The Witch Queen of the Black Numenoreans

Campaign: Adventures in Middle-Earth

Characters:

• Heva the Small, Woodman Slayer -- a harrowed woman haunted by visions of the growing Shadow
• Odo Hayfoot, Shire Hobbit Treasure Hunter -- a reluctant adventurer with a greed for gold
• Thuradiel, Mirkwood Elf Wanderer -- a world-weary traveler who tires of life in Middle-earth
• Nar Goldhorn, Dwarf Warden -- a seeker after a lost ancestral harp
• Lillian, Bree-lander Scholar -- a student of the healing arts who feels the pull of the road

Objectives: Seek Beruthiel in her dark fortress.

Events:

• The company is bolstered by the addition of two adventurers who have felt the cold hand of the Shadow upon the land and are moved to act against its reach. Nar Goldhorn, a Dwarf who wishes to locate his family's famed harp, and Lillian, an overfed scholar who dreams of adventure, join in fellowship with Odo, Thuradiel, and Heva.
• Travel northward results in no incidents of note. The fortress now occupied by the mysterious Beruthiel had long fallen into disrepair, but even so it seems cursed with a forlorn and moribund atmosphere beyond the rot and ruin brought by time and neglect.
• A lone watchtower lurks at the perimeter of the fortress's broken wall. Sensing that something watches them from the watchtower, a portion of the company decides to stay in view of the tower as a distraction while Thuradiel, Odo, and Lillian sneak inside.
• Inside the tower, Thuradiel, Odo, and Lillian surprise a small contingent of Orcs acting as sentries. Thuradiel and Odo engage the Orcs in combat while Lillian throws errant bits of broken masonry to distract the Goblins. Luckily, the Orcs were unable to light their warning beacon before being felled in the melee.
• Surprisingly, there are no sentries posted at the gate of the fortress. The gate is open, which feels like an uneasy welcome.
• Inside, the fortress teems with cats. They flow like a living carpet across the filthy flagstones of the keep. All the cats are black. As the company enters the fortress, the cats swarm them as a roiling mass of fur and fangs. The company manages to fight their way to the stairs; the feline tide recedes. 
• The keep is explored. Several statues in the style of the craftsmanship of Gondor are discovered, but each statue has been defaced in some way.
• In a long and ancient hallway the company is rushed by a number of Orcs and their allied panthers. The fight is vicious, but sudden and short. Despite his small size, Odo delivers the finishing blow to the majority of the black panthers. Nar vows to write a bardic tale telling of the day a Hobbit stood as a champion against the great cats.
• After further exploration, the company finds themselves in the presence of Beruthiel, a woman enshrined in dark robes whose face is veiled by shadowy cloth. The floor swarms with mewling black cats, but a white cat sits upon her lap. She is enthroned, and flanked by slavering Goblins. Addressing the company, she congratulates them on their bravery for seeking Queen Beruthiel of the Ages Past--Beruthiel the Returned, Witch of the Black Numenoreans, she who is the Claw of the Shadow!
• The Orcs surge forth and are met with blade and arrow. Beruthiel rises from her dark throne and commands the shadows cast by the torchlight in the room to mercilessly slash at the company. 
• Lillian attempts to put out the torches and thus rob Beruthiel of her shadows, but eventually realizes that this would leave the company in utter darkness against their foes. Heva is knocked to the ground by an Orc; despite her battle rage, she remains unconscious. The day, however, is carried. Thuradiel sends an arrow through the Witch Queen, who shatters into a thousand shards of potent darkness.
• And yet...the keep proves empty of the Orcish horde the company expected to find. Where is Beruthiel's warband? Is it already on the march somewhere in Middle-earth?

First Female Doctor in Britain, the Rise of Science Fiction, Remembering Octavia Butler

The First Female Doctor in Britain Spent 56 Years Disguised as a Man (Lauren Young for Atlas Obscura)

The Rise of Science Fiction from Pulp Mags to Cyberpunk (Jeff VanderMeer for Electric Lit)

Remembering Octavia Butler (Scott Timber for Salon)

Junjo Ito Cosmic Horror Game, Ugly Desires, Country Noir

A Cosmic Horror Game Inspired by the Work of Manga Artist Junjo Ito (Chris Priestman for Kill Screen) 

Ugly Desires in a Beautiful World: A Bloodborne Photo Essay (Gareth Dutton for Waypoint)

New Genres: Country Noir (Court Merrigan for Electric Lit)

Alraune

New podcast episode is up!

Hanns Heinz Ewers' 1911 novel Alraune is part horror, part science fiction, part decadent prose, and absolutely of the most extreme femme fatale stories ever written. Kate and Jack tackle Ewers' complicated personal and political history and why this German author's weird tales deserve to be read alongside the work of other horror luminaries.

Kate and Jack selfishly take on the role of readers this month, highlighting the author's luridly beautiful writing.

Explore sexy funtimes dekadentenstil with bloodletting, gender bending, and attempts to scientifically identify the sluttiest woman in Berlin. What on earth is a German fencing fraternity? Why should we bring back dueling for satisfaction? How can reading out loud be an effective pathway to getting laid? Find out all this and more in this month's episode of Bad Books for Bad People.

As our way of showing how much we love you, we reveal details of our first give-away, which is open until February 1, 2017, at midnight ET.

Intro/Outro Music: "Dekadente Nächte" by Porta Nigra.

Find us at BadBooksBadPeople.com, on Twitter @badbooksbadppl, Instagram @badbooksbadpeople and on Facebook. You can discover where to get all the books featured on Bad Books for Bad People on our reading list.

Listen here, listen now, listen forever!

The Two Things I Want Cover Art to Do

Should the covers of RPG core books be designed to serve a purpose? As a thought experiment, I propose that core book cover art should be designed to answer two questions: who are the characters and what do they do?

(I also want the art to be good, but that goes without saying.)

Let's see how a bunch of RPG covers stack up according to my rubric:

Moldvay Basic D&D 
The gold standard of D&D covers. The game is called Dungeons & Dragons, the art shows that the player characters are fantasy adventurers who go into dungeons and encounter monsters--like dragons, for instance. Easy win.

3.5 Dungeons & Dragons 
Absolute failure. What is this game about? Also: ugly and so very brown. If anything, the only vibe it gives off is about what the player, not the character, will have to do in this game: it might be a warning saying "This is a textbook, get ready to study."

Pathfinder
Cover art is a place where Pathfinder smokes 3.5 D&D. Borrowing a page from Moldvay, we get fantasy adventurers versus fantasy beasts in fantasy dungeons. It does what it says on the tin.

4e Dungeons & Dragons
We get a sense of who the player characters are on this cover, but not of what they do. You could argue that it looks like they're exploring subterranean depths, but it looks way too cautious for the big set-piece battle style that 4e supports.

5e Dungeons & Dragons
A return to form for D&D cover art: adventurers fighting monsters in fantasy locales. The slightly over-the-top heroics of the cover compared to Moldvay Basic give a fairly good indication that D&D isn't a necessarily a meat grinder anymore.

1e Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay
The characters depicted on the cover look like they were rolled off of random tables, stuck together in a party, and are now facing a tough battle that will leave some of them dead and others hideously wounded. I'd say that's a good encapsulation of the WRFP experience, actually.

7e Call of Cthulhu
It is usually the case that earlier editions of Call of Cthulhu have moody, evocative covers that show Cthulhu being generally menacing and whatnot, which really doesn't give an indication of what the game is about. The newest edition does a better job of this by splitting the game into two books, and thus has two covers. The cover of player's guide shows investigators getting way over their heads by discovering a cult idol--a pretty good indication of how the game is likely to play out.

Deadlands
I love the Brom painting on the cover of this book, but...you're probably not going to get to play a harrowed gunslinger so it feels a bit like false advertising. 

1e Shadowrun
The cover reads as "fantasy Flock of Seagulls steal data and do violent stuff in a cyberpunk dystopia," so it nails the premise fairly well. It may also hint at the idea of the party's hacker going on their own Matrix adventure while everybody else does other stuff.

RIFTS
So, we play the alien-chicks version of Charlie's Angels trapped in that one Rick Springfield video? No? Oh...in that case, this cover doesn't work for me; it really doesn't tell me anything about the player characters or what they get up to. Also, I know this is a beloved piece of RPG art, but I've always found it really static and a bit ugly.

Savage Worlds RIFTS
Okay, the amount of trade dress on the cover is excessive, but this gives me the impression of playing a post-apocalyptic punk with crazy weapons who fights robot Nazis, which is actually much closer in spirit to what RIFTS is about than the original cover.

Burning Wheel
Yeah, I would have no idea what this is about if I saw it on a shelf. Ridiculously uninformative. The cover is actually really attractive, especially when you see it in person, but it doesn't get me excited about the premise of the game itself.

Swords & Wizardry Complete
I'm not going to go to hard on this one since it's already been a lightning rod for grognard ire, but it suffers from the same problems as the Burning Wheel cover above. While I really like the image, it doesn't really indicate that the game is an OD&D clone.

Traveller
Seriously, go fuck yourself.

Romasanta: The Werewolf Hunt

Romasanta was far better than I expected it to be. The acting was good, the women beautiful, and I really liked the weird anachronism of the setting (it’s set in 1851, but looks like it’s set in the early modern period...and then someone mentions genes, which is a solidly twentieth-century understanding of biology). 

That said, the poster art is massively misleading. Anyone expecting a low-budget riff on the same territory covered by Brotherhood of the Wolf is bound to be disappointed; despite the garb showcased in the above image (which doesn’t even feature prominently in the film–if at all), Romasanta doesn’t have any of the swashbuckling kung-fu of that film.

Werewolf film buffs in general are liable to be disappointed as well. By the end of the film it’s not clear that there even is a werewolf at work here. Romasanta is based on the life of a nineteenth-century Spanish serial killer Manuel Blanco Romasanta, who claimed that he murdered because he was under a curse which caused him to turn into a bloodthirsty wolf. His trial is noteworthy because it featured phrenology (my favorite pseudo-science) and because Romasanta’s sentence was commuted by Queen Isabella II. Interestingly, the sentence was commuted at the request of a mysterious Dr. Phillips (possibly the exiled hypnotist Joseph-Pierre Durand de Gros) so the doctor could study this case of "psychological lycanthropy."

So, between the real-world case and the film, what’s gameable here?

• The tension in the question of whether a series of murders are the work of a madman or a werewolf is worthy of mining.
• Romasanta was collecting the fat from his human victims. Why? Was the fat used in a ritual to bring on his lycanthropic transformation or to keep it at bay?
• Furthermore, Romasanta inspired the legend of Sacaúntos, sinister men who killed children for their fat. What if these bogeymen were a particularly malicious sort of fey sent to frighten a human community away from an ancient faerie site?
• Who was this Dr. Phillips and why was he so interested in studying this werewolf? Perhaps the crown commuted the sentence in hopes of harnessing the occult secrets of lycanthropy as a weapon against an enemy nation.

Days Gone Bye

This is a read-through of The Walking Dead, from the beginning: headshots only.

The first issue of The Walking Dead is all about establishing what the audience is supposed to know about Rick Grimes, the primary protagonist of the series. We are introduced to Rick in the middle of a gunfight in which he, as a police officer, is shot down by an escapee from a nearby prison. We next see Rick awaken in a hospital, the zombie apocalypse having happened in the interim. The juxtaposition of Rick being wounded and regaining consciousness amid a world gone to hell underlines an important trait that will define who Rick is: he is a survivor. 

Rick's ability to survive whatever human and inhuman obstacles the story places in his way marks him as a protagonist; metaphorically, the ability to survive might be his "superpower." As the series unfolds, the narrative development is in how he survives and especially in what he finds difficult to survive or cope with.

However, the association between Rick and survival isn't meant to be taken as a solitary orientation; The Walking Dead is not the story of a lone wolf's struggle in a zombie-infested world. Instead, The Walking Dead is a story about community in the face of crisis. As such, Rick's survival skills have a communal, outward-facing focus. When Rick encounters Morgan and Duane, for example, he uses his abilities and access as a (former) policeman to give them guns and a better vehicle to help enable their survival in this tough new world. At this point in the story, this is Rick's default position: he is a survivor who feels a duty to help others survive.

Rick's default position proves to be troubled or strained by another trait of his that we're introduced to early on: his sensitivity and sentimentality. Even though he's been told by Morgan that wasting a bullet on a zombie that can't get at you squanders an important and limited resource, he takes the time to finish off a crippled and "suffering" zombie he had encountered earlier. Interestingly, Rick knows that his sentimentality is a potential liability; when he attempts to cheer himself up by relating the story of his son's birth--a story he tells to a horse, of all things--he remarks that "thinking about the good times makes all this seem so much worse." 

Of course, forming communal bonds is itself a survival instinct for the protection of the herd, but forging those ties is rendered problematic by moments of profound upheaval and instability. There are dangers here: there is already fear about cultural backsliding in this new apocalyptic age (Donna's fear that the equality of the sexes will fall by the wayside), there is the possibility of old resentments tearing apart a new community now that the old boundaries of social propriety are no longer in play (Shane's feelings for Lori), there are conflicts of ideology (the religious Donna doesn't approve of Andrea and Amy sleeping with Dale in his trailer), there is tension over who is going to be the leader and who has the best plan for the group's future (Rick and Shane butt heads to establish alpha male status).

None of this is easy, and the group is essentially living during wartime as they are besieged by enemies from without and from within. The fault lines already apparent threaten to erupt into irreparable rifts; disagreement over responsibility for the deaths of Amy and Jim lead Shane and Rick into a deadly confrontation in the woods--a confrontation that only ends when Carl shoots and kills Shane before Shane has a chance to pull the trigger on his father. This is how The Walking Dead registers the fallout of the group's strain: it asks, how does this effect the youngest and most vulnerable members of the group? How are they changed by the experience? And can the adults manage and handle that change in the children?

The problems of survival and community collude to make Carl learn the hard way that killing a living, breathing man is not at all like killing a dead, shambling thing. It's a lesson he wouldn't have had to learn otherwise, but the world he now lives doesn't leave him with that luxury.

From the hip:

• I love that Rick's survivor skills are exemplified by how easily he adapts to using different modes of transportation; all within the first few issues he walks, rides a bike, drives a car, and rides a horse. That Rick can do anything!
• Rick and Lori's disagreement over whether Carl should have a gun to protect himself parallels the ongoing debates about access to firearms in the US. Here zombies stand in for "terrorists" and "criminals"; clearly an armed populace can better protect itself, right? Right?
• Note that many of the characters were plagued by debt before the zombie apocalypse, perhaps hinting that the alternative was a slow moving and persistent economic Armageddon. 
• The issue where Carl kills Shane is the first issue that doesn't feature zombies. The violence between the living is allowed the space to stand on its own.