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

31 Days of Orb

1. Munition Sphere. When dropped, falls until it hits the ground, without concern for any objects it does not consider to be 'the ground'.
2. Orb of Ice. Snow globe slash terrarium. Preserves a stable slice of ice age ecology and a small fishing village of political undesirables collected over the last millennium. Little plug in the bottom for putting new things in.
3. Orb of Children. An attractive red colour, irresistible when bouncing. Anyone remotely childish will be compelled to kick it, everyone else will have a hard time not lovingly beholding the impromptu scrum. 
4. Orb of Anger. Tiny, squishy. Can be squeezed when angry, in order to store your anger in the ball while in no way diminishing the anger you feel. Thrown in to someone's face it will piss them off more than they were expecting.
5. Orb of Edges. Bright silvery, feels like fish-scales, beautiful but innocuous. Twisted and pressed just so, it collapses into 36 thin, razor edged short swords. Pressed not so, it explodes into the same. Three consecutive wisdom checks to re-ballify, 1d3! damage on every failure.
6. Shame Ball. Soft clay shaped like a human in fetal position, shivers gently with sobs. Not good to have in your pocket for long periods.
7. Orb of Daemon. Contains a guy named Damon, who is now very clear on the spelling difference. Unconvincing when he suggests a mix-up, or that a demon tricked him in here. Enough secondhand knowledge of dark rituals, from wizardly interrogations, that he actually might be able to answer your questions.
8. Orb of the Present. A crystal ball that shows what's happening here, now. Bad timestream management means the present is actually a few seconds ahead and a little to the left of what most people experience. Much more useful to time travelers. 
9. Orb of Night. Absorbs light and beam effects, re-emits them softer and more silvery. In darkness it grows spidery legs and crawls around doing trickery.
10. Skull Ball. Looks like the back of a head, all the way around. The brain inside is long-dead and half-fermented, making it all the more potent as a psychic resonator, alchemical reagent and illithid foodstuff. Definitely not an ostrich egg.
11. Forest Bole. Immensely heavy. Its many folds and rot holes hold everything you need to grow a forest: squirrel-stashed seeds, leaf litter, termites, worms, mulch, and many hundreds of birds, bugs and mice. Valuable to druids, comforting to dryads, a menace to agriculture.
12. Orb of Help. Battered and leathery. Desperately wants to be of assistance, will try to do anything you ask, but the lack of appendages, sense organs and brain makes it basically useless.
13. Orb of Food. Closely resembles a ball of dough. Can be baked to produce a crunchy, edible crust. Organic matter pushed in will be slowly digested. Left unattended, it will katamari around eating the most highly processed foods it can find.
14. Orb of Ooze. Proximity thickens bodily fluids. Slows poisons, may cure or cause sinus infection. Skin contact for a few minutes will harmlessly plasticize flesh and bones, an hour will smother eyes and ears with slime, providing a new array of tactile and chemical senses.
15. Orb of Snow. Used to contain a thriving ice age terrarium. Now contains a big crack in the side and ten thousand asphyxiated elk. Quite a lot of snow comes out when shaken.
16. Unholy Orb. Covered in dense, ever-changing limericks and bawdy pictograms. Always on the edge of whatever the viewer finds offensive. Longer study reveals darker and more salacious designs, which the viewer finds more and more titillating.
17. Orb of Nap. A soap bubble containing ten minutes wholesome rest. Whoever pops it falls immediately asleep, the orb reemerging as a snot bubble during their final snore.
18. Orb of Balefire. Swirling ball of straw, neatly woven into itself. Emits a thin, steady stream of smoke, but never ignites. Held to something flammable and blown through, it will start a small, easily controlled fire.
19. Runic Orb. Said to contain a hidden map to an even more hidden treasure, actually just teaches you dwarvish if you play with it for a month or two.
20. Orb of Huge. Starts off very very small. Sucks the bigness out of things that are bigger than they should be, or that have a smaller state to revert to. Stored bigness leaches out slowly, or quickly if you suck on it.
21. Orb of Push. Slide one under something heavy to make it effortless to push around. Roll under someone's foot to make them easy to push over. Visually indistinguishable from a ball bearing.
22. Orb of Doors. Can be used to roll up an unlocked door, then unrolled on almost any surface. Depth of the new room or hallway is in proportion to the quality of the door.
23. Orb of Slow. Everything seen through its green glassy surface moves in slow motion. Peripheral vision moves normal speed, the mild paradox incites migraines.
24. Orb of Tower. Causes dirt beneath it to gently mound, bricks to stack, timbers to lurch upright. Will slowly build dangerously unstable piles almost anything. Most practically useful as a muse for architects.
25. Orb of Arcane. Absolutely ancient, soaked in magic and impressions of thousands of wizards. Has a polite, detached tone, a broad expertise sabotaged by bitter jealousy of true sentience.
26. Boss Orb. When given a good smack, gets up and fights you. Starts off popping out a single arm, grows more appendages and weak points every time it's started up. Gives out more and more coins each time it's beaten, replaces the gold by eating those it defeats.
27. Orb of Gold. Makes the holder more believable, and gradually smellier. After a week, anything they say will be trusted, and no one will want to be anywhere near them
28. Orb of Toxin. Swirls sinisterly. Beloved by snakes. In no way reacts to poisons of any kind, but makes malicious gossip hit closer to home, narcissists feel more confident, the entitled feel more entitled.
29. Orb of Ghost. Looks to a ghost like a ghost looks to people. They find this terrifying. Responds bizarrely to holy water, exorcisms, makes a good test of their potency.
30. Reverse Orb. Circular patch of reality exposing the big orb the universe sits in. Can't really be grabbed or held by the edges, surprisingly easy to drag around with suction pads. Definitionally indestructible, perfectly reflective. Passing through it magically will land in you very strange places.
31. Orb of the World. Small, accurate map of the whole world, bizarrely deformed to fit on a sphere. Sufficient tools of magnification make it a suburb focus for all kinds of long distance magic, planning aid for long voyages, weather prediction tool.