OSR Commentary On The Lexicon Geographicum Arcanum vol 1 Species of the Hollow Earth By Andrew Marrington For The Lamentations of the Flame Princess Rpg

  Lexicon Geographicum Arcanum vol 1 Species of the Hollow Earth By Andrew Marrington is one of those campaign setting books that deserves more time in the light. Years ago we did a review on and then nothing. 

The campaign's review is something that I'm going to stick by; "What the 'volume of Lexicon Geographicum Arcanum' does is provide the Dungeon Master & his players with a richly detailed setting book that sets up the traditional Mentzer Dungeons & Dragons races into a social wedding cake of civilizations, cultures, etc. that all hit the high notes of mythology & pop culture. This is based around the take of the author/designer Andrew Marrington who does an excellent job for taking a home campaign series of notes into a fully fleshed out setting book. The lay out is exceptional & the artwork very nicely done." What makes The Lexicon Geographicum Arcanum vol 1 Species of the Hollow Earth By Andrew Marrington exceptional is the attention to details; ' These empires don't simply include the usual Dwarven, Elven, & Halflings. Instead we have Formorians & Neanderthals whose might is both black magick itself & very subtle within this inner Earth. There a consistency of alternative PC classes & solid work here for the players to digest.'

And yesterday I was looking into possibly using 'The Lexicon Geographicum Arcanum vol 1 ' as buffer with Rafael Chandler's 'World of the Lost'. There's so much crossover potential here because of the Hollow Earth aspect. 

Crossing these two fantastic LoFP resources could potentially give the DM tons of options to set adventures within an LoFP Hollow Earth with competing non human empires with the LoFP player's PC's trying to exploit the situation. You know this isn't going to go well at all. 

Between getting in dutch with the dinosaurs, the dwarven nation, and more it's only a matter of time before the inner world locks in on events happening in Europe. And yes we're looking England Upturn'd here. Because of the English Civil War's events the Hollow World and it's armies might just have an easy time to take the upper world quite easily. Between plague, violence, and more it doesn't take a great deal strikes against Europe to take the entire chess board. And what a campaign that would make. 

Journey to the Center of the Earth By Jules Verne As Old School Campaign Setting

So I've gotten another email request to further clarify what I meant by utilizing Jules Verne's Journey To The Center of Earth book and other media sources for AD&D 1st edition, OD&D, & even OSR campaign builds. To get into those other sources we're going to have to turn back the clock to about '82 or so. Cable television was really getting into its own & suddenly afternoon television was filled with exotic reruns of shows from other eras. For us kids this meant a taste of stuff our parents & some older kids talked about but stuff we'd never seen. This included Filmations line of cartoons & that brings us to the Journey to the Center of the Earth cartoon which ran from September 9th to September 6th,1969.This was a staple of weekday after school viewing for us kids & the start of a peusdo OD&D campaign. Way before the Hollow World was even a glimmer in TSR's Mystara product line The Lindenbrook party of adventurers were dodging trips, giant monsters, lost tribes of survivors, etc.

"Journey to the Center of the Earth is an American science fiction Saturday morning cartoon, consisting of 17 episodes, each running 30 minutes. Produced by Filmation in association with 20th Century Fox, it aired from September 9, 1967 to September 6, 1969 on ABC Saturday Morning. It featured the voice of Ted Knight as Professor Lindenbrook. It was later shown in reruns on Sci Fi Channel's Cartoon Quest."

"It appears to have taken the 1959 film, Journey to the Center of the Earth, as its starting point rather than Jules Verne's original novel, e.g. including the character of Count Saknussen and Gertrude the duck. However it moved even further away from Verne's novel than the 1959 film." actually it take the 1959 film & takes a left deep into sci fi gonzo weirdness which was a staple of Filmation from that period. Just look at their D.C. super hero lines from then. The Teen Titans & Aquaman fought more weird menaces & aliens then you shake a stick at. But I digress off of my original point here, the filmation cartoon takes some incredible liberties with the classic Jules Verne source material. Which is fine because science fiction pulps have been doing the same thing for a very long time. Below is the classic Amazing Stories from June of 1926 with its iconic cover. Here's where we part ways with the Filmation cartoon & start talking about the Jules Verne novel ( sort of)

Believe it or not all of the classic elements that Filmation uses in the cartoon are actually in the book & in point of fact the cartoon made me read the novel right after seeing the first episode. If your not familiar with the plot its a classic of speculative fiction;"Journey to the Center of the Earth (French: Voyage au centre de la Terre, also translated under the titles A Journey to the Center of the Earth and A Journey to the Interior of the Earth) is an 1864 science fiction novel by Jules Verne. The story involves German professor Otto Lidenbrock who believes there are volcanic tubes going toward the centre of the Earth. He, his nephew Axel, and their guide Hans descend into the Icelandic volcano Snæfellsjökull, encountering many adventures, including prehistoric animals and natural hazards, before eventually coming to the surface again in southern Italy, at the Stromboli volcano."
Spoiler alert the Lidenbrock party doesn't actually reach the center of the Earth;"Although it is often suggested that Jules Verne used the idea of a partially hollow Earth in his 1864 novel, A Journey to the Center of the Earth, his characters actually descend only 87 miles^[1] beneath the surface where they find an underground sea occupying a cavern roughly the size of Europe. There is no indication in the novel that Verne intended to suggest that the Earth was in any way hollow, partially or otherwise."

"Book cover for a 'double hitter' containing the two first Jules Verne novels: "Five weeks in a baloon" and "Journey to the Center of the Earth" Etching by Édouard Riou for the Hetzel publishing house, probably late 1860's." So the cartoon came out from Filmation and each episode is perfect material to mine for a Hollow Earth game but if we go back to the novel we've got a ton of megadungeon campaign for the taking given the,"beneath the surface where they find an underground sea occupying a cavern roughly the size of Europe."
For me its Édouard Riou's artwork that really gives some incredible richness to Verne's vision. All of the classic elements that we know and love are in the novel from are the giant mushrooms to the ruins of Atlantis.

It also makes it rife for OSR historical games like Lamentations of the Flame Princess or Dark Albion. The fact is that such a prehistoric location deep within an oceanic cavern would have to be artificially maintained for centuries. Lindenbrook is only the latest surviving finder of these mini campaign settings. Whose created these caverns? Well for me it could range from the Elves of Dark Albion to the Elder Things of HP Lovecraft.These places are not going to be in isolation either they're going to be a part of the deepest forbidden occult texts & inner cult doctrine. This is how its going to be in my games especially given how my Pellucidar  OSR Hybrid game is starting to verge into Beta Max Black cult movie territory. One of my buddy Glen's players & I got into a discussion over the accuracy of the prehistoric dinosaurs in 'Journey To The Center of the Earth.' His argument is that they're too big & not scientifically accuracy which is true given our modern knowledge. What these things actually are is biological weapon systems created by the owners of the caverns, sea, and other locations described in the book.

These owners have caretakers who might have been left behind or are still reporting to their masters. In the novel the party of adventurers comes across a giant skull on a part of the coast line of the inner Earth sea. Later they actually encounter one of these care takers;"A lightning storm again threatens to destroy the raft and its passengers, but instead throws them onto the coastline. This part of the coast, Axel discovers, is alive with prehistoric plant and animal life forms, including giant insects and a herd of mastodons. On a beach covered with bones, Axel discovers an oversized human skull. Axel and Lidenbrock venture some way into the prehistoric forest, where Professor Lidenbrock points out, in a shaky voice, a prehistoric human, more than twelve feet in height, leaning against a tree and watching a herd of mastodons. Axel cannot be sure if he has really seen the man or not, and he and Professor Lidenbrock debate whether or not a proto-human civilization actually exists so far underground. The three wonder if the creature is a man-like ape, or an ape-like man. The sighting of the creature is considered the most alarming part of the story, and the explorers decide that it is better not to alert it to their presence as they fear it may be hostile."


Who are these mastodon herders? Well in my mind their specially bred hill giants who have a telepathic hive mind with the Elder Things. In a future game of Dark Albion these hill giants are going to belong to the Elves of Dark Albion. They're telepathic, intelligent after a fashion, very dangerous, & have a very alien society who still worships their masters as 'gods'. This was something I used in a recent Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea adventure last year when the party journeyed deep into Under Hyperborea.



In my own 'Warlords of The Outer Worlds' the Journey to the Center of the Earth caverns are a hot house laboratory that has been used for centuries & is one of the Elder Things nodes where they bred thousands of biological weapons for when the 'stars were right'. They're hill giant handlers let them loose across the world along with other Mythos entities. The time when they reclaimed parts of the Earth for their own. Here's where Realms of Crawling Chaos comes in handy for the Fish Blooded, the White Apes, etc whom have been making pilgrimages to the ruins of Atlantis for centuries. They're chaos cults are flourishing across the globe in record numbers. Mankind is fighting a war on many fronts from the worlds of Jupiter to the wastelands of what was once his paradise. He's no longer at the top of the heap & the world is changing as he is as well.


So what does the novel Journey to The Center of the Earth have to do with Lamentations of the Flame Princess? Well it has everything to do with the retroclone game, the novel provides a perfect basis for ton of weird stuff to crop up in unexpected locations, it can add another megadungeon to World of the Lost which in turn create the vast prehistoric and weird underground locations of the novel. It can also be used to create a very nasty point crawl between the various underground locations. The various lost tribes & so forth can be generated using World of the Lost or any OSR system.

For downloads there are a few options the
Journey To the Center of the Earth 1877 edition is one of my favorites and is available from

Wiki Source to read on line here.

The Project Gutenberg Version is Here

You Can Also Read The Classic Illustrated Version of Journey To The Center of the Earth Here

Amazing Stories Volume 01 Number 03 has one of the best versions of Journey To The Center of Earth By Jules Verne complete with classic pulp artwork.

The Lost World By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle As Old School Campaign Setting

Nineteen Seventy Four was a killer year if you were a dinosaur fanatic like I was as a kid. Let me start off with a bit of quick background. I got an email request about a generic OD&D, AD&D, & OSR friendly non commercial setting that could be quickly set up & ready to go. Now why I mention Seventy four is because of the other Saturday morning cartoon show from Hanna Barbara that never gets mentioned. Yes I'm talking about; "Valley of the Dinosaurs is a 30-minute Saturday morning animated series produced by the Australian studios of Hanna-Barbera Productions and broadcast on CBS from September 7 to December 21, 1974."  Basically many folks see it as a poor man's Land of the Lost and while it shares many similarities with that show. There are some distinctions & one of those is the geographic location of Land of the Lost.

With that iconic voice over coming over the tube in the early morning you were tuning in to see dinosaurs. I was thinking about the fact that they had taken a good portion of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World and dropped in their characters into it. And that's where we begin to diverge from Valley of The Dinosaurs. I'm talking about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novel from 1912 & not the Michael Crichton novel from which we gets so many iconic CGI dinosaurs.Instead we're talking about one of the first block buster speculative fiction adventure novels of its time;"The Lost World is a novel released in 1912 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle concerning an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon basin of South America where prehistoric animals (dinosaurs and other extinct creatures) still survive. It was originally published serially in the popular Strand Magazine and illustrated by New-Zealand-born artist Harry Rountree during the months of April–November 1912. The character of Professor Challenger was introduced in this book. The novel also describes a war between indigenous people and a vicious tribe of ape-like creatures." Yeah pay attention to those vicious tribes of ape like creatures because they'll become very important in a moment. "The Lost World is a 1925 silent fantasy adventure film adaptated from Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 novel of the same name. The movie was produced by First National Pictures, a major Hollywood studio at the time, and stars Wallace Beery as Professor Challenger. It was directed by Harry O. Hoyt and featured pioneering stop motion special effects by Willis O'Brien, a forerunner of his work on the original King Kong. Doyle, who also created Sherlock Holmes, appears in a frontispiece to the film, absent from some extant prints."
Below is the complete and updated version of the film The Lost World and its an excellent resource of the film you can find it over at the Internet Archive. It runs for about one hour & sixteen minutes.

The plot is one that we've seen a million times in paperbacks and pulp magazines but this is one of the best uses of the lost prehistoric world its also one of the seminal classics; "Edward Malone, a reporter for the Daily Gazette, asks his news editor, McArdle, for a dangerous and adventurous mission in order to impress the woman he loves, Gladys Hungerton. He is sent to interview the cantankerous Professor Challenger, who has become notorious for claims made about his recent expedition to South America. The professor has been plagued by intrusive reporters and, being a formidable man of great strength, has taken to forcibly ejecting them, despite the resulting police prosecutions. To gain entry Malone pretends to be an honest enquirer, but is quickly discovered, assaulted and thrown into the street. Although this is witnessed by a policeman, Malone does not press charges as the original deceit was his. Challenger is suitably impressed, and decides to reveal something of his discovery of living dinosaurs in South America. Malone is invited to a scientific gathering that evening at which he volunteers, along with the biologist Professor Summerlee and the Amazon adventurer Lord John Roxton, to travel to South America to investigate the claims. After a long and arduous journey they reach the plateau. But one of their local guides has a score to settle with Roxton and destroys their temporary bridge across a precipice, trapping the explorers on the dinosaurs' plateau, where he expects them to meet their deaths.

On the plateau, the explorers encounter five iguanodons and are later attacked by pterodactyls, and Roxton finds some blue clay in which he takes a great interest. After numerous encounters with dinosaurs, Challenger, Summerlee, and Roxton are captured by a race of 'ape-men'. While in the ape-men's village, they discover a tribe of anatomically-modern humans (calling themselves Accala) inhabiting the other side of the plateau, with whom the ape-men (called Doda by the Accala) are at war. With the help of the expedition's firepower, the Accala conquer the ape-men; and insist that the expedition remain on the plateau. With the help from the young prince of the Accala, whom they had saved from the ape-men, the expedition discover a tunnel to the outside world, where they join a large rescue party. Upon return to England, they present their report, which include pictures and a newspaper report by Malone; but they are disbelieved by the public, until Challenger shows a live pterodactyl as proof, which then escapes into the Atlantic Ocean. At dinner, Roxton reveals that the blue clay contains diamonds, about £200,000 worth, to be split between them. Challenger plans to open a private museum, Summerlee plans to retire and categorize fossils, and Roxton plans to return to the lost world. Malone returns to his love, Gladys, only to find that she had married a solicitor's clerk in his absence. He therefore volunteers to join Roxton's voyage."

So what is it about the Conan Doyle book that is so important? Well Maple White Land is a hidden prehistoric  world on a South American plateau. It has all of the classic ingredients of the lost world genre & its all public domain. Many gamers haven't even read the book and so its wide open for exploitation by enterprising dungeon masters. In fact Maple White Land is a perfect OSR setting & recently I got the chance to play in a very different game by a friend. Glen is a DM up in Litchfield Ct that I've known for years whose DMing a very different sort of OSR campaign inspired by Sir Arthur Conan's The Lost World with few pulpy twists of his own.


Glen is a first edition AD&D dungeon master and retroclone enthusiast like I'm and loves to tinker with settings. Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World is easily adaptable to a number of OSR style games. With all of the classic setting material available its easy to see why. Here's how one dungeon master has made it his default OSR setting.




He's taken the setting of Maple White Land and made it into a hot house laboratory for HG Well's Morlocks of Time Machine  fame who are actually the vicious ape like humanoids that Professor Challenger's party fights and defeats. These are a variation of the Labyrinth Lord Morlocks able to go out in daylight but just as degenerate as their overseers.
The Morlocks are not the original owners of the laboratory but we'll get to the original owners  in a second. The campaign was actually inspired by a mash up of Goblinoid Games Labyrinth Lord retroclone systems & Mutant Future as well as Realms of Crawling Chaos thrown in for good measure. The setting was generated using the classic book. The Morlocks have been maintaining the systems of Maple White land for a very long time but their purpose is most likely the same as the time machine.

The original owners of Maple White land are H.P. Lovecraft's Old Ones who used this location as a biological breeding facility for alien and unknown purposes. Glen's campaign uses Lamentations of the Flame Princess real history conceit to add in his PC's at various times of history finding Maple White Land mixed in with some of the alien tech of World of the Lost plus bits of LoFP's Carcosa. Let's just say that there are certain tunnels you really don't want to go down in his version of Maple White Land.



Another aspect that Glen has mixed in is the inclusion of Maple White Land's Plateau surviving an apocalyptic event. Here your PC's are mutant cave men adventurers trying to survive in a mutated world gone mad. The Morlocks have spread out into the world and things are starting to get weird as Iguanodon

,Stegosaurus,  Allosaurus ,Megalosaurus , Apatosaurus  have spread to the Florida panhandle and the world has been terriformed into a jungle wasteland. There are deep connections to Rafael Chandler's 2016 supplement "The World of the Lost" but I can't get into them here because several of Glen's players read this blog. If you haven't picked up LoFP's World of the Lost I suggest you do, its a good solid campaign & toolbox plus its a good read packed with useful OSR stuff.


The Lost World remains a public domain resource that seems to seldom get mentioned in OSR circles which is too bad. The book would make an excellent excursion for Dark Albion as well with expeditions being mounted to Maple White Land for all kinds of natural resources. The book has the potential to be an exceptional old school campaign if a DM wants to put the time and effort into mapping it out.



You Can Download
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World For Free
HERE

Old School Campaign Deconstruction Using The Prehistoric Western Film With The Valley of Gwangi (1969) & The Beast of Hollow Mountain 1956 Cowboys, Dinosaurs, and Boot Hill

On a lazy Saturday afternoon in Connecticut way back in 1970 something or so, my world exploded in a prehistoric stampede of dinosaur fun when the Valley of Gwangi came on television. Maybe it was the fact that the Dinosaur Western wasn't that well  known or that this film came to define the Dinosaur Western genre in film. But for me in the Seventies & Eighties it came to define a friend's old school campaign world as we shall see.

My ex friend Peter was crazy about the film;"In Mexico at the turn of the 20th century, a cowgirl named T.J. Breckenridge hosts a struggling rodeo. Her former lover, Tuck Kirby, a heroic former stuntman working for Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, wants to buy her out. Along the way, he is followed by a Mexican boy named Lope, who intends to join the rodeo on a quest for fame and fortune. T.J. is not interested in Tuck because of this, but Tuck is still attracted to T.J., especially when T.J. jumps off a diving board on her horse. T.J. finally accepts Tuck when he saves Lope from a bull and the two kiss.
T.J. has an ace she hopes will boost attendance at her show - a tiny horse called El Diablo. Tuck meets a British paleontologist named Horace Bromley, who is working in a nearby Mexican desert. Bromley shows Tuck fossilized horse tracks, and Tuck notes their similarity to El Diablo's feet. Tuck sneaks Bromley into the circus for a look at El Diablo, and Bromley declares the horse to be a prehistoric Eohippus.
The tiny horse came from a place known as the Forbidden Valley. A Gypsy known as Tia Zorina claims that the horse is cursed, and demands that it must be immediately returned. Later, she and the other gypsies collaborate with Bromley to steal El Diablo and release it back in the valley. Bromley hopes to follow the horse to its home in search of other prehistoric specimens. Carlos, an ex-member of the Gypsy tribe now working for T.J.'s circus, walks in on the theft and tries to stop it, but is knocked out.
Tuck arrives just as the Gypsy posse leaves. Carlos sees him as he is regaining consciousness. Tuck notices that the horse is missing, and sets off after Bromley. When T.J. and her crew discover Carlos, Carlos claims that Tuck has stolen El Diablo for himself. Carlos, T.J., and the others decide to follow Tuck and Bromley into the valley.
Making their way into the Forbidden Valley, Tuck, T.J., and the rest of the group meet up and soon discover why the valley is said to be cursed when a Pteranodon swoops down and snatches Lope but due to the weight it falls back to the ground. After Carlos kills the Pteranodon by twisting its neck, they spot an Ornithomimus, which they chase after in the hopes of capturing it. Just as it is about to escape, it is killed by Gwangi, a vicious Allosaurus which chases Bromley and the rest of the group. However, a Styracosaurus appears and drives Gwangi away. As Gwangi leaves, he takes the dead Pteranodon with him.
Later, Gwangi pursues the group to their base camp and they try to rope him down, but he breaks free when the Styracosaurus reappears. Gwangi battles and kills the Styracosaurus and later manages to catch and kill Carlos, but is knocked out while trying to exit the valley in pursuit of the rest of the group.
Securing the creature, Tuck and the other men in the group take Gwangi back to town to be put on display in T.J.'s show. On the opening day of the show, the dwarfed Gypsy sneaks in and begins to unlock Gwangi's cage in an effort to free him, only to be killed when Gwangi breaks free. The crowd begins to flee as Gwangi attacks, and Tia Zorina is trampled to death in the chaos. Bromley is crushed by a broken piece of the cage, and Gwangi attacks and kills a circus elephant before rampaging through the town. Tuck, accompanied by T.J. and Lope, tries to hide the crowd in a cathedral, but Gwangi finds them and breaks in. Tuck urges the crowd out through a back exit, leaving Tuck inside with Gwangi, T.J. and Lope.
Gwangi tries to eat them, but Tuck manages to distract him by stabbing him with a flag. Tuck is eventually able to throw a torch onto the floor near Gwangi, setting the building on fire. Tuck and the others manage to escape, trapping Gwangi in the burning building. Roaring in agony, Gwangi dies in the fire. Tuck, T.J., Lope, and the crowd look on to mourn the sacrifice of the burning church."
Yeah its a classic & it was supposed to be done by the effects master Willis O'Brien but he passed shortly before the film could be produce & made. Now I've written extensively of  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World as fodder for an old school campaign but it was also the inspiration for the Valley of Gwangi.
But the Valley of Gwangi wasn't the only film in the Dinosaur Western genre there was a film that proceeded it. The Beast of Hollow Mountain was shown on Saturday afternoons as well as on TNT cable's Monster Vision much later on;"The Beast of Hollow Mountain is a 1956 Weird West movie about an American cowboy living in Mexico who discovers his missing cattle are being preyed upon by an Allosaurus. The Allosaurus would later attack local villagers in a town, and eventually be destroyed by getting lured into some quicksand and drowning.
The first film to show dinosaurs and cowboys in the same picture, it is notable for being based on a story idea by special effects innovator Willis O'Brien. It used a form of stop motion called replacement animation to bring the dinosaur to life. O'Brien co-wrote the script under the pseudonym El Toro Estrella; O'Brien was also to have originally done the special effects for this movie, but this did not happen for reasons unknown."
There are a few great differences here between the two films that an old school Dungeon Master can exploit. The Beast From Hollow was actually my preferred film because we were way back when playing a mix of Gamma World, Boot Hill, & OD&D. The Beast of Hollow mountains has a fully realized setting with prehistoric swamps, dinosaurs, & all of the classic lost world elements. These areas were all a part of an ancient empire belonging to the Serpent men of H.P.Lovecraft & Robert Howard's creation. These lost worlds & prehistoric laboratories were scattered throughout Mexico & Central America. Their degenerate Elven attendants still at the helm even into the apocalyptic era.

This is how we designed it in my old D&D group, many of us too turns Dungeon Mastering and we were in competition with each other to see who was the better DM. This also allowed us to cover lots of ground when it came to DMing. It also meant that we had an extensive prehistoric lost world inner Earth empire to accommodate our megadungeons and prehistoric wilderness point crawls.

All of this can easily be done by using both the Boot Hill rpg & AD&D, Boot Hill gave us some great 19th century fire arms rules along with quick rules for NPC cowboys and farm hands.


By using Mutant Future plus Labyrinth Lord and LoFP's World of the Lost to fill in the prehistoric monsters & the weird lost world elements as necessary. These strange types of Lovecraftian lost world adventure locations could show up anyplace and could be found tucked away across the world. Time warps, space gates and more means could be the perfect venue to bring in PC's as needed.


There are lots of possibilities for mocking up and using this sort of a lost world campaign, the hidden legends, weird mythologies, and even the possibilities of sneaking in some Lovecraftian horrors into the old school adventure mix. As a point crawl this sort of a campaign style can't be beat with the mix of classic old school TSR era elements to form a structured and stable campaign that could be enjoyed for years to come.
Cheers & remember to keep those dice rolling!

"The Mound" By HP Lovecraft & Zealia Bishop As Campaign & OSR Menace For Your Old School Campaigns

When I was a zit faced teenager I was big time into all kinds of high weirdness, I was always looking for something different to throw into our AD&D game. Things were getting very generic & a bit  stale in 1985 because everyone was really hardcore into Dragonlance (this isn't any disrespect to those who love Dragonlance but it was never really for me.Also our dungeon master really didn't do the setting any justice but that's a story for another time.) Everything changed when I stumbled upon a copy of Morning of the Magicians. The Morning of the Magicians by Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels, 1964, BCE. was a book that had an review of everything weird in the world of the Swinging 60's;" a generalized and wide ranging overview of the occult or paranormal, the book presents a collection of "raw material for speculation of the most outlandish order",^[1] discussing conspiracy theories, ancient prophecies, alchemical transmutation, a giant race that once ruled the Earth, and the Nazca Lines.^[1] It also includes speculations such as German occultism and supernatural phenomena conspiracy theory that the Vril Society and the Thule Society were the philosophical precursors to the Nazi Party".
Basically this was like pouring gasoline on a young mind, suddenly another late night  movie on HBO with Doug McClure made a whole lot more sense. Warlords of Atlantis 1978 British science fiction/fantasy film  always seemed to be on. I dearly loved that movie & still do.


Morning to the Magicians led me straight into 'Vril The Coming Race 1871 novel. "The Coming Race is an 1871 novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, reprinted as Vril, the Power of the Coming Race. Among its readers have been those who believed that its account of a superior subterranean master race and the energy-form called "Vril" was accurate, to the extent that some theosophists, notably Helena Blavatsky, William Scott-Elliot, and Rudolf Steiner, accepted the book as being (at least in part) based on occult truth.^[1] A book, The Morning of the Magicians (1960), suggested that a secret Vril Society existed in pre-Nazi Berlin. However, there is no evidence for the existence of such a society."
Suddenly those Atlanteans didn't seem so far fetched but I was going to need more. More came in the form of a very pretty & spooky girl from England who was a foreign exchange student at my school at the time. I had a crush on her but she wanted to be friends but she gave me a copy of HP Lovecraft's The Horror In The Museum & Other Revisions. She moved away & I had a really nice copy of  HP Lovecraft's Horror In The Museum & Other Revisions. After making my way through Vril, the Power of the Coming Race & The Mound by H. P. Lovecraft & Zealia Bishop.

The Mound's menace of K'n-yan was a home grown horror right here in the United States it was a lost world built upon other even older lost worlds. It was one of three of Lovecraft's alien world settings that he had fleshed out. Warlords of Atlantis was important to me because it showed that these Lovecraftian alien influences brought with them their own monsters and special horrors with them. They also create their internal mini societies and that makes all of the difference for the flavor of the campaign.
." K'n-yan ^[1] is a blue-lit cavern beneath Oklahoma. It is inhabited by a human-like race that resemble the Native Americans of the area, though they are actually extraterrestrials who arrived in prehistoric times. They are immortal and have powerful psionic abilities, including telepathy and the ability to dematerialize at will. They are also technologically advanced, using machines that employ principles of atomic energy, though they have largely abandoned their mechanized culture, finding it unfulfilling.^[2]

The most populous city is Tsath, the capital of K'n-yan. It is named for Tsathoggua, a deity once worshiped there, but later deprecated after the inhabitants found out the true nature of the god. Other deities include Shub-Niggurath, Nug and Yeb, Ghatanothoa,^[3] and the Not-to-Be-Named One (a title sometimes used to identify Hastur). The two most important ones, however, are Tulu (Cthulhu) and Yig. The denizens of K'n-yan often place idols of these deities in near proximity, as in the following passage from "The Mound": "[In] a pair of vast niches, one on each side, [the] monstrous, nitre-encrusted images of Yig and Tulu squatted, glaring at each other across the passage as they had glared since the earliest youth of the human world."^[4]

In ancient times, the people of K'n-yan traded with the humans of the surface world. But when geological calamities caused the continents of Atlantis and Lemuria to sink into the ocean, the people of K'n-yan "sequestered themselves below ground, thereafter having no further dealings with the outer world."  It was the perfect group of vile villains to tie in with Vril, the Power of the Coming Race. This also helped to tie a loose end of mine that had been bugging me since 4th grade. How were there two sets of Atlantian ruins in both 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea & Journey To The Center of the Earth could exist. Kid's brains work in weird turns & all of this gave rise to the K'n-yan Empire becoming a threat in my campaigns to this day. Back then Raiders of the Lost Ark was all you needed to help get an AD&D 1st edition gaming going. The ruins of Atlantis, the power of the Vril, the cults of K'n-yan, and more made tying together game campaigns a snap. There hasn't been a recent game in memory where a necromancer from K'n- yan has been in the background of a cult. They're the main bad guys in both my Warlord of the Outer World campaign & Accursed Atlantis.
Recently I've used Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea for fleshing these menaces out. Dark Albion Cults of Chaos  to create several cults from K'n-yan with their heads being minor nobles and deep connections to the Elves of Dark Albion. Lamentations of the Flame Princess Lost World is great for creating colonies  of the K'n-yan Empire and many of the weird prehistoric menaces as well as rebel tribes who live right on their door step.



Realms of Crawling Chaos is perfect for generating fast & weirdly dangerous Lovecraftian K'n-yanian black technology. Most of this stuff has weird auras & puts off strange radiations which a save vs device or wands must be made or a mutation check will result. Dark Albion has a number of nice systems or Mutant Future can be used as well.


So what does this have to do with my Beta Max Black Litchfield County  Pellucidar Campaign? Everything is perfectly set up for a gonzo over the top adventure movie style campaign. A few minor bugs remains but you can easily place the various OSR hazards within the inner Earth and still have room for more for your PC's to go prehistoric hex crawling if they survive.


All of this comes down to the fact that the Empire of K'n-yan retreated into the inner world and along with many of the Cthulhu mythos menaces has been biding its time till mankind tries to destroy succeed to destroy itself. They rise up from the inner world to take over and put man under their yoke once again. All of this is actually in the 'Mound' novella. We'll get into how all of this relates & fits into AD&D 1st edition next blog post.


Free Campaign Resources
You can find the Coming Race HERE

You Can Find "The Mound"  horror & sci-fi novella
By  H. P. Lovecraft & Zealia Bishop HERE 

You Can Find Edgar Rice Burroughs
At The Earth's Core Here

Journey to the Center of the Earth By Jules Verne As Old School Campaign Setting

So I've gotten another email request to further clarify what I meant by utilizing Jules Verne's Journey To The Center of Earth book and other media sources for AD&D 1st edition, OD&D, & even OSR campaign builds. To get into those other sources we're going to have to turn back the clock to about '82 or so. Cable television was really getting into its own & suddenly afternoon television was filled with exotic reruns of shows from other eras. For us kids this meant a taste of stuff our parents & some older kids talked about but stuff we'd never seen. This included Filmations line of cartoons & that brings us to the Journey to the Center of the Earth cartoon which ran from September 9th to September 6th,1969.This was a staple of weekday after school viewing for us kids & the start of a peusdo OD&D campaign. Way before the Hollow World was even a glimmer in TSR's Mystara product line The Lindenbrook party of adventurers were dodging trips, giant monsters, lost tribes of survivors, etc.

"Journey to the Center of the Earth is an American science fiction Saturday morning cartoon, consisting of 17 episodes, each running 30 minutes. Produced by Filmation in association with 20th Century Fox, it aired from September 9, 1967 to September 6, 1969 on ABC Saturday Morning. It featured the voice of Ted Knight as Professor Lindenbrook. It was later shown in reruns on Sci Fi Channel's Cartoon Quest."

"It appears to have taken the 1959 film, Journey to the Center of the Earth, as its starting point rather than Jules Verne's original novel, e.g. including the character of Count Saknussen and Gertrude the duck. However it moved even further away from Verne's novel than the 1959 film." actually it take the 1959 film & takes a left deep into sci fi gonzo weirdness which was a staple of Filmation from that period. Just look at their D.C. super hero lines from then. The Teen Titans & Aquaman fought more weird menaces & aliens then you shake a stick at. But I digress off of my original point here, the filmation cartoon takes some incredible liberties with the classic Jules Verne source material. Which is fine because science fiction pulps have been doing the same thing for a very long time. Below is the classic Amazing Stories from June of 1926 with its iconic cover. Here's where we part ways with the Filmation cartoon & start talking about the Jules Verne novel ( sort of)

Believe it or not all of the classic elements that Filmation uses in the cartoon are actually in the book & in point of fact the cartoon made me read the novel right after seeing the first episode. If your not familiar with the plot its a classic of speculative fiction;"Journey to the Center of the Earth (French: Voyage au centre de la Terre, also translated under the titles A Journey to the Center of the Earth and A Journey to the Interior of the Earth) is an 1864 science fiction novel by Jules Verne. The story involves German professor Otto Lidenbrock who believes there are volcanic tubes going toward the centre of the Earth. He, his nephew Axel, and their guide Hans descend into the Icelandic volcano Snæfellsjökull, encountering many adventures, including prehistoric animals and natural hazards, before eventually coming to the surface again in southern Italy, at the Stromboli volcano."
Spoiler alert the Lidenbrock party doesn't actually reach the center of the Earth;"Although it is often suggested that Jules Verne used the idea of a partially hollow Earth in his 1864 novel, A Journey to the Center of the Earth, his characters actually descend only 87 miles^[1] beneath the surface where they find an underground sea occupying a cavern roughly the size of Europe. There is no indication in the novel that Verne intended to suggest that the Earth was in any way hollow, partially or otherwise."

"Book cover for a 'double hitter' containing the two first Jules Verne novels: "Five weeks in a baloon" and "Journey to the Center of the Earth" Etching by Édouard Riou for the Hetzel publishing house, probably late 1860's." So the cartoon came out from Filmation and each episode is perfect material to mine for a Hollow Earth game but if we go back to the novel we've got a ton of megadungeon campaign for the taking given the,"beneath the surface where they find an underground sea occupying a cavern roughly the size of Europe."
For me its Édouard Riou's artwork that really gives some incredible richness to Verne's vision. All of the classic elements that we know and love are in the novel from are the giant mushrooms to the ruins of Atlantis.

It also makes it rife for OSR historical games like Lamentations of the Flame Princess or Dark Albion. The fact is that such a prehistoric location deep within an oceanic cavern would have to be artificially maintained for centuries. Lindenbrook is only the latest surviving finder of these mini campaign settings. Whose created these caverns? Well for me it could range from the Elves of Dark Albion to the Elder Things of HP Lovecraft.These places are not going to be in isolation either they're going to be a part of the deepest forbidden occult texts & inner cult doctrine. This is how its going to be in my games especially given how my Pellucidar  OSR Hybrid game is starting to verge into Beta Max Black cult movie territory. One of my buddy Glen's players & I got into a discussion over the accuracy of the prehistoric dinosaurs in 'Journey To The Center of the Earth.' His argument is that they're too big & not scientifically accuracy which is true given our modern knowledge. What these things actually are is biological weapon systems created by the owners of the caverns, sea, and other locations described in the book.

These owners have caretakers who might have been left behind or are still reporting to their masters. In the novel the party of adventurers comes across a giant skull on a part of the coast line of the inner Earth sea. Later they actually encounter one of these care takers;"A lightning storm again threatens to destroy the raft and its passengers, but instead throws them onto the coastline. This part of the coast, Axel discovers, is alive with prehistoric plant and animal life forms, including giant insects and a herd of mastodons. On a beach covered with bones, Axel discovers an oversized human skull. Axel and Lidenbrock venture some way into the prehistoric forest, where Professor Lidenbrock points out, in a shaky voice, a prehistoric human, more than twelve feet in height, leaning against a tree and watching a herd of mastodons. Axel cannot be sure if he has really seen the man or not, and he and Professor Lidenbrock debate whether or not a proto-human civilization actually exists so far underground. The three wonder if the creature is a man-like ape, or an ape-like man. The sighting of the creature is considered the most alarming part of the story, and the explorers decide that it is better not to alert it to their presence as they fear it may be hostile."


Who are these mastodon herders? Well in my mind their specially bred hill giants who have a telepathic hive mind with the Elder Things. In a future game of Dark Albion these hill giants are going to belong to the Elves of Dark Albion. They're telepathic, intelligent after a fashion, very dangerous, & have a very alien society who still worships their masters as 'gods'. This was something I used in a recent Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea adventure last year when the party journeyed deep into Under Hyperborea.



In my own 'Warlords of The Outer Worlds' the Journey to the Center of the Earth caverns are a hot house laboratory that has been used for centuries & is one of the Elder Things nodes where they bred thousands of biological weapons for when the 'stars were right'. They're hill giant handlers let them loose across the world along with other Mythos entities. The time when they reclaimed parts of the Earth for their own. Here's where Realms of Crawling Chaos comes in handy for the Fish Blooded, the White Apes, etc whom have been making pilgrimages to the ruins of Atlantis for centuries. They're chaos cults are flourishing across the globe in record numbers. Mankind is fighting a war on many fronts from the worlds of Jupiter to the wastelands of what was once his paradise. He's no longer at the top of the heap & the world is changing as he is as well.


So what does the novel Journey to The Center of the Earth have to do with Lamentations of the Flame Princess? Well it has everything to do with the retroclone game, the novel provides a perfect basis for ton of weird stuff to crop up in unexpected locations, it can add another megadungeon to World of the Lost which in turn create the vast prehistoric and weird underground locations of the novel. It can also be used to create a very nasty point crawl between the various underground locations. The various lost tribes & so forth can be generated using World of the Lost or any OSR system.

For downloads there are a few options the
Journey To the Center of the Earth 1877 edition is one of my favorites and is available from

Wiki Source to read on line here.

The Project Gutenberg Version is Here

You Can Also Read The Classic Illustrated Version of Journey To The Center of the Earth Here

Amazing Stories Volume 01 Number 03 has one of the best versions of Journey To The Center of Earth By Jules Verne complete with classic pulp artwork.

The Lost World By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle As Old School Campaign Setting

Nineteen Seventy Four was a killer year if you were a dinosaur fanatic like I was as a kid. Let me start off with a bit of quick background. I got an email request about a generic OD&D, AD&D, & OSR friendly non commercial setting that could be quickly set up & ready to go. Now why I mention Seventy four is because of the other Saturday morning cartoon show from Hanna Barbara that never gets mentioned. Yes I'm talking about; "Valley of the Dinosaurs is a 30-minute Saturday morning animated series produced by the Australian studios of Hanna-Barbera Productions and broadcast on CBS from September 7 to December 21, 1974."  Basically many folks see it as a poor man's Land of the Lost and while it shares many similarities with that show. There are some distinctions & one of those is the geographic location of Land of the Lost.

With that iconic voice over coming over the tube in the early morning you were tuning in to see dinosaurs. I was thinking about the fact that they had taken a good portion of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World and dropped in their characters into it. And that's where we begin to diverge from Valley of The Dinosaurs. I'm talking about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novel from 1912 & not the Michael Crichton novel from which we gets so many iconic CGI dinosaurs.Instead we're talking about one of the first block buster speculative fiction adventure novels of its time;"The Lost World is a novel released in 1912 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle concerning an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon basin of South America where prehistoric animals (dinosaurs and other extinct creatures) still survive. It was originally published serially in the popular Strand Magazine and illustrated by New-Zealand-born artist Harry Rountree during the months of April–November 1912. The character of Professor Challenger was introduced in this book. The novel also describes a war between indigenous people and a vicious tribe of ape-like creatures." Yeah pay attention to those vicious tribes of ape like creatures because they'll become very important in a moment. "The Lost World is a 1925 silent fantasy adventure film adaptated from Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 novel of the same name. The movie was produced by First National Pictures, a major Hollywood studio at the time, and stars Wallace Beery as Professor Challenger. It was directed by Harry O. Hoyt and featured pioneering stop motion special effects by Willis O'Brien, a forerunner of his work on the original King Kong. Doyle, who also created Sherlock Holmes, appears in a frontispiece to the film, absent from some extant prints."
Below is the complete and updated version of the film The Lost World and its an excellent resource of the film you can find it over at the Internet Archive. It runs for about one hour & sixteen minutes.

The plot is one that we've seen a million times in paperbacks and pulp magazines but this is one of the best uses of the lost prehistoric world its also one of the seminal classics; "Edward Malone, a reporter for the Daily Gazette, asks his news editor, McArdle, for a dangerous and adventurous mission in order to impress the woman he loves, Gladys Hungerton. He is sent to interview the cantankerous Professor Challenger, who has become notorious for claims made about his recent expedition to South America. The professor has been plagued by intrusive reporters and, being a formidable man of great strength, has taken to forcibly ejecting them, despite the resulting police prosecutions. To gain entry Malone pretends to be an honest enquirer, but is quickly discovered, assaulted and thrown into the street. Although this is witnessed by a policeman, Malone does not press charges as the original deceit was his. Challenger is suitably impressed, and decides to reveal something of his discovery of living dinosaurs in South America. Malone is invited to a scientific gathering that evening at which he volunteers, along with the biologist Professor Summerlee and the Amazon adventurer Lord John Roxton, to travel to South America to investigate the claims. After a long and arduous journey they reach the plateau. But one of their local guides has a score to settle with Roxton and destroys their temporary bridge across a precipice, trapping the explorers on the dinosaurs' plateau, where he expects them to meet their deaths.

On the plateau, the explorers encounter five iguanodons and are later attacked by pterodactyls, and Roxton finds some blue clay in which he takes a great interest. After numerous encounters with dinosaurs, Challenger, Summerlee, and Roxton are captured by a race of 'ape-men'. While in the ape-men's village, they discover a tribe of anatomically-modern humans (calling themselves Accala) inhabiting the other side of the plateau, with whom the ape-men (called Doda by the Accala) are at war. With the help of the expedition's firepower, the Accala conquer the ape-men; and insist that the expedition remain on the plateau. With the help from the young prince of the Accala, whom they had saved from the ape-men, the expedition discover a tunnel to the outside world, where they join a large rescue party. Upon return to England, they present their report, which include pictures and a newspaper report by Malone; but they are disbelieved by the public, until Challenger shows a live pterodactyl as proof, which then escapes into the Atlantic Ocean. At dinner, Roxton reveals that the blue clay contains diamonds, about £200,000 worth, to be split between them. Challenger plans to open a private museum, Summerlee plans to retire and categorize fossils, and Roxton plans to return to the lost world. Malone returns to his love, Gladys, only to find that she had married a solicitor's clerk in his absence. He therefore volunteers to join Roxton's voyage."

So what is it about the Conan Doyle book that is so important? Well Maple White Land is a hidden prehistoric  world on a South American plateau. It has all of the classic ingredients of the lost world genre & its all public domain. Many gamers haven't even read the book and so its wide open for exploitation by enterprising dungeon masters. In fact Maple White Land is a perfect OSR setting & recently I got the chance to play in a very different game by a friend. Glen is a DM up in Litchfield Ct that I've known for years whose DMing a very different sort of OSR campaign inspired by Sir Arthur Conan's The Lost World with few pulpy twists of his own.


Glen is a first edition AD&D dungeon master and retroclone enthusiast like I'm and loves to tinker with settings. Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World is easily adaptable to a number of OSR style games. With all of the classic setting material available its easy to see why. Here's how one dungeon master has made it his default OSR setting.




He's taken the setting of Maple White Land and made it into a hot house laboratory for HG Well's Morlocks of Time Machine  fame who are actually the vicious ape like humanoids that Professor Challenger's party fights and defeats. These are a variation of the Labyrinth Lord Morlocks able to go out in daylight but just as degenerate as their overseers.
The Morlocks are not the original owners of the laboratory but we'll get to the original owners  in a second. The campaign was actually inspired by a mash up of Goblinoid Games Labyrinth Lord retroclone systems & Mutant Future as well as Realms of Crawling Chaos thrown in for good measure. The setting was generated using the classic book. The Morlocks have been maintaining the systems of Maple White land for a very long time but their purpose is most likely the same as the time machine.

The original owners of Maple White land are H.P. Lovecraft's Old Ones who used this location as a biological breeding facility for alien and unknown purposes. Glen's campaign uses Lamentations of the Flame Princess real history conceit to add in his PC's at various times of history finding Maple White Land mixed in with some of the alien tech of World of the Lost plus bits of LoFP's Carcosa. Let's just say that there are certain tunnels you really don't want to go down in his version of Maple White Land.



Another aspect that Glen has mixed in is the inclusion of Maple White Land's Plateau surviving an apocalyptic event. Here your PC's are mutant cave men adventurers trying to survive in a mutated world gone mad. The Morlocks have spread out into the world and things are starting to get weird as Iguanodon

,Stegosaurus,  Allosaurus ,Megalosaurus , Apatosaurus  have spread to the Florida panhandle and the world has been terriformed into a jungle wasteland. There are deep connections to Rafael Chandler's 2016 supplement "The World of the Lost" but I can't get into them here because several of Glen's players read this blog. If you haven't picked up LoFP's World of the Lost I suggest you do, its a good solid campaign & toolbox plus its a good read packed with useful OSR stuff.


The Lost World remains a public domain resource that seems to seldom get mentioned in OSR circles which is too bad. The book would make an excellent excursion for Dark Albion as well with expeditions being mounted to Maple White Land for all kinds of natural resources. The book has the potential to be an exceptional old school campaign if a DM wants to put the time and effort into mapping it out.



You Can Download
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World For Free
HERE