"You Are Not One of the Elites" ~ OSR Commentary With Rpg Pundit's The Invisible College & Night Shift Veterans of the Supernatural Wars By Jason Vey & Timothy Brannan.

 "This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games. All games are basically hostile. Winners and losers. We see them all around us: the winners and the losers. The losers can oftentimes become winners, and the winners can very easily become losers.
"The War Universe", taped conversation, first published in Grand Street, No. 37 "
William S. Burroughs 

"His magic exists from a hypnotic, inadvertant demand of attention as he interrupts the Parade of Death and takes the stage, to unashamedly seize the higher pleasures they fear to reach. Dead and unborn onlookers wallow in their weakness, as the shame they emit fails to penetrate him and rebounds with force as he shoves it down their throats and they choke, vomiting up a jealous mess of many made up morals purely to justify their cowardliness and they sink back down to worthlessness. Rats of submission gnaw on his ankles but they fail to make him buckle and bow to necessity."
The Wild Boys (1971) William S. Burroughs 

Yesterday we talked about  'Welcome to Saint Cloud' here on the blog.  Today we're gonna pick it up with   Postcards from Avalidad By Miguel Ribeiro  & Manuel Souza. And while I do think that the classic edition of the excellent Over the Edge Rpg does a fantastic job of melding many of the tropes &  trends found in the underground literature of the Sixties & Seventies. We need to dive back into several important factors about Rpg Pundit's The Invisible College & Night Shift Veterans of the Supernatural Wars By Jason Vey & Timothy Brannan.  One of those first factor's is the availablity of 'real', solid, & actually available 'activated' information about the world of magick & the occult. Any true book store or even an internet site can provide the budding magus with information about the upper & lower vibrational planes. The dark forces powers of  'Welcome to Saint Cloud', have carved out their own piece of reality. These guys are actually second raters when it comes to the actual running of reality as we know it.  Postcards from Avalidad By Miguel Ribeiro  & Manuel Souza goes into some of the folks who are on the control end of 2021 reality through the lens of the Sixties & Seventies. 

This is adventuring in the lower dimensions of  realms of William S. Burroughs which comes with its own brand of horror & degradation just the sort of thing that Rpg Pundit's The Invisible College & Night Shift Veterans of the Supernatural Wars By Jason Vey & Timothy Brannan PC's are fighting against. If your expecting Gandalf or the classic D&D styles of Merlin they are here but their running their own cells in this fight for reality. The down & dirtness of magick makes the monsters no less dangerous. Orcs are going to be curned out from vats by dark powers at the ragged edges of reality as disposable troops.

 The powers that be are more likely too be unknitting reality & remaking it in ways that you have no idea about. If your thinking the Shadowrun rpg think again. The monsters of D&D are here but these are left over bio weapon systems from wars for our reality eons ago. They still exist but they are mindlessly still serving the Dark Powers as they once did ages go. And if you happen to be one of the unlucky bastard's whose seen through reality then you might be fighting for your life to preserve 2021. 
Organizations like the Cult of Typhon are in this for the long haul but they want reality under their control. Things from outside such as the Mind Flayers &  Slaad have other ideas. Just because your esoteric philosphies align doesn't mean that all out war isn't going to happen. The human race is bound by powers that it can't even understand sometimes all that stands between your family & total subservience to some Lovecraftian entity is good gun & some magick rituals. 
Once you cross over the Threshold there's no going back. Sure on paper it may look all kinds of cool. But imagine that the rituals of change & war actually worked. And that there really were dark powers after you! And that's where the street level magick begins. 

The real fight for the human soul begins deep in the realm of dreams. These could be higher or lower vibrational dimensions. Ben Laurence's Through Ultan's Door series of adventures is perfect for these sort's of surreal dungeon crawls. And we'll get into why next time!