by Moreau Vazh

Where The Work Happens

I have been reading Michael J. White’s Tabletop RPG Design in Theory and Practice at the Forge, 2001–2012 and while I initially approached it as a book to be reviewed, its structure makes that difficult. White presents material rather than arguments, and the result is less a finished history than a collection of notes toward one.

What struck me, reading it, was not simply what it documents, but how differently that period now tends to be remembered. The book can be read as part of the first draft of a history of 21st-century role-playing games, and in doing so it highlights a gap between the historical record and the popular understanding of that period.

I have argued before that the TTRPG hobby has a remarkably short memory, but reading White’s book made me realise that either I have been using RPG materials in a highly idiosyncratic manner, or the 2000s marked a shift in how the hobby approached differences in preferred styles of play: from something managed in real time at the table to something avoided through the alignment of system and players.

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by Moreau Vazh

Field Report: Crossroads, Issue 1

Field Report is an infrequent series tracing physical zines that move in the same circles as this blog: Folk Horror, Forteana, Weird History, and Occultism. It takes the place of my earlier Zine Corner series. The rest of the series can be found here.

VIBE:

A confident and ambitious first issue that approaches American Folk Horror as something still in the process of being defined. Though it begins by trying to justify that project in abstract terms, it soon comes alive through its examples, moving across film, folklore, and history. The result is not only stimulating but energising. This is the kind of zine that makes you want to be part of the conversation it is trying to build.

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by Moreau Vazh

A Poe anthology by Thomas Ligotti


Canon Fodder is an occasional series in which I write about classic works of horror fiction. This particular part of the series is devoted to the complete published works of Thomas Ligotti which I will slowly be working my way through.

Thomas Ligotti’s reworkings of Edgar Allan Poe do more than pay homage; they expose a fundamental difference in how both writers understand horror. Where Poe constructs meticulously controlled stories that generate dread through ambiguity, Ligotti returns to those same narratives and strips that ambiguity away, insisting that the horror is not psychological or symbolic but structural and inescapable. By revisiting “William Wilson”, “Ligeia”, and “The Fall of the House of Usher”, Ligotti transforms Poe’s carefully unresolved effects into expressions of a single, underlying system, one that governs not just his characters, but everyone.

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by Moreau Vazh

REVIEW: The Fisherman by John Langan

First published in 2016, John Langan’s The Fisherman won the Bram Stoker Award and has since become a staple recommendation for readers interested in Lovecraftian horror.

One of the defining characteristics of Lovecraftian horror is its portability. Lovecraft developed a set of images and tropes that are not only instantly recognisable but also applicable to a broad range of story-types. For example, Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country used those images to explore the experience of living in a country so profoundly racist that instances of petty bigotry and systematic mistreatment combine to create a pressure so intense as to be almost existential in character. Conversely, in Minions & Monsters, Lovecraft’s most famous creation Cthulhu appears as a faintly comic grump who serves as agent to monsters looking to get hired by Hollywood.

Having long since reached the point of pop-cultural saturation, the tropes and trappings of Lovecraftian horror are no longer in and of themselves frightening. Their power lies in the willingness of authors to use them to express something deeper and more personal, which brings us back to The Fisherman.

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by Moreau Vazh

Advancement and the Twisted Saints of West Somerset

I have of late been trying to navigate a path between three somewhat incompatible pressures in my gaming life: my group’s desire to play a fantasy sandbox, the knowledge that while the broader TTRPG hobby offers a number of easily accessible styles compatible with that mode of play I don’t get on with most of them, and the fact that I have been playing RPGs for a long time and have my own habits when it comes to building worlds, preparing sessions, and running games.

One of those habits is a preference for setting games where I live. Writing what you know may be a cliché, but basing things in your local area is a good excuse to immerse yourself in local history, a reliable source of the small details that make fictional worlds feel lived-in, and a generally enjoyable process in its own right. You get to twist your immediate environment, and your players get to see familiar places filtered through that distortion.

My current campaign is set in West Somerset. It began in an Elizabethan frame as a rejoinder to a game I ran last year, but in-world events led the group back into an alternate history in which I placed my take on Keep on the Borderlands. I had intended to finish that adventure and return to the earlier period, but the group have settled into this version of the setting and so I have decided to let it run, pushing them out from Taunton towards the Exmoor littoral.

Given that the campaign now seems likely to linger in this space, I have found myself wanting a little more mechanical infrastructure and, in particular, a clearer sense of how characters change over time. For reasons I will unpack below, this has led me towards a series of “advancement paths” inspired by Celtic and Anglo-Saxon saints associated with this part of the country.

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by Moreau Vazh

On “The Man of Stone” by Hazel Heald and H.P. Lovecraft


Canon Fodder is an ongoing series in which I return to authors and bodies of work over time, reading them closely and piece by piece. This essay forms part of the Lovecraft strand; a chronological index of my Lovecraft writing can be found here. Other Canon Fodder posts can also be browsed via the series category.

What happens when Lovecraft’s cosmic machinery is dropped into something as lurid and domestic as a tale of jealousy and revenge? “The Man of Stone”, his early collaboration with Hazel Heald, is a slight and often silly story, but it reveals something far more interesting than its plot. In stripping Lovecraft’s ideas from their usual structures and embedding them in melodrama, the story exposes how easily his obsessions can be separated from their original context and made to function elsewhere. Rather than a late development of his posthumous fame, this portability may have begun much earlier, at the point where collaboration and financial necessity started to loosen his control over his own work.

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by Moreau Vazh

REVIEW: Hard Light by Elizabeth Hand

The early novels in Elizabeth Hand’s series about punk photographer and professional self-saboteur Cass Neary are defined by a tension between psychological excavation and narrative propulsion. What began as a dense, literary exploration of a washed-up photographer confronting the corrosive nature of artistic genius edged closer to crime fiction as the series expanded outward, from a collapsed New England commune to the ruins of the Norwegian black metal scene. Neary made her name photographing punks and junkies at the moment of their deaths and continues to stumble over dead bodies with camera in hand.

Significantly longer than its predecessors, Hard Light expands the series’ field of view. Now dodging police across multiple countries, Neary arrives in London, allowing Hand to turn her attention to the legacy of the swinging sixties. Where the earlier novels focused on artistic damage within specific scenes, Hard Light roots itself in history and geography. London emerges as a place where past cultural movements persist in altered form, flattened, repackaged, and put to work. This is a novel about how trauma and creativity move through time, embedding themselves as much in spaces as in people.

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by Moreau Vazh

Field Report: The Ink that Bleeds


Field Report is an infrequent series tracing physical zines that move in the same circles as this blog: Folk Horror, Weird History, Occultism, Criticism, and RPGs. It takes the place of my earlier Zine Corner series. The rest of the series can be found here.

VIBE:

A brief and attractively produced zine that claims to explain immersive journaling games but reads more like the notes of someone lost deep within their own creative process. Its ideas about creativity, the unconscious, and emotional immersion are intriguing but rarely clarified. Rather than offering concrete recommendations or clear explanations, the author wanders between eerie candour and spiritual exegesis, leaving the reader to puzzle out both the method and its appeal.

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by Moreau Vazh

On Shut-Ins by Thomas Ligotti


Canon Fodder is an occasional series in which I write about classic works of horror fiction. This particular part of the series is devoted to the complete published works of Thomas Ligotti which I will slowly be working my way through.

The “Shut-Ins” section of The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein deepens Ligotti’s growing critique of existence as a self-perpetuating system. Building on earlier stories about immortality and genius, these tales present characters who seem perpetually on the verge of escape yet only move deeper into structures that sustain themselves through their suffering. In both “The Ever-Vigilant Guardians of Secluded Estates” and “The Scream: From 1800 to the Present”, the promise of change or liberation proves illusory. Ligotti’s bleak suggestion is that there may be no outside of the system at all, and that the only true exit lies beyond existence itself.

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by Moreau Vazh

TR: The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971)


Things Resurface is an occasional series in which I write films and TV series from in and around the ‘Folk Horror’ genre. While the spine of this series comes from the Severin films’ ‘All The Haunts Be Ours’ box-sets, it will also venture further afield. The other posts in this series can be found here.

The Blood on Satan’s Claw is often treated as one of the central works of cinematic folk horror, but its politics are far stranger than the label suggests. Originally conceived as a horror anthology before being reshaped into a single narrative, Piers Haggard’s film is driven by a queasy tension between fascination and disgust. As a rural community descends into a cult of sexual awakening and demonic ritual, the village elders move to crush it with violence and fire. Yet the film frames both rebellion and repression in unsettling terms. Through Dick Bush’s meticulously layered cinematography and a narrative steeped in generational anxiety, The Blood on Satan’s Claw emerges not as a simple warning about pagan excess, but as a portrait of a society so uneasy about change that it can only oscillate between hysteria and control.

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by Moreau Vazh

Yearnor Wood: Access and Use


Strange Ground is an occasional series about particular places and the ways they resist easy explanation. Some pieces approach landscapes through history and reputation; others are closer to field reports, written from within the site itself. Rather than smoothing these perspectives into a single account, the series lets their contradictions stand. You can find the rest of the pieces collected here.

We are at the point on the Somerset coast where Exmoor hurls itself into the sea. Scattered between expanding salt marshes and Exmoor’s looming upland is a smear of villages whose smaller settlements take their names from the first town: Porlock, but West. Porlock, but also a Weir.

Porlock Weir was named for its gated harbour. Designed to protect local boats from the Bristol Channel’s extreme tidal range, it now draws mostly tourists. Buses pull up and the gates close to allow more direct access to the beach. I use an app to buy parking and it starts a countdown on my phone.

There has always been a means of getting from Porlock Weir to what is said to be the smallest parish church in the country but the route was first formalised and then expanded into a network of pathways carved out by locals hired by wealthy landowners to provide employment in the economic aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. Fear of invasion once prompted attempts to turn the marsh into arable land until a catastrophic breach of the shingle wall in 1997 saw a radical change of policy. Fossilised trees now stand in the marsh and abandoned barns lean into the wind. Salt water visits the fields too often now. Today’s councils speak of managed retreat and encourage tourists to explore. Local conservation groups smile on social media as they pose before rebuilt wooden walkways. Next year two more will need replacing.

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by Moreau Vazh

On “The Dreams in the Witch House” by H.P. Lovecraft


Canon Fodder is an ongoing series in which I return to authors and bodies of work over time, reading them closely and piece by piece. This essay forms part of the Lovecraft strand; a chronological index of my Lovecraft writing can be found here. Other Canon Fodder posts can also be browsed via the series category.

Written at a low point in Lovecraft’s career and dismissed by some of his closest collaborators as a failure, “The Dreams in the Witch House” has long divided readers. This essay argues that its apparent incoherence is not a flaw but a breakthrough: a deliberate rendering of madness from the inside out. Blending biography, close reading, and literary context, I explore how the story’s warped geometries, restless prose, and collapsing dream logic reflect a writer turning inward, away from cosmic spectacle and toward the instability of perception itself. Far from a misstep, “Witch House” may be one of Lovecraft’s most modern and unsettling achievements.

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by Moreau Vazh

REVIEW: Available Dark by Elizabeth Hand

Originally published in 2012, Available Dark is a direct sequel to Generation Loss and the second book in Elizabeth Hand’s series of novels about Cass Neary, a psychologically damaged and drug-addled bisexual disaster-punk who also happens to be a lapsed photographic genius.

Despite being marketed as a work of crime fiction, Generation Loss wound up treating murder as little more than set-dressing in a decidedly literary novel that was primarily interested in exploring character psychology and the idea that artistic genius is a viral form of psychological damage.

As dense in ideas as it was in atmosphere, Generation Loss seemed almost resistant to continuation, its worldview too heavy to support the machinery of a crime series. Hand’s solution was to pull back from psychological excavation and steer the series toward the cleaner lines of crime fiction and the literary fantasy that first defined her career. The emphasis shifts and the density thins, but the ideas articulated in Generation Loss continue to shape what follows.

Available Dark is undoubtedly a lighter and more conventionally structured novel than the work that precedes it, but while its bones may be less dense, its flesh remains strong, not only by Hand’s deepening portrait of Neary herself but also by the decision to broaden the series’ examination of artistic genius by moving from art photography to Norwegian black metal. What does damaged genius look like when it lands in suburban Iceland rather than a decaying hippie commune? What does damaged genius look like when expressed through Nordic folklore?

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by Moreau Vazh

Field Report: AmberZine, Issue 1

Field Report is an infrequent series tracing physical zines that move in the same circles as this blog: Folk Horror, Forteana, Weird History, and Occultism. It takes the place of my earlier Zine Corner series. The rest of the series can be found here.

VIBE:

Long out of print and born in the pre-PDF era, the AmberZines represent a path less travelled in RPG publishing. Rather than offering new rules or optional mechanics, they functioned as an early experiment in documenting play itself. A platform for gamers to reinterpret canon, chronicle their campaigns, and treat the act of play as the primary text.

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by Moreau Vazh

On Loners by Thomas Ligotti

Canon Fodder is an occasional series in which I write about classic works of horror fiction. This particular part of the series is devoted to the complete published works of Thomas Ligotti which I will slowly be working my way through.

In the “Loners” section of The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein & Other Gothic Tales, Thomas Ligotti turns away from inherited monsters and toward a more intimate horror: the collapse of self-authored identity. A schoolmaster waits in vain for a vampire who may never have come; a playwright fashions the perfect companion only to discover that she is nothing more than his reflection. In both cases, fantasy does not liberate but encloses, and when the sustaining fiction gives way, what unravels is not romance but the self itself. These are not tales of temptation or rejection, but of isolation so complete that imagination produces only mirrors… and when those mirrors crack, there is nothing beyond them to fall into.

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by Moreau Vazh

TR: The Dreaming (1988)


Things Resurface is an occasional series in which I write films and TV series from in and around the ‘Folk Horror’ genre. While the spine of this series comes from the Severin films’ ‘All The Haunts Be Ours’ box-sets, it will also venture further afield. The other posts in this series can be found here.

A helicopter, a sealed chamber, a massacre unearthed, and a silence that lingers. The Dreaming wants to confront colonial violence, yet turns its gaze inward, toward the uneasy consciences of its descendants. Caught between haunting and history, the film reveals the real horror may not be possession, but inheritance.

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by Moreau Vazh

REVIEW: Strange Houses (2025) by Uketsu

First published in 2021, Strange Houses is the debut novel of a Japanese YouTuber who goes only by the name of Uketsu. His videos (primarily in Japanese, though increasingly translated into English) often revolve around mysterious and ambiguous objects, which Uketsu presents to his audience while wearing a black body-stocking and a papier-mâché mask.

Speaking through a voice-changer that introduces a deliberate gap between what we see and what we hear, Uketsu typically frames these found objects as uncanny in one register before manipulating them to reveal a second, deeper strangeness. The videos are great fun, and it is easy to see why they are so popular.

As Uketsu’s audience grew, this success expanded into other forms: a series of novels, followed by manga adaptations and, eventually, a film. Strange Houses was his first novel and the work initially targeted for adaptation. However, it proved significantly less popular than his second novel, Strange Pictures, which was the first to be translated into English and is often treated as the opening entry in what has since become an ongoing series of three books.

I mention the character of Uketsu’s online activity and the fact that this was his first novel not merely to set the stage, but also to provide a degree of explanation. While Strange Houses is a formally unusual and visually interesting attempt at a mystery novel, it is plagued by technical missteps which weaken it to the point of distraction. These problems make considerably more sense once it becomes clear that the book was produced by someone whose dominant areas of expertise are visual and conversational rather than literary. Strange Houses is an interesting book, but I would struggle to call it a good one.

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by Moreau Vazh

On “The Trap” by Henry S. Whitehead and H.P. Lovecraft

Canon Fodder is an ongoing series in which I return to authors and bodies of work over time, reading them closely and piece by piece. This essay forms part of the Lovecraft strand; a chronological index of my Lovecraft writing can be found here. Other Canon Fodder posts can also be browsed via the series category.

Written during H. P. Lovecraft’s 1931 visit to his friend Henry S. Whitehead, “The Trap” is a curious and quietly revealing collaboration: a story that neither man would likely have written alone. Part occult detective tale, part metaphysical thought-experiment, it centres on a vanished schoolboy and an antique mirror whose horror lies not in spectacle but in stasis… an eternity without sensation, change, or agency. Light on dread but rich in ideas, the story’s real interest lies in its seams: the shift from dialogue to exposition, the crossing of genre boundaries, and the glimpse it offers into Lovecraft’s emerging fascination with abstract imprisonment, an idea he would soon revisit, more forcefully, in “The Dreams in the Witch House”.

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by Moreau Vazh

The Borderlands, Unsettled

I am currently running a hacked Cairn campaign set in the Tudor period and my group recently decided to step off the edge of the map, forcing me to come up with a load of new material at quite short notice.

The campaign is set in Elizabethan West Somerset and the idea behind the campaign was to produce a game that was about moving through social hierarchies and obligations in much the same way as modern OSR games are about movement through space and land. The group became ensnared in a pushing match between an ultra-Protestant faction working out of the town of Taunton and a large Catholic family who remained loyal to the Crown after the ascent of Elizabeth to the throne. Hoping to provoke a reaction from the Catholics, the ‘Good Folk’ of Taunton bank-rolled a group of Protestant wizards who named themselves the Red Hand of Dunster and set about waging economic warfare on the Catholic family’s estate.

The characters wandered into the middle of all this and wound up dealing with the wizards resulting in the discovery of a magical portal, which had been used to summon monsters. Rather than closing the portal as I had been expecting, the players spent a couple of sessions prodding it before finally deciding to build themselves a set of diving helmets and cross the portal’s event horizon despite my having no plans as to what might have been on the other side.

I would have liked to just drop my group into an existing Cairn module but I struggle with modern OSR adventures as they are often whimsical in tone and heavily-procedural in play. Having had a good deal of success with dropping Ravenloft into the opening salvo of my campaign, I decided to repeat the experiment with another classic TSR-era module: Gary Gygax’s The Keep on the Borderlands.

This is a piece about how I relate to published materials and how I approached adapting one of the most storied (and problematic) D&D modules of all time.

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by Moreau Vazh

Mineral Line Incline: Access and Use

Strange Ground is an occasional series about particular places and the ways they resist easy explanation. Some pieces approach landscapes through history and reputation; others are closer to field reports, written from within the site itself. Rather than smoothing these perspectives into a single account, the series lets their contradictions stand. You can find the rest of the pieces collected here.

Like many of the roads criss-crossing the Somerset hills, this one appears to have started out as a holloway. Layers of flinty sediment rise up from the road before they ever meet a dry-stone wall. On both sides, rows of trees that may once have been hedges now grow so densely that even without leaves they blot out the sun. It is dark by mid-afternoon. I brake sharply so as not to miss the narrow parking space.

The road is fast and busy. Mud-caked trucks tear past, bullying smaller vehicles into verge and ditch. Things still move quickly here. They are simply not stopping.

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