About cosmic horror, of course.

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On cosmic horror, as (he argues in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race) we all live it, all the time.

For ages they had been without heads. Headless they lived, and headless they died. How long they had thus flourished none of them knew. Then something began to change. It happened over unremembered ( Read more... )

 Back to musing at the Something Wicked blog!

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One of the perennial challenges with horror is making sure that all the participants agree on what is they’re doing. That’s true in all gaming, of course, but when you’re shooting for a particular kind of mood, agreement matters extra.

The usual assumption in gaming storyline is that there’s ( Read more... )

 Today is a day of gaming happiness: HeroQuest characters made and play begun on Return to Apple Lane, and my players were in excellent form. Lots of fun all around.

 Lon pointed me at this great intro to ten abandoned cities, old and new, around the world. Most of them were familiar to me of course, but some were new, and it's certainly good Something Wicked fodder.

Today I got together with four friends via Skype and did clan creation as described in Sartar, Kingdom of Heroes. It was a blast! Took us two hours and change, and we came out with marvelous results; I'll post the clan character sheet once I produce a tidy version. Just tremendously enjoyable to work through the mythic and historical background of ( Read more... )

More film-triggered pondering, over at Moon Design:

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This is a tale of two movies that try to do fairly similar things, one of which succeeds. Dagon is a 2001 film directed by Stuart Gordon, Blood Creek a 2009 film directed by Joel Schumacher. Now, neither of those is a name to inspire a lot of confidence-Gordon tends to do schlocky stuff ( Read more... )

 I ponder ways of representing aspects of NPC character, over at Moon Design:

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Note: From time to time, I’ll put up a post about something not yet settled in our minds, very much open to discussion, and about which readers may well have suggestions. Anything with a subject line that begins with “Questions:” is one of these posts. I may not ( Read more... )

 I rhapsodize about getting to invent settings from scratch, at Moon Design:

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There’s this about my writing career to date: I’ve always worked in worlds whose foundations were laid down by others, starting with Nexus the Infinite City, and moving on to the Secret War in Feng Shui, and then to the World of Darkness, and this and that. The few ( Read more... )

 Me on design and play emphases, over at Moon Design:

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I should note up front that I’m only speaking on my own behalf and not for Ben, unless I explicitly say otherwise. We get along, but we don’t always think identically, and he’s got his own words. So if anything I write strikes you as horribly awful, you can still have hope for the other ( Read more... )

 This is something I couldn't post to the Something Wicked blog, not wanting to make complications for the nice guys at Moon Design. But...

We horror junkies are prone to talking about Thomas Ligotti. If you are not familiar with Ligotti, and most people aren't, here's a chance to become familiar with his work thanks to the magic of IP violations ( Read more... )