Jouer aux Bouquinistes

Voici une autre nouvelle apprise sur la page Facebook des Bouquinistes: ils vont organiser une soirée jeux de rôles intitulée "Mousquetaire de l'ombre" lundi le 16 novembre à partir de 17h30. Tout le monde est bienvenue, même les novices, selon ce que je sais, c'est pour 18 ans et plus et pour quatre à cinq joueurs. Vous trouverez les détails sur leur page Facebook. Jouer un JDR dans une librairie, c'est pas mal idyllique.

Pr. Henry Armitage (Hero Against the Forces of Darkness)

For today's countdown to Halloween post, I am blogging again about H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos. Lovecraft peopled his universe of many, many evil entities and nasty critters, as well as barking madmen, but he also sometimes gave us a few heroes who actually fought the forces of darkness. One of them is Professor Henry Armitage, from Miskatonic University, Arkham. Both university and city are fictitious of course. The portrait you see here is from the fifth edition of the role-playing game Call of Cthulhu. Pr. Armitage is featured in The Dunwich Horror and he is a Van Helsing figure, an academic who figures out the presence of the supernatural and knows how to fight it. He is far more bland than Van Helsing (Lovecraft wasn't the best giving much character to his good guys), but he deserves a mention in this blog. Horror has plenty of villains, we must remember that the genre also has heroes.

Cthulhu by Gaslight

 For today's countdown to Halloween post, a bit more of H.P. Lovecraft and a bit of the role-playing game Call of Cthulhu, inspired as you probably know by his writing. I spent a few afternoons and evenings of my teenage and young adulthood playing it, at times I enjoyed it even more than D&Dr. There were three time period you could play it in: the 1920s, so Lovecraft’s own time, the contemporary time period, to play in modern time, and the 19th century, which was called and is still called Cthulhu by Gaslight. It could give the game a more Gothic, old fashioned horror feel. Sadly, I never took the time to develop a campaign set in the Victorian era. I think it would be really fitting for Halloween. Are there anyone among you who played CofC in this specific module? Or indeed any other. Let me know in the comments.

Dagon (H.P. Lovecraft)

I have a lot to blog about this month, so you may forgive me to write another post for the countdown to Halloween. I would like to give a reading suggestion for your spooky nights, as well as sharing a memory with you. You know I love reading H.P. Lovecraft, I always include some of his stories in my Halloween reads. I started reading him to get myself inspiration for the role-playing game Call of Cthulhu. I blogged in 2022 about the first story I read of him. The second story I read of him was Dagon, on Halloween night 1993. Right before bed, in fact. It's still one of my favourite. It's about a mariner in World War 1, escaping capture from the Germans on a lifeboat, who finds a strange island and a monolith, and witnesses a sea creature getting out of the water and hugging the monolith. The apparition terrifies the mariner, who goes back to his boat and turns mad. I don't want to give more away, but the ending is just so perfect. You can read it here. I suggest you do it during daytime perhaps, because you might not sleep so well afterwards.

"Beyond the Grave"

Today I'm blogging about An Evening of Murder again. As you may remember, it's a murder party series which was quite popular back in the late eighties/early nineties. We played Beyond the Grave on my brother PJ's birthday. To this day, it's one of my favourite. In it, you try to solve the murder of Lorraine Lockwood, who died five years ago of cyanide poisoning. Her daughter has convinced family and friends to come to a séance in order to solve the mystery of Lorraine's death. The last post on the Facebook page of the game series, exactly two years ago, they were advertising Beyond the Grave as a Halloween game. I think it's fitting, given the subject matter. my brother's birthday was in October, so the connection has always been all the more obvious to me.

The Autumn D&Dr Special Day

First, a disclaimer: this image is the front cover of a fantasy novel I absolutely loathe. That said, the artist Larry Elmore gives really nice atmospheric pics, if nothing else. And it suits this post. Today is a special day for Wolfie and me: a few weeks ago, he told me he wanted a special father and son day, in early autumn, where we would go to a café, eat and drink autumnal stuff, then play Dungeons & Dragons and Minecraft. I'm not sure how he came up with this idea, but it's a day to celebrate the new season doing our favourite seasonal activities. As meteorological autumn has started, we decided that today would be the day. If it's a success, it might become a family tradition.

H.P. Lovecraft and Cosmic Horror

Today is an important date in my countdown to Halloween. Because yes, it has started. It's a benchmark, because it is the birthday of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. I discovered him thanks to the role-playing game Call of Cthulhu, inspired by his writing. I used to play it a lot, and read Lovecraft so I could draw inspiration for the campaign I was doing. You can read about my first reading experience of Lovecraft in this post. Today, I will try to make time to revisit some of his stories and maybe discover new ones. And you, do you know Lovecraft? Have you played Call of Cthulhu?

Dungeons & Dragons (about an anniversary)

I try to mark the time every year, even though I don't know the exact date. But anyway: my brothers and I, as well as some friends who were playing with us at the time, started our Dungeons & Dragons campaign back in August 1992. The world we had invented wasn't as developed as it became, but he already had potential. Now decades later, my brothers and I don't play together anymore, however I have started a new campaign in the same world with Wolfie. So the world lives on and helps develop someone else's imagination.

Herbert West, Reanimator

What you see here is a portrait of Dr. Herbert West taken from the RPG game Call of Cthulhu. Horror fans will know him as the villainous protagonist from H.P. Lovecraft's aptly titled Herbert West-Reanimator. The not so good doctor is a disciple if Frankenstein and he reanimates dead bodies. Except he is far more ruthless and cynical about it. Frankly, he is utterly amoral and has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. The short story is not very well written, Lovecraft considered it an old shame, yet it's very entertaining and genuinely scary. I am blogging about it today because they are filming a new adaptation. I'm carefully optimistic. They made a Re-Animator back in 1985, which was followed by sequels, but the film was very loosely adapted from the source material and turned into a gory horror comedy. Still fun to watch, but I think, I hope, that the new adaptation will be suitably dark. Anyway, I am in my countdown to the countdown to Halloween, so always nice to keep myself in a spooky mood and look forward to new horror movies.

An Evening of Murder (pulp style)

 I am blogging again about An Evening of Murder, the murder party series which I really enjoyed when I was younger. This is the back cover from Beyond the Grave, the second box we played, but the very first game of the series. I will share its front cover another time, this post is not about the specific plot, but about the art on the back cover. I always loved its aesthetic, but it is misleading. The games are all whodunits, yet this image calls back to pulp fiction and hardboiled stories, with private eyes, gangsters and femmes fatales. I love it to bits all the same, but it is misleading. Anyway, my two cents.

D&Dr: Downtime

 This picture is (as far as I know) of Dave Dorman, taken from the Dungeon Master's Guide of the second edition of laying Dungeons & Dragons. I always loved it. Anyway, comes a time in a D&Dr campaign when you don't play much. You have been running it for a while, had a few big adventures, the characters have progressed, got stronger, more powerful, and you feel like you are out of ideas. It often happens round this time of year, from my experience anyway. It is therefore time for downtime, and brainstorm your player(s) for inspiration. Any story suggestions from my readers are of course welcome.

About An Evening of Murder

 

You may remember that last month I blogged about the murder party series An Evening of Murder, more specifically Forever Friends, their second entry. My father had sent me pictures of the box sets we kept. Forever Friends was the very first set we bought and the game was in its very early years then. See the back of the box: it looks very cheap, unlike its front cover it is not really immersive, the accent is put on party, not murder, and I think I spotted a typo in the text. It got better, but this is for another post. I also discovered that the games have a Facebook page and a Twitter account. Still called Twitter on their website, so things are not up to date. All the same, I will spend some time there just to get a healthy dose of nostalgia.

An Evening of Murder

A long, long time ago, I blogged about a murder party series we used to love, called An Evening of Murder. Back in the eighties and nineties, it was all the rage among adults, teenagers and, well, sometimes also "old" children. The first we ever played was Forever Friends, localised into (Qébec) French as Éternellement Vôtre, or Eternally Yours. A better title, IMO. I mention localisation, as the character names and the places were all adapted to québécois culture, but for simplicity I will refer to the original English. The setting was a hotel called "the Old Lodge", where a group of college friends reunited, to find one of them murdered. I got hooked. Everybody had something to hide, was guilty of something. A cassette gave you the sounds of the murder, pretty gruesome stuff, introduced by Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor and a rather dark and sinister voice. You could also find in the box set invitation letters, characters sheets, also a booklet with suggestions of disguise, of décor, even a menu for the evening. Sure, the resolution owe nothing to anyone's deductive powers, but oh the atmosphere! And the role play! The fun we had. I will always treasure it.

Medieval Fantasy Read

Anybody among you ever read The Innocent Mage? Or anything by Karen Miller? Anyone? I'm asking the question because I bought it in a thrift sale for Wolfie a few weeks ago, for a quid. I thought at this price, it could not be a bad investment. I don't think he will read it any time soon, at least not by himself, but we do enjoy reading bigger books together, albeit we haven't done it in a while. Maybe it's too grownup for him for now, in which case I might read it by myself. There is another reason for my purchase: I thought I might use it for inspiration for our Dungeons & Dragons game. Wolfie's character is a mage, so it seems like a fitting source.

Lovecraft

Today is an important date in my personal countdown to Halloween calendar: it is the birthday of Howard Phillips Lovecraft. The father of modern and of cosmic horror. I first discovered him via the role playing game Call of Cthulhu, based on his work. I will try to read him today and in the upcoming weeks, it's one of my reading rituals in the months leading to Halloween.

D&Dr Planning

 As Wolfie is on a two weeks and a half holiday and I have plenty of free time, I can spend some quality time with him. I want him to have fun, however I don't want him to spend too much time just playing video games. So we will spend a few afternoonsplaying Dungeons & Dragons in the next few weeks. The next game should be fairly easy to be prepared; Wolfie actually gave me a special request. He wants his player characterto go on a quest in a tower, with villains "a bit like the Pillagers in Minecraft." All right, not exactly the Arthurian legend, but I'd rather him gets inspiration from a videogame for a RPG than the other way round. And I already have some ideas on how to integrate this special request (order?) into the game. So I have some planning to do.

D&Dr for November

November means a lot of things to me: autumn turning into winter, Noirvember (thus crime fiction), but it also means medieval fantasy. And also playing Dungeons & Dragons. Back when Iwas a teenager, November might have been our busiest month, because none of our friends were on holiday and we had little family obligations during weekends, not to mention that the weather was often auspicious to it. So we spent most of our afternoons and some of our evenings playing D&Dr. This is a pleasure that I am rediscovering, as Wolfie has started playing too this year. So for the first time in decades, I am playing D&Dr in November.

Horror on the Orient Express

Decades ago, I used to be a game master for  Call of Cthulhu,the role playing game based on the work of H.P. Lovecraft. Sadly never round Halloween time. It's a shame: it would have been perfect for the season, one more way to enjoy its spooky aspects. I always try to put a bit of Lovecraft flavouring on my Halloween. Anyway, there is one module I have always wanted to try: Horror on the Orient Express. I love trains any time of year and it's no different round Halloween. I blogged very often (and recently) how much they suit the horror genre, having modernity and technology clash with the supernatural. A classic train like the Orient Express is just the perfect horror setting, with the comfort and the cosy atmosphere disturbed by paranormal dangers. Apparently, it's an excellent game, although a highly risky one for the characters. But then again, I would expect no less. Anyway, I hope I can get my hands on it one day and find a few players. For those who enjoyed it, please leave a comment.

Cosmic Horror Day

 Today is the birthday of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.Not a very pleasant man as a person, but the father of cosmic horror and maybe the father of modern horror, period. His work was also the primary source of inspiration for the role-playing game Call of Cthulhu, which I always loved to play this time of year, for the kick of it, but also to get myself into a Halloween mood during summertime. It is part of the countdown before the countdown, so to speak. I would love to play a game now, just for fun. I am in a spooky mood.

Dungeons & Dragons, Father & Son

To start this post, I will repeat what I often say about being the father of a little boy: it allows me to live a second childhood. It also extends some family traditions. So I am not sure exactly why, but Wolfie suddenly got into medieval fantasy and he told me he wanted to play Dungeons & Dragons. So I bought some dice, dug up some old 2e edition books online as well as the data my brothers put on the clouds, and I started playing with him. Granted, it is a simplified game and we spend at least as much time walking around than sitting at the table throwing dices, but all the same. He plays a young wizard who spent the first few years of his life on an island and is going on the mainland now, with an adventuring party. It is great fun, it takes him off the screen and, to top it off, it allows the whole world created by my brothers and I to take a second life. All these kingdoms, characters, stories, now Wolfie is familiarising himself with it. So yes, let's just say I'm a proud dad.