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.

black books

 what if I ran a Call of Cthulhu game where the players were rare book collectors in New Orleans

1. Kitab al-Hufra. Book of unorthodox medical techniques from 9th-century Baghdad. Contains instructions for ectopic necromancy, the cultivation and extraction of kidney opals, and returning oneself to a childlike state of fluid consciousness through the practice of autotrepannation.

2. The Chaldean Agriculture. Farming manual from 9th-century Baghdad. Supposedly a translation of a 20,000-year-old Mesopotamian text. 1500 pages, mostly on how to grow crops, mixed with descriptions of Tammuz worship and the pagan rites of ancient Babylon. Mentions a spell for capturing dead souls in clay.

3. Mothallah Fragments. All that remains of an alien library that once orbited the star Mothallah. Secretly compiled by Omar Khayyam from transmissions received at his observatory in Isfahan. Histories of alien civilisations and a frustratingly incomplete recipe for interstellar travel.

4. The Necatrix. Written in medieval Andalusia by Fátima de Madrid as a reply to al-Ghazali’s Destruction of the Philosophers. Proves using pure reason that nothing can or could possibly ever exist. Contains instructions for “escaping history”, using only a wild lion and a labyrinth of mirrors.

5. The Book Of Melchizedek The Mage. 15th-century grimoire about a German Jew who travels to Jerusalem and meets an ancient warlock who teaches him the divine science of immortality, in exchange for his service to a Canaanite god. Summoning rituals in the form of word squares.

6. The Devil And His Dam. Manuscript of a 17th-century play, tentatively attributed to John Webster, in which an aspiring sorcerer sells his soul to the devil only to find that the devil owes its own soul to an even greater power. All known performances have ended with the theatre burning down.

7. De vermibus sub mundo. 17th-century scientific treatise on the nature of life below the Earth. Thought to have been written by the scholar Athanasius Kircher, following his descent into Vesuvius’ crater. Contains reference to a “reptilian empire” that lives in fear of something vast and coiled at the Earth’s core.

8. Le dictionnaire céleste. 19th-century catalogue of angels. Compiled by the occultist Jacques de Plancy shortly before his death, with the aid of an anonymous priest who the text describes only as Père Oeil. Striking illustrations. Officially repudiated by the Roman Catholic Church.

9. Confessions Of A Stowaway. The tale of an Irish opium addict who, carousing one night in Limehouse, climbs inside the hold of a mysterious black ship to fall asleep. He spends seven years sailing the dark oceans of the cosmos before returning to find only a single day has passed.

10. Mantua Codex. Found by detectives in the basement of an Italian aristocrat, shortly after his execution for the crime of nonconsensual immurement. Depicts the worship of the Spider-Faced-Queen-Of-Many-Holes. Likely translated from pre-Mayan texts by scribes of the Howler Monkey God.

also this list

i keep thinking about the Tarsioid Psalms and a secret tribe of tarsier men in the Philippines. bulging eyes in the forest at night. slowly unpicking the mosquito net and reaching in through the window with their long hooked tarsier hands

Ends of the World

Edge of the World

1. The ocean only stands a few meters above the edge of the world. The water turns and falls in a thick band, a unique ecotone home to all manner of specialist marine life. Extremely hydrodynamic fish balance effortlessly atop the waterfall, dipping over the edge if predators threaten, then swimming vertically back to snatch a snack caught in the current.
   
   
2. For the first few miles the waterfall coheres, lensing a view of the world's belly stretching gently away. Diving birds graze across the clear sheet to snatch a startled fish or falling treat. Bolder birds will punch straight through, shake dry and swallow, then dart back across to the sunlit side before their feathers freeze.
   
   
3. A hundred miles below the edge the sun creeps out from the shadow of the world. The warm, wet updraft rising directly below the earth hits the ball of cold air hugging the firmament's umbra. The foggy breeze crosses and breaks the great stream, beginning its transition to a falling wall of foam and mist.
   
   
4. In scattered baubles the water falls, just thicken enough to knock industrious fliers out of the air. It takes a full day of freefalling for water to reach this point. Well evolved eggs, laid by fish at the ocean edge, make take several days to fall this far, but by here they must hatch, while the water is still thicken enough to support their leaping, drop by drop, back to the solid stream.
   
   
5. A thousand miles down the pale disk of the world is lost in cloud. The thread of waterfall above casts spears of sunlight down through the steadily falling haze. This huge stretch of dense, wet, stable atmosphere provides a home for plants and animals that can be very slightly heavier than dry air, yet here remain buoyant.
   
   
6. Impenetrable gray haze above, below and all around. The air grows cold and rain begins to form. The clouds work in on themselves, twisted and tightening. Gentle pressures act slowly on the column of air, until the mile-wide cloud reconverges into a series of parallel, paper-thin waterfalls. Swimming becomes just barely possible once more, elvers and razor fish cut up through the thin water, pinprick shoals leap daringly between the arcs of water.
   
   
7. Surface tension grabs and drags at the descending rivulets. Gradually they intersect, twine together into a single solid sheet. It is less than a foot thick now, most of its bulk having already evaporated and started the brisk rise back up to the world above. 
   
   
8. Ten thousand miles below the sky the sunlight is pale and scarce. In the dim perpetual dawn the airy fish bioluminesce. This long, quiet stretch is a final refuge, where the last grit of life may be filtered from the passing water. Dried fish poo circles uncertainly on the breeze, too tired to fall further.
   
   
9. The waterfall has thinned to a blade of mist. That which drops this far falls only slowly, but with no water and precious little air to climb upon. This is the point of no return.
   
   
10. No more water falls. A little mist spirals disconsolately, withered fish skins whirl weakly on the nullbreeze. Still too far below, bouncing back meek, silver sunlight, a final shore of freeze-dried corpses. People, whales, whole cities that have tumbled off the edge and come to rest below the reach of the sea, floating on the inky unreality of this final edge.

Tip of the World

1. Horizon-wide desert, soft red sandstone cut to neat, straight ribbons by the steady wind. Something like a sunset tars the far eastern sky. Vultures overhead, overpopulated. Hyenic howls bound between the rocks.
   Encounter: 3d8 harassing vultures, 2d4 marsupial sugarlions, 1d6 wandering mounds
   
   
2. Ranchers make houses by the thin dry riverbeds, or up on the mesa where water springs from the rock. Cattle, sheep and goats live thirsty lives on the range, though well fed by deep rooted bushes that thrive on the frequent floods.
   Encounter: ranch house having a barn raising, merchant souk overrun by caravans, unattended herd hunted by beasts
   
   
3. Sandy hollows between the stone ridges funnel animal migrations. Uncounted eroding hooves cut deeper their path, and so the sand and scouring wind tighten and condense. Fastest travel is along these flat-bottomed canyons, but beware a buffeting in the belligerent breezeway. 
   Encounter: heavily armed merchant caravan, circus troupe, famous mathematician
   
   
4. Sky tightens down above, compressing the wind into a roving, perpetual storm. A floodplain of wind. Sparse, quick-growing bushes race to cast out seeds before the torrent passes back across. Rolling fog banks drive flash floods before them, both choked with coarse sand and stones. The land is returned to mud.
   Weather: thin hailstorm, soaking downpour, flash flood
   
   
5. Another belt of constant wind. It is heavier here, dense and laden. The land takes on bizarre twists and arcs. Arches, towers and tunnels, in smooth topology of shifting curves.
   Encounters: 4d4 wind pirates, 2d4 lost inventors, 1d20 pygmy gliding mammoths
   
   
6. This last predictable longitude houses the three great flying castles of this land.
   - The northernmost, Maignett, bobs above a thrusting ridge rich in iron. Ancient runic arrays and electromagnets are dug into both foundation and floating stones. Improvised galvanic machines trail twisting metal tails behind the city, feeding power to the ununderstood devices keeping the city aloft.
   - Clwerk is a miracle of modern sciences. Cutting edge alloys twirl implausible forces, clockwork fans storing the chaotic beating of the wind to provide a constant buoyance when the uplift dies away. Wings and balloons do the more consistent lifting, excess power from the banks of tilted turbines yoked to the factories and machines that make famous the town.
   - To the south, Laefindi floats organically above a fecund wetland. The city, grown from naturally buoyant plants with wing-shaped leaves, is weighed down as much by birds as people, anchored by ponderous chains of roots. The weather-trap that funnels water here keeps alive the town in every way, feeding its plants and those of the bird- and bug-rich plains below.
    
7.  Atmospheric phase change. Air clear, flat, heavy, utterly still. The far horizon is blotchy and blurred, high and low pressure systems rearranging themselves into a new paradigm, well beyond mere weather.
   Encounters: magnetic hermit, sunset drake, lightning-fisher blimp
   
   
8. Hyperstorm. Pockets of wind, post-wind, psuedocloud, transweather and hyperair change position like awkward teens at a dance. Hothead students from the floating cities come here to dare each other deeper into the quantum weather, hoping for inspiration and exhilaration both.
   Encounters: flying aces on training mission, experimental sentient weather machine, semi-stable weatherflux genie
   
   
9. Bubble of near-vacuum. Contorted atmosphere bathes the world in psychedelic sunset colours. Snakes, strangely shaped bugs and little mice with huge lungs titter across the silent, grassless plain.
   Encounters: magnetic ascetic, sunset angel, vacuum saint
   
   
10. Everything pinches to a pinhole, howling vortex where the world leaks out.

this, narrowing to a single point

End of the World

1. The sky turns nasty red
2. The birds fly up and up and up until they are gone
3. The animals froth at the mouth and run into the sea
4. The plants turn bitter and grow brittle thorns
5. The waters turn to blood
6. The people lament, their bodies wracked with sores and boils
7. The insects swarm, seek absolution through ruination
8. The waters recede and dust takes their place
9. The earth opens up to receive all sinners
10. Everything turns out okay