The Last Lovecraft

H.P. Lovecraft covered a lot of interesting and seminal themes with his writing, but one he liked a LOT was the idea that some things were just too weird for the human mind to handle.

"I dare not relate that which I saw, because you would go mad from the knowing, and I from the telling!" It's not an EXACT quote, but his protagonists often said similar things. Remember the famous Jack Nicholoson line, "You can't handle the truth?" Well, Lovecraft's favorite trope was that "The truth is so insane and horrible that the human mind would come apart like a house of cards in a typhoon if you REALLY knew what was going on!"

In short... NOBODY could REALLY handle the truth!

And his stories are full of characters who become more and more creeped out as they discover what's going on, to the point where most of them go completely fruity-gumballs and die or end up in an insane asylum... or retire quietly and live out horribly damaged lives, tortured by the horror of what they have seen. The horror. The horror...

Since most of his stories revolved around NOT seeing the monster, this means that most movies based on his work tend to have kind of a tough time. There have been quite a few decent ones -- From Beyond, Re-Animator and its sequels, The Dunwich Horror, and even a pretty-good version of The Call Of Cthulhu -- but most Lovecraft adaptations (The Curse, Cthulhu Mansion, Necronomicon, The Unnameable) kind of fall flat.

Which brings us to The Last Lovecraft... a comedy.

Is it a good movie? No. It is not. But in a weird kind of way, it may be the single truest adaptation of Lovecraft's THEMES that I've ever seen in a movie.

Because the longer I watch it, the creepier it gets. The more uncomfortable it makes me. The weirder and more horrific it becomes.

Not the monsters. The actors.

I can sum up the plot, without spoilers, fairly easily: "The coming of Cthulhu and the Elder Gods is nigh. The Stars Are Right. The world will end soon, and humanity will be done for... unless the last surviving member of the Lovecraft family (a nerd) can put a relic to proper use and stop the Apocalypse from happening, with the help of his even nerdier friends. But our heroes are pursued by Deep Ones and worse things..."

When I heard about this, naturally I was interested. I'm a Lovecraft fan from way back. But this movie... this one is just... wow. You see... the monsters... aren't scary. The people are.

The movie shifts back and forth between following the monsters who are pursuing our heroes to get the magic relic so they can bring about armageddon... and our heroes, who are trying to figure out how to use the relic while staying ahead of the cultists and monsters. The viewpoint shifts back and forth between these two camps.

And you know what? The monsters and cultists are actually pretty comforting. They're guys in masks and special effects makeup who ham it up and act like monster bad guys in a million other B-movies. It's like old home week. Family reunion, even.

... while the nerds? The nerds are the most unlikeable, awkward, geeky, socially maladroit (even with EACH OTHER) dweebs that you ever saw at a Star Trek convention, or gathered around a gaming table. These are the guys who, apropos of nothing, walk up to you in a comic shop, assume you are their friend, and start telling you about their D&D character. These are the nerds that made me give up going to conventions in the first place, the kind of people I don't really wanna be rude to, but would cheerfully chew my leg off to escape from a conversation with. The kind of geek with NO social skills, and a worldview that's skewed enough to make you feel like you're on drugs just from standing too CLOSE to him, you know? Especially the guy in the middle of the poster above. I could practically smell his BO as I watched the movie...

...and as I watched the movie... I realized that this was intentional on the part of the moviemakers. The monsters aren't the monsters in this movie.

We are.

I'm going to go do something more comforting now. This may be the single scariest Lovecraft adaptation I've ever seen...

"It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue."

1985 was a whole different world.

AIDS hadn't hit yet; the Sexual Revolution was still going strong. President Reagan's wife Nancy told us all to "Just Say No," but most of us weren't. A lot of us hadn't figured out that the seventies were over. If you want pop culture details, I recommend "1985" by Bowling for Soup.*

But this blog is about gaming, and to some extent, computers. We had both in 1985, but they were pretty different from what we know now.

There were games, sure. Dungeons and Dragons was eleven years old by then, and the first edition of Advanced D&D was still going strong. Magic: The Gathering and the Vampire games were still to come by years.


There were computer games. Sort of. Most of the best games you'd see were in the arcades at that time, but for the few who had personal computers back then, you could find a few items.


I'd cut my teeth on ADVENTURE, for the Atari 2600, the old cartridge-based console that pretty much created home console gaming as we know it today. No hard drive, no internet connection, and all of 16 kilobytes of memory. That's KILOBYTES, son, not megabytes, not gigabytes. But what did we know? We thought it was awesome, because it was the cutting edge of technology at the time.














The box is on the right. The actual gameplay screen is on the left. YOU, the player, are represented by the little green square at upper right; the arrow thing you are holding is your magical sword. The yellow thing at lower left is the Grail, the object of your quest; get it back to your Golden Castle, and you win the game! Unfortunately, you have a red duck -- er, DRAGON, to contend with. In this screen, he is very likely charging at YOU, the player; however, since the chunky-pixeled icons could only be rendered ONE WAY, you're holding your sword backwards, and the duck-dragon is charging at you butt first.

Did I mention you can only hold one item at a time? If you charge down and butt the grail with your square little body, you will automatically drop the sword. Luckily, the dragons in this game are so dumb, he'll likely charge into it and kill himself. If he doesn't, though, he'll bump into you, ROAR loudly, and then eat you; your square yellow selfness will be visible in the little hole in his belly. And then you can hit RESET because you've just lost the game.

That was the state of the art in 1980. It had improved a tad by 1985... but not a hell of a lot. ZORK was still the big dog as far as computer fantasy gaming went. It was quite good. It was also completely text based... NO graphics whatsoever.
It was considered hot stuff because it could parse text; you could literally type in English what you wanted to do, and the game would figure it out and let you do it.


It's also worth noting that ZORK and its sequels were still in print for YEARS after the first one came out in 1980. We were still pretty far back along the tech curve; processing power was doubling every few years, sure, but this was not a rapid process when you were starting out with mere kilobytes of memory. Hell, the first computer I ever owned that had an actual hard drive wasn't until 1999.

I do remember the first home computer game I ever played that had actual graphics. It was 1985, the computer was the Tandy ColorComputer (and it should tell you something that Radio Shack was still a player in the computer manufacturing and sales biz at the time), and the game was Dungeons of Daggorath.

Snazzy, eh? Vector graphics! Actual colors! Yowza! Admittedly, the graphics didn't actually MOVE -- although there was sound. No music; this was beyond the capability of the system or the speakers.

You'd type MOVE FORWARD (or M -space - F - space - ENTER) and you'd move up, square by square.

Upon reaching a door, you'd type OPEN RIGHT, indicating you were using your right hand to open the door, and the screen would change. It was essentially creating the illusion of movement by simply drawing a new picture every time you did something. Your computer still does this, but at a framerate of 24 to 30 pictures every second. The old Tandy CoCo had a framerate of... um... about one picture every two or three seconds, if I recall correctly. It was not fast. It seemed downright glacial by today's standards. But it was magic, back in the day.

Oh, look, we're being attacked by a troll. The troll did not move. His pose never changed. You could tell he was moving towards you because his hazy silhouette would appear in the distance, and then he'd suddenly appear -- one square closer to you -- until he was in your face, as he is now, and it was time to fight.

Behind him, you can see the distant form of a snake. The snake will wait patiently until the troll is out of the way before attacking you. This wound up being one of the keys to the game: once you'd become powerful enough, weak enemies like snakes and spiders COULD NOT HIT YOU, which meant if there was a spider in the way, the Troll or Knight (lord, we were terrified of knights) would have to simply stand there behind the spider, waiting for the spider to die, before he could move up and hit you. So long as you had armor and shield and were tough enough -- and had a spider behind you -- you could explore the dungeon in relative safety. It was also handy to save empty potion bottles and discharged magic rings -- if you threw them down on the ground in front of you, the enemy HAD TO PICK THEM ALL UP BEFORE ATTACKING YOU.

This is how I killed my first Knight -- I dumped all my stuff on the floor except my sword and shield, and waited. When a knight found me, I beat the crap out of him while he was picking up all my stuff. I finally managed to kill him, just as he was picking up the last item.

The second knight was easier. And note that we had to find all this crap out by trial and error. There were no hint books, no cheats, and no Internet to go and look stuff up on.

This brings me to the real topic that made me sit down today for yammer: the story I read in 1985. It was published in Dragon magazine that year -- issue 97 -- and was pure science fiction. In it, a young girl is trying to make money so she can attend this exclusive music school in Austin. Her method of making money is rather unorthodox: she is playing a game called "Catacomb" on her computer.

Catacomb isn't just a simple computer game, though. She's connected to thousands of other players, all over the country, and many of the people she meets in-game are ACTUAL PEOPLE, avatars of players from other places! And in Catacomb, it is possible to slay monsters, take their treasure, and either buy better gear in-game... or trade it for a fraction of its value in real American money. This is how she hopes to make enough for tuition: by slaying monsters in an "online" game you play on a "web" of other computers.

I don't think today's youth can imagine how incredibly unlikely all this sounded back in 1985.

Sure, we knew about computers. We were cheerfully dropping quarters in them in our free time to play anything from Video Poker to Spy Hunter. In fact, that year, a dungeon-type arcade game, Gauntlet, was quite popular with a lot of people I knew. But playing over a web of computers? How would you connect them? Telephones? The long distance fees would beggar a king!

Shows what I knew. In the SJG game Car Wars, autoduellists could keep in touch while on the road using Elmay (short for electronic mail), a computer text that could be transmitted and recieved within seconds. Suuuure. Why use Elmay when you could just call someone up? And the idea of a game where you could actually sell your in-game treasures for real money? Ha, ha, ha!

Sure sounded like science fiction to me. But the guys at SJG were a lot more plugged into the world of computers than I was. And, apparently, so was Henry Melton.

You want to know what the world of online gaming looked like from the far distant world of 1985? The author of Catacomb, one Henry Melton, was kind enough to post the entire text of the story on his web site. Here's the link: http://www.henrymelton.com/0/h10.html

So go see for yourself.

*The lyrics to the song "1985" by Bowling for Soup can be found here: http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/1985-lyrics-bowling-for-soup/88197b61f74bdd2748256eca000a86a3

The Battle Of Bulette Pass: An Exercise in Group Storytelling

DRAMATIS PERSONAE:

TODD THE BARBARIAN, half-orc. Still getting the hang of this "magic axe that comes back when you throw it" thing.

IXCHEL THE MAGE: No armor whatsoever. Eek.

SNIG THE GOBLIN: Why should adventurers have all the fun?

FATHER ANDERSON: Cleric and den mother.

MISER THE MINSTREL: Bard and seduction machine.

MEREDITH: Druid and animal lover. This does not include bulettes.

REDGAR: A fighter. A BIG fighter. A very STRONG fighter. But not a very high LEVEL fighter...

TIZERK OF THE GOLDEN BOW: Elf. Archer. And not present for this session, regrettably.

Part One. The bulette has attacked the group while traveling through the mountain pass out of the Battle of Bones, en route to a treasure site somewhere in the Anauroch Desert. Miser the Minstrel has had the crap beat out of him, and has retreated back into the wagon. Todd the Barbarian has had the crap beat out of him, and is on the ground in front of the wagon, barely alive (behind the bulette).

Yes, Tizerk, your horse is fine.

Meanwhile, Redgar sneaked out of the back of the wagon, flanked the beast, and whacked it a good one, getting its attention. Father Anderson, holding the torch, is seen to the left of the wagon, having had the crap beat out of him, too. Meredith the Druid is visible at far left, using her Bag of Boulders to pelt the beast with mega-sling-stones. Ixchel the Mage is not visible, as he is hidden in the wagon, poking his head and arm out every turn to launch a spell at the monster, then quickly withdrawing to safety.

Part Two. After having the crap beat out of him, Redgar is swallowed whole on a natural twenty. The monster then goes after the source of pain in his left buttock (Father Anderson and Meredith); Anderson is closest, and gets attacked. Ixchel continues to pop out, launch spells, and pop back inside, like a demented Whack-A-Mole that shoots back. It is somewhere around this time that Snig the Goblin is seen, hanging onto the monster’s underbelly and trying to hack through its armor. The group yells at him to get out from under the thing, which he does.
Part Three. The group disperses to raid assorted fast food joints, regrouping a half hour or so later.

Part Four. Snig does a Legolas Maneuver, charging up the monster’s tail onto its back, drops prone, and begins using his daggers as pitons, to move forward onto the monster’s face, closer to its vulnerable eyes. Redgar is taking heavy damage from the monster’s digestive juices and constricting stomach. He solves this by tearing open a bag of caltrops, hoping to give the monster indigestion. This works, but also has the effect of turning the monster’s guts into something resembling a cheese grater, in which Redgar is now being abraded and squeezed to death. Meanwhile, angry and in great pain, the monster attacks Father Anderson, bulldozing Todd and knocking the wagon aside, nearly onto Miser (seen at right). Critically injured, Father Anderson desperately looks for a way out – and notices Todd’s battleaxe, which is still embedded in the monster’s armored forehead…

… and Father Anderson leaps onto the monster’s head, seizing the axe, nearly losing a foot when he uses the thing’s lower lip as a springboard. He is now in one of the few places on the map where the thing cannot bite him… but he’s in deep trouble if it decides to start burrowing again!
Meanwhile, Snig claws his way closer, closer, to the monster’s eye – STRIKES – misses, and promptly fails his reflex save. He’s sliding forward, right toward’s the angry beast’s mouth! Fortunately, Father Anderson is in the way, and his ears provide fine safety handles. He finds himself nose to nose with Anderson, terrifiedly clutching the cleric’s head for dear life. Anderson is just as terrifiedly clutching the axehandle. Redgar, dying, begins frantically kicking the monster’s tonsils around with his heavy boots---

---and Todd, still axeless, charges around behind the monster and whacks it in the butt as hard as he can with his mighty Gauntlet of Fury!

---and the mortally wounded (and VERY nauseous) bulette projectile-vomits Redgar some thirty or forty feet (far right). Redgar takes serious damage from this; imagine a flexible cheese grater suddenly and violently giving birth to a large fully armored fighter, and you’ll have a clue.
The monster collapses, convulsing, dying, heaving its last.

Miser turns and runs towards Redgar, beginning a healing spell under his breath. The monster gags and coughs, one last time. A blast of blood and phlegm, studded with a great many iron caltrops, erupts with the monster’s dying breath.

Miser catches the edge of the moist shotgun-blast, and is knocked ass over teakettle, although his injuries are minor.

Todd, feeling very pleased with himself, roars the Name, to summon his mighty magical axe back to his hand… having completely forgotten the purpose it serves at the moment.

The axe ploughs a trench up the dying monster’s forehead, up and over its back, down its spine, and right at Todd’s face, taking Father Anderson and Snig with it. Todd glances up and sees his axe, with a goblin’s butt poised right above it, screaming right for his face.

Todd blinks twice, and promptly flings himself on his back, using his Uncanny Dodge.

The axe plows into the ground above Todd’s head, stopping cold. The axe haft catches the plummeting Father Anderson in the belly, stunning him badly. He falls on the unfortunate Snig.

And lo, there is much rejoicing.

Left to Right: Todd, Ixchel, Snig, Fr. Anderson, Meredith, Redgar, Miser, and a raccoon.

The OMG post!

I monitor and post on several miniatures related sites. A regular feature of nearly all of these sites is the "OMG I FOUND!" post.

I hate these posts. I hate them somewhat less when they have pictures, but I hate them nonetheless, because they make my heart burn white hot with envy.

These posts often have "OMG" in the title, or in the post itself. They invariably detail some fantastic find on the part of the poster. "OMG," one will say, "I found a copy of First Edition Space Hulk at a garage sale for five bucks! And it still has all the pieces!"

And I seethe. Why couldn't it have been me?

"OMG!" will cry another. "I was at Goodwill, and I found a second edition boxed Talisman set, with all the plastic minis, and the first two expansion sets included, for ten bucks!"

Hiss, I hiss. May your offspring be born one-eyed mutants.

But I understand why they do what they do and howl like they howl. Game geeks LIVE for finds like this. Awesome stuff from yesteryear that we should have bought while we had the chance... but didn't, for one reason or another. Or worse, we HAD it, but we loaned it out... or sold it... or it just vanished during a move... or something. And now, here it is, a bit scuffed, but no worse than it would have been in my closet, at the Salvation Army for a buck. Who wouldn't crow over a find like this?

Today, it's my turn.


I did not buy Battle Masters when it came out. I was poorer then than now, and since it was available at Wal-Mart, of all places, it never occurred to me that it might perhaps not be there if I waited too long. So I waited too long, I was a responsible adult, I paid my bills, and the chance came and went. Sigh.

Many times since then, I wished I'd been more impulsive and perhaps a week late with the rent. Battle Masters was the mass market version of Warhammer Fantasy Battles, released by Milton Bradley, but with 100-odd miniatures made by our old friends at Games Workshop/Citadel Miniatures, suitable for any number of fantasy skirmish games or RPGs. For twenty bucks! What, I couldn't spare twenty bucks? IDIOT! (whacks self on head repeatedly).

From time to time, I would encounter some of the plastic miniatures. A friend once gave me a handful of orcs he found at a garage sale, and I'm not sure how I came across the ogre, but I got him somewhere.

But I never so much as saw the box again. Except on line, of course. Ebay, Amazon, and other dealers in new and used dreams. They want HOW much? Eeesh. And that doesn't even include SHIPPING?


Until today.

Wife and I went Rumpusing, which is a strange and arcane ritual we undertake periodically when we have a couple bucks and life is dull. It involves eating out at a restaurant we don't normally patronize, and then going and poking our noses into places like used book stores, consignment stores, garage sales, antique stores... anywhere the merch is likely to be varied, eclectic, and unpredictable.

Oh, yeah, and preferably cheap.

Who knows? We've found quite a bit of furniture that way, and sometimes I find toys I can kitbash, or -- glory of glories! -- a gently used game I can restore. Found a milk crate full of Car Wars books and maps and stuff, once, for five bucks!

But today... today was magic.

After a leisurely browse at a really good used book store, we noticed a resale store downtown, one that had to be FAIRLY new -- we'd never seen it before. So we stopped to look. And at this resale store, amidst longboxes of old X-Men and vintage loose Star Wars figures carefully locked in little transparent card boxes for ten bucks each ... sat a copy of Battle Masters.

I snatched it up. It was heavy. Heavy enough? It's been twenty years. How likely is it that all the parts are in there? It was taped shut, so I couldn't check. I looked it over. Box was a LITTLE rough -- it had obviously spent many years on a closet shelf or in the garage. Still, what's a few scuffs on the box? I turned it over. It wasn't priced. I took it to the clerk and asked "How much is this?"

"I don't know," she said. "We just bought that from a walk-in, a couple days ago. Let me go and see if it's entered in inventory, yet." And she did. And she (rrarrgh!) checked it on Ebay as well, to get a clue as to value and price. On the other hand, she also plainly wanted to move the merch, as opposed to stand on the awesome value of the find. She quoted me a price.

I stopped and thought. It wasn't a bad price, but it was way above what I would have liked to have paid. This was a resale store, after all. Then again, it was hella cheaper than any price I'd seen online. "Can I have a look in the box, make sure all the pieces are in there?" I said, ready to stick my nose in the air and take a hike if she said no.

She looked around, found a knife, cut the tape, and opened the box.


The box was full. There didn't seem to be any loose pieces. Everything seemed... to still be on the sprues!!!

I looked closer.

The movement trays were still in the baggie. The DICE were still wrapped. NOTHING was punched off the sprues. The counters were still in the cardboard.

My mind about shorted out on me. The rubber bands around the cards were ancient, and about ready to break. Every card, sticker, token, counter, EVERYTHING, was... untouched. The game had been purchased... but never played.

Becca picked up some bumper stickers, and I agreed the deal was good. We paid, and after more rumpusing, went home, where I unpacked my treasures on the dinner table. Mighod, I'd never realized how MANY miniatures came with this thing! You could put together a whole Warhammer army -- no, TWO armies, Orcs and Empire, out of this box! What, a plastic KEEP comes with it?


I spread things out on the table to get a better look.

And I marveled. Man, there didn't seem to be any END to this game. Well, they did say "more than a hundred miniatures," right there on the box...

I gloated and reveled in my find. Wow. Did I dare pop anything off the sprues? I mean, it's practically MINT... and it's MINE!

But, then, I should have known. The omens were right. The signs were there. Earlier, at the used book store, I'd found a book I didn't even know EXISTED, based on one of the more hilariously twisted movies I've ever seen. And this should have tipped me off, right there.





Any day you run across the novelization of the only movie Sean Connery has ever starred in while wearing a diaper, you HAVE to know that as far as miniatures go, this day is going to be SPECIAL...

"Appendix N"

As I sit, blogging away my remaining hours of spring break, I find myself nosing around on other people's blogs. http://www.rpgblog2.com/2009/05/friday-discussion-whats-your-appendix-n.html asks an interesting question: "What's your Appendix N?"

The original Dungeon Master's Guide included several appendixes. Appendix N was a list of literary influences on the D&D game -- the original Conan novels, Lord of the Rings, and so on. It made me think -- what was MY "Appendix N?"

Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit (the novels, of course. Animated movie didn't come out until I was already gaming heavy, and the Peter Jackson movies were decades to come).
Conan (the comic books were my first big influence, weirdly enough. The paperbacks were good, but trying to FIND them when you lived in a little teeny cow town out in the middle of nowhere was a bit of a trick)
Hawk The Slayer, that great old swords and sorcery movie. First saw it on ... Showtime, I think it was... on a Saturday afternoon. Never forgot it. Ghod, it was awful, but back then, it managed to be magical.

Edgar Rice Burroughs. Weirdly enough, I never read any of his Tarzan books as a child, although my wife and father in law lived on 'em in their youths. I grew up on the first four John Carter of Mars books, The Land that Time Forgot, and At The Earth's Core, the last two being movie-photo-cover editions that accompanied the release of some remarkably bad movies... but the books were all pretty good.
DC Comics had a bunch of second string characters -- Claw the Unconquered, Dragonsword, and so on -- that had an effect on me.
The Elric books, by Michael Moorcock. I found the first two at a garage sale in my little bitty cow town. They were great. They had an immense effect on me.
Glory Road, by Robert Heinlein. Man, Nevia was MADE for dungeoneering... all the way from wild dragons in the forest, down to the poetic insult as an art form.
Dragon Magazine. I subscribed not long after I got my Player's Handbook. Once a month, all the geekdom in existence was opened for me. Their "Giants in the Earth" feature pretty much influenced the books I read for a couple years, when I could find them -- I never would have discovered Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser or the works of Poul Anderson without the Dragon.
The Magic Goes Away, by Larry Niven. The title caught my eye, but Boris Vallejo pretty much picked the book up, stuck in my hand, dragged me to the counter by my nose and took my wallet out and paid for it. Fantastic, iconic Boris cover! And the book was every bit as good as the cover! If only he'd done the interior illustrations, too... back before he was Frazetta-level famous...
H. P. Lovecraft. I really liked his stuff. I didn't even read his BEST stuff until I got to college. Too dratted hard to find out in the Great Fried Empty.
Bad movies. There was an awesome forgotten film called Wonder Women Vs. The Super Stooges (aka Amazons Vs. Supermen) that would have made an awesome D&D campaign -- a village of zero level farmers is threatened by a mob of 1st and 2nd level amazons, who must face off against three seventh level heroes: a monk, a barbarian, and... um... well, basically, a Mexican wrestler with the power to make fifty-foot broad jumps straight up cliffs. AWESOME fun from some Hong Kong chopsocky factory, and it would still make an awesome adventure. And, of course, all those Italian sword and sandal epics. I sure wish I could find WWvstSS on DVD these days...
Star Wars taught me a lot about excitement, climax, and pacing. Influenced my Traveller game, too.

No doubt I will remember others...