Goosebumps

In the mid-1990s, R.L. Stine's Goosebumps series was a sensation, creeping out kids across the globe. The phenomenon of kid-friendly horror fiction is hardly a new one, so Kate and Jack tackle three Goosebumps titles and see how they stack up against the terrifying stories of their childhoods. Bring on the haunted houses, possessed dummies, and nightmarish theme parks!

This month's guest reader is Aunt John from Kindertrauma, the long-running website dedicated to all things childhood-horror-related. 

How weird are the Goosebumps books? Why do people love them so much? How do you say Goosebumps in Dutch? What highly inappropriate Freudian subtext can our hosts insert into their conversation about these stories for young readers? All these questions and more will be answered in this episode of Bad Books for Bad People.

See you in 2017, friends.

Talislanta and the Gothic

My friends and I played a bit of Talislanta in high school, but it proved to be a difficult setting to get across to my peers at the time. It was too weird, too alien, too unlike the usual mash-up of Lord of the Rings and Conan that fantasy usually fell back on. The fourth edition of Talislanta's core book advises you to pick one general area to start out with, focusing on that slice of the setting and building outward once you're comfortable with it. Either the edition I had never mentioned that or I missed it or the idea of only using one smaller area of the massive campaign world never occurred to me because in practice it was a nightmare trying to convey this unique setting as a teenager to other teenagers.

Rereading the fourth edition made me realize where I should have started when trying to run a Talislanta game. What immediately caught my a‚ttention was the description of the Western Lands: "Opposing religious factions, witch hunters, and secret cults make this a good starting place for local-scale campaigns based on intrigue and subterfuge" (430). 

Hold up. Religious factions? Witch hunters? Secrets cults? This sounds downright Gothic to me! Cue to me flipping to the larger detailing of the Western Lands. The High Orthodoxy of Aaman, with its inquisitors, monastic orders, and templars, would make a dandy stand-in for the Gothic’s vision of the Catholic Church; Necron, City of the Dead, is haunted by necrophages (read: ghouls) and ghasts (liches); the Sarista of Silvanus are literal gypsy analogs; the Dhuna of the Witchwood have enough wiggle-room in their occult orders to be either kindly druids preserving the lost ways of an Old Faith or Wicker Man-style evil pagans; the Werewood is home to banes (vampires) and werebeasts; the Zandir work as a decadent, corrupt culture; etc.

I think if I had scaled down the setting to focus on Talislanta as a Gothic Fantasy game set in its Western Lands I would have had more success getting the game going. I certainly would have had a better idea about what to do with it.

Theory of Creepiness, Pest Masks, When Meat Extract was King

A Theory of Creepiness (David Livingstone Smith for Aeon)


Creepy Yet Cool, Pest Masks! (Pixivision)

When Meat Extract Was King (Rob Baker for Flashbak)

Firearm Problems in Old-School and 5e D&D

Old-school D&D is a pretty abstract game when it comes to the mechanics of combat (see, for example, hit points, armor class, the functional similarity of dissimilar weaponry), and yet when it comes time to introduce black powder firearms suddenly people start talking about using different damage dice versus specific armor types, period-accurate reload times, and translating the peculiarities of smooth bores vs. rifling, to say nothing of detailed comparisons of matchlock and flintlock firing mechanisms.

Suddenly a game that privileges ease of play over realism is bogged down in a mire of special properties, edge cases, and bolted-on house rules that seem at odds with the base system.

Lamentations of the Flame Princess is a pretty good example of this effect in action. LotFP is a game content to abstract melee options. It doesn't have a big detailed chart of everything you can use to bludgeon or stab someone to death with in the game; instead, weapons are ranked great, medium, minor, or small, and you're left to fluff them accordingly. 

(There are a few weird outliers, like the cestus, polearm, and spear which have some special-case rules, but generally things are kept simple and consistent rather than realistic and detailed.)

And then you get to the firearms appendix and all that simplicity and consistency flies out the window. Now you've got bullet-pointed lists of special rules for firing mechanisms (with asterisked exceptions), gun and barrel types, and any firearm accessories with mechanical add-ons (such as apostles) that you're bringing to the party. 

My own firearm rules back when I was playing Labyrinth Lord had moments of being equally as convoluted and contrary to the free-wheeling spirit of the rules. At various points I had bespoke rules about range and reloading based on some way-too-intensive research, exploding damage dice rules, etc. It was a mess and it added nothing good to my games.

Instead of coming up with new cruft to add to the game, I should have taken inspiration from Erik Jensen and just used the rules for ranged weapons that already exist in the game. At the level of abstraction that most old-school D&D games default to, you're just better off using the stats of bows or crossbows and reskinning the fictional aesthetics of the weapon than detailing all sorts of new rules to make it "realistic." John Bell gets it. Brian Mathers gets it. 

5e D&D has somewhat of the opposite problem. Firearm rules are buried in an optional section of the Dungeon Master's Guide (267-268). Generally, the rules are pretty simple: the black powder firearms follow the rules already extant for crossbows, except they do a bit more damage. More modern firearms also have similarly efficient rules for their use. No problem, right?

Well, no, not exactly. Since they aren't part of the default game assumptions, they don't really interact well with things like special abilities or feats. If you use them as-is, there's no real reason to pick a firearm over a crossbow; if you start house ruling to make similar feats available for firearms, there's no reason to use anything but a firearm because their damage is just plain better.

Oddly, the solution to 5e's problem is the same as the solution to the old-school problem outlined above: just use the stats for crossbows, since they are already integrated into the game, and refluff the descriptive fiction as black powder firearms. A heavy crossbow could certainly be ye olde arquebus, a light crossbow could be ye olde musket, and the hand crossbow could be ye olde pistol. You don't have to invent rules about which class is proficient with which; just look to see which crossbows they can already use with proficiency and apply it to firearms as well. You don't have to come up with new feats; change the wording to Crossbow Expert and you're good to go.

Jodorowsky's Dune

Jodorowsky's Dune is an odd documentary; instead of chronicling the making of a feature film, it charts the strange life and stillborn death of Alejandro Jodorowsky's attempt to film Frank Herbert's classic science fiction novel. 

The early portions of the film where interviewees speak on the formation of Jodorowsky's dream-team of collaborators and co-conspirators (a formidable list including Moebius, Chris Foss, H. R. Giger, Pink Floyd, Salvador Dali, Dan O'Bannon, Orson Welles, and David Carradine) plays out like Hannibal assembling a psychedelic and cinematic A-Team. Indeed, the process of finding the right people for the job feels like a trope straight out of Jodorowsky's work: he insists that he chose the people he wanted to work with based on their suitability to be "spiritual warriors" dedicated to the mind-expanding power of his vision for Dune. Even the stories Jodorowsky tells of saying the right metaphysical or philosophical thing at the exact right moment to hook his collaborators into working on the project has more than a bit of trickster mythology clinging to their edges.

It all comes crashing down when it turns out that no movie studio wants to put up the money for Jodorowsky to film his (let's go with) ambitious version of Herbert's novel. I am almost always on the side of artists in matters that pit creativity versus economics, but in this case Jodorowsky is a little disingenuous in his outrage with the way movies do or don't get made. Jodorowsky was proposing filming Dune as a fourteen-to-twenty hour film; it is something less than shocking that no major studio was willing to foot the bill for a project of that size that about a hundred people would watch. Of course, that is if the project didn't derail itself before completion, which frankly seems a likely outcome given the volatile personalities and overreaching intentions involved. 

Similarly, Nicholas Wendig Refn is completely full of shit when he claims that the reason Jodorowsky's Dune didn't get financed was because Hollywood was scared of the ideas the film might impart or inspire. Hollywood is afraid of only one thing: not making money.

You do feel for Jodorowsky when he talks about how he felt when he heard that David Lynch had successfully directed a version of Dune that was due for theatrical release. You can also easily excuse any spite on his part when he reports feeling relieved at discovering that Lynch's movie was a tremendous artistic blunder. Therein lies the silver lining; even if Jodorowsky had been able to bring his vision to the big screen, there is every chance that it would have been as titanic a misstep as Lynch's film. Jodorowsky didn't fail--he dodged a bullet.

The dissolution of a project, even of a dream project, is not always an artistic tragedy. That a Dune shot by Jodorowsky never materialized was a hidden blessing; although he didn't get to put his own personal stamp on Arrakis, he was able to later return to the ideas he had for the Dune film and craft them into a series of stunning comic books. The Incal, Metabarons, Technopriests, et al, are the inheritors of the inspirations Jodorowsky accumulated for Dune, but in execution that are better for not being fettered to a film adaptation of another artist's work. The comics are purer expressions because they are individualist expressions rather than adaptive ones. They still contain the strands of Jodorowsky's Dune-inspired mania, but they are works that reinterpret and reinvent with a freer hand and freer spirit. I certainly wouldn't trade them for another shoddy silver screen run at Dune.

Dirgecraft: Krevborna Edition

What did I listened to as I worked on Krevborna? These mixes will give you an idea. Click the links to open the mixtapes at 8tracks.

Red Acid Haze
Trackist: Blood Ceremony - Lorely † Hexvessel - Earth Over Us † Purson - Dead Dodo Down † Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats - Downtown † Earth - From Zodiacal Light † Sabbath Assembly - I, Satan † Jex Thoth - Into a Sleep

The Quiet of Arboreal Graves
Tracklist: Mike Reagan and Chris Velasco - Darksiders Theme † Glenn Danzig - Bridal Ceremony of the Lilitu † Salt and Sanctuary - Sacrifice † Abel Korzeniewoski - Transgression † Dark Souls - Aldritch, Devourer of Gods † Howard Shore - The Defiler † Dead Can Dance - I Am Stretched on Your Grave † Mark Korven - Witches’ Coven † Myrkur - Skogen Skulle Do

Orchestrated at the Edge
Tracklist: Peccatum - Murder † Haggard - Of a Might Divine † Finntroll - Ett Norrskendad † Porta Nigra - Fin de Siecle † Summoning - Nightshade Forests † Lacrimosa - Thunder and Lightning † Therion - Polichinelle † Skepticism - Pouring

Chancel by Night
Tracklist: Myrkur - Onde Born † Cradle of Filth - A Gothic Romance † Dimmu Borgir - The Night Masquerade † Therion - To Mega Therion † Theatres des Vampires - Lilith Mater Inferorum † Ancient Ceremony - Brides Ghostly Dance † Opera IX - The Sixth Seal † Moonspell - First Light

The Master and Margarita: Absurdity and Writing

The characters in Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita live in an obviously absurd world. The extremity of that absurdity is such that instead of creating a rich tapestry of fantasy or magic realism, it instead renders the plot—such that it is—annoying to many readers. And yet, I don't think that annoyance is truly rooted in an utterly unrecognizable heft of absurdity permeating the plot, characters, and setting; rather, the absurdity in the novel is vexing because it echoes a fear we have about our own existences: our world is also absurd, and if it isn't as profoundly absurd, it is at least persistently absurd. There is an uncomfortable resonance there, which is why the narrative chafes.

Many of the characters in the novel attempt to make sense of the absurdity that surrounds them in a way that is recognizable to many of us: they attempt to write their way toward sense, order, and understanding of the world around them. Take Ivan, the poet, as an example:

'The poet’s attempts to compose a report on the terrible consultant had come to nothing. As soon as he received a pencil stub and some paper from the stout nurse, whose name was Praskovya Fyodorovna, he had rubbed his hands together in a businesslike fashion and hastily set to work at the bedside table. He had dashed off a smart beginning, “To the police. From Ivan Nikolayevich Bezdomny, member of MASSOLIT. Report. Yesterday evening I arrived at Patriarch’s Ponds with the deceased Berlioz …”

And the poet immediately became confused, largely due to the word “deceased.” It made everything sound absurd from the start: how could he have arrived somewhere with the deceased? Dead men don’t walk! They really will think I’m a madman!

Such thoughts made him start revising. The second version came out as follows, “ …with Berlioz, later deceased …” That didn’t satisfy the author either. He had to write a third version, and that came out even worse than the other two, “… with Berlioz, who fell under a streetcar …” What was irksome here was the obscure composer who was Berlioz’s namesake; he felt compelled to add, “ …not the composer …”' (Chapter XI: Ivan is Split in Two).

Even those most comforting pastimes and passions of the intelligent and creative—writing, words, literature, art—fail to give sufficient structure or stability to a world seething with nonsense, surreality, coincidence, and chaos. Words might comfort us, but in the end they don't work; language becomes so slippery and imprecise that even Ivan's third draft of his account refuses to give a definite shape to his experience.

So it goes with all of us, but perhaps writers feel this failure more keenly. Bulgakov certainly does: the novel is brimming with writers and other creatives who turn to writing or storytelling as a bulwark against an uncertain world, only to have a chance for greater meaning slip away into the tumult of a world that cannot be tamed by words alone. Ivan feels this, as does the Master, as does Margarita, as does anyone connected to MASSOLIT, as does Pontius Pilate and Levi Matvei as they witness The Story of Stories unfolding. Does Bulgakov? I'm terrifyingly certain he did.

Grand Guignol Art, Cersei Lannister's Fashion, Dandy Cigarette Cards

Wonderfully lurid and and macabre posters from the Grand Guignol (Dangerous Minds)

Cersei Lannister's Fashion Evolution (by Freyia Lilian Porteous for Bustle)

Historical Dandies: British Cigarette Cards (by Karen Strike for Flashbak)