Today in our countdown to Christmas: a little more chat about the background to Whispers Beyond The Stars, the upcoming near-future gamebook inspired by the work of H P Lovecraft. Aspiring Cthulhu cultists can reserve their copy here. It's $35 for the hardcover + app or $15 for the app alone -- either way you get the PDF too. Why not treat yourself? After all, it's Christmas.

The Dragon Warriors RPG is set in a place called Legend*. But what is the world of Legend like? That was a question a new player in our campaign posed recently. One of the veteran gamers said, ‘All you need is to read the Vance short story “Liane the Wayfarer” and you have the whole thing – the humour, the vibe, the chances of success.’ That surprised me, flattering though the comparison is, as the Legend in my head (which is no more valid than any other, of course) is utterly unlike the Dying Earth. Blood Sword features a higher fantasy variant of DW's Legend, but it still doesn't come close to the flamboyantly fantastical world of Mazirian, Rhialto, Cugel and co. Much as I love Vance’s work, even the relatively restrained Lyonesse** is much more magic-drenched than most of Legend.

Pressed to come up with some sources to convey the flavour of Legend to a newcomer, I started out with movies like The Seventh Seal (Bergman), Dragon’s Return (Grečner), The Hour of the Pig (Megahey), and The Black Death (Smith). None of those looks exactly like Legend but there are elements I recognize. Richard Carpenter's Robin of Sherwood actively inspired me when writing DW, to the extent that Clannad’s ‘The Hooded Man’ was part of our Legend gaming soundtrack in the ‘80s. The show depicted the level of magic that I think people in Legend would believe in, as do Dragonslayer (Robbins) and The Northman (Eggers).

Not quite like Legend but still worth plundering for ideas are Hero (Platts-Mills), which is especially good for the malice and craftiness of the fays, Jabberwocky (Gilliam) for all the mud and shit, Flesh & Blood (Verhoeven) which is set three centuries too late for Legend but reminds us that it’s a time when for many life is nasty, brutish and short, and a claymation film called H (Simpson) to which Ian Livingstone introduced me and which is great for the hallucinatory madness of medieval religion and superstition; it's where the image at the top of the post comes from.

Further out still are a few movies I feel share some common ancestors with Legend. Excalibur (Boorman) and The Singing Ringing Tree (Stefani) are both absolutely shot through with epic fantasy but with a subtle core of folklore. Every time a DW mystic works their magic, you feel the Dragon’s tail give a twitch. Viy (Yershov & Kropachyov) is brimming with febrile fantasy and gloriously rough and dreamlike '60s special effects. I like King Lear (Brook) and Macbeth (Polanski) for flavour. And, surprising though it is to say it, Pillars of the Earth (Mimica-Gezzan) has something to offer to the Legend referee even if it’s only Ian McShane’s performance.

That’s movies. In other media I recommend Kingdom Come: Deliverance (Warhorse Studios) and Crécy (Ellis), both a century or two too late to really reflect Legend. And when it comes to novels, the Legend take on elves was definitely influenced by Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword and Michael Moorcock’s Silver Hand trilogy. They swiped it all from Scandinavian and Celtic myth, of course.

Talking of Celtic myth brings me at long last to the main point of this month’s post, which is to tell you about David H Keller’s Tales From Cornwall. Some of these were serialized in Weird Tales in 1929-1930 and again in the 1970s by Robert ‘Doc’ Lowndes in his Magazine of Horror, which is where I came across them. They’re in the genre of new folktales, establishing a fantasy history for Keller’s own Cornish ancestors. Here’s a taste:

The stories are slight, at times not quite making sense (they’re very authentically like a lot of Celtic myths in that way), but what I like are the atmosphere and the tone, especially in the Cecil stories that start with ‘The Battle of the Toads’. There’s a subtlety missing from most pulp fantasy too. At a time when most heroines have to be Bêlit the she-pirate, carousing and mixing it up just like the men, Keller’s strong women are clever enough to achieve their goals despite the constraints put on them by their society.

We don’t have the last five stories. If anyone happens to have access to Syracuse University library, they could pop in and read them, but it seems unlikely that they’ll get into wider circulation until at least 2036 (when Dr Keller’s work enters public domain). I just hope Syracuse University keeps the manuscript safe till then.

Still, we have the first ten stories and in them there’s a little bit of the DNA of Legend. Try them -- you’ll find that for century-old yarns they are surprisingly fresh in places, and despite lashings of fantasy it feels like they’re still on the ‘realist’ edge of that long misty border into Elfland.***

*But not by its inhabitants. That is, Legend is a non-diegetic term for the setting. If you ask a DW character they'll call it "the world" or "the middle world".

**There's a Lyonesse RPG of which I happen to be one of the writers.

***This entire post is an abbreviated version of one from my Patreon page. Come and join the fun, even if its only as a free member, and get the complete article and a lot more besides.

If you're a movie buff and you've played any of the Vulcanverse books, you can't have failed to notice my penchant for hommages. In The Hammer of the Sun the inspirations are mostly pretty obvious, from the skeleton warriors of Jason & the Argonauts to Eldon Tyrell's boardroom in Blade Runner -- but did you also spot the nod to Robert Eggers's The Lighthouse?

In Workshop of the Gods I should have made a list of the movies, TV shows, poems, short stories, comics and books referenced. There are so many I soon lost count. If you look closely you should be able to find the following:

• Blake's 7: "Orac" (Lorrimer, 1978)
• Breaking Bad: "ABQ" (Bernstein, 2009)
• B.P.R.D.: "The Soul of Venice" (Gunter, Oeming & Mignola; 2003)
• Dance of the Vampires (aka The Fearless Vampire Killers; Polanski, 1967)
• Dark City (Proyas, 1998)
• The Description of Greece: Book 6 (Pausanias, c.150 AD)
• Doctor Who: "The Edge of Destruction" (1964)
• Doctor Who: "Dalek" (2005)
• Don't Look Now (Roeg, 1973)
• The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (Lovecraft, 1927)
• The Eyes of the Overworld (Vance, 1966)
• Force of Evil (Polonsky, 1948; that's where the still above comes from)
• The Freshman (Bergman, 1990)
• Fury Road (Miller, 2015)
• The Iliad (Homer, c.750 BC)
• Inferno (Dante, c.1321; The Divine Comedy, Canto 26)
• Iron Man (Favreau, 2008)
• The King of Elfland's Daughter (Lord Dunsany, 1924)
• Land of the Pharaohs (Hawks, 1955)
• Murder, My Sweet (Dmytryk, 1944)
• Night of the Demon (Tourneur, 1957)
• On the Failure of Oracles (Plutarch, c.83 AD)
• The Revenant (Iñárritu, 2015)
• The Shadow (Mulcahy, 1994)
• Strange Tales #110 (Lee & Ditko, 1963)

For Legend games I’ve always liked taking a seed crystal of historical fact (or anecdote) and growing an adventure around that. When a friend of mine told me a story about Notker the Stammerer and a stolen relic, I had the basic set-up for “A Box of Old Bones” right then and there.

Real history offers plenty of inspirational snippets like that. How about these, taken from a review in The London Review of Books of Martyn Rady’s book The Habsburgs?

“Werner the Pious was the first fabricator in the family, forging a charter that confirmed him as the hereditary abbot of the local abbey (where the Emperor Karl’s heart rests today). But this was small potatoes compared to the heroic efforts of Rudolf the Founder, who had his scribes concoct five interlocking charters claiming that previous emperors had confirmed the Habsburgs as hereditary archdukes of Austria, bolstered by letters supposedly written by Julius Caesar and Nero.” 

“Cymburga, the Polish mother of Frederick III, renowned both for her beauty and for her ability to drive nails into planks with her bare fists; Frederick the Slothful, who travelled his realm with his own hen coops to save on buying eggs; the Habsburg knights who had to cut off their fashionable long toe-pieces when forced to fight the Swiss infantry on foot; Margaret of Parma, another illegitimate child of Charles V by a different serving wench, who grew and carefully trimmed a moustache to provide her with an air of authority when her father made her governor of the Low Countries.” 

“The slaughter of thirty thousand in the Lutheran stronghold of Magdeburg led to a new word being coined, ‘Magdeburgisierung’. Invaders bombarded cities with shells of poison gas, a fetching compound of arsenic and henbane. After the war, France and Germany signed the Strasburg Agreement of 1675, the first treaty to ban the use of chemical weapons.”

There are ideas for Legend there almost in whole cloth. But they’re trumped by another of Notker’s accounts which is pretty much a ready-to-run adventure:

“In one particularly bad crop year, a certain greedy bishop of Old Francia rejoiced that the people of his diocese were dying because he could sell the food from his storehouse to the survivors at exorbitant prices. Amidst this climate, a demon or spirit started haunting the workshop of a blacksmith, playing with the hammers and anvil by night, much like a poltergeist. The blacksmith attempted to protect his house and his family with the sign of the cross, but before he could, the demon [Notker describes it as ‘pilosus’, ie hairy] proposed an arrangement of mutual benefit: ‘My friend, if you do not stop me from playing in your workshop, bring your little pot here and you will find it full every day.’ The starving blacksmith, ‘fearing bodily deprivation more than the eternal damnation of the soul’, agreed to the demon’s proposition. The demon burgled the bishop’s storehouse repeatedly, filling the flask and leaving broken barrels to spill on the floor. 

“The bishop discovered the theft and concluded, based on the excessive waste, that it must be the work of a demon rather than a starving parishioner. So he protected the room with holy water and placed the sign of the cross on the barrels. The next morning, the guard of the bishop’s house found the demon trapped in the larder. It had entered during the night, but, because of the holy protections placed by the bishop, was unable to touch the stores nor exit again. Upon discovery, it assumed a human form. The guard subdued it and tied it up. It was brought to a public trial where it was publicly beaten (ad palam cesus). Between blows, it cried out: ‘Woe is me, woe is me, for I have lost my friend’s little pot!’ “

If we read that with a modern sceptical eye we can work out what had really happened, but the motif of the devil and the blacksmith is common in folklore, and the world of Legend is the Middle Ages as the people at the time believed it to be, not as it really was. That said, I doubt if any demon or goblin in my game would be quite so easy to deal with.

This is a repost of a piece on my Patreon page, proceeds for which will support the artwork (by Inigo Hartas; sneak peek at the top of this post) for the Jewelspider roleplaying game which is due for publication later this year.

When I'm writing a scenario for publication (such as this one) I'll sometimes cast the incidental NPC roles by saying which actor might play them. It's a shorthand way of conveying the idea of the character without having to describe their personality in the scenario.

My wife goes one further. When writing her novels she picks real faces that she can visualize as the characters. That could work when designing roleplaying scenarios too.

And a further evolution: Unreal Person lets you generate faces that don't exist. (The one above on the right really shouldn't.) Or you can use something like Nightcafe for non-modern images like this medieval apothecary:

You do have to let the art lead you where it will, though. There's not yet much hope of getting the AI to draw exactly what you want, as my experiments on the Mirabilis blog show. Still, the field of generative AI has reached escape velocity now. It's only a matter of time.

It’s the time of year for me to weigh in on a claim that’s causing controversy – not to deny that the claim if true would be outrageous, but to say that I remain unconvinced that it is true. And, in line with recent tradition, the outrage again involves a professor.

This time round it’s the turn of The X-Men, first published by Marvel in July 1963, though with a cover date of September because comics. The Doom Patrol debuted in the June issue (that is, April) of My Greatest Adventure, published by Marvel’s rival DC. The bone of contention is whether Stan Lee was influenced by (ie swiped from) Arnold Drake, the writer of Doom Patrol, in putting Professor Charles Xavier in a wheelchair like the Doom Patrol’s leader.

Drake shrugged it off for years as a coincidence, but after brooding on it for forty years he became convinced it was dirty pool on Stan’s part:

"I didn’t believe so in the beginning because the lead time was so short. Over the years I learned that an awful lot of writers and artists were working surreptitiously between [Marvel and DC]. Therefore from when I first brought the idea into [the DC editor’s] office, it would’ve been easy for someone to walk over and hear that this guy Drake is working on a story about a bunch of reluctant superheroes who are led by a man in a wheelchair. So over the years I began to feel that Stan had more lead time than I realized. He may well have had four, five or even six months."

Now, I’ll put my hand up to being a fan of Marvel from way back. I grew up on those stories. So you might want to take what I have to say with that in mind, but – was Drake completely nuts? First of all, Stan Lee was having to get out more than ten books a month, and he was doing almost all the writing single-handed. Sure, he had “the Marvel method” to help (plot first, then art, then write the script) but even so it’s unlikely he had much time to look through DC’s output, at that time upwards of thirty books a month. And even if Stan had been told about Doom Patrol in January 1963, he wouldn’t have had long to single out that one idea and work it into the new book he was planning with Jack Kirby.

OK, it is just possible an artist came across from DC (it was a 13 minute walk) and mentioned that DC was doing a try-out book with a super-team whose mentor was in a wheelchair. But was that really the standout detail worth swiping? Far more likely that Stan got the inspiration for Professor X from any number of brainy invalid scientists in 1950s sci-fi movies. And in any case there’s a strong story reason for Professor X being in a wheelchair. Stan loved irony, and this character is all about the power of the mind. He’s Nero Wolfe turned up to 11.

In the same year as the quote above, Drake also said:

"Stan Lee and I were working in the same vineyards, and if you do enough of that stuff, sooner or later, you will kind of look like you are imitating each other."

Well, that change of heart is interesting. Maybe Drake had taken a step back to think about where his own ideas came from. If there was any creative borrowing going on, more likely it was in the other direction. Why was Drake creating the Doom Patrol in the first place? Because he understood the appeal of the Fantastic Four. The FF’s first issue was November 1961 – only, you know the score, that means September, so it had been running for thirteen issues by the time Drake sat down and scratched his head about what could be done to counter this new and coming force in comics.

Drake saw that the FF frequently squabbled. And they got their powers from an accident – not mutants like the X-Men, notice. And the coolest members of the team were sort of freaks, the Thing especially. So it’s not much of a stretch (I’m not planning these puns, honest) to think of Robotman as the Thing, Negative Man as the Torch, Elasti-Girl (wait, what?) as Susan Storm and the Chief as Reed.

By 2000, Drake had convinced himself he originated all this:

“That was the thing that made Doom Patrol different, these people hated being superheroes. And they were a little bit self-pitying, just a little bit, and the chief was constantly telling them, ‘Stop crying in your beer.’ That made them something that wasn't around at the time.”

It wasn't around at the time? Really? What about Peter Parker? Ben Grimm? Bruce Banner? Tony Stark? So it’s a little bit rich that a few years later Drake was saying of Stan Lee, ‘He’d take credit for the King James Bible.’

All that said, it’s interesting that these days it’s hard to make a convincing movie about the Fantastic Four, and yet there were four seasons of a Doom Patrol TV show. I didn’t stick with it even for four episodes myself, but it actually feels more modern than the FF -- who were, after all, Stan Lee’s first attempt at making superheroes real and relatable and flawed. As the prototype, perhaps it’s not surprising that the FF have dated – and they were my own least favourite Marvel comic back in the Silver Age, their adventures being too cosmic and out there to appeal alongside the convincing contemporary lives of Tony Stark, Peter Parker, Matt Murdock, et al.

If you're interested in the full fascinating story of how Marvel overtook DC and revolutionized comic book storytelling, try Reed Tucker's book Slugfest and/or Adrian Mackinder's Stan Lee: How Marvel Changed The World.

During my time at the Lucca Comics & Games festival, quite a few people came up and said how much my work meant to them. That's always really lovely to hear. You write to make a connection, hoping that what you do will inspire others. But I always point out to fans that I'm a fan too. There are writers who inspired me (Terry Nation, Stan Lee, Michael Moorcock, Roy Thomas, Robert E Howard, Gene Roddenberry, and many others) and they had writers who inspired them. It's a torch we're passing along.

And because writers are fans as well, I was delighted to come full circle and appear in the December issue of Doctor Who Magazine not as Dave Morris, aspiring Dalek scriptwriter, but as David Morris, my six-year-old self, geeking out over a set visit to watch the rehearsal of "The Brink of Disaster". I won't spoil it with any details here, except to say that it followed a few weeks after my dad took me to meet a real-life Dalek.

This is issue #584 of Doctor Who Magazine. That's pretty impressive, especially for a monthly. It's a show that has inspired generations of sci-fi enthusiasts. Whether you write, read or only watch, those enthusiasms are what make life worth living, so let's celebrate such treasures of the imagination -- and keep passing on the torch.