Houses of Horror

Last night I caught up on the first three episodes of American Horror Story: Asylum. This season takes us far from last season's ghost-crowded “Murder House” in present day Los Angeles to an aging asylum run by the Catholic Church in 1964 Massachusetts. The first season was a lurid (at times almost to the point of parody) romp through just about every modern horror trope the creators could pack in--and was utterly entertaining for it. The second season seems to be shaping up in exactly the same way.

Let’s check the list so far: alien abduction, snake-pit asylum, sadistic nun into corporal punishment, even more sadistic mad doctor with a deformed monster, masked serial killer on the loose,and oh yeah, demonic possession. That’s just the first three episodes; hell, that’s actually just the first two.

It occurs to me that this might be a great set-up for a horror rpg campaign. In the Call of Cthulhu mode, a lot of horror rpgs center on going places and investigating things.  What if all the mysteries were in one edifice? One pretty large place could be the nexus for a whole lot of weirdness.  It could be the horror rpg version of the dungeoncrawl. Maybe it would need to be relatively short in the grand scheme of campaigns, but I think it’s an idea worth exploring. Do you dare enter?

House of Fear

Mingus Rooke told them there was an apartment building in Solace where another angelic horn could be found. Rooke had used Gabriel's to halt the Machineries of the Night before. Our heroes thought that might be their ticket to doing so again.

In last night's Halloween edition of our Weird Adventures campaign, Boris and Cornelius found themselves trapped inside the building with Erskine and Diabolico on the outside. The building was sealed; all of it's inhabitants were trapped, except for the one old man who ran out raving when they opened the door--and promptly died.

The buildings residents were being held captive by an extradimensional monster: a flowing, translucent blob creature. It seemed to in and out of the Material Plane. Boris and Cornelius first encountered it in the basement, but it moved around the building with impunity.

They went through the apartments, one by one. There were seductive, aging flappers, a  crazy old man trying to cast a banishing ritual, a room full of hostile golliwog dolls, and other eccentric inhabitants. Eventually, they found the weird horn in the hands of a jazz musician. Cornelius blew the horn.  It knocked him unconscious, but blew open the door so they were able to escape.

Mingus Rooke was waiting for them. He revealed the horn actually belonged to a fallen angel.  He said it wouldn't be able to help them destroy the Machineries of the Night--and the forces of Heaven would be coming for it soon, in any case. Rooke had known this from the beginning and tricked them into retrieving it and freeing the building's inhabitants.

Rooke did give them a little advice that would help them, though: destroy the dodecahedron and the heart-string.  The latter they had; the other...

Warlord Wednesday: Halloween Edition

Travis Morgan and his friends have encountered a lot of frightening things so far on Warlord Wednesday. Here are a few of the horrifying highlights:

The Children of Ba'al (issue #23) didn't seem that scary at first, being gold skinned and good-looking and all--but then they decided to sacrifice Morgan to their god and cooked at ate some of the brutish Orms.

While we're on the subject of sacrifices and gods, when the android Bogg (issue #39) invited Morgan to the feast of Agravar, Morgan had no idea he was going to get fed to a worm-thing.

Lest you think it's only Morgan that get's into these fixes, recall the Machiste and Mariah survived a shipwreck to get rescued by:

Which probably qualifies as "going from bad to worse."

Morgan also encounters horrors that are pretty appealing at first glance.  Azrael, the personification of death, is one of them.  Another is the sexy Cobra Queen from issue #28.

The greatest horror of them all would have to be Morgan's recurrent nemesis, Deimos the Demon-Priest.  Deimos was never so horrific as when he was a head on a hand after being chopped to pieces in his previous encounter with Morgan:

Spirit of the Season

In the City, it's the month of Redfall and Revenant Night approaches.  Read all about it in this classic post.  While you're dipping into the FtSS vaults, you might want to refresh you memory on the Red Dwarf of Motorton, whose powers seem increased on that night.

Monstrous Monday: Jumpin' Jack

He attacked women in the night in the streets of Victorian London, slashing them with knives or claws. He was said to be of hideous, inhuman appearance and able to make superhuman leaps and even breath fire.  Like that other guy a half-century later, he was christened "Jack."  Spring-heeled Jack.

Beneath a black cloak, Spring-heeled Jack wears a slick outfit like an oilskin (or maybe latex or some alien material?) and a helmet. He's said to have eyes like balls of fire and a diabolic countenance. His hands end in metallic claws. Unlike the latter day Jack, the Spring-Heeled gent seems more interested in causing fear than murder. He slashes victims' clothes, claws at them, then bounds away, disappearing to the night.

Read more about his exploits here.

Spring-Heeled Jack 
AC 4  HD 4  #Attacks: 1 claw +1 to hit (2d4) or breath  Special: Fearful Countenance: as per fear spell on a failed save; Leaping: can jump 20 ft. vertically or horizontally; Fire-breathing: 10 ft. cone, 2d6 fire dmg. (save for half) once every 1d4 rounds.

Follow the links below for more MONSTROUS Monday!

Monster Mashup

Classic monsters have uses beyond horror (or horror-themed) games. A number of monstrous crossovers in other media show how they can rear their ugly heads in games of other genres.

The astute Marvel reader may be aware that Solomon Kane fought Dracula (Though don't go looking for those stories in any of Marvel's Essential collections. I hear it's in the Dracula Omnibus, though ), but fewer may be aware that Dracula faced Zorro in Old California in a 1993 limited series from Topps. Frankenstein's monster gets around, too.  He encounters Tarzan in a 1996 Dark Horse limited when jungle lord tries to prevent Thomas Edison from recreating Victor von Frankenstein's experiment. (The collection Tarzan: Le Monstre also includes encounters with the Phantom of the Opera and Jekyll and Hyde).

Wold-Newton afficiandos among you that the pulp hero G-8 is rumored to be one of the pilots that took down King Kong. In "After King Kong Fell" Philip J. Farmer suggests that Doc Savage and the Shadow were hanging around that day, too.

Kim Newman's Anno Dracula series is an alternate history where the protagonists fail to defeat Dracula like they did in Bram Stoker's novel, and the count's villainous real estate scheme leads to a vampiric takeover of the British Empire.  The series goes from the 1888 to the 1980s.  Here's a free sample chronicling the vampiric 70s, with a lot of cameos from the likes of Travis Bickle, Shaft and Blade: "Andy Warhol's Dracula."

The monsters needn't be the villains. "Black as Pitch, from Pole to Pole" by Howard Waldrop and Steven Utley takes Frankenstein's monster into Pellucidar. Neil Gaiman's short-story and comic book serial Only the End of the World Again puts Larry (the Wolf Man) Talbot in Innsmouth and pits him against Deep One cultists.

You get the idea. So check out some of these great sources of inspiration in time for Halloween.  Also, take a look at this previous post for more pulpy appearances of classic monsters.

Books That Put the Weird in the West

Here's two book recommendations that bring a little bit of the fantastic into an Old West (or old west type) setting:

I've recommended some of Cherie Priest's work in this vein before--both the Steampunkian Boneshaker and the more horrific historical Those Who Went Remain There Still. Dreadful Skin reminds me more of the latter, though what it reminds me of most is Lansdale's Dead in the West or Collins'  Dead Mans Hand. It's a set of linked short-stories about a former nun pursuing a supernatural menace across Post-Civil War America. It's episodic and none of the stories builds to a climax in quite the way I would have liked, but it's a quick and entertaining read with some nice set pieces: the first story is a cat and mouse game with a werewolf aboard a steamboat trapped by a storm mid-river.

Felix Gilman's "Lightbringers and Rainmakers" is a a free story at Tor.com set in the Western-ish secondary world of his novel The Half-Made World (which I recommended here) and the upcoming sequel The Rise of Ransom City. In brief, a frontier is being made from the more malleable reality of the wilderness, and humanity is caught between two opposing forces: the technologically more advanced, oppressive order of the Line and the violent chaos represented by the Gun. The short story weaves an epistolary tale of frontier towns and confidence hucksters in the rich world Gilman has built.