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.