Fury of Yig Playtest Update

It’s been a while hasn’t it?

The group has made it through the terrors of the Ozarks, encountering a snake handling church and a beast Lovecraft did no more than hint at.  I’ll gloss over this, as this is a fun scenario that I want people to enjoy.

Later, one of the characters went mad while reading a book woke up near the murdered body of a local Yig cultist (who seemed relatively harmless).  The rest of the group discovered they were being monitored with a camera from a nearby hotel room.  Upon breaking in, they found nothing but a scrubbed laptop and a sacred serpent of Yig.

They then followed their next lead to Oklahoma, where they hoped to uncover another trace of the mysterious cult they were chasing.  They found it – and much more than they hoped.  This was the deadliest encounter of the whole campaign.  They all made it out alive, due to one lucky skill check and a quick-thinking player.  He often surfs for clues on his PDA (as his character would do), so he suddenly made a connection between a hint from a few sessions before and the present situation.  He quickly alerted the group, and everyone headed out.  One player will start the next session in the hospital, but they were a very fortunate group all told.

Happy Halloween

Greetings to one and all!

Last night, we had a very small Halloween party at the Undisclosed Location (in keeping with its size).  M. did a great job with festooning the place with black and red, along with pumpkin lights and a curious beetle sculpture we found in the brightly-lit corner of a chain home goods store.  M. was a witch, and I went as Sherlock Holmes (sans pipe, I’m afraid).  Little Yig came out for a brief while, under the overprotective guardianship of her dad.  The hippo, now freed from his imprisonment, swathed himself in a couple socks and appeared as a ninja.

Some wanted to play The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but we never got to it.  Instead, I decided to maintain the holiday spirit with some classic black and white films – White Zombie, Last Man on Earth, and Nosferatu.  (By the way, if anyone knows of a good still of that contract perused by Renfield in the latter, please let me know.)

You can also check out my Halloween party iMix.  As with most mixes, it omits a great deal that iTunes does not have in its library, but it seems the essentials are present.

My Interview with Warlock Asylum on the Necronomicon

My interview with Warlock Asylum about the Necronomicon – unedited and complete, just as he promised, can be found at his site.  Frequent visitors here have likely heard much of it before, but it’s a good introduction to my perspectives on a number of topics related to Lovecraftian spirituality.

On the Shelf Review – The Progradior Correspondence

Rather unbidden, Keith Richmond of Teitan Press offered to send me a copy of The Progradior Correspondence to review.   This book collects letters to Frater Progradior, known in the outer as Frank Bennett, from Aleister Crowley and many people in his circle.

I’m not going to pontificate too much on this topic – despite my secret membership in the OTO, I don’t have great knowledge of Aleister Crowley.  I’ve read a few of his books over the years, along with Sutin’s biography, and I have a basic knowledge of his philosophy and the outline of his life.  Nonetheless, you won’t find me collecting the works of or seeking out rarities of a man who, by my judgment, was really bright but tended to objectify the people around him.

Bennett was a student of Crowley’s from early years in London.  He moved to Australia and dropped out of contact with Aleister for a while, picking up the acquaintance when Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis was just beginning.  He became a loyal Thelemite, until the letters petered out – as so often happened with Crowley’s followers, it seems that the Beast asked Bennett for too much  too often.  (I was particularly struck with the “Hey!  Things are screwed up at Cefalu!  Come over here and help!” communique.)

This handsome book collects the correspondence sent to Bennett by Aleister Crowley, Leah Hirsig, Charles Robert Stansfeld Jones, Norman Mudd, and others.  Bennett’s own side of the correspondence is mostly lacking, and gaps in the collected letters leave us with an incomplete picture.  Nonetheless, the correspondence really brings the participants to life in the way that biographical works can hardly do.

I should also note that this seems to be a companion volume to a work entitled Progradior and the Beast, which I have not seen.

I recommend this book for people more interested in Crowley than I am, and those interested in the history of the OTO and the Thelemic movement.

The Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy Shipping

Donald Tyson’s annotated edition of The Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy is now shipping.  From the blurb:

The Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, by Henry Cornelius Agrippa and unnamed others, is considered one of the cornerstones of Western magic, and the grimoires it contains are among the most important that exist in the Western tradition. For more than three hundred years, this mysterious tome has been regarded as difficult or even impossible to understand—until now.

Occult scholar Donald Tyson presents a fully annotated, corrected, and modernized edition of Stephen Skinner’s 1978 facsimile edition of the original work, which was six tracts published as one volume in 1655. For the first time, these classic works of Western magic have been rendered fully accessible to the novice practitioner, as well as occult scholars and skilled magicians. Tyson presents clear instruction and practical insight on a variety of magic techniques, providing contemporary magicians with a working grimoire of the arcane.

I think I’ll have a copy by tomorrow, at which point it will go into the Review Pile.

Thanks to Morrisville

It’s been busier than lately in non-blogging areas, but I did want to thank Morrisville Community College for all of its hospitality that it provided M. and I for my “Horrors of Upstate” talk.  The audience was lively and full of questions, and the dinner at the Copper Turret afterward was simply wonderful.   The drive back to the Undisclosed Location was dark and filled with wind and swirling leaves, the perfect setting for lovers of the weird.

More later.

On the Shelf Review – Cthulhu Britannica

For our thousandth post – no, really! – I’ll be reviewing the Cthulhu Britannica supplement for Call of Cthulhu, which Cubicle 7 was kind enough to send to me for review.

The book includes five scenarios from a range of periods.  Disappointingly, none of the scenarios here take place in the classic Twenties area, but one does come from the mid-Thirties, a time frame into which more recent CoC adventures seem to be moving.  Only the first two seem to have a distinctly British flavor, which could cut either way in terms of their usefulness.

The first scenario, “Bad Company” by Alan Bligh, is a welcome addition to the small number of Gaslight scenarios.  The investigators are asked to help a wealthy government official avoid scandal by uncovering the whereabouts of his son.  Making their way through London’s seamy underbelly, they soon come across a mysterious woman whose influence taints all who cross her path.  If a group can get into the proper mindset of playing upper crust investigators intent on avoiding embarrassment, this should quite a good time with plenty of shady characters and some of the most terrifying creatures to haunt any scenario.  The central figure gets short shrift – a page or two on interacting with her would not be amiss – and it is unclear how the investigators will allow at the final solution, with the dearth of clues pointing to it.  Nonetheless, this is a compelling piece.

“Darkness, Descending” by Mike Mason brings us to a Cambridge archaeological dig in 1934 where dark secrets of a particular Old One are unearthed.  The archaeological dig has become a common setup in Call of Cthulhu scenarios, and it has been handled much better than it has been done here, with no real characterization, setting, or other elements to distinguish it from the others.  At best, this is a workmanlike effort.

“Wrong Turn” by John French sends a television crew to an old abandoned radio telescope installation for a location scout.  As darkness falls, the phantoms of a failed dimension-breaching experiment return to bring madness and death to the hapless intruders.  It took me a little while to warm to the setting, but French’s excellent suggestions for creating and maintaining mood as the story proceeds really made this for me.  This is an excellent scenario in what Trail of Cthulhu players call the “purist” mode.

Keary Birch’s “King” starts strong, with a group of patients recovering from an eye surgery trapped in a secret lab where more has happened to them than they realize.  This is a solid scenario, damaged by an insistence upon piling one Mythos baddie upon another upon another, until what would work well as a straight mystery with a supernatural aspect ends up just being baffling.

The book rounds out with Paul Fricker’s “My Little Sister Wants You to Suffer,” a scenario set in the near future.  If you read the title and said, “Boy, that sounds rather gonzo and over the top,” you’d be right, and your mileage will likely vary based on how your group reacts to such things.   For my part, I can’t decide whether it’d be highly amusing or highly annoying for my players.  It’s difficult to see how to integrate this scenario into a regular campaign.

Overall, I’d have to say Cthulhu Britannica is a mixed bag in terms of era and use of the British setting, and the quality is uneven, though it veers toward the positive overall.  Aside from the second scenario,  all of these have a special twist or innovative technique that sets them apart from standard fare.  That’s certainly a good reason to keep an eye on this publisher and its offerings for Cthulhu.

The History of Magical Demonology

For those interested in the history of the use of demons in magic, I highly recommend “Les who’s who démonologiques de la Renaissance et leurs ancêtres médiévaux” by Jean-Patrice Boudet.  He presents a mid-sixteenth century manuscript at Trinity College, Cambridge (which I visited not so long ago) that parallels in some ways the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum of Weyer, though its list seems to be more comprehensive than Weyer.

Why’s that important?  Well, Weyer’s list begat that of Reginald Scot in Discoverie of Witchcraft, and Scot’s list was the likely origin of the demons in the infamous book of demons known as the Goetia, perhaps one of the most well-known books of demonic magic today.  What Boudet reminds us is that this book was by no means comprehensive, but merely one iteration of a lengthy tradition of lists of spirits compiled by magicians over the centuries.  As such, Boudet’s contribution bears a look by anyone interested in such historical issues.

On the Shelf Review – The Dunwich Horror (2009)

I watched the new Dunwich Horror movie on SciFi, or whatever they’re calling themselves these days.

It was at the point, five minutes into the movie, when Henry Armitage was shooting lightning from his fingertips at the bat-winged coed possessed by Yibb-Tstll while his assistant, Valerie Fay Morgan, rolled marbles on the floor to uncover the Sumerian pyramid puzzle, that I realized this might not be entirely faithful to Lovecraft.

Nonetheless, I am willing to watch even an unfaithful version of a film, granted that it has good characterization, great location shots, its own sense of aesthetics, good special effects, or any number of other elements.  Based on that, the Dunwich location shots in Louisiana could be quite evocative, once you got used to the idea of Dunwich being in Louisiana.

The film also featured the Simon Necronomicon.  The title sequence using the sigils and the like was quite impressive, but its use in the actual film came across as cheap.  Then again, it might have been more impressive to someone who hasn’t spent so much time with the book…

On the Shelf Review – Magico-Religious Groups and Ritualistic Activities

My friend Tony sent me a copy of his new book, Magico-Religious Groups and Ritualistic Activities: A Guide for First Responders, for review.  I’ve known him for several years and been favorably impressed with his knowledge and his sensibility on topics where hype is prevalent, as well as his first book, A Cop’s Guide to Occult Investigations.

The past few decades has seen a growing number of practitioners of what we might call “magical faiths” – religions that include magic as a key component – in the United States.  In many cases, the reputation of these faiths has been sensationalized by the press and popular media, so that an ordinary person often has a distorted view of the beliefs and practices of these groups.   Thus, emergency personnel who might encounter practitioners or rituals at the scene of a crime or accident might find themselves needing to make quick decisions that protect their own safety and that of others while respecting those with whom they come into contact – a difficult task, to put it mildly.

In his book, Tony concentrates upon the groups that first responders – EMS personnel in particular, based on my reading – might encounter in the course of their duties.  He devotes chapters to Wicca and Paganism, Santeria, Palo, Voodoo, and Curanderismo.  (One notable absence is Satanism, though I agree it might not fit with Kail’s stated goals for the book.)  Each chapter covers the system’s theology, holidays, rituals, paraphernalia, theories of illness, and healing treatments.   Discussions are rounded out with a discussion of strategies to be pursued when encountering such a group, taboos and mores to observe, and possible health hazards for those who arrive at the scene.  Tony does an excellent job of blending cultural sensitivity with the needs for safety and efficiency of first responders.  (As some people need to have it spelled out, that means it’s not a “they’re all eeeevil” book, nor a “true members of our faith never do X!” book.)  The book is rounded out with a glossary, depictions of common symbols for each group, and an index.

Though the book is excellent on the whole, I think a few matters could have been made clearer.  For example, whether Neopaganism bears a line of descent back to Paganism is a hotly debated topic, to say the least, and Tony’s presentation of it as essentially ancient does not give the whole picture.  Further discussion of the links between Afro-Caribbean faiths and Catholicism would have been welcome.  Finally, there is one small error, with the word “Gardenarian” being consistently used for “Gardnerian.”

Overall, however, this is an excellent book for any medical personnel who encounter people of alternative faiths.  Law enforcement officers might find it less valuable, but it still has enough points to make it useful to them.