Buried In A Cheap Cardboard Coffin

When we weren't looking, Cheapass Games died.

Admittedly, the current claim is that Cheapass Games is only hibernating. However, it's employees have moved on, James Ernest is designing games for other people, and Toivo is no longer collating.

I'm not sure what lead to this state of events, my three theories are:

1- At it turns out, people would rather pay 300% more for cool plastic widgets. The evidence for this can be found in the catalogue of "James Earnst Games," an imprint of Cheapass games that specialized in full-color card games, including previous hits like Give Me The Brain, and Before I Kill You, Mr. Bond. And while Killing Doctor Lucky was fun in black and white, the Paizo company has determined that it would be even more fun to do so in glorious Technicolor. (Paizo being the company that has licensed certain Cheapass Games assets. Perhaps I'll finally get a nice copy of Spree.)

2- Game Designer James Earnst's obsession with games where you bid for resources. For every The Great Brain Robbery, there seemed to be a Bleeding Sherwood, or a Jacob Marley, Esq.. I own some of those Bidding Games, and I can tell you that the only one I could ever convince people to play a second time was The Big Cheese. And that's because The Big Cheese could be played at a restaurant, while waiting for the pizza to come out. I do not imagine my experience is atypical.

3- My demographic cannot keep a business alive. Perhaps there was something else involved in the company's demise other than low sales, but given that Secret Tijuana Death Match never sold out of it's initial 5,000 copy print run, we can conclude that it was at least a strong factor.

At least the dream of James Ernest lives on. Unspeakable Words is a fun card game by James Earnst, where you try to gain 100 points by spelling out words. Every angle in the letters you use earns you a point, and the more points you make makes the word more likely to drive you insane. (Which potentially leads to a number of skipped turns, unless optional rules are used. Optional rules always make me wonder how fully a game was play-tested.) Sanity is measured by thirty neat little C'thulhu tokens, which could easily have been represented by pennies instead. I don’t know if the game has legs, but the first few play-throughs have been enjoyable enough that I’m tempted to snap up my own copy.

Alternatively, you can play Stonehenge, a board game with five different ways to play. James Ernest suggests you play a game that involves bidding on things.

Played: Arkham Horror

Game On!

I recently finished a game of Arkham Horror. This counts as a victory, as previous attempts ended when one or more participants suddenly realized that they actually hated the game, and would run off screaming.

Arkham Horror was originally designed in the '80s, when the quality of gameplay was judged solely by how many cardboard tokens were crammed inside the box. There are tokens representing life, sanity, cash, clues, monsters, portals to other dimensions, free passes to avoid being sucked back into these portals, good magical sigils, bad magical sigils, horror, terror, closed doors, the numbers one through three, and "The Button". If you get bored with that, you can play around with the baker's dozen of card decks, or the character sheets for the players and the elder god that's trying to break into the world and eat its cookies.

Everyone at the table plays a group of god-fearing 1920's archetypes, running around town and putting paid to the tentacular ner'do'wells that keep popping up around the place. Eventually, your goal is to jump into portals leading to various lands of dread, survive two random encounters there, and then turn off the portal by reading a book at it or shooting it down. In other words, it's exactly like the way I ran Call Of Cthulhu when I was in high school, right down to the importance of keeping a stick of dynamite with you for special occasions. What this has to do with horror is anyone's guess, because a Will -2 roll is only so unnerving, even when it's backed up by the threat of losing your last brain token and being sent to the asylum for the fifth time.

In short, this is the kind of game designed for fans of this kind of game. It seems enjoyable enough, but it's ultra-cooperative feel actually causes the game to drag in the end. You have a pretty good idea whether everyone wins or everyone dies, so why continue? Also, if your gaming opportunities are as limited as mine, Arkham Horror will have to compete with games that don't require players to remember when the Horror Meter causes the Terror Meter to rise, and exactly how big the Outskirts Stack can become before it causes the General Store to close up shop.

I'm Huge!

Let the enormity of our new choice of font enthrall you this Halloween!

If that doesn't work, perhaps my thoughts about C'thulhu's place in the world will.

There's little question that Cthulhu's a bit overdone, at least in the subcultures I dwell in. He's the default punchline of eldritch horror coming right at you, he's appeared in every webcomic, and you can now choose from a hundred different visages of C'thulhuy goodness to adorn the bookshelf where your toys now live. (Mine is in the terrifying form of a Beanie Baby.) Every four years, he begins his doomed run for the presidency with complementary t-shirts and bumper stickers. He's not quite recognized by the mainstream, but he also doesn't feel out of place there.

Meanwhile, the character of Nyarlathotep can crack jokes, wear the nice outfits, and passive-aggressively fuck with the other characters to no end. He's the too-cool sidekick that steals all the scenes, and he can still provide non-euclidian horror in one of a thousand forms. In any other series, this would end up as the character the audience identifies with, while the masters he slaves for are only vaguely recalled. Instead, oh, he's about the same, but to a much smaller extent than Cthulhu is. He's got only the one stuffed animal, almost no t-shirts, and I've never turned on a random cartoon to find him in a guest-starring role.

I don't know quite why this is. Perhaps it's because Call Of C'thulhu has been dubbed the quintessential Lovecraft story. Or perhaps it's because of the character design, which is one part squid, one part demon, and one part flabby guy. Then again, it's probably just that Nyarlathotep almost exclusively appeared in the stories in those The Rest Of Lovecraft volumes that are bought, read once, and quietly regretted.

Or it could all come down to the name. I had to copy Nyarlathotep's spelling from Wikipedia, and just hit the paste key whenever it came up in this post. When spelling C'thulhu, my only worry is whether to throw in a random apostrophe for flavor. There's a very low limit on how much gibberish a monster's name can contain and still be cool.

Things Which I Do Not Know How to Speak Aloud

In all fairness, my favorite monsters should be gremlins, as they not only provided inspiration for the title of this blog, but lead me to seek out my current occupation as a bulldozer driver. If not gremlins, then vampires, as without them I would have a lot less to make fun of. And as much as I'd enjoy meeting a beholder in a fedora or being abducted by mind flayers, they aren't, you know, real. (Take that, eighth-grade English teacher.)

It's slightly embarrassing to admit that my favorite monster is one I know very little about. Several Google searches proved that I didn't even know how to spell its name properly, much less pronounce it. My initial investigation kept bringing me back to boots.

I first learned of the penanggalan (or penanggal) from a Ravenloft Monstrous Compendium, so my initial understanding of the creature was likely a bit sanitized. Commonly classified in America as a Malaysian vampire, a penanggalan is actually a normal woman placed under a curse. At night she separates her head from her body, flies through the treetops, and looks for newborns and placenta to eat. The penanggalan's entrails hang from its neck, and some accounts say that these may be used to grab victims or perform common tasks like programming VCRs. But the dangling viscera are also the monster's weakness. An expectant mother will leave sharp branches and thorns around her home to prevent penanggalan from sneaking in and sucking the fetus directly out of her womb.

Go ahead. Click on that and see what happens.

After doing a little non-role-playing research, it's no surprise penanggalan have always fascinated me. For one thing, they scream whenever children are born. Some of them have Hong Kong action hair. They're difficult to spell. And for a monster this horrible, they're ridiculously underexposed.

I'm sure That Guy Skipp could recommend several short stories about penanggalan, but that's not my point. For me, the coolest monsters are the most unfamiliar. It's hard to take C'thulhu and the horrible realizations of man's universal insignificance you can see in his eye seriously when that eye keeps falling off your 13" C'thulhu Santa. The penanggalan is a weird, rare, disturbing monster that even if it could be classified a vampire, is not one you'd want to have sex with.