The 3rd Day of Horror: Ghost Virus (Graham Masterton)

 

Ghost Virus by Graham Masterton

If you are unfamiliar with Graham Masterton then I would imagine you are not much of a horror buff, or perhaps someone who does not look upon the recent movement toward classic era horror fiction of the 70's and 80's that has led to restorative projects like Paperbacks from Hell, and loads of entertaining pastiches and homages to a distinct period of two decades' worth of gore-filled, often horrifying, sometimes ridiculous, fiction from a time when small paperback formats ruled supreme. If you want to know more about this I recommend finding a copy of Grady Hendrix's Paperbacks from Hell overview of the era, a fine read which gives you some firm footing on which to stand in exploring this very specific style of horror fiction. 

If you want to go real deep, just start by reading Graham Masterton! His prolific decades as what I like to think of as the Steven King of Europe (or would that be that King is the Masterton of America?) have led to some of the wildest, goriest and most bizarre stories in the genre. His early career kicked off with Manitou and then The Sphinx, and it just got better and better from there. I loved to read his books back int he 80's, and was pleasantly surprised to see that he is still up to no good even today. 

I actually grabbed the fourth book in the Patel & Pardoe series first (What Hides in the Cellar) and quickly caught on that this book had recurring characters from prior novels so I sought out the first in the line: Ghost Virus. The protagonists of the series are both detectives in London district, Jerry Pardoe who normally likes to run down pretty thieves, and the somewhat more enigmatic detective seargent Jamila Patel, who happens to be especially good at what she does due to a little gift she has in which she can divine whether a person is telling truth or not. A weird murder involving a local immigrant family draws the two together as subsequent murders, each with an inexplicable cause of death, begin to form an odd pattern. That pattern  grows over time as the detectives catch on that something very weird and supernatural is going on, and around midway through the book it goes off the rails. Then you get to the final act and realize you weren't even close to going off the rails until then. 

I really hesitate to say anything about it because the sheer audacity of the source of the supernatural killings is so nuts, but I have to say a little bit: I will put it this way: the source of the murders, and the gradual build toward an explanation (which is, similar to many other horror tales a somehow acceptable yet also ludicrous explanation) is so over the top that I can't readily imagine anyone ever being able to turn this into a movie and be taken seriously; it works so much better in print than it ever could on a medium like film, simply because Masterton himself can make you desperately nervous around your own coat, thanks to the power of word in imagination....a feat that a more visual medium would have a very hard time pulling off without aiming for farce or campiness.

Masterton is such a great writer that it is hard for me to put a book of his down once I start and I blew through this over a couple days. I am now looking forward to starting the next book in the series, and I am intrigued to see where Masterton takes his two hapless detectives next. Solid A!

SPOILER SECTION:

Okay! Don't read on here if you want to read the book first. The supernatural threat in this book is a nutty concept: a ghost virus, a sort of propagating infectious supernatural plague that infects clothes. The clothes become possessed by the ghost memories of those who died under duress and desperately want to live....and can do so by finding victims they can get to wear them. At first its a couple coats, but then it turns into pretty much the entirety of everyone's wardrobes by the end of the book. The book suffers a bit from its focus on the detectives, mixed with the in-between chapters focusing on the victims. The ramp up to madness as you get close to the end and the nature of the threat looms large is not unlike the pacing in the movie Weapons, actually. You have a slow burn tale of weird murder and investigation, which slowly escalates to what seems like a supernatural serial killer using a strange medium, and then it turns into a full on zombie apocalypse at the end....but with animated clothing instead of zombies. Deadly, murderous, poltergeist-like possessed clothing flying everywhere and murdering likely hundreds in their wake. It is so utterly preposterous that I just stopped questioning the logic and went with the flow. It was like Masterton was challenging himself by seeing how he could write himself out of the corner he had painted himself into. Lovely stuff.

And that, you see, if why I can't wait to see what the subsequent novels in this series bring to the table!

The 2nd Day of Horror: Weapons (2025)

Weapons (2025)

You may have seen this one recently, as it became a runaway hit at the box office over the last month or two, but if you haven't, and you happen to like really weird horror films (and don't mind more jarring tonal shifts at odd moments) then Zach Cregger's Weapons is well worth a watch. Julia Garner plays a teacher named Justine caught up in a month of insanity in a small town where one day all of the children in her class except for one fail to show up....and it turns out all of them disappeared willingly in the middle of the night, sneaking out of the house to run Naruto Style* through town to an unknown location. The relatively ill equipped local police find themselves at a total loss as to where the kids went, which proves especially amusing (and perplexing) later on in the movie.

I won't go into any spoilers here as the movie is out now and best watched without any idea of what to expect, but I will comment on its format: while we have some main characters to root for, the movie is really almost an ensemble piece, focusing on the impact of this event on the lives of several disparate characters, and the stories of these five-ish protagonists weave together to assemble the whole story. It's weakness is that most of the actual reveal on what the heck is really going on is end-loaded with the final character we are introduced to, and I can't say I 100% bought in to some of the necessary leaps of logic for the events to transpire as they did, but the ending was overall sufficiently weird and crazy that the pay off was worth overlooking a few "that doesn't feel terribly likely," moments.

This has been a pretty good year for horror movies, and while I found that I loved some other horror films that came out this year a lot more (Nosferatu and Ash both come to mind), Weapons is a solid addition to a generally great roster for the genre this year. B+! Would have made it an A if certain plot bits didn't keep nagging at the back of my mind. I mean...it works, don't get be wrong, but there's a couple spots where the logic feels forced.....you'll see what I mean.

As an aside, on the way out of the theater my buddy, my son and I were talking about the movie and i commented that it did well enough that I was sure they would do the sequelitis thing, and predicted that it would be a prequel about the villain, to explain the whole deal (origin story). Then if that does well a third film will come out focusing on the lone surivor kid when he grows up. They announced recently that yes indeed Creggers is going to do a prequel to Weapons next, so I am right on count one.....!

*A thing I know exists because my teen was into it before he was a teen. He and I still argue over whether its really a thing or even a smart way to run, of course. 

The 1st Day of Horror: The Mansion of Madness (1972)

The Mansion of Madness (1972) 

To kick off our first day of 31 Days of Horror, we have a Vinegar Syndrome Blu-ray restoration: The Mansion of Madness from 1972! Known as La Mansion De La Locura, directed by Mexican director Juan Lopez Moctzeuma, and based loosely on the Edgar Allen Poe tale "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether," this is less of a horror film and more of a sort of weird, 70's style surreal satire, the kind that could only have been produced in that era of film making. 

The story focuses on our protagonist, Gaston LeBlanc, a reporter for an inquiring newspaper sometime in the 19th century as he seeks to investigate the nature of a series of innovative treatments at a remote sanitarium run by the enigmatic Dr. Maillard. As Dr. Maillard takes him on a tour of the maddening facility it becomes apparent that the inmates are running the asylum, and Maillard is the maddest of them all, perhaps. Other characters are woven in, including the woman Eugenie, who is the daughter of the man who previously ran the sanitarium, as well as some hapless allies of LeBlanc who are unable to escape the clutches of the madmen.    

The movie has a number of elements typical of the more experimental (and often foreign) films of the late 60's and 1970s. The perspective of the mad, the nature of madness, the relationship of the insane to those who try to cure them. The further back you go, the more exotic and strange perceptions on psychiatric treatment tended to be, although this movie hardly tries to portend to such matters; the Dr. Maillard of the film is a doctor in name only, and his bizarre method of treatment for his patients is basically to let them do as they will, and to indulge in his own control fantasies in the process. 

One side effect of being a film of its time is that the orchestration for the movie is completely batty. For the time this movie came out one must be mindful that we were still a few years away from John Williams redefining film scores with Jaws and Star Wars, and I imagine that contemporary viewers of the day would be more in tune with the tonal incoherence of the film as dictated by the disjointed choice of music from scene to scene. Some of the music sets a disturbing and menacing mood; other pieces emphasize a unique early seventies take on "the sound of madness" which to today's viewer makes the pieces sound absurdist (and maybe they did then, too). I have to admit, I feel like someone could completely redo the music in this film and get a shockingly different feel out of it as a result. 

All things considered, this isn't a scary movie by any stretch, though it might be a bit disturbing or even just unsettling, though I think deliberately uncomfortable portrayals of madness have been outdone by subsequent films over the decades, making this one feel a bit quaint. At one point I sort of felt like, "This is what the crowd at a free love Ren fair in 1972 looked like if you got them to work as extras on a film set for a couple days," and that's probably not far off the mark.

Choice bits:

Apparently, the director was friends with and influenced by Alejandro Jodorowsky, which explains a bit. 

Ellen Sherman, who played Eugenie, was the only American actor in the film.

Check out the third act sequence as the Godiva-like woman on horseback is led through the vast chamber of glass coffins...would love to find out where this was filmed, as it is an excellent visual to steal for a future horror game!

The main protagonists of this film are almost amusingly incompetent in their fighting skills, though they do at some point rally a bit. The basic, almost mundane nature of physical conflict portrayed within the film is oddly refreshing in how "normal" it is, contrasted by the aberrant behavior on parade.

Who Should See This: I would suggest this film is best enjoyed by film viewers into studying that era of film-making from the 70's in particular, and I also think anyone into surrealism in films might enjoy it a bit. I wondered to myself if this was a film a very young David Lynch might have seen early in his budding film career, as certain moments felt like they might have been influential.

Available in restored 35mm from Vinegar Syndrome here. The restoration is actually quite striking, and gives the film an interesting vibrancy that makes it stand out. The greenery of the filmed outdoor locations are especially striking, and many of the set locations are fascinating and suitable locations for depicting the labyrinthine sanitarium.

All in all, a solid C, but with the caveat that this film is meant to be an interesting (albeit not at all contemporary) experience...and may not always feel entertaining so much as perplexing to younger film goers. 

31 Days of Horror in October!!!

 Credit where it's due: The Other Side Blog has this idea first! I did this ages ago but its been a while. Over the weekend at the Morgue & Krypt Horror Convention in my local neighborhood I got a chance to load up on weird old movies from the Vinegar Syndrome booth, something I've been obsessed with for the last couple years now. 

For my 31 days I'm going to do a mix....some horror films, some horror games and some horror books. A well rounded experience! Also a chance to talk about some of what I've been reading, watching and playing....and kick myself back into a better writing habit (I've fallen off the deep end on my writing consistency this year). 

Realms of Chirak the Setting and Pathfinder 2E

By popular demand my Wednesday group has returned to Pathfinder 2E, now Remastered, and everyone is having a good time. I gave some thought to what setting I would use...I had created the Oman'Hakat world for Pathfinder 2E when the system came out and ran a series of successful campaigns in that world, including one that ran to 20th level. I ran some shorter campaigns in PF2E using Keepers of Lingusia, and even the Enzada campaign, which was the world I designed for Pathfinder 1E when I switched over to that back in the day. I had not, however, used Realms of Chirak.....which I ran a huge number of campaigns for using D&D 3.0, 3.5, 4E and then Pathfinder 1E. I had kept my scenarios and campaigns in Chirak with D&D 5E, but a side effect of that was that I was generally less satisfied with running future games there because of my many issues with the 5th edition mechanics, which were now amplified by the even less satisfying new 2024 5.5 edition. So it was time to merge PF2E with Chirak!

This has led me to realize that I have a lot of work cut out for me, though maybe less in some ways than I might have thought, as specific ancestries in Chirak that do not have proper analogues in Pathfinder 2E will require more extensive write ups with the racial feats and such to provide proper support. Right now I am sort of running these scenarios ad hoc....reskinning appropriate NPC and monster stat blocks to get what I want, and finding the best analogue already in PF2E for players. Eventually I will work up the energy to develop actual ancestry paths for things such as the animates, cannesh, Masirians and so forth, and add in feats to support the gnome/goblin connection stuff like that. If you are unfamiliar with tis setting, I still have an old 4th edition take available out there on Drivethrurpg sites. I have an extensive 5th edition draft that I have run 5E games with for years, but never compiled into a print-worthy document. Now, maybe, I will find my writing spirit again and cough up something for Pathfinder 2E. Who knows! I'd love to feel that inspiration to write hit me again like it did back in the day, though I think it didn't so much leave me as life kind of crumpled it up and shoved it down deep into the couch cushions. It's hard to feel motivated to indulge in such fancies when the world is going to hell in a handbasket, you know?

Anyway, I am having fun with this return to Pathfinder, and likewise this return to Chirak. I rolled the timeline forward another 20 years so many of the plots and NPCs the PCs are meeting are now older than their last appearances, and many children of said NPCs are now adults. It will be interesting to watch this develop. Some venerable old PCs who have gone on to become important NPCs will weigh in, and I admit it is a shame I lost touch with some of my old gaming crew, would be fun to have them back again, but life has a way of carrying on....ah well!

As a side note, Friday's biweekly game has wrapped a scenario in Tales of the Valiant (we all enjoyed it, and found it slightly more satisfying than classic 5E, and much more satisfying than the new 2024 5E lite), but we are all eyeing the new Starfinder 2E hungrily now, especially since it is now 100% fully compatible with Pathfinder 2E mechanics....I have the Player Core, GM Core and Galaxy Guide now and I have to say, I like the approach they have taken over all --though I miss a lot of the older art style in the game; a lot of the newer art is just not as dynamic as it used to be from the old core books. The art is still good, though....just not as good as it used to be. Either way, this new edition handily embraces its space fantasy elements and fixes practically everything I had issues with in the prior edition, so I am looking forward to trying it out now.  

The Thing From Another World in Mothership

I don't think anyone has done this exactly, but I think it's time to do a series on adopting various famous monsters to the Mothership rules. Let's start with one of the greatest of all time: the Thing!

Love this Alt Poster!

The Thing's key traits:

An alien creature that is in fact a cell colony with the ability to absorb and replicated/replace the cells of any other creature, taking on their appearance, abilities and even their identity. 

The Thing's original appearance is difficult to discern, and it may have no consistent appearance (even the description of what it might have looked like, with three eyes, could just be the current form it was mimicking).

The Thing is intelligent, and presumably retains knowledge from prior assimilated victims. This includes the ability to craft and pilot something as sophisticated as a starship.

When absorbing a creature, it takes the Thing about 45 minutes to completely convert a human sized target into its own. 

The Thing exhibits a weakness to fire, though this could be better described as "it burns like anything else." But due to its malleable, ever-changing nature and ability to remember and mimic any life form it has previously absorbed, the Thing can sustain and recover from most damage with only modest initial impact. Fire and energy damage that can destroy it at the cellular level is most effective at destroying the Thing.

The Stats for a piece of the Thing depend heavily on what it is mimicking and/or what sort of amalgamation it forms in the moment. Several stat blocks will be provided to reflect different sized/focused forms of the Thing as a result. 

Special Qualities: The Thing has these traits in all forms:

Infectious. All Things have an infectious trait, and skin exposure to the Thing leads to assimilation when exposed. PCs who take any damage or come into any skin contact with some portion of the creature, even at the cellular level, must make a BODY[-] check or they are infected and have 45 minutes to assimilation into a Humanoid Thing.

Malleable and Resilient. The Thing takes damage from kinetic weaponry, but it rapidly heals, repairs and restores function. It regains 1 Wound and equivalent health every minute, and as a special feature may heal even sooner (per combat turn). It is unable to use this feature if it takes fire or energy damage for one minute, and is "dead" if it loses all wounds from such damage, with only a slight chance a portion of its mass survives.

Head Crab Thing: C: 25%, 1D10 DMG, I: 50%, AP 1D5-1, W1(10) - may have 1D5 additional appendage features (EX: 1-crab legs, 2-extendable tongue with a grasping feature, 3-eye stalks, 4-spits acid, 5-whip tail with poison barb)

Humanoid Thing: C 50%, 2D10 DMG, I: 60%, AP 1D5-1, W2(20) - may have 1D5 additional surprise features (EX: 1-claw arm, 2-head splits for attacking maw that does 4D10 DMG, 3-infecting tendrils, 4-chest maw (4D10 DMG), 5-exotic eyesight); Special: indistinguishable from the humanoid it mimics until exposed.

Monstrous Form Large Thing: C 75%, 4D10 DMG, I: 90%, AP 5+1D5, W3(30) - will have !D5 additional features (EX: 1-multiple limbs (1D4) for extra attacks, 2-infectious tentacles, 3-vomiting infectious attack, 4-wings (if local atmosphere and gravity support it), 5-spines (50% chance they shoot))

Exposing The Thing: In the film, it is revealed that the Thing's individual cells are engrained with a survival instinct, so jamming a hot wire into blood samples reveals what is real and what is imitation blood. Creative PCs may find other interesting ways to reveal imitations in their midst. For example, The Thing often has an exterior form that mimics the appearance of the human it just assimilated, but may have an internal morphology that hides appendages intended for attack or other special purposes. An x-ray may reveal these internal differences.

It is Settled (for now): Mothership and Tales of the Valiant

 So I have at last wrapped the D&D 5.5 campaign (we have loose plot threads, so who knows, maybe it will be revisited eventually) and Wednesday night formally begins with a Mothership ongoing campaign. I am plotting for around 5-10 sessions, but maybe we'll get more out of it; who knows! Mothership is a very fun game, but it is easier to do one shots and short campaigns with it than it is to do protracted campaigns....similar to Call of Cthulhu, the group can only sustain so much horror before it transitions from spooky fun to "wow how aren't we dead yet."*

I have had an infrequent Friday group as well, which my son was occasionally running Pathfinder for (and I ran Shadowdark for them before that). The group expanded to six players with last week's return to form, and I began running Tales of the Valiant at long last! It was a good session 0.5, with some char gen followed by a bit of gaming. I am introducing the variant concepts to them as we go (such as lineages and heritages, luck, doom, dread and so forth) bit by bit, in a completely new world setting I devised jut for TotV. I had initially planned to use preprinted modules but after reading through everything I had I decided most of them sucked for purposes of my GM style and what I wanted out of the game, and so I devised my own low level intro campaign module instead. I meticulously followed the encounter design rules outlined in the Gamemaster's Guide and have so far found them more satisfying than 5e/5.5E's traditionally more vibe-based guidelines.

Anyway, this mix seems to work for now! I have plans soon to try out Cairn 2E, Fabula Ultima, Outgunned, The Electric State** and possibly a return to Savage World's Pathfinder edition. We shall see.....but the important thing is, lots of options that require no further engagement with D&D 5.5.  

*Or, alternatively, "We have all lost multiple PCs, does anyone have a living PC who remembers why we landed on this haunted space station in the first place?"

**RPG and the original book only, we will not speak of the Netflix movie. 

Superman - A true revival of the Comic Film

 I saw Superman (2025) twice this weekend, and will likely see it a third time soon, and who knows, maybe a fourth. It's easily the best superhero/comic movie they have done in the last several years, and the interesting choices made by James Gunn to lean heavily into the comic book reality of the movie has, I feel, paid off in spades. This feels like an actual comic book movie, they could have easily called it "Action Comics Issue #1024" and that would have been perfectly okay. It's an optimistic, uplifting film filled with crass villainy that gets soundly defeated, and it does not shy away from providing allegorical content that one can readily read in to. It's the opposite of most Marvel films, in other words.

Gunn's prior comic book outings are starting to reflect a sort of form and style that is consistent, which I suppose is good, as it means you know what you are getting with him, but it does mean you might watch this movie with a recognition of his particular style in the craft. For example, it is now clear to me that every movie Gunn makes has to have that moment in it where someone, usually with a small but incredibly dangerous object, proceeds with what can only be described as a madcap moment of violence that plays out in the background as a sort of montage or collage, often entirely in one take. We've seen it repeatedly in Guardians of the Gaaxy (standing out with Yondu's arrow sequence in the second GotG film), Harly Quinn's hallucinatory rampage in The Suicide Squad, and now Mr. Terrific and his T-Balls vs. Lex Luthor's army of raptors and mad scientists in Hawaiian shirts.

If you've heard about the movie being "woke" then be assured it is, but that is not to the detriment of the film. The "wokeness" of this film is just optimism, human decency, and a desire to see the old, better America stand out...the one that used to care about being decent and good, instead of cruel and spiteful. Salon's review describes this better than I ever could. 

I will say, if you feel (like I have) that the golden age of Superman films was with Christopher Reeves in Superman from 1978 and Superman II, then I think you are likely going to find this film to be a worthy successor. The worst thing I can say about it is that it starts rather jarringly in what feels like the middle of the third act of a normal film, but this only ultimately lends further to the unique take of the film, and I enjoyed it even more on a second watch. A+++! My favorite film so far this year, maybe even this decade.

Reinvigorated! Or maybe Reanimated?

 Well I am feeling less burnout this week! But also sometimes more burnout. I did a deep dive into various systems and found that I was definitely starting to sense a pattern in my interests. Here's what I realize now; noting that this isn't a unchanging constant; just what my tastes seem to be running to in the moment:

Verisimilitude Over Abstraction: I prefer somewhat more simulationist systems, which favor verisimilitude over "rule of cool" as a natural recourse. I liken this to the difference between a movie where our hero drops 10-15 feet and seems to take injury or has trouble getting up from such a fall, vs. other movies (Marvel films come to mind) where same hero seems able to drop 30-50 feet and is unphased, even without having super soldier serum to explain his massive invulnerability.

This means systems like BRP, GURPS, Mothership, Call of Cthulhu, Traveller, Cyberpunk Red and Dragonbane are standing out to me because they provide meaningful engagement levels with some sort of baseline "reality" but some other systems....even ones I like....aren't feeling too good to me at the moment because I am not presently "vibing" with the idea that the abstractions on the character sheet and in the system are really just numbers and have more to do with "did this look cool?" than anything else. That rules our D&D 5.5, Cypher System, Fantasy AGE, Tales of the Valiant, and no doubt others.

Pragmatic Character Info: I'm preferring systems which communicate clearly what you rcharacter is about, without a lot of rule-flipping and holistic interpretation. Pathfinder 2E is not a good example of this; it is laden with weird feats, obscure conditionals, and a balanced mechanical process which means skill sets are very "meh" in figuring out how your character looks different from another similar character. Contrast with BRP, which narrows the character generation to a set of common baselines defined by genre expectations for powers (if used), but in general you can look at a character sheet and understand what it means to run that PC without having to crack the book open constantly. 

The System Respects Theater of the Mind: lots of games these days lean in to the popular desire for maps and minis, and I get it; those can be fun (I suppose). But I have run RPGs for most of my life without such gimmicks, and the sorts of stories I want to convey through gaming these days (and most days) work better when the players aren't focused on the ancient wargame element that remains embedded in conventional takes such as D&D. Admittedly GURPS, as an example, supports elaborate hex-based movement and suggests this can be useful; I have played in GURPS games where the GM used this to effect, and I get it. But I have also run (and played) in countless GURPS games where it was all theater of the mind, and the experience was always more creative and superior. So systems which either implicitly or explicitly support TotM play are preferred.

No Authorial Overtones: I won't single anyone out, but if the system has a heavy authorial overtone which tries to tell you how to play, either explicitly or implicitly, that can be a real turnoff. The author does not trust you to play the game the right way for you, the end-user, and that is just not cool. I can be in 100% agreement with the game writer's viewpoint and this will still piss me off because it is an attempt by the author to control the narrative on the end user experience.* 

There are quite a few RPGs on the market today that like to talk about how their source of inspiration was, shall we say, a racist person in his time, and then denigrate his works, even as they then proceed to write an entire system around said works, implying there was still merit to the man's creations, enough for them to exploit for money. Hypocrisy! It makes it very hard to take such works seriously. Either you acknowledge that you are, indeed, inspired by the creative works of said author which means you feel his imaginative developments have merit and inspiration beyond the unpleasant bits you did not like (okay, yeah, I'm talking about Lovecraft here) and will expand upon his vision despite your dislike of his century-old racist attitude, or you maybe should decide that its ethically better for you to go write a different game and leave well enough alone. I'm looking at you, Age of Cthulhu and Arkham Horror. 

Sometimes it feels like these games were written by authors fearful that their audience would get mad at them for not appearing cognizant of these perceived injustices or social issues. The best head-scratching example I can provide is in Liminal Horror, which has a paragraph about how its not cool to play cops, authority figures or people with wealth or means. This, of course, is actual nonsense; part of the point of RPGs is the ability to explore roles beyond most people's grasps....and horror as a medium is excellent at skewering all sorts of professionals and the wealthy with equal aplomb; its not merely the purview of the poor and downtrodden to be murdered by eldritch cults. But if you were writing this game a few years ago when there was a strong push on social media to "strike back at the man" or you are a younger author (spiritually or physically) enmeshed in antiauthoritarian counter cultural values, then this might feel like a sensible paragraph to put in, no matter how utterly stupid and counterfactual to the actual genre of horror it is. 

Important: despite this minor rant, I really like Liminal Horror as a mini-system; it occupies a unique concept space and I look forward to the Kickstarter backed future edition coming out soon. Also, I find that entire rant ironic given that the best module produced for Liminal Horror so far, the Bureau, is entirely about a fictional authority organization inspired by the Bureau of Control from the eponymous video game. So one of the system's first modules directly contradicts this angry little countercultural paragraph that demonstrates a woeful lack of imagination and genre understanding right off the bat. 

Okay, rant off! Tonight I plan to close out the D&D 5.5 game, and am proposing we tackle Dragonbane or Mothership next (because that's what I packed for).

*Note that I am not talking about games which have advice on "know your audience," sections, or talk about the use of the X card. Those are just practical advice (don't run a game for 9 year olds with Kult, m'kay? or if you are running for a diverse crowd of Gen Z players, an X card may be quite revealing if you are not good at reading a crowd as a GM). Admittedly, if a game tells me to "remove the spiders if a player is offended" my internal advice is: don't run a game with spiders for someone who is scared of imaginary spiders, you know? Maybe find different players?

True Burnout

 In recent weeks I think I hit an almost unassailable wall. I have bailed on a Saturday game night (admittedly, family stuff dragging me away from it as well), but also because I was running out of steam as GM. I have bailed from as much else as possible. I am still running Wednesday night, but even there I am finding the old spark for D&D is gone. I am not even sure its purely a "5.5 is kinda meh" problem although that doesn't help. I need to get this campaign to an end so I can look hard at what to do next, and see what happens. 

I've been fighting with periodic burnout for years, but this time around feels different.....a first for me to make active efforts to dodge out of GMing, something I have historically always enjoyed, but with this recent shift escaping from that responsibility is now now proving so enticing. I have bought some new RPGs of late, stuff I should be very excited about (Daggerheart, Cypher System Neon Noir, Batman Chronicles RPG and more) but I just can't find the motivation or interest to engage with any of it. I am finding most of my free time is subsuming into reading, both regular books and catching up on my comic and graphic novel collections. I'm just.....dang, I hate to say it....worn out on RPGs and gaming at the moment. It's weird. But maybe not so unexpected; I've run an average of two games a week now for most of this century, what did I expect?

Being a player doesn't even help! It's fun for a bit, but never really been the side of gaming I enjoy all that much. It does keep me involved in the friend circle, I suppose, but my sense of dedication as a player is paper thin; I find reading, playing a video game or watching a movie to be immensely more satisfying. 

I'm hoping this is just a phase, and some time off will rest me up for a more productive GM future. But I also worry its a side effect of age, and maybe a general component of just slowing down a bit, with my interests and desires shifting focus. Deep down I am one of those introverts, and know that without effort it is very, very easy for me to sink into an isolation quagmire and that is not ultimately terribly healthy. I must ponder.....I am sure I am not the only one who has experienced this.

EDIT: I may not be giving D&D 5.5 enough credit for how much it impacts my desire to game. I just read Alexandrian's hot-take on Calibating Expectations with 5E and it really resonates with me as a clear enunciation of all the core conceits of this edition that just make it so much less fun for me.