Friday night's game

We had an excellent start for Call of Cthulhu on Friday night. At close to the last minute, I decided that my group would transition better with a shorter adventure that broke into action faster than Tatters of the King. Tatters looks like an AWESOME adventure, but the lack of action at the beginning would work better for a group that's more used to the feel of CoC as opposed to D&D.

So, I started them with the Haunting, the classic CoC adventure of all time. They wanted to play modern, and the Haunting is fairly non-specific timewise, so that worked. I won't include the spoilers in this post, but suffice to say that one of the characters left the house after ten game minutes and refused to go back in until it was daytime.

List of Phantasmagorical writers - Part I

Who do you consider to be phantasmagorical writers? For me, "phantasmagorical" is in many ways a term that retreads the old meaning of the term "Romantic," before it came to mean Harlequin novels and their ilk. This sort of novel involves forces that are beyond human understanding, and into which it is dangerous to fall. Some of these might be horror stories (per Lovecraft) or not (per Dunsany)...

Here's an "official" definition:
adj : characterized by fantastic imagery and incongruous
juxtapositions; "a great concourse of phantasmagoric
shadows"- J.C.Powys; "the incongruous imagery in
surreal art and literature"; " [syn: phantasmagoric,
surreal, surrealistic]

Into that list, I'd place (for starters)
H.P. Lovecraft
Robert Chambers
August Derleth
Mary Shelley
Bram Stoker

Lord, there must be a huge number. Any suggestions to add to the list?

The OSRIC Story

You may know that OSRIC is a system reference document for 1e (first edition). For legal reasons, I can't connect OSRIC with the actual name of 1e, but most readers will know what I mean when I say it's the first edition of a sword and sorcery fantasy role playing game written by Gary Gygax.

I started the OSRIC project in late 2005, joined almost immediately by Stuart Marshall (known on the net as "Papers and Paychecks"). After I'd written 75,000 words or so, I was hit with a downswing in the cycles of my bipolar disorder and prepared to give up the project. Stuart offered to finish it for me, and I handed it over to him in toto. The basic idea of OSRIC is to make the rules of 1e generally available for use in publications. Although it is legal for anyone to use the rules of another person's game, it is not legal to use their descriptions of those rules, or "derivative material" from the descriptions of those rules, or to refer to the trademarked name of those rules. With all those pitfalls, it's obviously a major project to publish anything using RPG rules written by someone else, even if the rules themselves technically can't be copyrighted.

However, since the original rules aren't in print, with copies becoming daily more expensive (although still cheap at this point), I decided to try and create an open source version of the underlying rules. This wouldn't have been possible without the existence of the Open Game License published by Wizards of the Coast, which opened up a lot of the legal "grey area" of things that might or might not have been copyrightable. The goal was to give publishers a joint "name" for the game, a jointly available rules reference, and eventually to get the rule book back into mainstream distribution channels again.

Fortunately, Stuart stepped in when I despaired of ever meeting these goals, and did a fantastic job of completing the book, polishing it, editing it, and releasing it to the world. It's been an enormous success; in its first three weeks after release both Gary Gygax and Sean Reynolds had made comments about it. OSRIC is now one of the top 42 downloads of all time at RPGnow.com. A huge number of resources for OSRIC have already been published - and the release date was only June 30, 2006.

Although at the moment I'm playing Call of Cthulhu again rather than 1e, I'm still watching OSRIC's progress with considerable awe, and hoping it continues to grow.

Here's the download location (free download): OSRIC

Gaming - CoC

It looks like our group is firmed up to play Call of Cthulhu, present-day, on the 29th. I'm going to take a look at Tatters of the King to see if it can be played in the present day. I've read excellent reviews of it at Yog-Sothoth.com, including "It's Cthulhu done right." And since I'm reading the source material from it, the King in Yellow, it seems like the perfect fit. Hopefully it will arrive from Amazon in time...

Introduction

This blog is a general discussion of phantasmagorical fiction and gaming, particularly the genres of "cosmic" horror and swords and sorcery.

At the moment, I'm reading The Yellow Sign and Other Stories, which is a Chaosium edition (Chaosium also publishes, as most readers will know, the Call Of Cthulhu RPG. I plan on writing a review of the Yellow Sign when I'm done reading it, although the very first story in the collection, The Repairer of Reputations, made the book worth its purchase price already. It is spooooky.