New Flesh Rpg & William Hope Hodgeson's Nightland rpg Session Report Two

 

 The PC's almost couldn't cope when the darkness creeped across the landscape and the monsters began to wake up.We lost two operatives last night as the Humpted men closed in on the player's PC's. These things were raving and sobbering humanoid horrors. This picks right up from the last session here on the blog. 
“And I saw how that the Humped Men did seem to be humpt by reason of their being so monstrous thick and mighty of the neck and the shoulder, as that they had been human bulls. And I saw that they were very strong, and by the speed of their climbing, I knew they were swift…” – Ch. 9, “The Dark Pyramid”

 The Humpted Men followed them behind the party almost getting taken and they got two of the PC's who were dragged into the darkness. The party moved on & they found that they were being tracked by an unknown force.The PC's scambled to find a volcanic tube while spraying machine gun fire everytime they heard foot falls. They found the lava tubes and checked the tubes for monsters and found one that was clear. The PC's wanted a better look at what they were up against. 
The party's psionic opened herself up to the influence of the Nightland! This was a bad idea as she was overwhelmed in the incredibly bad influences of the Dark Forces of the Nightland. The PC made her saving throw and was able to shake off these dark influences before she was possessed! 

Our adventurers are a diverse group of New Flesh rpg  party members & they are on a mission to get the technologies of the Nightland. They are facing down the evolved remains of mutant races from Interzone who are now the monsters of the Nightlands. 

Deep in the lavatube they found a ton of obsidian arrows from the bows of the Humpted men. These arrows could penatrate most modern body armor. 
The party has moved several boulders into the front of the lava tube. The party survived the night with two guards on the tube's enterance. Outside there were literally dozens of humanoid horrors. These horrors were out there until the red sun rose. The party have fed thier bio implants and then ate thier own food supplies. They were able to cycle out thier guards and they got some sleep. They heard another railed city pulling into the area. The party started toward the railed city and then were attacked by the advanced city guards. The party were shocked by the railed city guards! We ended with the party retreating. Our game ended here!

The Nightland book is a prime resource for our campaign and we're  filled in wasteland & mutant  details using The Red Room's Wretched Apocalpyse Second Edition. 

The PC's were able to send a couple of corpses and artifacts of the Humpted me back through the temporal wormhole that the party came through. The party came across a small metallic book that they sent back down the time travel stream. 

New Flesh Rpg & William Hope Hodgeson's Nightland rpg Session Report

  We've got together despite the weather and snow here! We've got a diverse group of New Flesh rpg  party. These guys are sent into an alternative timeline to plunder for technology. In this case, it's the far future of William Hope Hodgeson's Nightland & the party ended up in the twilight zone of the railed cities which chase the giant red sun before the cold horrors of the Nightland close in. 

The party missed the city on the rails by two hours. And so the party was left  deeply in the wilderness.
Around them were dozens of volcanic 'fire holes' and these the party looked to survive the night. The cold was starting to set in. 
They ended up battling a couple of giant scorpions and spiders within  one of the holes. Our adventurers ended up within a clean volcanic hole and deployed water collectors. The night pasted without incident. 
The morning was a different matter as they climbed out of the hole to a red sun rise. They drank clean water and began following the rails toward the travelling city. 
The party was attacked by wicked obsidian arrows from the primitive and dangerously cannibalistic  mutant Humpted Men!
“And I saw how that the Humped Men did seem to be humpt by reason of their being so monstrous thick and mighty of the neck and the shoulder, as that they had been human bulls. And I saw that they were very strong, and by the speed of their climbing, I knew they were swift…” – Ch. 9, “The Dark Pyramid”
The party beat back the cannibal tribe of mutant horrors but not for two horrors of game time. We ended with the party going back to thier lava tube encampment. We ended here.
Alright the Nightlands by William Hope Hodgeson is practically unreadable for it's first chapter. I've read it ages ago and recently reread the book. Within it is reference to the railed cities which follow the bloated far future  red sun before it sets around the dead seas of our former Earth. This of course takes place millions of years in the future. I filled in wasteland & mutant  details using The Red Room's Wretched Apocalpyse Second Edition. 

So basically I built on some of the ideas of the Wretchedvese's temporal wormhole generators for alternative timeline travel. See the Wretched web comics & plugged in some of  William Hope Hodgeson's material. 

Beyond Appendix N Mail Call - Night Land and Other Perilous Romances: The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson, Volume 4

Today has been mail call day! This isn't your usual mail call though. This is for the William Hope Hodgson Nightlands book that's been missing from the archives for a very long time. This past Christmas my wife grabbed me a first edition Hodgeson book for me. But who was William Hope Hodgson; "William Hope Hodgson (15 November 1877 – 19 April 1918) was an English author. He produced a large body of work, consisting of essays, short fiction, and novels, spanning several overlapping genres including horror, fantastic fiction, and science fiction.^[2] Hodgson used his experiences at sea to lend authentic detail to his short horror stories, many of which are set on the ocean, including his series of linked tales forming the "Sargasso Sea Stories". His novels, such as The House on the Borderland (1908) and The Night Land (1912), feature more cosmic themes, but several of his novels also focus on horrors associated with the sea. Early in his writing career Hodgson dedicated effort to poetry, although few of his poems were published during his lifetime. He also attracted some notice as a photographer and achieved renown as a bodybuilder. He died in World War I at age 40." 

 William Hope Hodgson was an incredible writer of horror,cosmic horror, romance, fantastic fiction, & science fiction. He's work often blurred those themes as he tried his hand at every one of these genre's. But his work for me that reflects perfectly the lens of his literature in the field of cosmic horror is  The House on the Borderland (1908) and its squeal in spirit  The Night Land (1912). The House on the Borderland (1908) serves as both a predecessor & book end squeal to the The Night Land (1912). 


The Nightlands is everything I love about the Dying Earth genre, a doomed protagonist who is the reincarnation of an early Nineteenth century man whose love is taken from him. Finds himself astrally projected into a post terrestrial landscape millions of years into the future. The sun has almost burnt itself out as a red star, most of the oceans have dried up, the landscape is dotted with millions crammed cities, there are energy weapons, knightly orders of monster hunters, & even minion like Lovecraftian horrors lurking at the corners of a pitch black darkened world.



This particular collection is part of the Nightshade book series & I picked this collection for very specific reasons; "Night Shade Books’s five-volume series presents all of Hodgson’s unique and timeless fiction. Each volume contains one of Hodgson's novels, along with a selection of thematically-linked short fiction, including a number of works reprinted for the first time since their original publication. The fourth book of the five-volume set, The Night Land and Other Romances, collects all of his romances and women’s fiction, as well as the entirety of his classic 1912 dying-earth novel The Night Land.

The Complete Fiction of William Hope Hodgson is published by Night Shade Books in the following volumes:
The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” and Other Nautical Adventures
The House on the Borderland and Other Mysterious Places
The Ghost Pirates and Other Revenants of the Sea
The Night Land and Other Romances
The Dream of X and Other Fantastic Visions"

The Nightlands true horrors are the Watchers towering horrors from beyond the bounds of time & space. The Earth's last residence huddle in the Redoubts ( million strong city colonies that house the last true humanity descendants. The Watchers ( really Outer Gods given towering form feed on human souls & other less identifiable substances) wait & wait for the Redoubt's force fields to fall. Then its lunch time!  


The far future Earth has its share of paladin & knightly orders which fend off the lesser monsters of the darkness & the cults belonging to Watchers. There are even other alien entities that were mixed from humanity & things much less distinct out in the darkness waiting to get their claws into any juicy humans. My lovely wife had gotten me for Christmas a first edition of The Dream of X and Other Fantastic Visions: The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson, Volume 5. 

This volume contains The Dream of X a cut down chap version of The Nightlands which Amazon reviewer 

Michael Battaglia has an excellent break down of ; ""The Dream of X" but instead of being presented front and center as the other ones were, its buried a good chunk of the way down in the table of contents, leaving plenty of room for everyone else. Magnanimous perhaps, but what gives?

The truth is, "The Dream of X" is basically a streamlined version of the last collection's "The Night Land", written for the purposes for securing a copyright for the story and later turned into a separate illustrated piece all its own (the illustrations, alas, do not make the collection). Yet, for those people sighing under their breath and thinking "Not this story again" you can actually make a serious case that the cut down version is in effect a stronger work than the unabridged version. While it strips away some of the story's hallucinatory feel and woozy sense of distance, it also cuts the plot to the bone, putting the rest of the land into the realm of mystery and retaining the best parts of the story anyway, which were the beginning and the end. Even more thankfully, it not only gives us less of that archaic prose to wade through but also leaves out almost all the middle chunk of the novel where the narrator and his true love Mine Own eat tablets, walk, romantically bicker, unromantically bicker and repeat those things for what feels like three hundred straight pages. It also mercifully eliminates roughly a hundred references to her pretty feet. The original epic length does make the ending feel slightly more earned (at least for me, because I managed to chug through it) but getting to the still powerful ending faster does reward those who are more into instant gratification.

That said, "The Dream of X" only takes up about forty pages of a four hundred page collection, leaving the rest of the space to be filled with lots and lots of short stories, all of which dubiously fall under the umbrella of "Fantastic Visions"".

So what does the Nightlands have to offer the old school or OSR dungeon master?! Everything actually! They have incredible vistas & visions of thousands of future ruins, dungeons, and hundreds of possibilities for a DM to take his or her games into a very alien realm almost entirely unknown to many players today! Thankfully I have a fantastic wife who understands & shares my passion for the OSR & table top hobby! I've got a ton of reading to do & more OSR campaign planning which I will share in up coming blog entries!

Thanks honey for the fantastic gift!