Weird Fantasy and Cosmic Horror?

These are two terms that are bandied around lots when it comes to the Old School Renaissance (OSR),

A quick Google looking for a definition of Cosmic Horror, sends you straight towards HP Lovecraft and his Mythos. The rather nihilistic idea of alien beings, and their incomprehensible actions being the source of alarm and anxiety, rather than blood and gore. To be fair that’s were I came in with the term, with the Games Workshop printing of Call of Cthulhu (2nd edition + Companion with all manner of new art, in a lovely hardcover instead of a bunch of pamphlets in a box which was the US Chaosium offering at the time). Actually, I was more interested in the idea of using it as a Gothic horror game, since rather than Lovecraft I had been brought up on a diet of Hammer Horror films, with a dash of the bizarre and creepy 70s/80s British TV Series Tales of the Unexpected (which sometimes went into the realms of the supernatural). I didn’t really get Cosmic Horror until I read the work of Lovecraft’s peer Clark Ashton Smith a couple of years later. CAS is the master of dry, almost sarcastic, delivery of “oppps man has wandered into an encounter with the supernatural almost outside of his comprehension, and suffers badly because of it”. I personally think he’s a much better writer, than Lovecraft, and he certainly got across the sense of how to use Cosmic Horror effectively.

Weird Fantasy? Again a quick Google brings you to a broad church of pulpy, supernatural, dark fantasy, swords and sorcery, titles and stories, that have their origins in the 1920s with the familiar circle of HP Lovecraft, CAS and Rober E. Howard.  For me as a Brit, brought up on a quaint diet of Tolkien and CS Lewis, it means anything that is genuinely strange and somewhat dangerous by its very nature. Moorcook’s Eternal Champion stories (Elric, Hawkmoon, Corum, Von Beck among others) which I drank deep off in my teens come to mind in a happy way here.

Both flavours are covered by the zines I’m offering as part of the From the Shroud ZineQuest 4 Kickstarter.

From the Shroud #3, is cosmic horror in a big way. The Tales that describe the adventures on Other Worlds and their alien inhabitants are the first proper look at the genre that has previously been heavily mentioned and referenced by some of the otherworldly fiends that are the monsters of Crypts and Things. Now I give Crypt Keepers (C&T GMs) a bucket full of ideas to inflict upon their players, whose characters now can visit the worlds beyond the Shroud.

The nearly funded second zine, Mancuria covers Weird Fantasy. It’s an alternative history take on 21st Century Manchester, with an airpunk theme, with flying airships, steam-powered weapons, and dangerous elements in the form of a zombie workforce that sometimes gets hungry, visiting barbarians on unicycles and pirates who prey on the airships.

Both zines are available on Kickstarter now until Monday 29th August.

 

 

Fiendish Friday: The Dead God Ugsharak

Once upon a time in alien Other World there was a God called Ugsharak. As a deity that lived outside of time and space, he could be called upon to provide magical knowledge and power. Ugsharak was served by a race known as the Gizoni, who in return for blood sacrifice received potent black magic from the god.  When he took form in the world it was as a monstrous 30 foot tall giant skeleton whom the Gizoni called the “God Who Walks in Bone”.

Over a span of a thousand years the Gizoni home world weakened and became a desolation because of the constant need for blood for Ugsharak.  In response Ugsharak decided to leave, gathering his priesthood into his mouth and traveling to a new world to start the cycle of pain and suffering again.

Upon reaching the world of Zarth he materialised there in his physical form. However disaster awaited him. His body materialised in the earth, an element abhorrent to him, and he became trapped in rock up to his neck. His soul escaped to a place in the Shroud helped by a the Gizoni. In time the Gizoni priests, made a bridge via an ancient crystal Black Monolith not far from his body, which had now fossilised and with only the skull above the earth. Thus the legend of Skull Hill was born.

In time humans settled nearby, refugees from one of Zarth’s devastating wars. They were simple farmers and a superstitious lot. When they found the Black Monolith at the edge of their lands, they started leaving some of their crops as an offering at Harvest time. One day the Gizoni came out from behind it, as they had gated over from the Shroud to make sure the Zarth end of the portal was still intact as was their wont from time to time.  The locals prostrated themselves before these new gods and soon they were providing human sacrifices to the Gizoni at ‘Harvest Time’ who would take them to the slumbering Ugsharak in the Shroud.  Tragically though within a couple of generations the nearby human settlements were deserted due the strain put on their populations due to the annual sacrifices demanded by the Gizoni to reunite their god’s soul with its body. Not only was it tragic for the local humans, whose lands became the deserted Lonely Place, but for the Gizoni who were only a few sacrifices away from having enough stored magic reuniting their god’s soul with its body and freeing it from the hill.

To be continued in the “The Secret of Skull Hill”. An adventure in From the Shroud #1 eta December 2016.