"Love Song" - Part 2

"My hands pulled out a rotted net of wet, decayed fabric, blackened by dead leaves and mud, but still displaying its almost obliterated pattern; a pattern that was all too familiar.

I shook it free from my hands and stared back into the cleft: curving up against the humus and bark were three graceful arcs, rising through the clustered stems of pale orchids; sinking back into the ooze were long clean sticks, articulated into a line and now a highway for busy white termites; staring out from the fallen and scattered leaves, disturbed by the press of my face, were two black square holes, framed by tendrils of rain-drenched hair...

The air was heavy with the eucalyptus reek of fallen leaves, cut through with the smell of gardenias...

"Love Song" - Part 1

"I went back to the register and grabbed my coat. Pulling my keys from my pocket, I moved to the front entrance of the shop and flipped the sign from “Open” to “Closed”. I turned the key in the lock and then stared through the glass: outside in the rain, she stood on the pavement, in her summer dress completely careless of the deluge falling over her. Her long dark hair was plastered to her face and neck and I could see the blue lines of veins in her arms, through the paleness of her skin. She wore no shoes. As I stared at her, she looked back at me with an intensity that was startling: the fingers of her hands were spread, as if readied for action, rivulets of water running from the nails.

Impulsively, I turned the key in the lock once more, taking my eyes from her for only a second. When the door blew open, the bell above tinkling mellowly in the sudden rush of rain, she was gone, as if she’d never been..."

Rip It & Run! Monster of the Week

This week we look at the mainstay of sci-fi and fantasy-based TV shows, a device that can be utilised to make your gaming work, especially if you and your team are pressed for time.

As gamers age, they get fewer and fewer opportunities to indulge in their hobby. Real Life has a way of taking up all of that free time you used to have in your teens and twenties. Work impinges; offspring become demanding; families intrude. On top of this, general decrepitude starts to set in and that means that you can’t stay up all night the way you used to do, living solely on a diet of fizzy drink and pizza. It boils down to commitment, and at this time of life, gaming has a priority ranking somewhere slightly above gouging your eyes out with a spoon.

Other things replace the gatherings that were so much fun in your youth: crappy TV shows; online gaming; PC-games. The only person who needs to be motivated for these events is yourself; no-one needs to hunt down a baby-sitter or re-schedule their workout session. From my experience, if gaming is automatically coming at you from your too-hard basket, then don’t say “sure! I’ll play” if you get the invitation. You’re automatically wasting more people’s time than your own.

Time is an issue for busy people, but there’s a way to work around it. Most remarkably, it’s been there in front of you all along, on all of those television shows which you’ve been watching on TiVo while chugging your dinner before heading to the gym. What you need is a Monster of the Week (MOTW) game.

The basic premise is that each session that you get together – be it fortnightly, monthly, whatever – a case is presented, explored and solved by lights out. There are some basics that are fundamental to getting this right:

Character Establishment: each and every player needs to know what they’re doing and why they’re there. The party should have well-defined strengths and weaknesses: someone good at fighting; someone good at research; someone good with social skills. If this sounds like the “A-Team” then that’s perfect – you’ve got it. Without this the thing falls quickly to pieces. This doesn’t mean that characters can’t grow and develop over time, branching out into other areas of expertise, but everyone needs a firm starting point.

Time Management: Whatever time frame in which your sessions take place, your games need to fill that space exactly. This can take awhile to gauge: Keepers always think that they have to be parsimonious with clues and information – that’s crap. The players are there to wander through your plot; not be foiled from entering. It’s the difference between having an open-door policy and posting a bouncer. Hand out the clues like corn-chips; players love to know that they’re on the right track. Also, your Keeper needs to be aware of how much story can be accomplished in say, three-hour’s play. This is a learning curve too, but then many TV shows have 2-part episodes during their kickoff, so don’t feel badly about it.

“Less is More”: Always be aware that roleplaying will fill out the space provided for it. The more you add in, the more will happen. If you keep it simple, you’ll generally run to time.

So much for the essentials; now what do you do with it? Here, I’m going to be speaking to Call of Cthulhu players predominantly, but other Horror RPGs and even other types of games can benefit from these observations too.

Most horror-based TV shows follow a basic premise – one episode, one monster. This is what you should start with. It’s a tried-and-true format that, admittedly, has its limitations; but these can be mollified somewhat. The kickstarter for this style of action was “Nightstalker”:

Poor Karl Kolchak could never catch a break: always working against stuffy officials, jealous co-workers and an angry boss, and never trusted, no matter how many times (all of them) that he actually got the story straight. The show was a sleeper, because it broke new territory in a time when people wanted re-runs of “Bewitched”, or “My Favourite Martian”, or the burgeoning abomination of the family sitcom: “Good Times”, or “Happy Days”. On a practical note, engineering a different monster each week in terms of (not so) special effects, costumes and actors, took its toll. In the long term, the format wasn’t self-sustaining: credibility (although admirably maintained by the writers) eventually fell to the wayside. Something else was needed. As a more recent example, “Brimstone”, was an excellent show that leant too hard upon the MOTW format and quickly lost its ability to surprise (despite a host of excellent features going for it).

Chris Carter took the MOTW format and kicked it up a notch with the “X-Files”. Here too was the MOTW, but Carter added over-arching storylines to weave through the weekly dose of spookiness and pique the interest of fans. In the long haul, it just became too complex to follow, and the so-called “mythology” episodes were soon the ones that people remembered  - for the most part - least fondly. “Twin Peaks” had the same problem, and worse, the directors and producers deliberately wanted it to be that way.

Along comes “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and the excellent writing of Joss Whedon created a new take on the MOTW to pull in the fans. In this iteration, each successive season of the show had its own story arc including a top villain, or Boss, to use a computer gaming reference. In this fashion, the focus of the viewers became narrowed: previous season issues were wholly character-based and the current nemesis drove the action, with the occasional freaky weirdo popping in for a bit of variety. Each episode brought the heroes another step closer to that season’s nemesis, with a grand conclusion in the final offering.

Currently, top dog in horror TV-show stakes (ahem) is “Supernatural”. It takes all of the lessons learned by its forebears and rolls them into a post-modern take on the entire genre. There’s enough Whedon-esque humour, ongoing conspiracies, and down-and-dirty heroes to catch everyone’s attention, along with a hefty dose of self-reference and in-jokes. Essentially though, it’s still a MOTW program. And it’s not perfect:

So much for history: how does this help time-poor gamers? It’s all about structure.

Obviously, in gaming there’re no such things as "seasons", although we can pretty well define an individual session as an “episode”. Each episode needs to be one of four types of events:

A Scübidüberism;

A High-level Action-fest with Low-level Servitors;

A Random Horror; or

A Mythos Event.

Let’s take these one by one:

Scübidüberisms, as you might infer, are incidents that look as though there’s a supernatural element operating, however it turns out that it’s a front for some other (usually illegal) activity. Bootleggers imitating the Jersey Devil to smuggle hooch past an otherwise-occupied police force; sneaky kids haunting a decrepit local house to keep nosey-parkers away from their hydroponic weed crop; a ruthless developer causing “accidents” at an old theatre in imitation of a legendary ghost to keep patrons away, thereby forcing a sale: you know the drill. These kinds of stories are great for developing a team’s ghost-hunting skills and providing them with some credibility; later on when some NPC rings up out of the blue to ask for help with their little ghost problem, it will seem completely natural and un-forced.

Obviously though, it’s not always going to be a case of some cranky old dude getting away with it but for those pesky... um, ghostbusters? Sometimes it will be actual mayhem connected to Mythos entities enacted by their low-level minions. Face it: every organisation has logistical requirements and the fulfilling of these is usually left in the hands of grunts; facing these grunts is where the players will get their first taste of the greater Evil that’s hiding in the shadows.

...And then sometimes, a vampire will leap out of the woodwork. Every series needs some genuine monsters to spice things up: Keepers should pin down the rules concerning these guys and stick with them (“True Blood” vampires react negatively to silver, for example), but they should also mix things up a little so that the players have to work things out. Is the vamp the late-working head of the local blood bank? Is the werewolf a park ranger with a hard line in keeping wolves out of rancher’s lands? Adding layers to the onion is the way to hide the true nature of what’s at the heart of the mystery, but remember – less is more.

Finally, there’re those moments that all of those cultists you’ve been butting heads with have been working towards, when something horrific gets summoned in from some extra-dimension and the world goes pear-shaped. These should always be “season finale” episodes, cliff-hangers where it’s all or nothing and some characters may (*gasp!*) die. Clues as to what is being planned should have been strewn like breadcrumbs throughout the previous sessions, but this is where it all comes together – do or die.

The end result of all this planning is that characters have some time to grow and develop, and their players get a good grasp on how to use them; NPCs are generated that can be dragged-in to support later tales and story arcs; and – unlike a lot of CoC games – no-one’s a gibbering wreck in fifteen minutes flat. That ol’ longevity problem that keeps people from really enjoying Call of Cthulhu is solved from the word “go”.

So, if you’re time-pressured but still keen, give the MOTW style of playing a shot. It’ll certainly be cheaper than shelling out for the next season of “Supernatural”!

The Mountain

"‘You know they worship it, the Mountain,’ said Marcel one evening. Anton had been woken up that morning by a monstrous Coconut Crab that had invaded his tent, its central body mass larger than a football, its limbs monstrously long; Marcel’s wife had corralled it with a cast-iron frypan and Marcel had cooked it for dinner that night.

‘Really?’ Anton responded. The night was warm with a wind rising and he was feeling cosy and well-fed; he was wondering whether to try walking back to his sleeping bag, or if he could just crash there, stretched out on one of Marcel’s tables.

‘Bien sur,’ said Marcel, ‘to them it is a god; they are its people. Great Yasur, it owns them, and they live at its pleasure.’ He topped up Anton’s cognac. Anton wondered at the veracity of Marcel’s statement, but then the chef had married one of the local women, lived among these people; perhaps it was true. Marcel’s wife didn’t speak much, content to scowl at them from the kitchen where she washed the pots and pans. Her tinny cassette player warbled out from behind the louvered glassless windows, some American tune that he dimly recalled from decades ago...

Later that night in his tent, the Mountain rumbled and seethed and strode mightily through his dreams..."

Rip it & Run! The Stoker Gambit

This is the first of a new range of articles that I’ve been thinking about. The concept derives from the notion that, in most long-running TV shows, there are plot features and story arcs that are pulled into service to keep the show simmering, not allowing it to boil dry of ideas or explode into some kind of meltdown. These are called ‘tropes’ and, believe it or not, if you’ve been a fan of any TV show since the ‘70s, you’re aware of at least some of them.

The most obvious one is the “Christmas Episode”: these are always cheesy and annoying, especially if they show up on your viewing schedule when it’s obviously not Christmas. Another favourite often used to pad out a series when the number of episodes falls short of what the stations demand, is the “Clip Show”, those episodes when the main characters sit around and reminisce about old events by means of repeated flashbacks. These are even more annoying because nothing new happens and you have to wait another day (or week, or whatever) to get the next actual episode of your favourite show. There are others: the episode where the bad guys take on the appearance of the main characters; the one where minds and personalities get swapped; and, in more recent shows, the “Groundhog Day” episode.

What does this have to do with gaming? Well, looking at these kinds of gimmicks in the context of roleplaying games gives you a means of coming up with story arcs for your players that will keep them guessing and make your games more satisfying and adaptable, keeping them running for a good long time.

Obviously those tropes that TV shows fall back upon are unique to the television medium and adapting them for a roleplaying format is largely impossible (unless, of course, you’re playing “Teenagers from Outer Space”). There are others though, that can be easily brought into play, and most of these are to be found in the literature from which a lot of our gaming springs.

*****

To kick off this series, I want to take a look at a writer whose style and stories loom large in horror and gaming circles: Bram Stoker. Most of you would have read Dracula (and if you haven’t, shame on you!), or at least seen the movies. Stoker’s books strike directly into the heart of a Victorian fixation, a “love that dare not speak its name” which was a kind of fantasy among male readers of the time. This is the notion of the Fallen Woman. Socially, a woman who was “no better than she should be”, even if her circumstances were not of her own making, was to be avoided at all costs by polite society: to be seen in the company of such a person brought shame and scandal. However, there was a frisson of excitement involved in damning convention and going against the herd that was a source of allure for many Victorian and Edwardian men.

In Dracula, Mina Harker (and Lucy Westenra before her) becomes a Fallen Women through her contact with the vampire. Ordinarily, she would be expunged from the human pack, driven away as a source of uncleanness and danger; however, a band of dedicated young men gather to her and defend her cause, even at the cost of their own lives. Trimming away the supernatural elements, we can read Mina’s circumstances through a different lens: in a novel by Dickens or Hardy, for example, she would be a young woman of gentle birth fallen into poverty due to the mismanagement of her family’s fortune by a relative or guardian; her essential goodness would be indicated by her gentle nature and beauty and the inner strength with which she accepts and endures her lot. This stereotype was not new for the Victorians either, as it forms a strong element of an earlier story-cycle which they embraced wholeheartedly:

Sir Thomas Malory’s La Mort d’Arthur was a favourite read during Victoria’s reign and it was used as a guide-book for people engaging in romantic life. The behaviour of the knights, as the champions of the weak and strong in the cause of Justice, is obvious, as is the role of the Lady, to be the object of the Knight’s quest and the one for whom he strives and risks all. For the most part, women in Malory represent everything noble and pure; but there is one instance where this notion becomes corrupted and leads to tragedy. This is the Trial of Queen Guenevere.

This is a pivotal point in the love triangle of Lancelot, Arthur and Guenevere when she is wrongly accused of poisoning a Knight of the Round Table and she is put on trial. Arthur is forced to act as judge, unable to intervene; Lancelot falls into a difficult situation where he must act openly in support of the Queen, thereby confirming all of the local rumour concerning the exact nature of the relationship he has with the King’s wife. It’s a tricky moment that tarnishes everyone’s reputation and signals the end of the Good Times.

Stoker fixed on this notion of the heroic Fallen Woman: she who has valued, even treasured qualities, but whose circumstances have placed her beyond the pale. Those who flock to champion her are noble due to their conscious decision to support the insupportable, to defend the indefensible: for love alone, they make the ultimate sacrifice. In Dracula, Mina becomes the object of the quest and is surrounded by her coterie of “knights” – you’ll remember that the latter part of the book has repeated instances where the men periodically form tableaux of devotion around her, as she falls deeper into the vampire’s thrall.

Heady stuff for the average Victorian male; you can see why Dracula was an instant success!

Interestingly, it’s not the only time that Stoker used this device: in The Jewel of Seven Stars the concept is hard at work once more, although the ‘taint’ afflicting Margaret Trelawney, the Fallen Woman, is that of reincarnation and manifests as a fight against the will of an ancient mummified princess who tries to subsume the personality of the body into which her spirit has been re-born and to resume her own life in the modern world. Again there are “knights” – Malcolm Ross, Doctor Winchester, et.al - who band about the victim united by their love and pity for the distressed young lass, each of them willing to die in her cause.

The Stoker Gambit works in the following way: a character is afflicted by a curse that requires others to rally around and help in order to see it removed. In Dracula, it’s Mina’s impending demise and conversion to un-death if Dracula isn’t destroyed first; in The Jewel of Seven Stars, it’s the reincarnated spirit of Princess Tera that has to be stopped from assuming control of the victim’s body. Whatever the affliction, it has to have an obvious cure, although “obvious” should never equate with “easy”.

 

The Stoker Gambit is a mainstay of mummy horror flicks: in almost every one, there’s a young lass who resembles some long-dead hussy with whom the reanimated high-priest wants to ride off into the sunset. Usually, the band of “knights” who try to prevent this are her father (often the one who dug the mummy up in the first place), other members of the archaeological dig, and her boyfriend. The Creature of the Black Lagoon is another example, although here, the “curse” is simply that the victim of the Creature’s obsession is the only female present.

Of course, in these enlightened times, the afflicted member of the party needn’t be a woman. One of the best examples of the Stoker Gambit I’ve seen was actually a Donald Duck comic, wherein Donald resembles the bridegroom of a resurrected Sumerian princess who jilted her in antiquity and whose resurrected father fully intends to see nuptial attainment after a 5,000 year hiatus.

In establishing this trope in your game, you need to focus the action onto a player who will be able to shoulder the responsibility of being the cursed character. Ideally, the character so afflicted should be one that doesn’t perform a majority of the party’s logistics and planning – the action-types are not suitable for this kind of passive role. Being the object of the quest gives an otherwise thumb-twiddling character a lot to do and to focus on, while the “knights” take care of business around them. Of course, no player wants to be sidelined every time the action heats up either, so a range of competencies outside the areas of expertise shown by the “knights” – and many occasions to use these skills – are crucial. Are the “knights” social boors? The victim can smooth the way for them in society gatherings. Are the “knights” illiterate? The cursed one can impress with their academic background. It’s all about balance.

Charles Addams Exhibition

Last Friday I went down to Sydney to see the current exhibition on the life of Alexander the Great at the Australian Museum. I hadn’t actually heard that this was showing, living out in the boondocks as I do, but any excuse to go and sniff around the institution that holds the Cthulhu idol taken from the SS. Alert will do me (seriously, it’s right there in “The Call of Cthulhu”, although the place is no longer called the “Sydney Museum”).

An early start and two hours on the train saw me on the steps of the Museum waiting for the rest of my party to arrive. An encounter with a particularly officious and over-zealous volunteer put me in a bad mood that wasn’t going to get any better without caffeine so, being barred from entering the Museum Cafe (despite signs clearly stating that I could come and go from there as I chose) I mooched around the corner to Stanley Street and sank a scalding long black to get my head straight. Back at the Museum, my friends had beaten the volunteer into a retreat and we were finally allowed access.

In the past, exhibitions at this place have always struck me as being too eagerly targeted towards children (“our future benefactors!”). Displays have usually been arranged on plinths set way too low for the average adult, and the information provided has been dumbed-down to a sixth-grade reading level: “see the Incas”; “see the Incas run”; “see the Incas die horribly from imported Spanish smallpox”. To my satisfaction, this time things were different. After all, this was a display of the collection of the Heritage Museum of St. Petersburg, and it was good to see it getting the approach it deserved.

Alexander has copped varying press over the years – sometimes he’s “Great”; sometimes he’s anything but. At the moment, he’s going through an image renovation, but there is still a big faction of people out there who think of him as “Alexander the Not-All-That”. This exhibition plumbs the depths of his media hype (by means of Lysippus the sculptor, for one) and the poison pens of later historians and current film-makers. There were fascinating things to see – many of them famous in their own right, like the Gonzaga cameo which graced the cover of my Ancient History textbook in school and which hit me with a fair degree of startling recollection.

However, these shows bring out my curmudgeonly side. I understand that children have different attention spans and needs at these events; there’s a level of comprehension and understanding that’s required to really reap the benefits of such a showing. I understand this. Do most parents out there? No. Not if this experiment was anything to go by. It bewilders me to watch children carrying on like pork chops while their owners stand idly by muttering futile things like “now now, Tarquin”, or “be still, Jocasta”. I watched a six–or-seven-year-old boy banging violently on a glass case while screaming “this is BORING!” and all his mother could do was to murmur, “hush Tommy: Mummy’s trying to look”. Seriously: if I had carried on like that at his age, I wouldn’t be alive to write this today.

What is it about this post-Slap, hands-off, time out, “I’m going to count to five” parenting style nowadays, that says children mustn’t be taught good manners? This wasn’t the only badly-behaved kid present by any stretch of the imagination; in fact they were in the majority. It’s as if parents have developed a gulf between themselves and the children: monitoring them and controlling them has somehow become someone else’s duty and responsibility. And I’m not talking about corporal punishment either: the two kids who were part of our team were perfectly well-behaved and interested, and only because we adults had bothered to engage with them and not treat them like an annoyance interrupting our day’s activity. Anyway, it was all enough for me to go, “you know what? I’m just going to buy the exhibition catalogue in the Museum shop and forget about trying to see it first-hand.”

Take my advice and take a day off work mid-week, outside of school holidays, to go and see this: you’ll save yourself a huge headache.

Not that there weren’t any bad-mannered grown-ups there either (and by that I mean apart from the children’s parents, who by default and their culpability are understood to be bad-mannered). There was a wheelchair-bound woman who, I swear, if she ran over my foot one more time while cutting in front of me, was going to get a clip around the ear. People: not only stupider and more pig-ignorant than you imagine, but stupider and more pig-ignorant than you can imagine.

Inevitably, I left this Sartre-an vision of Hell, and went upstairs to chill out with the dinosaurs. Here too, there was an excess of intemperate, badly-behaved little oiks and their ‘minders’ (so-called), but at least they were more spread out. The Museum staff have (wisely, in my opinion) set up a little cafe on this floor and, inevitably – because noise levels were much diminished beyond its portal – I drifted inside. To my instant delight, I found that there was a Charles Addams exhibition in progress here, care of the Tee and Charles Addams Foundation. This was more like it: coffee, no brats or whingeing adults and the artwork of Addams the Great!

As a kid, much to the mortification of my parents, I was a great and instant fan of the Addams Family. Not the TV show (although I loved that too), but the cartoons: my grandparents had a copy of a Chas Addams collection of strips from the New Yorker and I would thoroughly enjoy leafing through it. It had just the right twisted quirkiness, coupled with playful impishness to appeal to me. Frustratingly, the book would vanish for long periods of time only to be discovered again in odd corners of the house; nowadays, I recognise this as an effort by my carers to limit my exposure. Ironically, it only served to increase my interest.

The fun part of Addams’ work is that it’s often very subtle; unless you are quick to spot the strangeness, it can slip by completely unnoticed. On display at the Museum was one of my favourite cartoons entitled “Planetarium”: unusually, for Addams, this is a strip rather than a single panel. The audience at the planetarium enter and sit down; they watch attentively as the lights dim and the ‘stars’ emerge; an image of the moon appears, waxes full and then wanes to a crescent before the lights come up and everyone walks out. If you don’t look closely, it doesn’t make much sense; if you do, you see the little man in the second row break into a sweat and transform into a horrible creature as the ‘moon’ grows and diminishes, before resuming his natural state and leaving with the rest of the crowd. Like the un-careful viewer, they miss the transformation too.

I’d seen most of these images before but it was a delight to see the originals in close up. I never realised that much of the white space in a typical Addams cartoon is highlighted with white ink and that this medium is often used for correcting errors in inking the final work. I mean, it’s only logical when you think of it, but since Addams is, like, a god to me, I’d just assumed that his works sprang fully-formed from his brow, as Athena did from Zeus’s.

The inky blackness of the typical cartoon is not a uniform shade either, as many of the New Yorker reprintings imply. Rather, there is a subtlety and gradation in the monochrome ink washes that lends the works depth and dimension. It’s kind of like seeing the original of a favourite print and realising that there are brush strokes visible on the canvas that can’t be discerned in the reproduction.

Ironically, viewing all these stodgy bankers, their wives and their Boy Scout offspring falling victim to the freaky Addams Outsiders made me think more intensely of the bad-mannered families below in the main exhibition: I could imagine some of them encountering their come-uppance in the form of a grinning Uncle Fester spawned machination some day! (Not that I would wish something like this on anybody. Not really. Except maybe Tommy...)

All-in-all, much as I enjoyed the displays (not the experience) of the Alexander exhibition, this was the highlight of the day for me and I left the ‘Repository of the R’lyeh Idol’ (ie. the Australian Museum) with a sense of completeness and well-being.

Oh, and the Alexander catalogue!

Ironfest 2013!

 

I can’t tell you the last time I was in Lithgow. It was sometime when I was very young and I remember that the place was grey and oppressive: everything was run-down and miserable-looking without a single bright colour anywhere to alleviate the gloom. Imagine my surprise then, when I landed there today in order to attend the 14^th annual Ironfest gathering!

Certainly it’s autumn, and the cluster of European trees that always indicate Blue Mountains communities was bursting out in reds oranges and yellows; those trees are now much larger than when I was a child and the surrounding country looks lush and heavily-forested. Lithgow sits at the bottom of a natural amphitheatre bound by craggy cliffs and is punctuated with the Victorian ruins of its mining past. The train passed through eight or so tunnels before we reached the station, each of them framed with elegant sandstone.

Economically, I don’t think much has changed in the town. It was poor when I saw it years ago and it’s still struggling now: Main Street is full of pubs, dentists and hearing-aid specialists, bargain stores and employment agencies, all separated by empty shopfronts plastered with “For Lease” notices. Nowadays though, the buildings lining the street are painted and cheerful, a world away from the grey uniformity and bleakness I encountered in the ‘70s. However, nice a surprise as this was, I was here for something quite different:

Ironfest is in its fourteenth year at Lithgow. Originally, this event was a get-together organised by a local metal-weapons re-enactment group but, after allowing other such organisations to attend and then opening their brief a little wider to encompass other hobbyists and fans, they’ve made the event a wonderful, quirky and welcoming phenomenon.

 

I have a bit of a confession to make at this point: I was once an SCA member and did my time running around a freezing paddock in a silly outfit. I came to the activity due to an interest in heraldry and stayed to learn - and eventually teach - archery (before a visiting “King of the West”, under whose aegis we fell at that time, decided on a whim that we were a bunch of homicidal toxophilists and banned us from archery, pending a moratorium – one of many, many, reasons I quit). Coming to this event I was a bit hesitant about the possibility of running into some of the (colourful? certifiable?) people I encountered back then, but, secure in my anonymity, I felt few would recognise me now. Still, it was with some unease that I approached the front gate of the Lithgow Showgrounds with the sound of “All Around My Hat”, the Steeleye Span staple that infects every SCAdian gathering, ringing off the surrounding hills. Suddenly though, the sound of cannon-fire drowned out the singing and, when the echoes had faded, the tune had changed: I walked through the gate and was pleasantly confronted by an amazing spectacle.

 

The place was truly magical. Everything was tricked out in party atmosphere: bunting and tents lined all the laneways and people were hurrying around dressed up to the nines. There were so many top hats and bowlers on show that I suspect people had been ruthlessly raiding their local second-hand stores in the weeks previous. Most of these hats were adorned with the ubiquitous steampunk goggles. All the tents were furiously merchandising and each one of them was a “shoppe” – any other term just doesn’t convey the feeling these vendors were trying to exude. There were leatherworkers, mead-makers, purveyors of fairy-wings and metal artworks, hatmakers, glovemakers and henna-tattoo artisans. And this was all just within ‘coo-ee’ of the front entrance! The theme this year was “Time Travel” so any perceived anachronism had its own built-in rationale; to underscore the notion, there was a TARDIS just inside the gate.

 

I was particularly impressed by the main pavilion which, made of brick, has towers with crenellations and arrow slits. Inside, there were merchandisers selling “Ironfest 2013” T-shirts and other branded goods, as well as a bunch of guys who build replicas of R2-D2 in their spare time. There were so many of these little guys in different colours, all tweeting and beeping and scooting about alarming kids, that it was hard to know where to look: there was a steampunk version made of brass, rosewood and glass, as well as a copy that had been assimilated by the Borg. There were also Daleks, copies of K-9, a replica of the Time Machine from the first movie based on H.G. Wells’ novel and a mock-up of the bridge of the SS-Enterprise from the original “Star Trek” series These guys obviously have no lives!

 

Outside once more, I turned to the main showground: the grandstand to one side was the perfect spot to observe the jousting, so I headed in that direction. As I wandered, I saw a beautiful Viking tent (the owner was selling goods made of leather and horn) and a bunch of Roman Legionaries running a shoppe selling ‘mediaeval’ tchotchkes. I saw an information tent set up by the Lithgow Small-Arms Factory Museum (this used to be a major employer of the locals, including my grandfather) and an encampment established by a group of ANZAC re-creators. Next to them was a disturbing coterie of Third Reich living-history types who – I guess, understandably – pointedly avoided having their photos taken.

 

I reached the grandstand as the jousting ended, but this was no big deal; it drew my attention to the centre of the showground where the various “villages” of the re-creation attendees were established. The guy on the loudspeaker announced that the Mediaeval Village was about to be attacked by a squad from the 1^st AIF, so I wandered over to see how things would pan out. Incidentally, the Mediaeval Village was the site for a rolling series of attacks by outsiders from various times and places. As I approached the embattled settlement I think I saw the cause of their problem:

 

The various encampments around the village each had their strengths and weaknesses; I especially liked the Napoleonic re-enactors who had the major share of the campground, populated with a mess tent, space for camp-followers, a string of cannon, and horses. An announcement over the PA as I ventured over informed me that the Frenchies were about to have lunch, which I thought was a little unnecessary in terms of general information-distribution, but I soon saw why our attention was being so drawn: the mess tent comprised a coal-burning cooker with spits for roasting and an enormous pile of edibles that the troops and their hangers-on were tucking into with period gusto. While not an activity that we gawpers were invited to share, it was amazing to watch such adherence to period details. (And what they were eating certainly looked better than all of the fairy-floss, chilli-dogs and deep-fried mysteries that the audience was consuming!)

 

I decided to follow some Troopers over to the metal-working displays and see what all the noise (and there was quite a lot of it) was about. This exhibition space – normally used for judging cattle – was chock-a-block full of guys with hammers, whaling away at bits of hot metal. They were making hooks and horseshoes, knives, pot-hangers and even a tree. One group had really gotten into the spirit, all of the smiths wearing top hats or bowlers, and their molten metal was being pounded by a steam hammer. Out in the yard beyond these guys were four steam engines and the biggest of these periodically did laps around the fairground to amaze onlookers.

 

Musically, the joint was jumpin’, with belly-dancers, folk-singers and a tent full of mediaeval musicians with incredible period instruments and a repertoire to go along with them. The Lithgow City Council Brass Band was also in attendance and gave everyone tunes to sing along with.

 

There was a lot more but it would take weeks to go through it all. Suffice it to say, there was a great vibe happening and a huge amount of creativity reverberating in the one spot. I was delighted by the willingness of everyone to pitch in and some of the costumes were amazing: one girl had designed a dress after the TARDIS as a nod to this year’s theme; sadly, it was somewhat too cold a day for her to enjoy wearing it and her willingness to be photographed had tapered off abruptly. Nevertheless, kudos! At every turn I found something to be tickled about: the weapons and armour guys had a display of their craft and there, lurking in the middle of it all, was the Spear of Destiny. It was great to see everyone picking up the theme and running as hard as they could with it.

Eventually though, I had to head back to the train station and make my way home. As I left, the gatekeepers asked if I was intending to come back today, in which case they would stamp my wrist so that I could come and go as I wished (and I should hope so, with a $35 entry fee!). I wasn’t going to be coming back but I got the stamp anyway: next year’s Ironfest bears the theme “Life on Mars” - I’ll definitely be coming back!

Elder Sign Puzzle #2

Those pesky dwarfed mobsters from China are running amok! The Tcho-tchos are the busiest lesser servitor beings on the planet and they really know how to strike from the shadows and then disappear into dark corners – nasty little ankle biters!

An Elder Sign won’t do diddly against them but, for some reason, they tend to flee in fear whenever they see one. Let’s see what happens when we put one together: maybe it’ll reveal the source of their insidious power. Answer the following questions and write them in the proper spaces; then rearrange the letters in the orange squares to find the cash crop that brings in the big bucks for the Tcho-tcho menace!

Questions:

T: Although traditionally associated with the Plateau of Leng, from where the Tcho-tcho reach in to Earth’s Dreamlands, they originally emerged from the Plateau of _____.

C: Although very few of the Tcho-tcho worship it now, they are the indirect creation of which Great Old One?

H: A major component of Chaucha cuisine is bak bon dzhow – especially nice with barbecue “White” Pork – otherwise known as _____ ganglia paste.

O: Taking their lead from the British and their intentions towards China in 1942, the Tcho-tcho peoples inevitably wormed their way across the planet by utilising the drugs trade, especially the smuggling of _____.

T: The Tcho-tcho dupe their human cohorts into action by infiltrating and co-opting the criminal organisations known as ______.

C: The Tcho-tcho people themselves believe otherwise, but technically their dietary peccadilloes mean they are all defined as _________.

H: Tcho-tchos are opportunistic above all, and they worship many different deities. However, they worship this particular Great Old One more than almost any other.

O: The perverse Tcho-tcho holy text “The Book of Blackened Jade” is encountered here more than anywhere else.

M: An ancient work concerning the Tcho-tcho is the Tang Dynasty Chinese scroll, “The Abduction of the ________ Hsu”.

E: What is the name of the ancient Tcho-tcho sage abandoned on the Plateau of Sung?

N: The name of the ancient amphibian race which spawned the Tcho-tcho by interbreeding with humans is the Miri _____.

A: According to prophecy, the Tcho-tcho are able to wreak havoc as they see fit, until the day of the coming of the “White _______”, who will bear their creator god hence.

C: The Tcho-tcho, like the tongs of China, are prone to passing secret directives to their confederates concealed in fortune cookies, known to them as a “Moon ____”.

E: The Tcho-tcho are somehow able to pass into Earth’s Dreamlands; the most renowned member of their race dwelling there, is the one known only as the “Slant-____ Merchant of Ill-Repute”.

Answers to Last Month’s Puzzle:

1: CXAXUKLUTH

2: SHANTAKS

3: PIPERS

4: DARKNESS

5: IA

6: SEED

7: HGLA

8: CHAOS

9: IDIOT

10: TULZSCHA

11: EARTHLY CULT

12: S’NGAC

13: DAEMON SULTAN

14: NUCLEAR

15: STYGIA

16: ATEN

17: HORRORS

18: DE VERMIS MYSTERIIS

19: TUNGUSKA ASTEROID

20: AZATHI

21: AZATHOTH

22: SHAGGAI

23: NYARLATHOTEP

Thus, filling in the grid from the centre outwards:

DAEMONSULTANUCLEARTHLYCULTULZSCHAOSTYGIAZATHOTHGLATENYARLATH

OTEPIPERSEEDEVERMISMYTERIIS’GNACXAXUKLUTHORRORSHAGGAIAZATHIDIO

TUNGUSKASTEROIDARKNESSHANTAKS

Or, in numerical order:

13 14 11 10 8 15 21 7 16 23 3 6 18 12 1 17 22 5 20 9 19 4 2