HIGHLAND VICE

Taking a short break from the Strange Aeons stuff to post something completely different.

A long time ago, on this very blog, I wrote a sci-fi cowboy hexcrawl set in the highlands of a terraformed Mars. More recently I went back to this hexcrawl, expanded and updated it, and called it HIGHLAND VICE.

You can now download it from my itch.io page. Progress is being made!

Earth is polluted anarchy. The Solar System has been colonised. FTL travel remains impossible. Humanity's dreams are mostly dead.

Mars - the ‘fresh start’ planet. Victim of a thousand misjudged terraforming schemes. Failed utopias. Religious fanatics. Mining outposts. Cloned Ice Age monsters. High-altitude cultures - Tibetans, Peruvians - adapted to the cold and the low oxygen levels. Crooks and outlaws hiding out from the Magistrates' Guild.

You are scavengers, tinkerers, entrepreneurs and bounty hunters - the scum of the Inner System. Basically the cast of Cowboy Bebop. A valuable chunk of raw computronium, from the brain of the superintelligence Marduk, is hidden somewhere in the Martian highlands. Your job is to find it.

100 hexes + map. Woolly mammoths. Lost cities. Android anchorites. Satellite shamans. Terror birds. Mountain men. Bad tractors. Gauchos. Monks. Cannibals. Goblin lemurs. Sky bandits. Horseshoe crabs. Hell pigs. Biocosmists. Neanderthal cultists of Tiamat, the Mother Machine.

I wrote the first version of this years ago, before Mothership existed, for a half-baked sci-fi game I was working on back them. More recently I updated and expanded it. Right now it's not designed for use with any particular system. Mothership would be a natural rules fit but do what you want.

STRANGE AEONS - CALCUTTA

Another set of Strange Aeons adventures.

Dr. Vikram Sharadindu Chatterjee, the legendary Calcutta detective, is dead. Mysteriously dead. You have to solve all his outstanding cases. No time to lose. The body of a Special Branch detective was recently found at the Nimtala burning ghat - stuffed in a jute sack, burnt alive. Gangsters, naga, creepy monks and parasite-infected Himalayan mountains await. I'm also on Bluesky so check me out there.

Here's another section of my list of occult treasures if that's the kind of thing you like.

1. Canary Idol. Owl-shaped Guanche cult image found on the Savage Islands by a family of Portuguese slave traders in the late 16th century. Represents the goddess Chaxiraxi, a demon queen worshipped in ancient Carthage. Sends you dreams of the future if you bathe it in a child’s blood.
2. Camera Nebulosa. Wet-plate camera used by Robert Fenton to shoot Cistercian abbeys and the Crimean War. Requires hour-long exposure times. Sold by Fenton after he abandoned photography in 1862. Gustave le Gray’s experimental chemical process captures spectral entities on film as swirling blue-grey mist.
3. Lunch Pipe. Long-stemmed Xhosa pipe. Handmade in the 1850s by the cattle-killing prophet Nongqawuse. Enables tobacco to substitute for food. Designed for use by breastfeeding mothers - influences the milk. Taken by Boer police from the Black Hebrew evangelist Enoch Mgijima after the Bulhoek massacre of 1921.
4. Eternal Flame. Taken from the Great Fire of Adur Gushnap, a Sassanid flame temple at Takht-e Soleymān in West Azerbaijan. Kept in a brass cup by Hulagu Khan. Smells bad to demons. Can’t be extinguished by anything, ever. Will still be burning when the stars go out.
5. Thunder Casket. Gilded copper reliquary holding three teeth of the Buddha. Found by David Spooner in the ruins of the Kanishka stupa outside Peshawar. Captures and stores lightning - leave it outside in a storm to fire off a thunderbolt at a later date. The Korean pilgrim Hyecho describes its use in war by the White Huns.
6. Epiphany Bell. Crafted over thirty years from meteoric iron by a Russian Old Believer living in total isolation in the Altai Mountains. Said to create a path to the mythical paradise of Kunlun, across the Weak River and the demon-haunted Moving Sands, when rung in the right spot.
7. Phallus Magnus. Roman fascinus amulet - winged bronze penis on a chain. Always points to the fattest woman in a hundred-mile radius. Lost in the Sudd by the legionaries of Nero’s White Nile expedition. Dug out of a hippo’s belly, many years later, and used to populate the harem of King Mutesa I.
8. Chasse-Galerie. Flying canoe purchased from Hell by Quebecois lumberjacks working on the Gatineau River around 1868. Travels 500 km per night. Only works between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day. If you say the Lord’s name or touch a crucifix while using it, the Devil takes your soul.
9. Star Wax. Ambergris from the gut of a cosmic leviathan. Gathered by Caral-Supe harpoonists in 3000 BC. Pale and greasy. Peanut-sized lump found by a Chinese coolie under ten feet of guano in the Chincha Islands in 1874. Used in delicious perfumes - Coco Chanel’s assassins scour the globe for more.
10. Titan Cube. Green crystal from Saturn’s rings. Makes people more likely to accept mundane explanations for supernatural phenomena. Given to Galileo as payment for his propaganda on behalf of the Serpent Men. Locally dampens anti-Fortean mind control when smashed - sparks witch hunts, encourages vampire belief.
11. Snake Clown. Painted wooden Hopi kachina figurine. Leave it alone in a cage with a snake overnight - next morning the snake will be gone and you’ll have good luck all day. Found in a Coconino cave by the astronomer Percival Lowell - used to guide his investigations of the Mars canals.
12. Greybeard. Salt-glazed stoneware jug filled with mercury, nails, rum and urine. Resembles a bearded man. Abandoned in the Dampier Archipelago by a captain of the Dutch East India Company in the early 1600s. Any vehicle that carries it will eventually crash, wreck or sink.
13. Pig Dragon Stone. Coiled neolithic jade figure with a vaguely porcine head. Repels cosmic parasites. Owner will slowly become fat, greedy, lazy, stupid and impossible to defeat in single combat. Taken by Chinese Gordon from the Summer Palace ruins and used to manufacture champions for British boxing rings.
14. Night Ship. Carrack in a bottle. Made by a Lubeck shipwright in 1806. Close study reveals minute insectile figures scurrying through the rigging. Fall asleep holding it - become a captain in the Dreamlands, plying the trade routes between Ulthar and the Moon. Lets you carry dream objects back to the waking world.
15. Lazarus Mask. Glittering red Venetian carnival mask. Neither age nor disease can kill the man who wears it. Discovered by Mekhitar of Sebaste in the ruins of the leprosarium on Saint Lazarus Island, on the face of a centuries-old Knight of Malta, who fought like a demon to prevent its being removed.
16. Olifant. Hunting trumpet made from a lunar mammoth’s tusk. Used by the knight Roland at the Battle of Roncevaux. Can summon a legion of extraterrestrial paladins. Requires enough lung-force to pop vessels in the brain - inflicts strokes and aphasia on anyone who blows it.
17. Taklamakan Ape. Red-furred mummified primate found by Aurel Stein in a Tocharian tomb under the Flaming Mountains on the edge of the Taklamakan Desert. Silk robe and tiny hat. Comes alive at night to steal coins, fruit, small shiny objects - these can be cut out of its bloated stomach.
18. Devil’s Fiddle. Made by the master luthier Nicola Amati on commission from the Devil in 1666, using upas-tree wood and strings made from the guts of damned sinners. Won in a fiddle contest by an anonymous Georgia hillbilly in 1879. Hungry wolves and spittle-flecked berserkers will stop to hear it played.
19. Covenant Ark. Chest used by Moses to hold the Tablets of the Law. Brought to Tana Qirqos in 350 AD by Ezana of Axum. New commandments occasionally spawn in it. Kept in a monastery - the basement is full of stone tablets prohibiting kissing and the consumption of fresh bread.
20. Holy Grail. Brought to Glastonbury Tor by Joseph of Arimathea after Jesus’ death. Lets the drinker return from death, once, by fighting their way free from Annwn - the Welsh underworld, home to red-eyed hounds and mottled serpents. King Arthur is down there, caught in brambles - you can bring him back.

STRANGE AEONS - ISTANBUL

The next set of Strange Aeons adventures.

Leo Kazankian, sole owner and proprietor of the Manzikert Hotel in 1920s Istanbul, wants you to help him solve all manner of occult mysteries. But perhaps the greatest mystery... is himself? Basil Zaharoff has stolen the Prophets' Sword from the Topkapi Museum and is auctioning it off in a secret esoteric bazaar in the old Byzantine cisterns, run by eunuch priests. If you liked my old Black Auction posts I hope that you'll like this. And I'm on Bluesky now if that's the kind of thing that floats your boat.

I'm still fleshing out my lists of spellbooks and treasures, as well. Here's some more.

1. Greenland Spar. Jomsviking navigation crystal. Looted from the Uunartoq fjord settlement by the Victual Brothers in 1428. Found in an abandoned boat shack in the Turku Archipelago. Invisible things can be seen through it. Reveals extra planets when aimed at the night sky.
2. Ghost Shirt. Made from buckskin by the Paiute prophet Wovoka. Deflects bullets. Worn by Chief Kicking Bear during the Battle of Greasy Grass. Sold by Buffalo Bill to a Glaswegian bank robber in 1891. Uncomfortable. Fits under a long coat. Only works when it’s about to rain.
3. Catalan Barsoom. Portolan chart of Noachian Mars, showing the coastline of the northern ocean and the spice ports of the Valles Marineris outflow channels. Made in 14th-century Majorca. Green figures in turbans depicted riding insects. Bug-eyed Antichrist crouches atop Olympus Mons.
4. Glyph Cone. Live venomous sea snail. Shell marked with angular cuneiform - generated by a chemical cellular automaton, devised by Lemurian scientists to preserve their sacred texts. Neurotoxic needle kills in minutes. Specimens routinely found by Queensland divers.
5. Hockomock Hinkypunk. Cluster of luminescent floating grubs - the souls of Wampanoag shamans. Bottled by a Connecticut trapper during King Philip’s War. Uncorked in a rural area, they fly off in all directions, permanently haunting the vicinity with strange misleading lights.
6. Taduki. Dried leaves in a hessian pouch. Lets you relive past lives if smoked. Harvested in the Drakensberg by slaves of the Zulu dwarf wizard Zikali. Distributed by Omani traders from Zanzibar and Muscat. Horribly addictive. Use D&D rules for medieval memory adventures.
7. Paramaribo Judge. Gold vessel found in Suriname by 17th-century Dutch settlers. Traded to the river Caribs by Mansa Muhammad ibn Qu. Djinn inside can fairly settle any dispute, given calculation time and library access. Currently considering the ancient case of Animal v. Man.
8. Plum Dust. Rosewood box stolen by Hitachi Province fisherman from a hollow metal vessel shaped like an incense burner, discovered on the ocean around 1803. All the box contained was a pink skull made from lacy crystal that dissolved into powder on contact with the air.
9. Cipher Block. Brick from Solomon’s Temple. Absorbs heat. Hums when left in sunlight. Inscribed in Hebrew with a Name of God. Any building constructed using it will develop rudimentary consciousness, capacity to grow. Taken from foundations of Keziah Brown’s Arkham cottage.
10. Nosferatu Coffer. Sealed by seven locks, one for each classical planet, requiring a key of the corresponding alchemical metal. Holds the heart of the oldest vampire. Plants die around it. Removed by subterfuge from a Swiss bank vault - the Gnomes of Zurich want it back.
11. Ottakar. Life-size wooden mannequin. Four feet tall, proportions subtly wrong. Manufactured by a German firm to the exact specifications of the Symbolist painter Odilon Redon. Figures drawn with it as a model tend to resemble the same pallid entity - and move when you look away.
12. Mist Whistle. Skull-shaped Aztec whistle found in Tlatelolco. Makes a dry shrieking sound and summons an ice-cold mist when blown. Skeletons bathed in the mist get up and dance. Attracts the bones of underground giants - +10% chance to cause an earthquake every time it’s used.
13. Brain Cylinder. Holds Knud Andersen, bat expert, recently returned from a tour of the crystal cities and fungal forests of the Oort Cloud. Bubbling with excitement - wants to publish his new biological discoveries. Sleeps a lot. Only good things to say about his mi-go hosts.
14. Lucky Penny. Minted in 2043. Steel. James K. Polk on one side - lightning bolt on the other. Brings good luck in battle to its owner - opponents have a way of tripping over and dealing themselves comically grotesque wounds. Bad luck in all other fields. Can’t be reclaimed once lost.
15. Slime Helm. Diving helmet full of cold black ooze. Used in an attempt by rich Theosophists to investigate magnetic anomalies detected off New Zealand’s southern coast. Hauled up years later by Chilean fishermen. Ooze can be poured out - there’s always more.
16. Stopwatch. Made from an abandoned time machine, found by urchins in a Southwark warehouse and dismantled for scrap. Can freeze time for thirty seconds. Usable once a month. Ape-men from the future must destroy it to avert the paradox that ends their species.
17. Dowsing Pendant. Tiger’s eye pendulum on gold chain. Gives you direct access to the Akashic Records. Charge it up with sunlight and suspend it over a map to see where you’re supposed to go. Destiny of all previous owners - Mughal princess, French aristocrat - has been horrible death.
18. Thunderclap Bomb. Cast-iron sphere full of gunpowder. Blessed by 888 Taoist priests. Character for “heaven” on the side. Last of a bundle used by Song dynasty warriors at the Siege of Kaifeng. Will level a building and summon a celestial bureaucrat to see what all the noise is about.
19. Aqua Tofana. Thumb-sized vial of colourless liquid. Makes you fall so deeply in love with the first woman you see that it kills you. Brewed from toads and mercury by the Palermo poisoner Giulia Tofana in 1633. A kiss each day from your inamorata delays your painful death.
20. Imperial Harpoon. Hurled by the Roman general Belisarius into the flank of the sperm whale Porphyrios, who plagued shipping in the Sea of Marmara during the reign of Justinian I. Retrieved from the beast near Mocha Island in 1838 and hung above the altar in a Nantucket church.

STRANGE AEONS - NEW ORLEANS

Writing a set of pulp horror adventures based out of New Orleans, set in and around the Gulf of Mexico and the Deep South. Over at my new blog.

You can find all the adventures I've written so far in the Mystery Manual. I did one set of eight based around London. Now I'm doing New Orleans. Coming up is Istanbul and Calcutta. The overall form of these project keeps changing so I'm not locking anything in just yet.

Ultimately this should be sort of a world map of occult adventure, to make it easy to run open-ended sandbox games in the 1920s. Ghost hunters and private detectives uncovering prehistoric mysteries. The world of Weird Tales - Lovecraft meets Indiana Jones.

Here's a sample of what's going on over there, from Servants Of The Worm - the story of an evil carnival in Alabama, built over a gateway to the Hollow Earth.

• Yorgos Grammatikos, the Illustrated Greek, was taken captive in Siberia by a clan of Chinese Tatars and tattooed from head to toe. Most of his comrades died of infection or shame. The obscenities on his biceps can be seen for a price - the ones on his belly he’ll never show to anyone.

• Professor Infinitesimal, the World’s Smartest Dwarf, in glasses and a powdered wig, provides daily lectures on the Secrets of the Atom. In his lab there’s a dynamo purchased from the morlocks, and an experimental lightning gun that he is trying to replicate. Omar, the Bethlehem Giant, is his slave.

• Sad Sack Sal, the Melancholy Clown. Tears painted on his face. Suicide attempts thwarted by his partner, Yellow Joe, who swaps out his cyanide for ink and puts confetti in his gun. Follows you round the carnival, wordlessly begging you to kill him. Sincerely believes most people would be better off dead.

• Rondo Barbosa, the Mato Grosso Maniac. Trick rider and sharpshooter. Horses are terrified of him and do as he says. Wanted for the murder of three nuns in his native Brazil. Expert with the lasso, the bolas, and the thrown knife. Birds treat him with maximal disrespect - he kills them on sight.

• Nestor Alfresco, the Upside-Down Man. Geek and contortionist. Rubber bones. Elasticated skin. Can bend himself through a letterbox, given time. Found as a child compressed beneath the floorboards of a Cleveland flophouse, subsisting on dropped food. Hypnotises chickens before eating their heads.

STRANGE AEONS - SPELLS

 I have a new post on my new blog. It's about spells for a Call of Cthulhu type setting. The idea is that every spell should go with a specific book and a specific historical context. Every grimoire is an adventure hook, every spell is a big deal and can drive you mad.

It's built on some stuff I wrote here. But more developed.

The Book of Nun. A collection of Egyptian funerary inscriptions from the thirteenth century BC. Found at only three sites - a hidden chamber of the Osireion at Abydos, a vandalised tomb in the Valley of the Kings and (this is disputed) a sandstone cave on the Central Coast of New South Wales.

Contains advice for the recently dead on how to navigate the watery caves of the underworld and plead one’s case before the Ogdoad, the eight frog-headed gods of primal chaos. Careful study reveals a few rituals of use to the living.

• Speak With Dead. Get a corpse, so recently deceased that the soul still lingers in the vicinity. Anoint its forehead with sweet oil. The soul is drawn back in for a few moments, to creak out a few parting words, though it’s already forgetting how eyes and lips work. It has more questions for you than you do for it.

• Black Tongue. Add two dice to all Charisma rolls and speak any language on Earth, though the voice is not your own and you might not understand what you’re saying. Can be used on someone else. Lasts for the space of one conversation. Tongue blackening wears off in a few days.

• Cavern Slave. Animates a shabti figurine to perform an unpleasant task in your place. The shabti resents this and will constantly try to misinterpret or wriggle out of your commands. Stupid and cunning as your average peasant. Responds better to violence than to reason. Can be commanded “die for me” and forced to absorb a curse or magical judgement in your place.

Check out the rest of them here at strangeaeons.substack.com. The blog was briefly suspended by Substack because of the bad design of their spam filter but hopefully that will not happen again.

STRANGE AEONS

I keep making new posts on this blog announcing that I'm doing a new project and then not really following through. Bad practice. Embarrassing honestly.

But this time it's real though. I'm now posting over at strangeaeons.substack.com. The idea is to run OSR-style games in the Call of Cthulhu setting.

What does this mean?

OSR design principles - open-ended gameplay, high degree of player freedom, amoral profit-motivated PCs, lateral-thinking problems that test player skill.

Call of Cthulhu - 1920s pulp adventure. Cosmic horror. Prehistoric alien races emerging into the present day. Anything that could plausibly have appeared in Weird Tales. PCs are ghost hunters, private detectives and Indiana Jones.

I have written a whole bunch of adventures already - open-ended occult mysteries. A sandbox for London-based psychic investigators. You can check them out.

Some relevant old posts I did on this blog:

timeline. I wanted to build a coherent world that wasn't quite the Lovecraft mythos but had room for it.

Lovecraft Villains 1 and Lovecraft Villains 2. Villains with a cosmic-horror angle but believable human motivations that make it so you can interact w/ them in a game.

The Black Auction 1, Auction 2, and Auction 3. Probably the best posts I've ever done on here. Notice how the paragraphs get shorter as I get better at writing. Worldbuilding and collectible magic items.

Anomalous Media. Not from the 20s but same basic horror-detective concept.

people you'll meet in cairo and black books. More loose Lovecraft content. Feel like I've been working on this project in the back of my head for years.

Might be more stuff, I don't know, I forget much of what I've put on here. Some of it's good some of it's lame. Anyway I will be endeavouring to post over at strangeaeons.substack.com from now on so check it out and don't forget to like and subscribe. I've also discovered that 1920s photographs are creepy so expect a lot more of those.

substack announcement

 I've been writing short stories and putting them on Substack. It's matthalton.substack.com, it's just my name.

If you like the writing on this blog, you will like the short stories. They are mostly horror stories. They're about fucked up things happening to freaks. 

They're not particularly well organised at this stage.

I think you should start by reading the story Los Encantados. This is my favourite of the ones I've done so far. It's about a sailor who gets into some trouble in the Amazon. It's loosely inspired by the Maqroll stories of Alvaro Mutis. Here is the opening paragraph -

She is waiting for me in the water.

I’ve been sitting in the bar watching the old men play chess and drinking that translucent rum they have here. The old men are using corks as pieces. Nobody’s ever thought to bring a real chess set this far up the river. The rank of each piece is carved into the top of the cork. I’ve seen how deft they are with their knives. Each man here carries a blade the length of his hand in a leather holster at his hip, all the time, even when he’s making love or sleeping. So I’m told.

I based it off something from one of my old Black Auction posts but don't reread that until you've read the story unless you want to be mildly spoiled.

You can also find me on Twitter at @circusarmy if you want to pick a fight with me. I will take on all contenders at all times.