In the Tree of Azathoth, CT Phipps finds new levels of cosmic horror - it’s like Cthulhu Christmas!

 When I read Cthulhu Apocalypse by C. T. Phipps, I knew I wanted to read the rest of the series. And I didn't feel the need to write  about the second book, the Tower of Zhaal, because I figured it was a trilogy and that I could write a summary of my thoughts of the finished work, the full arc of the work.

… Yeah, it turns out that not the right way to approach the series.

What I realized while reading the third book, the Tree is Azathoth, is how much each book is its own beast, is a stand alone, complete thought.

John Henry Booth is a serial hero in the sense that he isn’t the hero of one story but of ongoing stories. Which isn’t a bad thing at all. King Arthur and Robin Hood are serial heroes, for crying out loud. And Phipps, as I later learned, used him in short stories as well.

At the same time, the John Henry Booth at the start of Cthulhu Apocalypse and the end of the Tree of Azathoth, they are not the same character. The later Booth is so much more messed up for one thing.

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The first two books in the series are Weird West works, set after the stars were right  and the Great Old Ones rise up. Heck, the Tower of Zhaal is a clear riff on The Magnificent Seven. (Which, to be fair, I have never seen. I have seen Seven Samurai though)

And the Tower of Zhaal is a rip roaring fun ride. It is a roller coaster of an adventure with the heroes (spoilers) summoning Cthulhu itself to save the day at the end. 

Then, in the Tree of Azathoth, Phipps completely changes gears and we go from Weird West to Film Noire. Booth ends up in a city in the dream lands and find the role of hard boiled detective coming over him. And the genre flip is acknowledged in context.

The books are a well balanced blend of Cthulhu Lite and Cosmic Horror. The heroes are able to defeat eldritch abominations. Beings like deep ones and ghouls are humanized. Booth has civil conversations with shogoths and Nyarlathotep and more. But, in the big picture, the Great Old Ones won, every victory is fleeting and hollow, and humanity is entirely meaningless.

And the Tree of Azathoth is the bleakest book, at least unless Phipps writes another one. The remnants of humanity are ghosts living in a dream world. That was a nightmarish outcome that Booth fought against in the first book and now that is as good as it gets. 

I was impressed by how bleak it got. By the end, it was full on cosmic horror while still giving Booth agency. It’s good enough I don’t want to spoil it beyond saying that.

Through out all the books, Phipps makes shoutouts to many authors but Brian Lumley get a lot of them. Lumley was important both as a proponent of Cthulhu Lite and keeping Lovecraft alive before his worked made the jump to pop culture. 

But I just keep thinking that Phipps does it so much better every time he references Lumley. Phipps normalizes the Mythos more effectively with making monsters normal people. But when he goes for abyssal horror, it hits hard.

Since Phipps makes several references to Howard, particularly in the third book, I’m expecting swords and sorcery if we get a fourth one.

Even a fluff Knuza is good fun

 I recently saw a copy of Reiner Knizia's Cat Ass Trophy at a flea market. A gaming buddy talked me into picking it up and he made a good call there. It's not one of his greats but even a middle-of-the-road Knizia is a game that you'll keep playing.

The game consists of a deck of cards that has seven suits ranked one to eight. Each card has a cat up to some kind of silliness or mischief and that's as far as the theme goes. The art is more on the charming rather than cartoony end of the spectrum.

Deal out a hand of nine cards to everyone and then deal out a row of cards in the middle, the number depends on the number of players. You will have cards left over and they are out of the game until the next round. Your goal is to get an in-suit straight of five cards and five of a kind. Which means one of the cards in the straight will be also part of the five of a kind. Each turn, you swap a card from your hand with one from the row. If someone achieves the goal, they reveal their hand and the hand ends and you score.

(POST SCRIPT: We learned we’d been making a mistake in how we were playing Cat Ass Trophy. You don’t need a straight. You just need five of a suit and five of a rank. So we accidentally came up with a variant that I’m pretty sure is still balanced, just a lot nastier)

You can also knock, doing nothing with your hand. The first time someone knocks, nothing happens. The second time ANYone knocks, the hand ends and you score.

Like golf, you don't want to score points. If you have a run or a set, you won't score any points for those cards. For all the rest, you score each rank value once. So if you have one, two, three or four 7s. its always seven points. Play hands equal to players and lowest score wins.

Cat Ass Trophy is very simple. You However, it is still full of interesting/tough decisions and lots of tension. And, while all the player interactions are indirect, they also manage to be in-your-face at the same time.

The two elements that make Cat Ass Trophy engaging and fun (particularly if swearing at other players is part of your fun) is the fact some of the cards aren't going to be in play and the mechanic of knocking, You can be putting a hand together without knowing if it's even possible. And knocking keeps the game from stagnating, adds tension and gives players agency.

Knizia doesn't always design the most thematic games but his mechanics rarely disappoint. On paper, Lost Cities seems like dull fluff but, in practice, the game hooked enough of us to be considered a classic. He builds simple structures that end up having constantly branching, shifting decision trees.

Cat Ass Trophy isn't a game that I would have sought out but now that it's landed in my lap, i enjoy playing it.

So what is A Dragon’s Gift?

A Dragon's Gift is the best pick-up-and-deliver micro game I have found thus far. I don't think it's the final word on the subject but I think it's a fine word.

As of my writing, it's either currently on Kickstarter or about to be. Either way, a demo version is available on PnP Arcade. It's part of Scott Almes' and Button Shy's Simply Solo series, a series of games that has pretty reliably made me happy.

The idea behind the game is that a dragon protects a group of villages and they are making him a gift as tribute. Honestly, the theme could have been about building an atomic bomb or a super computer or founding a medieval city and the mechanics would have worked just as well. A Dragon's Gift is a train game in disguise. That said, tribute to a friendly dragon does stick in your brain.

A Dragon's Gift is a tile-laying game where you are trying to connect materials to towns that will make finished products. Each card has one town and one raw material on a network of roads. The cards are double-sided, showing the same network but with the town either inactive or active. A town has to be supplied with materials before it can be active and supply its good. Simple goods require two raw materials. Refined goods require a simple good and a raw material. The final dragon gift requires one of each.

Here's where it gets interesting. Your basic transport of a yak can only deliver materials across two cards. Each game, you get three special transports that break those rules. However, they get tapped when use and only get reactivated if you activate a town with a specific good.

A Dragon's Gift hits the mark for because of two key reasons. It is successfully minimalist and has clean, solid rules.

Like all the Simply Solo games, it consists of eighteen cards and nothing else. No pawns, cubes or tokens. I certainly don't mind games with pawns or cubes or tokens. In most pick-up-and-deliver games, they are absolutely essential. However, if I am using them, I'd like use them in a game that's bigger than a micro game.

More importantly, the mechanics are clean and intuitive. And, most important of all, they work well. It only takes a couple of plays to understand how the game works and what you are trying to do. However, reliably winning the game takes longer than that, giving you an interesting and replayable challenge.

A Dragon's Gift is not a substitute for Steam or an 18XX game. It strips down pick-up-and-deliver to about as little as I think you can go while still managing to be functional and interesting. It is a game for ten, fifteen minutes, which is often about as much time as I personally have. If you want a bigger game than that, you are going to need a game that is actually bigger.

I know that the final version of A Dragon's Gift will get some more spit and polish. And, if it follows the Simply Solo formula, there will be at least four expansions. And I will probably revisit the game for a more detailed review when is more finished. But the demo shows a world of promise. 

Excellent character work struggles against meh pacing in Shaman King

 Shaman King took me a while to get around to finishing. Frankly, if I hadn’t gotten the entire series in a bundle, I wouldn’t have. When it was a slog, it was a real slog. However, when it was good, it was really good and knowing that there was good stuff kept me picking it back up.

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Shaman King is a manga from 1998 to 2004 that’s basically about a tournament of magic users to become the titular Shaman King, who is effectively omnipotent. What I recently learned some folks call a battle manga.

I apologize to fans of Shaman King but I found it to be a middle of the road, average Shonen manga. Which isn’t to say that it’s bad. In some respects, it’s quite good. However, it doesn’t sparkle.

The biggest problem, in my arrogant opinion, is the pacing. There are points where the story just drags. During the American road trip, I reached the point where I took a couple month break. And, while some of the flash backs felt both unnecessary and poorly timed. Horo Horo’s tragic backstory was revealed so close to the end of the story there was no room for character growth from it.

Honestly, a good edit would probably remove 20% of the entire series with significant improvement. Not that a weekly manga can get edited like that but hindsight is 20/20.

So what was good?

The actual character work is strong. More than that, the characters grow and change with well developed arcs. 

In particular, I enjoyed Yoh as a character. Which was a good thing because he’s the main character. Initially depicted as a slacker who wants power so he can be lazy, he is revealed to be a convincing and striking all-loving hero. 

Enemies becoming friends is a defining characteristic of the Shaman King. Yoh routinely invites people who just tried to kill him over for dinner. Near the end, Hai joins the heroes at some hot springs and Hai’s explicit goal as the big bad is to wipe out the human race.

While the lead up to the finale is a series of slog fights that I didn’t find nearly as compelling as the earlier tournament fights (and I got through knowing the end was near), the end being hugging it out with Hai worked well for me because the groundwork for that kind of ending had been well laid.

Ultimately, Shaman King’s positives do come out ahead of its issues for me but it just doesn’t have that je-ne-sais-quoi. (And it’s not the age. I find Hajime no Ippo, for instance, compelling (but socially dated as heck) and it’s ten years older)

A look back at a 1971 Batman history

 When I was quite a bit younger than I am now, I came across a battered copy of Batman: From the 30s to the 70s, edited by E. Nelson Bridwell and published in 1971. While it also included commentary, it was primarily reprints of old Batman comics from the first thirty-ish years of Batman's existence. It had some color pages but most of it was in black and white.

Looking back, I honestly cannot emphasize enough what an extraordinary book this was. Even by the time I found it, which was long after 1971 (I'm not that old), graphic novels and collected editions just weren't a thing, particularly from Marvel or DC. I'm not saying they didn't exist whatsoever. William Eisner had published A Contract With God in 1978, among other things. However, graphic novels were still an anomaly. And in 1971, a book the Batman: From the 30s to the 70s basically didn't exist. (Other than a companion volume about Superman I also found at the library a bit later) I also found the Smithsonian Book of Comic Book Comics around this time but it had been published eleven years later in 1982.

(Interestingly, newspaper comics had a history of getting published collections for decades. Even at that point. And stories did get reprinted as parts of annuals and such. But not in a format that was designed for longterm shelf life)

Bridwell did a really strong job picking out stories for the book. It isn’t a proper retrospective but much more of a greatest hits collection. While it naturally has the first appearance of Batman in Detective Comics #27, it has a number of other important milestones.

The first appearance of Robin, of the Joker, of the Riddler, of Alfred, of Ace the Bathound, of the first Batwoman and Batgirl, of the second Batgirl who is the first one pretty much anyone cares about. It has the first Red Hood story and Batman entering the Bronze Age. And that’s not even an exhaustive list. There’s something like forty-eight stories reprinted in the book.

(I have to admit that I was surprised, revisiting the book, how much I didn’t enjoy the Silver Age stories, compared to either the Golden Age or Bronze Age. Honestly, so much of what I enjoy about Batman really comes from Bronze Age and on forward.)

In almost every way, this collection is more of a historical artifact rather than an important resource. We now live at a time when bound reprints are readily available, not to mention digitally available. And they’re in color! More than that, and this kind of boggles my mind, it covers less than half of Batman’s publishing history

Still, when I found it at the library, it was an amazing experience.

Stealing Lovecraft is about cutting and pasting new visions

 Stealing Cthulhu is an RPG guide by Graham Walmsley with notes from Kenneth Hite, Jason Morningstar and Gareth Hanrahan. So, at the very least, it has a lot of experienced names behind it.  

The idea behind the book is how to run a Mythos game that feels specifically like one of Lovecraft’s actual works. Which, to be fair, isn’t as clear cut or as obvious as it sounds.

Pretty much from the beginning, the Mythos has been bigger than Lovecraft himself and Lovecraft himself is the one responsible for that. He encouraged other authors like Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert Bloch and quite a few others to use the Mythos in their work. Mostly, from what I can tell, because it would be fun. And, since then, the number of creators who have used and redefined the Mythos has exploded.

So, game scenarios that are built around being a Lovecraft purist is actually an unusual idea. And I will note that Walmsley actively admits that the book is talking about how to do that, not that this is how you should run a Mythos game.

In many ways, he explores using Lovecraft’s work as a set of LEGOs, how to break apart various elements and rebuild them into something new or at least will catch players off guard. Which might sound like an obvious thing to do but spelling it out so deliberately helps turn the concept into an actual toolbox.

I will admit one of my initial takeaways from the book is that, if you want a scenario to actually feel like a Lovecraft work, you have to limit the players’ agency. In fact, as the game goes on, increasingly restrict it. Which goes against my core RPG philosophy but is pretty essential to a Lovecraft work and is a core concept of horror in general.

One criticism that has been leveled at the book by reviewers, the annotators and by Walmsley himself is that he focuses on a very narrow range of stories. (For instance, Pickman’s Model and ghouls in general are left out) However, his argument was that he had to limit it to make the book manageable. More than that, the book isn’t an analysis of Lovecraft stories. The selections are just examples.

What I find more interesting is what non-Lovecraft stories he mentions. The King in Yellow by Chambers and The Wendigo by Blackwood influenced Lovecraft and go without saying. The Return of of Lloigor, the Burrowers Beneath and The Insects from Shaggai are more interesting but strong choices. (I do appreciate his argument that the Shan are the best Mythos creature Lovecraft never wrote) 

(I have read and enjoyed all of those works except Return of the Lloigor. Which is a work I can’t seem to find even vaguely in print. Walmsley does love him some Lloigor)

My initial thought about Stealing Lovecraft was that it might work better as a guide to writing homages to Lovecraft that don’t suck. Which I do think it would work well as. However, one reviewer noted you can use the technique on other genres.

Years ago, I looked at Lasers and Feelings, a minimalist but solid Star Trek RPG homage. I felt one of its strengths was that it didn’t need a setting guide since everyone already knows Star Trek. Combining Lasers and feelings with the techniques of Stealing Lovecraft could result in some really awesome games.

Walmsley also incudes the base rules for his own rules lite Mythos game, Cthulhu Dark, which is so light that only takes a few pages. It’s perfect for a pure Lovecraft game and I was impressed by the quick start rules I read years ago. Stealing Lovecraft makes me want to revisit the catacomb that is Cthulhu Dark.

Stealing Lovecraft is definitely not the final word on its subject. It is, however, a good start to the conversation.

Common Grounds is a fine mix of comedy and pathos

 I stumbled upon Common Grounds by Troy Hickman over twenty years after it came out. A six-issue limited series, it is either obscure or I’m just an uncultured cad for having never heard of it.

But Common Grounds is worth discovering.

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The titular Common Grounds is a chain of doughnut shops that serve as a neutral ground for superheroes and supervillains, where they can meet and talk without violence. It’s an anthology, tiny slices of life, but forming an overall arc that we only see by the end.

More than anything else, Common Grounds reads like a love letter to Astro City. And, coming from me, that is a huge compliment. Superheroes as people is hardly new. That was the point of the Fantastic Four and an idea that Spider-Man elevated to darn near perfection. But Common Grounds does it really well. 

Like Astro City, Common Grounds is a world of original characters that are built off of archetypes to the degree that you intuitively understand who they are. And you can picture the characters being able to hold down their own series.

While the core concept lends itself to comedy, and there is comedy to be sure, there is also drama and even tragedy. Sometimes in the same story. A reunion of goofy giant monsters from the 1950s has a total mood shift when they hear about a child’s death from domestic violence. ‘Who is the real monster?’ works when it’s done well. 

And I don’t think that’s one of the stronger stories.

 

Little details and callbacks add up as the stories go on, culminating in the origin of the Common Grounds itself, rooted in tragedy and hope.

I wonder what an ongoing Common Grounds series could have been like. There was the potential for so many more stories. However, getting even these six issues and their cohesive vision is a delight.