paramour in #24:

And post-Grell, the vampire queen of a frozen valley from #108:

Famous Monsters: The Mummy

In 1932, The mummy was the third of the classic Universal monsters to appear, following Dracula and Frankenstein who had debuted the previous year. It was probably Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 that raised the public profile of mummies--particularly Egyptian mummies--enough to get a film made based on the concept. Universal’s run of mummy movies was followed by a Hammer franchise in the fifties, and a post-Indiana Jones re-imagining in 1999 kicked off another series at Universal.

Like Frankenstein, mummies don’t usually get to be sexy...Well, except Valerie Leon as Princess Tera in Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb:

But the above photo illustrates one of the interesting things about movie mummies. At some point in the story, they tend to regain a less dessicated form and don’t really look like a mummy anymore. The other take frequently seen is to have the mummy be some mute automaton doing the evil bidding of some wicked priest--in other words a classic (pre-brain-eating) zombie.

Maybe this is the big problem with mummies. They're either essentially what gaming would call liches, or they’re zombies. It’s really only a roll of bandages and Egyptian bling that make them stand out.  Shamble, moan, strangle.  Repeat.

I suppose some difference can be discerned in their origins. Liches are boot-strapping undead; they’re generally self-created, and so have to be evil individuals of esoteric knowledge. Classic zombies are either living people (and so not undead at all), or they have something unfortunate (and undeserved) done to them after death by an evil individual of esoteric knowledge. Mummies are either being punished (in most of the mummy films), or honored or accidentally created (like real life).

And of course, they need not be Egyptian. Mummies come from all over, and some of these other mummies have made it into fiction. The Aztec mummy got its on film series, which includes a fight with a robot.

Not psychotronic enough for you? Well South of the Border, they don’t stop at just Aztec mummies. They've got a whole museum full of natural occurring mummies in Guanajuato. In film, these guys wind up fighting superhero luchadores on more than one occasion. Again, the differentiation between them and zombies is largely semantic. Still, Guanajuato’s peculiar mummies can be good game fodder, even without the masked wrestlers.

No reason mummies should have be from historic eras. Howard’s titular mummy from the modern adventure yarn Skull-Face, is Kathulos, an undead sorcerer from Atlantis.  Now he's a mummy who doesn't just shamble and moan.

Famous Monsters: Frankenstein

With Halloween drawing nigh, I thought I’d take a look at the iconic Universal monsters and what inspiration can be found to freshen up their traditional protrayals in gaming. Since vampires (particularly Dracula) have gotten a lot of virtual ink in the blogosphere of late, I figured I’d with start with the vice-president of the monster club, Frankenstein’s monster. Frankenstein, to his friends.

I suppose you could call his type “a construct” or a “golem.” It’s not really an archetype that seems to fire people's imaginations to the degree the vampire does. No series of sexed up urban fantasies for the ladies about a hunky dude made from stitched together corpse pieces (at least not that I’m aware of).

Comics still seem to love Frankie, though. Mark Wheatley gave us Frankenstein’s Mobster, where a slain cop in a city overrun by crime becomes a “made man”--literally. Grant Morrison offered up a more over-the-top, pulpy adventurer Frankenstein as part of his Seven Soldiers line. Somewhat similar (though less over-the-top) was the Wachowski Brothers’ alt-history, Doc Frankenstein. 

I should point out combining Frankenstein with pulpy elements didn't start with these recent comics.  The Utley and Waldrop novellette "Black as Pit, From Pole to Pole" (1977) has Frankenstein wandering into the Pellucidar-esque Hollow Earth.  Dell comics made him a superhero back in the sixties.

Perhaps the best way to reimagine Frankenstein is in terms of what he's come to represent. Critics of genetic engineering and the like are always invoking his name. Splice is just the most recent riff on this sort of (post-)modern Prometheus.

How can this all be related to gaming? Well, the flesh golem of AD&D’s Monster Manual is the classic movie Frankenstein, and most sci-fi/conspiracy games do a riff on the more modern science-fear inspired Frankensteins. It would be cool, though, to see a more intelligent, villainous Frankie. Something along the lines of his original portrayal.  Something less "stand-in for fears of man overstepping his place," and more singular menace.

Jess Nevins argues in Fantastic Victoriana that Shelley’s protrayal of the monster has a tinge of Yellow Peril to it, and I think he’s right. Maybe Frankenstein with a Fu Manchu spin would be the way to go? Let’s let the guy with bolts in his head have some soliloquies instead of just grunts.

Addendum: Check out Jim Shelley's Flashback Universe blog for a couple of comics panels of Frankenstein fighting a dinosaur, and a pictorial overview of various comic versions of the monster.  Great minds think alike!