Otherworlds

Cattle die, kindred die, Every man is mortal: But the good name never dies Of one who has done well Havamal, stanza 76

“ Council plans to underwr i te a £100,000 unveiling ceremony for a statue of Margaret Thatcher in her home town of Grantham have been approved. “ The statue itself cost £300,000.00 and they want to use £100,000.00 of public money for a ceremony to unveil it. In a time of austerity and poverty, with record numbers of homeless, jobless and struggling people relying on foodbanks I can honestly say that this is definitely what she would have wanted. My only concern is that a stray bolt of lightning will bring the fucking thing to life and she’ll start a new reign of terror in an immortal three metre form, like a right-wing golem breaking into schools and stamping on free school meals. Just kidding. God wouldn’t touch this hell-creature even at lightning-bolt reach.

A political parable for our times with many hidden references to Putin, the performative aspects of modern politics and an optimistic wish.

My latest novel – a story of magic and intrigue set at least partially in the crowded metropolis of London in the 1850s is now available at amazon.com , amazon.co.uk and other regional amazons. The protagonist is Barnaby Silver, a young man newly come to town to confront the past that his mother, a powerful sorceress, fled from when he was just an infant. He will discover that his powers and his heritage make him not only an outcast from mundane society but also from the Order of Magi that exists secretly in the heart of the city, and from the hidden Faerie realms that border the human world – both the wild woods of Green Jack and his court, and the nightmare pastiche of the worst slums of London ruled over by the sinister Constable Rook. Outcast or not he has truths to uncover and a web of conspiracy to unravel before he learns the truth of his mother’s long ago flight from mortal peril, and where exactly he has been running to for all his life. Currently available as a Kindle

Firstly, I’m a big fan of Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit and the Silmarillion. This article isn’t offering disrespect to the memory of JRR Tolkien or his many fans. I’m coming at this only from the viewpoint of an RPG player and GM Sauron is a monolithic evil. He’s bad because he’s bad because he’s bad. And he’s very bad. The world around him becomes bad. Creatures under his sway become bad. Even one of Michael Jackson’s albums became bad. I’m not averse to the ideas of evil in fantasy settings in RPGs, it’s sometimes liberating to have someone explicitly evil to punch, stab or incinerate without wondering if they were simply misled and deserving of redemption. I prefer to give antagonists in my games a little more depth but I have no moral objection to the idea of unfiltered evil as a concept. Less useful though is the idea that the single monolithic evil entity exists. By doing so it becomes the defining focus of the world and all struggles, eventually, converge on the Sauron f

A city setting outline for Barbarians of Lemuria or any sword & sorcery game Created with this wonderful web utility and tweaked with paint.net This is a city I created for use with my home grown Swords & Sorcery campaign set in the lands beyond the Circle Sea . It was made in response to my player characters pursuing a notorious and evil Pirate King into the Bone Coast region that they had previously not travelled. In order to gain safe passage to hunt those waters they needed to deal with the city of Gathkun and reach some kind of arrangement allowing them to do so. As is often the case with my notes I don’t present a particular throughline or plot, I just put together the ingredients on the page (or actually in OneNote) with some likely themes, conflicts and characters, and then see what the player characters focus on and go from there. As it turned out the three or four sessions they spent in Gathkin turned into a locked-in palace intrigue with the incitement of at

I can’t believe it’s been two months or so since I last updated this blog. A lot has happened, or to be precise a lot has happened to many many people but very little has happened to me. Under the lockdown resultant from the pandemic I’ve been working from home since the end of March and apart from a week of feeling dreadful early on with all the classic symptoms of Covid-19, I and my family have all been fine. Did I have the dreaded ailment? In the absence of testing there is no way of knowing and of course there is no guarantee that having had it provides further immunity in any case. It would be an odd exception to the normal coronavirus properties if immunity was achieved after an infection. No, my health is fine at the moment, and the worst I can complain about is the disruption to routine and the sameness of each passing day. I applaud the efforts and sacrifices of emergency workers who risk their lives to minister to those who are ill, often in the face of appalling and unn

From the writing challenge at Always Another Chapte r The loyal Bobby, faithful hound His master’s vigil kept Remaining patient by the grave All while his master slept But Felix at his master’s side Stares at the carven rood As if to say “Get up you sod It’s past time for my food” Finn’s first novel A Step Beyond Context is available on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com and a few others as well. It’s a punchy genre-busting mystery with a heroine who is a Regency lady, a high tech mercenary and much more.

An adventure outline for the Mothership RPG This is an idea for a scenario I’ve had for the Mothership RPG – you can read my review of it HERE or go check out the maker’s website and download a copy of the game for yourself HERE. At present I don’t have the opportunity to run the game – I do a lot of gaming but am neck deep in various campaigns that I love, but on reading Mothership I’ve been taken by the mood and themes of the game and an idea came to me for an adventure that blended the game’s core elements with the cosmic horror of HP Lovecraft that has always been close to my twisted gaming heart. I know enough about myself to know that the idea will nag at me until I get it out of my system so I’m posting the bones of it here to exorcise it. Hopefully it may inspire someone to flesh it out and run it themselves, if so I’d love to know how it goes. This write-up is how I tend to write up scenario notes for myself – relying on imagining the scenes from the basic concepts and i

In Space, nobody can hear you not have a group large enough to get the best out of a great looking game Random Internet rambling recently led me to discover an absolute gem of a roleplaying game. It’s called Mothership and it’s a game of science-fiction horror that seeks to emulate a setting and feel similar to that of the Alien/Aliens franchise (and by extension similar stories of futuristic isolation and menace). You can find the game HERE and since the rulebook is Pay What You Want I suggest you go snag it for yourself now and if you like it go back and throw a few credits to the creator. The rulebook is short and concise and the design work is incredible. The character sheet is a work of genius allowing a complete novice to create a character without ever having to refer to the rules – everything you need is on the character sheet complete with arrows showing what scores modify what results, how skills work and everything. The rest of the rulebook is equally accessible. Ch

Much ink could be spilled, and has been, discussing the dichotomy between the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses. Or you could watch this. Finn’s first novel A Step Beyond Context is available on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com and a few others as well. It’s a punchy genre-busting mystery with a heroine who is a Regency lady, a high tech mercenary and much more.

I write myself.  Not just between the stately study walls Where with fine pen-strokes perfect tales are shaped But in smudged ink, misspellings, blots and scrawls In rips and tears where nib on paper scraped. The page shows all; a workbook not framed art. I write myself – in whole, not just in part. Finn’s first novel A Step Beyond Context is available on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com and a few others as well. It’s a punchy genre-busting mystery with a heroine who is a Regency lady, a high tech mercenary and much more.

I’ve been roleplaying since shortly before the great flood and come across a lot of RPG systems that handle task resolution in many and varied ways. One of the big ones is always the combat system – even in rules-lite games the combat system is (usually but not always) more complex than the rest of the game system with more granular options. There are of course exceptions and some games go for the universal mechanical approach that treats combat scenes just like any other scene. The normal approach I think grew out of D&D’s roots inside the wargaming hobby and though the RPG scene (including D&D) grew quickly past the simple recreation of fantasy skirmishes there has been a big focus on the combat scene as the core activity of many role playing game sessions. Personally I’ve never been a big fan of combat for its own sake. Even when I play Fighty McFighter type characters I don’t want the game session to be taken up with lengthy combat encounters in which there is little sco

He was a strange figure, a dull lumpish creature that the locals knew only as Trog.  Whether that was the name his parents gave him or simply an unpleasant title dreamed up by the people around him nobody knew.  It was the name he called himself though and his unfortunate neighbours would often hear him lumbering around in the darkness of the night calling out obscenities and invoking his own name as if he considered himself some unseen tormentor or deity in his own life. They wanted him gone, those neighbours, for Trog was a nuisance and an unpleasant annoyance in their lives.   They never knew when a peaceful afternoon would be interrupted by cries of “Trog, Trog, Trog hates trees,” or “Trog, Trog, Trog is mighty!” and then the great shape of the thing itself would appear at their hedge or fence, looming over it and leering or grimacing at them.   They wanted him gone, but Trog was cunning and sly as well as strange and clumsy.   He had great hoards of wealth in his cave, he said,