Vintage RPG

Michael Newton’s Monsters, Mysteries and Man was a bit of a mystery for me for many years. I remembered it from my local library (it was at the Main, which I didn’t go to as much as the closer, smaller Branch). I had gotten it out before a trip to my grandparents’ house and I distinctly remember reading it in bed there in almost one sitting. I remembered that it had a garish monster head on the cover and that the title reminded me of Richard Cavendish’s Man, Myth and Magic series, but that was all I could remember. Searching, for years, on the internet, turned up zilch.

And then, sometimes, I find that magic combination of words on the right site and boom, there it is, the thing I was looking for all those years. The site in question was Archive.org, so hey, you can read it too. The dust jacket is magnificent, isn’t it?

The text was a bit less noteworthy all these years later. It’s a general survey of crytpids — Yeti, Sasquatch, surviving dinosaurs, sea and lake monsters, Kraken, Nessie, UFOs — and the efforts to find and study them. Two more chapters cover vampires and werewolves, but they are half-hearted because there’s no meaningful chance that they are real. And that’s what Newton wants. He’s the opposite of skeptical Daniel Cohen; the whole book is arranged around finding the small holes of doubt in the skeptic’s argument and filling them to brimming with the hope of the believer. Considering not much has changed on any of these fronts in my lifetime, I don’t expect they ever will. Sorry Mike.

Still, that cover art is an all-timer.

I got Monsters Who’s Who (1974) in a lot along with some big books on horror movies (you’ll see those in October). Because everything on the cover is a movie monster, I assumed this one was like the others, but it is actually a pretty fun general monster encyclopedia that casts a wide net. I’ve never encountered it previously, but boy, if I had it as a kid, I’d’ve practically memorized it.

That’s not to say it’s…good. The author, Dulan Barber, had an odd notion of what a monster was. Most books like this are a hodge-podge (looking at you, Jeff Rovin), but this one seems particularly all over the place. There’s a surprising number of characters from Marvel comics, for instance. The Thing, sure, even the Hulk, I get. But Green Goblin, Spider-Man and the members of the Fantastic Four? And sure, Bi-Beast seems to be more of a monster than all the others combined, but who’s ever heard of them? And no representation from DC? And these are alongside the standard assortment of cryptids, mythological monsters, movie monsters and dinosaurs (some of which are pretty obscure, like the nuckelavee and the Monolith Monsters). I love that some of the dinosaur illustrations are photographs of dinosaur toys. There’s a lot of big photographs which I am sure was a big selling point.

Anyway, they can’t all be winners. But also, I wouldn’t exactly call this a loser, just, not as much of a winner as all the others.

More monsters, can you believe it? It’s like I have shelf after shelf of monster books or something.

This is The Beasts of Never (1968), by Georgess McHargue, and, to my knowledge, it’s her first published book. It’s illustrated throughout by Frank Bozzo in expressionistic watercolors that I quite like but would probably not cut it in terms of preconceptions about quality in a similar sort of book today (more’s the pity about modern publishing, honestly). There’s a second expanded edition from 1988 that got nominated for a National Book Award, but there is something about the look of this edition that I prefer. Perhaps it was the fact that it was on my library shelf, though when I was a kid, I wasn’t super interested — that “Never” business was too contrary to my deep wish for monsters, even something like Bigfoot or Nessie, to be real.

She covers Nessie, though, at the end of the book, as a way to suggest perhaps there are monsters out there. Along the way, she also devotes time to dragons, both Eastern and Western, the Phoenix, the Basilisk, the Unicorn and a myriad of creatures of the sky and sea. She is most interested the meaning of the monster, not necessarily in the context of myth or legend, but what it might have meant to a person telling the tale beside a campfire. She ruminates and the book is poetic, even if it isn’t poetry. Speaking of the Phoenix, she says, “We will never find answers which are true in the same way the answers to mathematical problems are true.”

In the introduction, she says one of the most perfect things about monsters I’ve ever read. “[…] these imaginary animals, these beasts of never, have a real importance, and this is not merely because they hold a place in history and legend. It is because they are truly magic. By this I mean that the men who invented them were expressing the hopes and fears of themselves and their friends. In doing so, they made their fears less terrible and their wishes more possible. The man who first told of the winged horse Pegasus had created a creature that ought to be—a stallion swift and beautiful and tireless, whose shining wings would carry his master ever higher, beyond the noise and dust of the everyday world. That is more like true magic than anything done by a wizard with his wand or a scientist with his lenses and test tubes.”

In Search of Kelandor’s Gold (1982) is a gigantic funhouse dungeon from Judges Guild that uses a peculiar universal system. Castle Kelandor has been empty for years, but the king’s treasure is in there still and the current Kelandor wants you to clean it out except, surprise, he’s an evil wizard and the castle is a trap for doing away with powerful adventurers who might rival him.

I didn’t buy it for the plot, or the dungeon. You know why I bought it. I bought it for that cover. That’s Lük Skaiwalker, er, I mean, Luke Skywalker (Bespin). Don’t tell me you didn’t recognize him. Did the slight addition of fur on his shoulder and cuff or the saber hilt on his sword fool you? It did not. They didn’t even recolor his outfit. Man, I thought House on Hangman’s Hill was a bold theft. This beats that one by a mile!

This is Chaos in Kansas (1989), a scenario for GURPS Cliffhanger or GURPS Horror, depending on how you’re feeling. The cover doesn’t even come close to telling you what amazing things lie in wait inside, but it’s a start. In truth, the title alone is gold. Say it with me, Chaos in Kansas, Chaos in Kansas, Chaos in Kansas.

There are two scenarios and some source material on the setting, a town called Liberty. The first involves a kidnapping by a coven of witches who worship the horrible sorcerer monster that’s trapped in a cave outside of town. They’re led by a teen flapper, the girlfriend of the kidnapped victim, who she intends to use as a human sacrifice to free the Dire Dreamer. She has a goat mask with crystal eyes in the trunk of her car. The cave is guarded by a horrible humanoid spider creature. The Dreamer itself is a mummified head on top of a pile of human intestines. I suspect that the phantom on Miro Sinovcic’s cover is meant to be the Dreamer, but good taste prevailed against depicting the pile of intestines. When the players defeat the Dreamer, the head explodes in a splash of goo, which should happen at the end of more RPG boss fights if you ask me.

The second scenario has the players investigating strange goings on at the local cement factory. And by strange goings on, I mean getting hired by the boss to root out the “Bolsheviks” who have been disrupting the work. Except it isn’t Bolsheviks, its the ghost a Wobbly who was murdered on the site. When he came back as a ghost, he just kept on agitating for the workers, adopting the guise of the Demon of Capitalism to terrorize and sabotage the work site. He can’t be exorcized (he was an atheist, lol) and he won’t rest even if his killer is brought to justice. The only way he’ll depart is if the workers organize a union. The scenario includes lyrics to “Solidarity Forever” and other labor movement songs, presumably so you can sing them to the players in the character of Joe the Ghost. Joe’s my hero.

Did I say The Future King was the WTF-iest of this week’s posts? I lied. Pacesetter’s Sandman: Map of Halaal (1985) is by far the WTF-iest thing you’re going to read about this week. It was Pacesetter’s last publication, which sucks, because it was the first of a projected series of three box sets, so as batshit as this box is, it is also deeply frustrating that the story never resolved. Goddamn the Volume One curse.

In terms of system, we have a genuinely interesting light weight, skill-based system with a narrative focus. They run about two and a half pages, total. Rule number one is to pitch any rules that diminish the fun of the game. Characters have a flat 40% chance to do things, 60% if they are trained. Often, a table is consulted to determine the quality of the success, which adds a bit of unpredictability to the system. Wounds are a series of check boxes of increasing severity (this mechanic in particular is very modern, showing up later in Tales from the Loop and other places). Overall, it’s years ahead of its time and genuinely exciting, which is something I can’t believe I am saying about a Pacesetter game.

On the GM’s side, scenarios are meant to be played in single four-hour sittings and are broken down into acts and scenes (there is also a visual version of each scenario, which is bizarre, but also cool). In practice, this reminds me a lot of the Choose Your Own Adventure board game, or Parsely, which reconfigures interactive fiction for group play. The designers question whether this was technically even an RPG by the definition of the day, preferring to call it “dramatic entertainment.”

And the plot. Folks, this game is weird on the level of Lords of Creation. The introductory scenario has the players waking up on a train with amnesia, though they have credentials from Ohio State University. They are on a train in Morocco. World War II is going on. They wind up interfacing with character from the film Casablanca before going out into the desert to retrieve a wishing lamp and the titular map (which, weird to use a name that is one letter away from halal, the term from Islamic dietary law which means a given food is allowed).

The second scenario moves the action to a medieval fantasy land (sorta) where they need to deliver an amulet to the correct blind man. This one features that terrifying jester on the screen. There is also a biker gang and the climax takes place in a parking garage. The third scenario recasts the players as bank robbers working with Bonnie and Clyde; eventually they wind up in Neverland. There is a dance-off with Tony, the Italian-American prince of disco (a tie is broken with a knife fight). The final scenario involves the Arab pirate Halaal (Sinbad, basically) and Dionysus’ rocket ship (which is piloted by Albert Einstein, who explains the wine god’s scheme to hang mirrors at the edge of the universe to…do something I don’t quite understand). The sustained atmosphere of dreams, or hallucination, is really something.

Throughout all of this, the Sandman appears periodically and tries to murder the players. Pacesetter offered a $10,000 cash prize if someone could figure out the character’s true identity before the release of the final chapter. We’ll never know, probably. Perhaps that’s for the best?

Grenadier Models produced three adventure modules in the ’80s to support their associated miniature lines: Cloudland for fantasy RPGs (read: D&D), The Horrible Secret of Monhegan Island for Call of Cthulhu and this, Raid on Rajallapor (1984), for Mercenaries, Spies and Private Eyes (a game I am completely unfamiliar with). I picked this up because I am a completionist, because I like the production values of the other Grenadier modules and because, judging from Martin Kealey’s cover alone, I was sure there was more to this scenario than just merc shit.

For starters, it’s actually two scenarios. The back has a solo scenario that seems very James Bond, in which you need to find a microfilm in a casino. Flint Henry’s illustrations seem preoccupied with people holding both guns and champagne, but I kind of love them. That guy with the sword hand is fantastic.

The first scenario though is the good stuff. It’s practically a Delta Green scenario. The frame is pretty simple: attack the estate of Roger Dalton (gee, I wonder where they got that name) in (fictional) Rajallapor, India, and steal his golden statue of Shiva, then spirit it over the border to Pakistan into the hands of the buyer. The wrinkle: once stolen, spectral manifestations of Ganesha and the bull Nandi pursue and attack the thieves. It isn’t much of a supernatural twist, really, but I love it. I was so excited when I got to that part when reading, because I knew it in my bones going in. Big “Leonardo Di Caprio pointing dot gif” energy.

And dammit, on the last page, it says Grenadier made a Traveller adventure too?! It never ends.

This week, I’m looking at some of the most WTF RPG publications I haven’t already covered, starting with The Future King (1985), which might be the WTF-iest.

The booklet is by Tom Moldvay of B/X D&D fame, and spins out, thematically, from his gonzo Avalon Hill RPG Lords of Creation. Mechanically, though, Moldvay opted for a stripped-down system that focuses on character interaction and uses a pair of D6; the full rules run about a page and are surprisingly light for the period.

The scenario is unhinged, however. Players take the role of six heroes summoned out of time — Nostradamus, the Viking Harald Hardraada, the Welsh freedom fighter Owen Glendower, Doc Holiday, Cyrano de Bergerac and Bruce Lee — who are tasked with finding a number of magical items — the skeleton of Sir Bedivere, Excalibur (naturally) and the magic bell that will wake the sleeping king and his knights. Nostradamus has a bunch of prophecies that can possibly help player through the plot, but honestly, the adventure is a series of scenes that, while jumping through time and space, are pretty linear in practice. Random encounters (with Sinbad, the Red Dragon, Comte St. Germain and a futuristic soldier of fortune, among others) spice things up. As much as Moldvay pretends the scenario is about character interaction and puzzling out riddles, success is mostly determined by successfully kicking the butts of a series of guardians, which include a cyborg and Sir Mordred. It’s all over the place, a fever dream all the way through.

And it has pretty solid art! Dave Billman, who did a lot of work on the Lords of Creation line also does a lot here. Other illustrations are by Mike Gustovich, Rick Magyar and John Totleben (!).

The Sutra of Pale Leaves: Carcosa Manifest (2025) is the follow-up to Twin Suns Rising and contains four additional scenarios. Two are directly interconnected but the rest standalone more or less. They are presented across the two books in chronological order and work as an interconnected campaign that way.

The two-parter is the centerpiece of the campaign, with the primary cult going all in in an attempt to bridge our world to Carcosa in order to allow the Prince to physically manifest here (instead of only within the minds of his thralls). I don’t love the way the first part ends (a central NPC’s fate is sealed no matter what the players do) but otherwise I think it’s a gripping yarn with plenty of ways to lose. And win, but I’m not here for the winning in Call of Cthulhu, come on now. These are probably the most conventional CoC-style scenarios in the campaign though, for better or worse.

The other two scenarios are more interesting. One involves stopping the release of an Alice in Wonderland-themed videogame that is a vector for infection by the Sutra. It has a tight narrative and the videogame stuff works gangbusters. I particularly love the lo-res character portraits. Of all the scenarios, this one feels like maybe the scenario idea that spurred all the others on. It marries theme, setting and cultural context really well. The last adventure is sort of an unhinged riff on “The Repairer of Reputations” meant to be deployed when the players are at their lowest (it begins assuming they’re living on the street in disgrace) and gives them an opportunity to sink even lower. It’s very weird and casually deploys some of its most bizarre material in way similar to the original tale. It’s a great homage.

The whole campaign was written by Sons of the Singularity, who have made a name for themselves with The Sassoon Files and some other large-scale Call of Cthulhu campaigns. I tried The Blessed & the Blasphemous, but it didn’t click. Maybe I need to try again.

When I saw Chaosium was doing a new King in Yellow themed campaign, I sorta shrugged. I have a lot of love for the King, the Chambers book was an obsession of mine when I was in high school in part because it was impossible for me to find a reprint (I did, eventually), until I found my strange, probably rebound first edition in yellow boards, which I then carried around with me everywhere. The mention of Carcosa in True Detective set my brain on fire. But in a lot of ways, my relationship with the Carcosa mythos culminated with the Delta Green campaign Impossible Landscapes. I think maybe Delta Green culminated along with it in some ways. It’s just one of those things were its greatness and the way it transcended its form was immediately apparent and largely beyond debate. So, no shade, but that’s a hard act to follow.

And then I read The Sutra of Pale Leaves: Twin Suns Rising (2025) and was impressed despite my expectations. Spoilers ahead, so let me just say that I think this is worth picking up and checking out, especially if you’re intimidated by Impossible Landscapes (which is a fair reaction). But for real, if you think you’re gonna play this, stop reading.

This book, and its companion, are set in Japan during the 1980s, which is right out of the gate a dramatic shift. The way in which the authors intertwine Japanese folklore and pop culture with the tropes of the King in Yellow mythos is impressive in its own right. Two of the scenarios here use Yokai in ways that cleverly nest with themes from Chambers’ original stories. The third scenario features manga subcultures, a comic convention and cosplay and is really rather brilliant. All the themes and topics are reinforced by art in a complimentary style, so, the character portraits in the manga scenario all look like manga.

The real star of the show, however, is this manifestation of the King himself. He’s a meme who replicates himself in the minds of anyone suitably exposed to the titular book. He bends the wills of his hosts to find new ways of repeating the viral code in order to get ever more hosts (so, say, by translating the Sutra into a mass market manga). Nearly all the scenarios require players to interact with the Sutra and its derivatives to succeed, but in doing, they open their minds to the King (called here the Prince of Pale Leaves). Thus opened, the Prince knows all they do and think and, eventually, can take them over entirely. It’s an insidious and paranoid meta!