A blog about sewing machine repairs,but mainly my hobbies which include old school role playing games, science fiction,films, horror, and general geekery. Sit down and stay a spell.
Today I sat down with DM Steve & DM Iris at lunch for a bit of a powow over the lingering campaign that was started back in June of 2021. Scheduling being what it is with work & such not much materialized. But its gotten me thinking about both Calidar & Ben Laurnence's Through Ultan's Door dreamlands.
Is there several problems with Calidar?! No unless you count the fact that the product line is extremely expansive. And so its a question of concentrating on one aspect of Bruce Heard's campaign setting.
DM Iris has had a number of wrinkles that have come from real life because of Covid & the resulting pandemic.
Calidar is high fantasy with the knobs turned up to elven and then some with elements of Steampunk thrown into the mix as well. Skyships are the norm & Calidar as a series works very well. Personally, we'll be concentrating on series two & series three of Calidar. Calidar's sky ships have been trading their way through the dreamlands for decades. And there's been more then a bit of friction between the wizard power blocks over some of the trade opportunities. These are going to be regular D&D characters & not Godbound BTW.
Meanwhile, Ben Laurence's series of adventures has moved on quite a bit & it means quite a bit of reading on DM Steve & myself's part. And give the amount of sheer world building Ben does its gonna be interesting.
This campaign is gonna end up someplace between High Fantasy & Sword & Sorcery in my estimation. Ben Laurence's worlds are weird, dangerous, and filled with lots of opportunities.
There is a single main definition of the object of all magical Ritual. It is the uniting of the Microcosm with the Macrocosm.The Supreme and Complete Ritual is therefore the Invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel; or, in the language of Mysticism, Union with God. Ch. 1 : The Principles of Ritual Aleister Crowley We are living through one of the last cycles of Chaos & scorn according certain Hindu sacred texts. All of this is a part of the 'Invisible College' rpg on some back burner paragraph but its there. But what if there were high dimensional realities right around the corner where we might escape to as a part of the Great Work?! We'll pick up right here from where we left off from here last time on the blog.
Try to imagine for a moment that the D&D or AD&D campaign settings that we know & love ala Greyhawk are actually higher dimensional realms perhaps a part of a mega dimensional campaign. Now its only been eight days since our last blog entry on this OSR ousting here. Since then several thoughts have been going through my conversations with DM Steve. He suggested Kevin Crawford's Worlds Without Number simply get rid of the Latter Earth which is the game's default campaign setting. And insert in your own version of a TSR mega setting perhaps Blackmoor, Mystara, & Greyhawk as one mega campaign setting. The ritual magick of 'Invisible College' rpg taps into the same other dimensional source as D&D. That source is the realm of Chaos inherit within the center of 'dream'. The same energies that 'gods' and 'immortals' access.
Let me simply go on record as saying that I don't give two shites about any of the authors of these rpg's political or religious beliefs. Now that being said there are monsters under the bed and these monsters sometimes come into our world through some very dangerous back doors. And this is all very David Lynch.And this brings us right back to Welcome to Saint Cloud.The Lynchian vibe is very strong in this adventure & this brings up a point. That many of the places that David Lynch's literature, films, etc. talk about are places where reality is breaking down. Whose doing this?! The magus of course by their very acts of magick because it serves to bring in the corrosion of chaos.
Lynch's Mulholland Drivecould well be a magus dealing with the breakdown of their own reality. The whole affair looping back on itself in higher or lower dimensional reality. There are cracks that form within such realities allowing demons or worse to exploit them.
Now if we follow the anti logic here then we can see several factions within 'Invisible College' rpg exploiting such weaknesses. On the extreme end of such manipulation you have villains or magus such as John Carpenter's 'In The Mouth of Madness''s Sutter Cane taking pieces of reality & turning them into their own personal balloon animals.
These piece of reality could be seen as fragments of the dreamlands bound up as domains floating next to the endless void. They circle but can not touch the endless exo planet. But what about all those valuable 'treasures' and artifacts that seemingly & endlessly end up in every pawnshop, estate sale, etc. across the Earth? Why are these allowed to come into our world?! Because the Fey & the monsters of the dungeons of these over & underworlds want to spread their countless baubles from dungeon to reality for the endless parade of fresh meat. And this is where Night Shift Veterans of the Supernatural Wars Companion By Jason Vey & Timothy Brannan comes into play. The monsters are the magus's muscle & boots on the ground. This is because this end of reality is so dangerous. The PC's have to keep back the hordes from overrunning us. Part Jack Kirby's Fourth World & part Clive Barker's Nightbreed for influence but its gonna be Ben Laurence's Through Ultan's Door that's gonna be the hungry location. This place is quietly going to casting its net into our local time space reality for the unwary & the foolish. This end of the dreamlands feeds very well indeed. Why?! Next time...
"I am certainly of opinion that genius can be acquired, or, in the alternative, that it is an almost universal possession.Its rarity may be attributed to the crushing influence of acorruptedsociety. It is rare to meet a youth without highideals,generousthoughts, a sense ofholiness, of his own importance, which, being interpreted, is, of his ownidentitywithGod. Three years in the world, and he is a bank clerk or even a government official. Only those who intuitively understand from early boyhood that they must stand out, and who have the incrediblecourageand endurance to do so in the face of all thattyranny, callousness, and the scorn of inferiors can do; only these arrive at manhood uncontaminated. "Energized Enthusiasm : A Note On Theurgy" in The EquinoxVol. 1 no. 9 (Spring 1913)" Aleister Crowley
Let's pick it up right from here on the blog yesterday. . Magick is the inherit science & practice of changing reality as we know it. What happens when reality breaks us down instead?! The reality as we know it becomes corrupt?! And it begins to body & mind harm?! Several factors got me thinking about about this fact.Last time we mentionedMichael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius & its Cornelius's cycles of reality that come into play here. We are living through one of the last cycles of Chaos & scorn according certain Hindu sacred texts. All of this is a part of the 'Invisible College' rpg on some back burner paragraph but its there.
“There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself. What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. what we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish. There is no free will. There are no variables.” ― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor
Chaos as we've seen it in the classic Anderson sense is a fell beastie that seeps through the cracks of our reality & it fundamentally changes those it touches. It takes various forms of mutations across the spectrum of reality. Our own doesn't fundamentally tolerate those. Cancers & death seem to be the result but on the very fringes of our so called reality we see the occasional mutant or cult of chaos arising. Mostly what we get is henchmen for magical lodges whoe abilities serve them across several realities. And this brings us right back to Welcome to Saint Cloud. The Lynchian vibe is very strong in this adventure & this brings up a point. That many of the places that David Lynch's literature, films, etc. talk about are places where reality is breaking down. Whose doing this?! The magus of course by their very acts of magick because it serves to bring in the corrosion of chaos.
The extremes of this sort of ritual abuse of reality allows those things on the otherside enterance across the threshold into our reality. See these cults thrive in enviroments where the fundamental reality has been turned into Swiss cheese. Higher & Lower dimensional entities such as demons & gods just love to exploit these weaknesses in reality. If you want to expand upon such cults in the 'Invisible College' then I suggest Dark Albion's Cults of Chaos. And please don't tell me that such cults can't exist today because the news tells us otherwise in every back page story coming out of some God forsaken corner of the Earth.
'The Invisible College' isn't going to be that concerned with such cults. The various factions may on occasion use them. But on the whole you are actually looking at the street level minions & workers who are going to be in the dark underworld of the streets. And this is where Night Shift Veterans of the Supernatural Wars Companion By Jason Vey & Timothy Brannan comes into play. The monsters are the magus's muscle & boots on the ground. This is because this end of reality is so dangerous. Yhe fact that this setting is only a foot fall away from our current consentual reality. Turn down the wrong corner & you could find yourself between the fire fight of a different kind. The hearts & minds of the societies of the Earth are not the only things that these factions are fighting over. There are real & dream like treasures of the occult at stake here. Caverns of faery gold lay unguarded across the threshold of reality for th taking but these come with their own price. The gold of myth & legend is closer to the Rhine gold then the gold of a jewelry or pawn store. Other treasures are also there but the guardians know who you are & why your coming don't worry they have thier own operatives in our own reality. And their coming for you.
"Float down the sewer river of the dreamlands with Through Ultan’s Door double issue 3. This issue presents a pointcrawl along a sewer river of the dreamlands that connects the dungeons from issues 1 & 2 with 7 new locations. It introduces an entire settlement, the Sanitarium of the Benefactors, and numerous factions including the sewer wyrm Cephaia, Prophetess of the Muddled Waters; her rival the Cranemay, melancholy fey witch; and the Lurid Toads, ominously polite cannibalistic parasites. Complete with a giant dreamy sewer encounter table, and rules for playing your very own opium dreaming wizard! It is illustrated more lushly than ever, with over 30 gorgeous illustrations by Huargo, Orphicss, Gus, Daria Khlebnikova, Johan Tieldow, Jeremy Duncan, and David Hoskins."
Through Ultan's Door issue#3 represents the sorta of point crawl that can slide into our reality without us even knowing it. The powers of the 'Invisible College' & the Nightshift The Vetans of the Supernatural Wars are working hard to prevent it.Why?! Because its already happened in the past. We have a tendency to believe that reality as we know it stinks, the world is rotten, etc. We've all heard the thought or caught a glimpse of this in opinion in the past. This blog post picks right up from here.
“A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. A psychotic is a guy who's just found out what's going on.”
― William S. Burroughs
Magus are going to be outsiders at the best of times & part of the machinery of society at other times. Society is going to think them the madmen & the fools, along with every other 'ism' on planet Earth. The truth is so much more stranger. What makes the darkly surreal Tech-Noir game setting and adventure of 'Postcards From Avalidad' 'Postcards from Avalidad' By Miguel Ribeiro & Manuel Souza so dangerous is the fact that this setting is only a foot fall away from our current consentual reality.
'Once upon a time' became reality for a time & the land of dreams is a very hostile & imicial place for mankind. Gods, demons, faeries, magick was reality & then the immortals of the higher realms or dimensions finally set back reality. The 'Invisible College' factions, one of them at least called back in the immortals not the gods but the immortals to set reality right again. There were those who were still changed by the experience. The mutates, the mutants, etc. who were left behind. They were left behind in the reality of 'Postcards From Avalidad' & that place is used to dealing with its mutants quite quickly in point of fact.
Traveling from one universe or reality isn't the problem getting back to ours is! Magick is the science or act of change especially ritual magick. The college picks up whom it can to train as magus for its factional 'invisible or occult' war. The problem is the fact that is that there are monsters who get left behind. Some of which can be trained to become adventurers in their own right. But this is a 'war universe' and factional wars are messy businesses at the best of times.
The cult of Typhon for example knows this & yet they strive to bring 'things' into our reality to cause mayhem. The blakc & white of alignment systems get very twisted in the face of the war for reality. Dungeons & ruins as we've spoken of since the last time are invasive remants of past battle grounds. They linger here & bring with them monsters, murderers, madmen, & mayhem. This is where the agents of 'Postcards From Avalidad' sometime end up butting heads & spilling blood with the members of 'The Nightshift'. One side is unaware of the true nature of the other. But blood is still spilt & lives are lost. I'm reminded of my college days of Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius & William S. Burroughs. Seen through the Cornelius & Burroughs lens at the end of the world. The question become what world through the strange lives of Avalidad's celebrities, fiscal royalty and seedy underbelly of Postcards?
Adventuring with either the invisible college, the Nightshift or God help you the agents of 'Postcards From Avalidad and you will not comeback unaltered. Lives are shattered, adventurers are created, & survivors may live to tell the tales. Our reality doesn't suck, its what you make of it really. The fact is that the powers at be within '
'Postcards from Avalidad' know what's at stake. At the higher viberational realms are places of ruin & abandoned dreams. Night Shift Veterans of the Supernatural Wars Companion By Jason Vey & Timothy Brannan comes into play here. Because the magus are going to need muscle on those layers of reality.And many of those layers cross into the realm of dreams. Dreams of power, sex, and all of the other primal weirdness. Because these are the keys of need & want within the human psyche. All of these layers of reality are invasive organisms that crawl into our psyches & try to become the new 'normal'. Can magick fix what's broken & are adventurers merely those that survived. And what about those 'treasures' from those invasive realities?! We'll get into those next time.
In a lost land, that only dreams have known, Where flaming suns walk naked and alone; Among horizons bright as molten brass, And glowing heavens like furnaces of glass, It rears with dome and tower manifold, Rich as a dawn of amarant and gold, Or gorgeous as the Phoenix, born of fire, And soaring from an opalescent pyre Sheer to the zenith. Like some anademe Of Titan jewels turned to flame and dream The city crowns the far horizon-light Over the flowered meads of damassin .... A desert isle of madreperl ! wherein The thurifer and opal-fruited palm And heaven-thronging minarets becalm The seas of azure wind....
(Note: These lines were remembered out of a dream, and are given verbatim.) The City in the Desert (1922) byClark Ashton Smith
I've been quietly looking into Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique over the last twenty four hours. Zothique is one of those places that infects my imagination. Zothique is a world millions of years in the far future. There have been literally been hundreds of countries, kingdoms, & empires that have turned to dust among its deserts.
Clark Ashton Smith artwork by my friend Andrea Bonazzi used without permission.
Last night around the campfire there was talk about the Mind Flayers from back in July on the blog. We were speaking about the fact that our guys from our old Amazing Adventures campaign have unfinished business on Zothique. And this involves the Bothrians view themselvs as the only true mind flayers & brain lashers left. All of this went back to the party almost dying at the hands of a mercenary unit of githzerai.They were tracking the Bothrians through the astral plane.The Bothrians in their astral plane hopping nautiloid style ship decended into a lost kingdom in the wastelands.
There was a major fight between the party's two martial artists & the monks of the Githzerai. This all came to a crashing halt when the Botherian guards started to pour from the city.
All of this ties back into a discussion that was going back in April of 2021 over at the Piazza website on the reappearance of the nautiloid Spelljammer ships in fifth edition D&D here. The player's PC's and the monks of the Githzerai parted ways quickly as the guards were dispatched by the monk's leaders. And then they disappeared in a haze of psionic energies. The question what happens now?! The PC's were confronted by a sky ship straight out of Bruce Heard's Wings of Darkness during tonight's game session after fleeing the rest of the guards!
The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams, the way the whites are taking care of the Indians: killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits. William S. Burroughs
Recently Jason Vey changed up the video on his Night Shift Veterans of the Secret War's Companion Kickstarter. And its gotten me thinking about a few things especially Rpg Pundit's The Invisible College rpg and his recent video about it. The real gem of this was a comment that was made by Fernoll on Youtube; "This reminds me of Clive Barker's Jericho, a video game. You control a squad of occult soldiers in the service of the US Chaplain Corps, like a gun-slinging catholic priest, a mestizo shaman with a minigun and a telekinetic sniper. Really neat stuff." Now we're not gonna rip off Clive Barker here today. There are way too many folks who have done that already. And instead I want to take a moment to address 'Postcards from Avalidad' By Miguel Ribeiro & Manuel Souza.
The Invisible College is going to take a look at the fact that if we get a bleed over into our reality from the world setting of 'Postcards from Avalidad' By Miguel Ribeiro & Manuel Souza then things are going become very complicated very fast. And ritual magick may be the only way to 'fix' it.
'Postcards from Avalidad' By Miguel Ribeiro & Manuel Souza isn't the 'real reality' instead its an invasive organism universe or reality that comes across into our colllective universe to take over & conquer. And it does this through its agents, its vitality, & the constant crushing of the human spirit. And it also houses its own inner lodges & colleges of magick at its highest levels. How does one deal with such an agency of reality? Drive it back into the furthest ends of the planes as one can! You play out an invisible war or occult war driving back the lower vibrational planes as quickly as one can.
The fact is that the powers at be within 'Postcards from Avalidad' know what's at stake. At the higher viberational realms are places of ruin & abandoned dreams. Night Shift Veterans of the Supernatural Wars Companion By Jason Vey & Timothy Brannan comes into play here. Because the magus are going to need muscle on those layers of reality. And many of those layers cross into the realm of dreams. Dreams of power, sex, and all of the other primal weirdness. Because these are the keys of need & want within the human psyche.
These could be higher or lower vibrational dimensions depending upon which keys & gates are used. Ben Laurence's Through Ultan's Door series of adventures is perfect for these sort's of surreal dungeon crawls. And they illustrate the dangers of decay within the higher vibrational realms of dreams. And what happens when the things don't stay put within the realm of dreams & start to invade our reality?!
"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
The fact of the matter is that magus are going to be the low man on the totem pole. Magus & monsters in Rpg Pundit's The Invisible College & Night Shift Veterans of the Supernatural Wars were talked about the other day here on the blog. Magus are going to be outsiders at the best of times & part of the machinery of society at other times. The factions of the Invisible College are going to be moving their unseen hands across the table top of the world. The B/X nature of the occult of both games goes excellent with the darkly surreal Tech-Noir game setting and adventure of Postcards From Avalidad. '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. And yet reading through the 112 page pdf, I'm reminded of my college days of Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius & William S. Burroughs. Seen through the Cornelius & Burroughs lens at the end of the world. The question become what world through the strange lives of Avalidad's celebrities, fiscal royalty and seedy underbelly of Postcards.
Ben Laurence's Through Ultan's Door series of adventures is perfect for these sort's of surreal dungeon crawls. There's more then enough room for the monsters & magus here. Each of the factions of the Invisible Collge rpg would love to have a backdoor into the dreamlands. But those blundering into this world might end up in the lower viberational setting of 'Postcards from Avalidad'. Firearms & all of the modern high tech toys of 2021 are not going to be enough to deal with the harsh & unforgiving underbelly of these adventures. The dreamlands reality plays for keeps. And it devours those that try to defy its long embrace. The PC's could flip back & forth between realities only to try to find out which one is the true reality. Monster or supernatural PC's in 'Postcards from Avalidad' are going to find themselves in a very dangerous world. A world used to dealing with them. And this bring ups the point that could PC's like B/X powered Night Shift Veterans of the Supernatural Wars Companion classes such as the Divine Warrior, the Mystic Martial Artist, the Psychic Gunslinger, and the Spirit Rider even remotely make a difference in a weird & surreal setting such 'Postcards from Avalidad'?! This is the question that I'm pondering even now as we're planning campaign into this high weirdness & surreal jam. More coming up.
