An Inner Darkness Kickstarter: Last Chance!

Hey gang, Oscar Rios, Brian Sammons and Golden Goblin Press have put together another winning Lovecraftian anthology, An Inner Darkness, centered around social injustice in the 1920’s with a dash of cosmic dread. My own offering, By Unknown Hands, sees an unscrupulous conman murdering Osage Indians for their oil headrights in Oklahoma. He gets more than he bargained for when he targets a reclusive Osage woman….the anthology is a mere eight hundred bucks away from happening, so if you’re reading this, head over here and kick a buck as we’re in the final two hours.

————————————————————–

Here’s a taste of By Unknown Hands….

I never set out to kill no Indians. It was just something I fell into.

After the war, I came back to Tulsa County to find my old maw dead and gone, and our Sooner land sold off to the oil company. I don’t know who they paid for it, but it wasn’t me. The house was just gone, which explains why none of my letters were ever answered.

I worked for a while as a wildcatter, but that got to feeling too much like being back in the Army. Most jobs did, when you got right down to it. I had brought home a deep unease with me that I just couldn’t shed. Thunder made me jump inside, and open spaces made me fret. I had little patience for men, women, and beasts. Though I had cropped my hair short since I was a boy, it was like somehow they could smell the Indian in me. Maybe it was all that sun from working outside. I left a lot of them bleeding.

In late summer ’21 I drifted west, headed for California, but got tripped up by the Osage Hills and wound up on a ranch on the west edge of the big Indian reservation, manning a 500 gallon copper still for a fellow named Henry Grammer, the world steer roping champion and the biggest bootlegger around.

There were some rough customers among Grammer’s bunch, many who had been bank and train robbers in their day.

One of them, a wind-burned older fellow with nickel blue eyes and an easy manner named Casey Matheson approached me one day while I sat smoking under the blackjack.

“Where are you from, boy?” he asked.

“Berryhill,” I answered, “and leave out that ‘boy’ talk.”

There was threat in that, but he didn’t seem to mind.

“You ain’t no moonshiner,” he went on. “What’d you do before?”

“All kinds of things.”

“You was in the Army though.”

“How’d you know that?”

“You just got that look about you. Makin’ shine don’t fit your pistol, does it?”

“Nothing much does anymore,” I said, tossing my butt away.

“I bet you don’t like sleepin’ in that bunkhouse neither.”

All Grammer’s employees slept in the ranch bunkhouse off the main house, cowboy and moonshiner alike. It was drafty, and the Negro handyman was stingy with caulk, boards, and nails.

“You see that car over there?” Casey said, pointing to a grey Bearcat I had seen about the place once in a while. “That’s a thirty nine hundred dollar automobile, and I got it for a day’s work.”

“Running shine?”

He laughed.

“Hell no. Killin’ Indians.”

He watched me for a minute, gauging my reaction. I tensed for a fight, but said nothing.

“You know how to drive?” he asked.

I did.

“You wanna take a ride?”

It beat squatting over the still.

My hands shuddered on the wheel till we left the gravel drive behind and hit the pavement. I opened her up and whipped those 6-cylinders to galloping, leaving the blackjack hills behind. I hadn’t moved this fast in years. The wind blew over me, roaring in my ears, and those big empty plains of bluestem and spiderwort flew past. I lost my hat, but I didn’t care.

After a bit, Casey waved for me to pull over so he could be heard.

He lit a cigarette, offered me one. I saw he was missing the last two fingers on his left hand.

“Meanin’ no offense, but you got some Indian in you, don’t you?”

I took the cigarette, stared at him. I had a great-grandfather on my mother’s side who was Choctaw.

“Berryhill,” the old man mused, when I didn’t say anything. “What’re you? Quarter Cherokee?”

“Eighth Choc,” I allowed, waiting to see if I’d have to lay him out.

He nodded and waved his cigarette across the big empty prairie, trailing smoke.

“We’re on the Osage reservation now. You notice anything?”

I put my foot on the running board and looked. I could see far, to the towns northeast; to Fairfax and Grey Horse. In between were clunking derricks, laboring like giant metal picks rising and falling on the earth.

“Just oil.”

“That’s right,” said Casey, grinning. “That’s sharp. Most folks’d say ‘nothing.’ Government shuffled these Indians around, stuck ‘em on the barest, rockiest patch of nothing they could find. Only they didn’t figure on what was underneath it. Devil’s tar. Lakes and lakes of it. The Underground Reservation. And the lawyers fixed it so every full-blooded member of the Osage tribe got headrights. Six hundred and fifty seven acres, every man, woman, and child, and mineral rights for leasin’ to the oil companies.” He spat. “Devil must’ve been runnin’ the government back then. Come on, Buckwheat, let’s go into Pawhuska. I wanna show you something….”

An Update: I just got word that this project funded! Thanks to all who supported it. I’ll have a link up to the actual anthology as soon as it becomes available, so watch this space. Ia! Ia!

My First Call of Cthulhu Game

Last night I finally had the opportunity to play a game of Chaosium’s renowned Call of Cthulhu RPG in a really unique and appropriate space, The HP Lovecraft Historical Society’s headquarters over in Glendale.

Chaosium provided Sean Branney with a sneak peak at a forthcoming module, and we got to play test.

I’ve played Dark Conspiracy, Palladium’s Rifts, Vampire, HERO, Cyberpunk, and D&D from 1st-5th edition (skipping 4th), and though I’ve even managed to write fiction for Chaosium a few times, somehow over the years Call of Cthulhu the game has always eluded me. Just never been in the vicinity of a group that plays (and haven’t yet attempted playing online).

I armed myself with Seth Skorkowsky’s CoC video primers on Youtube , got a general grasp of skill checks and game flow, and headed out to Glendale.

First, if you’ve never been to visit HPLHS’ HQ, I gotta say outside of Providence it has to be a minor mecca of all things Lovecraftian for HP-heads on the West Coast. Besides a shopfront of their movies, radio plays, t-shirts, and astounding props, the right half of the room is dominated by a reference library that might have been salvaged from The Church of The Starry Wisdom’s attic – not just collections of old HP (though I spied some bagged Weird Tales up there), but a lot of primary period references and neat occult editions.  Sean showed us a particularly cool new two volume set of John Dee’s angelic writings collected fairly recently by Kevin Klein (not the actor) that had me envious.  I noticed a couple of books I had, and LOT I wish I had.

The shelves were also adorned with props from the society’s film adaptations, the Mi-Go puppet and contraptions, and the library sign from (I believe) Whisperer In Darkness. For me the big thrill was getting to play my inaugural game under the deep set eyes of the Cthulhu puppet from their silent masterpiece Call of Cthulhu (the virtues of which I have previously extolled here).

Anyway, I don’t want to go too much into detail of the actual module and gameplay session as I don’t want to spoil anything, but I decided to stretch my RPG chops (well, a stretch for a guy whose characters usually consist of fast talking thieves and bashy Howardian Barbarians) and played a nervous ex-Catholic nun having a crisis of faith, and man, I had an absolute blast. I’m used to a lot of dice rolling and combat, more story-lite fair, and CoC proved to be a refreshing alternative, heavy on the roleplay and deduction. None of the investigators ever even got into a combat situation at all (though we were told we had taken ourselves to the edge of mayhem by the time we broke at 11 o’clock), yet I still found the gameplay riveting.

Sean made the whole thing a great experience. I don’t know his background but from his NPC’s, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s encountered a lot of rural Midwest types in his day – and if he hasn’t, well, he’s a helluva gamemaster. Ah, he’s a helluva gamemaster anyway.\

So, thanks to the HPHLS and Chaosium for the unique opportunity. I came away with a very positive impression. Hope to return soon and finish out Sister Mary’s investigation, and generally play more Call of Cthulhu in the future.

Emergence (featuring Perennial) from Ragnarok Publications

An ancient trigger gene buried deep in humanity’s DNA is sporadically activating, evolving select humans into something superhuman. Influenced by comic-book culture, many of these ‘chimerics,’ as they have been dubbed, have taken on costumes and adopted codenames. Organizations have risen up to either train, exploit, or police chimerics, and the world is at odds about their very existence. Emergence collects eight tales, each with a unique perspective on what it might be like to be superhuman in today’s day and age.

In Perennial, teen heartthrob Jim Cutlass, young star of the popular Peter Pan-inspired TV show Peter ‘N Wendy, arrives on set having discovered the existence of an insidious ring of Hillywood power players routinely sexually abusing his underage costars. Intending to confront the show’s producer, he is instead caught up in a planted explosion which kills the entire cast and crew…..except him. Cutlass’ latent supergene activates to protect him, and he finds himself imbued with the powers of his famous alter ego. Presumed dead, he goes underground for years, assuming the mantle of Pan and operating from the shadows to root out and bring to justice purveyors of child exploitation wherever it occurs.

When a destructive supervillain attacks downtown La Futura and Pan is the only hero around to stop him, Cutlass, physically unchanged from his days as a teen actor, finds himself thrust unwillingly into the spotlight, setting off a storm of controversy in the media as the apparently the world’s first superpowered child.  He also attracts the attention of enemies he didn’t even know he had…..

Pan of Perennial began ten years ago as a character in a PBEM (that’s Play By E-mail – basically a turn-based roleplaying game entirely text-based) game that included one World Fantasy Award winning author and an ENnie Award winning game designer (still waiting for all that greatness to rub off on me) and a slew of other talented guys, and seriously kept me from losing my mind while doing hard time in an office cube at the most miserable job I’ve ever worked. In fact, a major sequence toward the end is directly inspired by a scenario that came up in it, which lends credence to my claim that RPGing is one of the best leisurely exercises a writer can participate in. Seriously, I came up with more story concepts gaming than I ever go out of two years of college writing courses. Merkabah Rider’s setting was first fleshed out in this very same PBEM group.

I’ve always been a big fan of James Barrie’s novel, and I had just read Kensington Gardens when the idea of a Peter Pan themed superhero who couldn’t age came into my mind. After the game ended I kept the idea simmering on a back burner for a decade, adding little bits to it over the years in light of Andrew Birkin’s JM Barrie’s Lost Boys and Amy J. Berg’s documentary on Hollywood’s history of child actor abuse, An Open Secret.

I also befriended comic book artist Geof Darrow, and through him, learned of author Andrew Vachss and the HERO Rescue Corps, an organization of military veterans who specialize in protecting exploited children and pursuing their abusers. Reading into the doings of the HERO Rescue Corps are what finally caused the plot of Perennial to coalesce.

Helping to develop the shared world of Humanity 2.0’s been pretty satisfying and I hope Perennial does its share in bringing Ragnarok’s shared universe to the public eye. I also encourage you to look further into the efforts of HERO.

__________________________________________________________

“For those just tuning in, the death toll in the rampage across southern La Futura now stands confirmed at ninety five,” the anchorman said, shuffling papers and pressing his index finger to his ear. “Reports say it began when an unidentified man collapsed in front of Federal Station thirty minutes ago.  We now know this man to be the Alpha-level chimeric Lance Lattimer, a former Wall Street futures trader better known by his psychotic and violent alter-ego, Tantrum, which manifested during Lattimer’s attempted suicide leap from the roof of the New York Stock Exchange three years ago. During that initial outbreak, Tantrum left over two hundred New Yorkers dead by his psychokinetic powers.  Our correspondent Patty Park is live from the scene in Chinatown this evening. Patty?”

Patty Park crouched behind a police barricade of scurrying SWAT, strands of her black hair strewn half across her face, the light from her cameraman making her dark eyes shine like those of a terrified animal facing down a roaring Peterbilt.

“Mitch, historic Coronel Street Market was destroyed in the first few moments of Tantrum’s attack. We don’t know how many people lie buried in the rubble at this point. He’s moving up Hill Street in the direction of Roger Stadium. We’re right in his path. The police are attempting to rally with two armored cars from the Bulwark Division Station.”

“Patty, what about superhuman response?” Mitch asked.

An explosion caused Patty and the police in the background to duck down instinctively, and a fine white powdery mist descended on them, dusting them like a layer of sugar.

“Still no word from TCA hero A-Frame. He departed the charity ball he was attending up north in Port Haven with The Brown Thrasher and Pecos as soon as word reached them, but it could be up to an hour before they arrive and…”

“What about the LFPD’s new P.O.N.E. unit?”

“Word is they’re stuck in traffic on the southbound 504. You know, none of them are fliers, so…”

Two ugly, dark armored vehicles with mounted battering rams rumbled past the camera and Patty spun, gesturing frantically for the camera to follow their progress as the cops cheered them on.

“Get this! Get this!” she shouted.

The camera swung to track them as they tore down the deserted street. Hill Avenue cutting through Chinatown was part of the annual Chinese New Year parade route. Everybody was used to seeing it littered with those paper cap wrappers and the remnants of streamers and red firecracker bricks, but not rubble. The numerous businesses, eateries, warehouses, and junk shops selling battery powered waving cats, cheap Japanese swords and lacquered chopsticks to the undiscerning tourists south of University Street had simply ceased to exist. It looked like Hiroshima. Broken glass littered the streets, and here and there red, vaguely human shaped splotches that were all that remained of the people who had run screaming from the leveled buildings blossomed on the pavement like Banksy-style street art. The block was flattened. Water from orphaned pipes spewed into the air, and plumes of black smoke spread across the dark sky.

In the center of it, advancing up the street, floating lazily ten feet in the air and slowly turning, was Tantrum. Bright, devil red, a huge, distended cranium filigreed with thick pulsing veins like a Telosian on Star Trek. Besides the huge bald head, he looked exactly like a weirdly floating buck naked infant, an evil version of the benevolent Star Child of Arthur C. Clarke, constantly wailing, screaming, a high, inhuman shriek.

And wherever that scream was directed, the masonry of buildings scattered, and flesh and muscle flew from the bones of unfortunate bystanders, until their skeletons collapsed and blew away to powder and ash.

Case in point, the two armored cars barreling at full speed towards the frightful enfant terrible.

The noise of the engines, or maybe the flash of their headlights, caught Tantrum’s attention immediately and he looked at them and screamed, little dimpled fists trembling before his downturned, scowling face.

The pulse of psychic energy that emanated from that tremendous brain was visible as a heatwave distortion. As soon as the bar of the energy tide struck the two vehicles, the armor shed from them like sheep’s wool before the shears. The chassis and engine exposed, the bolts fastening them together hung suspended in the air for a moment before the whole affair clattered to pieces. It happened too quickly for the crews inside to scream. Their deaths were instantaneous, but terrible, and even the practiced hand of the cameraman flinched from the sight and returned to record Patty Park’s horrified reaction as a second fine mist rained down on her and the cops around her. This one dotted her skin and raincoat scarlet.

She wheeled aghast at the camera, tears mixing with the blood running down her cheeks.

“Oh my God! Oh my God!”

The camera cut back to Mitch Brenner manicured and coiffed safely in the studio, hand to his mouth in mock concern.

“Patty. Are you alright?” he asked stupidly.

“What’s that?”

The feed cut instantly back to blood soaked Patty as she pushed the camera physically back toward the hellish Tantrum.

“Shoot, Bobby! Shoot!” she urged.

A figure descended quickly out of the sky. Small. Slight. No more than a child, really. The police spotlights caught the green of his strange costume. He was dressed like a masked Christmas elf, with a belted green leather tunic and gauntlets, some kind of green bodysuit, and a peaked, Robin Hood-style cowl. His appearance would’ve been ridiculous if it hadn’t been so unexpected.

“Hey, kid!” the newcomer shouted in a shrill pre-teen’s voice, as he stomped a heavy manhole cover with one foot, sending it spinning in the air. He caught it one hand and cocked it back like a Frisbee.

Tantrum revolved in place to face him, turning his destructive power from the barricade and from Patty Park and her crew.

The kid in green sent the manhole spinning. It collided with Tantrum’s forehead and the killer infant went flying head over heels, smashing through the front window of a Chinese restaurant.

“Get the hell out of here!” the kid yelled directly at the cops as the camera zoomed in tight on his beardless face, on the blue eyes flashing through the holes of his pointed cowl.

On his couch, in his home in Mogera Hills, Nico Tinkham sat bolt upright, knocking over his bowl of Cheetos and splashing Coke across his hardwood floor.

“Holy shit!”

________________________________________________________________

Order Emergence here. It’s available September 13th.

https://www.amazon.com/Emergence-Humanity-Novel-J-M-Martin/dp/1941987680/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1472402233&sr=8-1&keywords=emergence+humanity

Gods Of The Grim Nation in Dread Shadows In Paradise

“Research….is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell therein.” – Zora Neale Hurston

On sale now from Golden Goblin Press is Dread Shadows In Paradise, an anthology of Lovecraftian fiction set in the Caribbean Islands.

Edited by GG Press owner Oscar Rios and Brian M. Sammons, the table of contents is as follows:

• Jamal by Glynn Owen Barrass
• With the Storm by Pete Rawlik
• Crop Over by Tim Waggoner
• Tradewinds by Sam Gafford
• The Gold of Roatán by Sam Stone
• Sugar Rush by William Meikle
• Hearth of the Immortals by Konstantine Paradias
• Upon an Altar in the Fields by Lee Clark Zumpe

My contribution, Gods Of The Grim Nation follows real-life author and playwright Zora Neale Hurston early in her career as a anthropologist sent to Haiti to collect Voodoun folklore. When a series of ritual murders plague the interior back country, the local police crack down hard on the Vodoun societies. But Zora, with the aide of an accomplished secret society ritualist, sets out to uncover the true menace at the heart of the crime spree.

Zora Neale Hurston was a writer of the Harlem Renaissance best known for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. I first encountered her in college, where, reading her aloud in class, I took a delight in her writing style, which attempted to capture the folksy regional dialects of rural Florida African Americans in the 20’s and 30’s.

A fiercely independent and outspoken woman, she had worked her way from the small town of Eatonville to college and into the epicenter of the Harlem Renaissance, rubbing elbows with Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman, and yet remaining somewhat apart from their unified view, often to her detriment. Hughes and the other literati thought her cleaving to the rural and sometimes undignified depictions of African Americans denigrating to the race as a whole, and she was often criticized for her libertarian politics. She opposed integration, lamenting a loss of black teachers instructing black students in African cultural traditions, and was a staunch opponent of FDR’s New Deal, fearing always a loss of the personal liberty she strove all her life to maintain.

“If I say a whole system must be upset for me to win, I am saying that I cannot sit in the game, and that safer rules must be made to give me a chance. I repudiate that. If others are in there, deal me a hand and let me see what I can make of it, even though I know some in there are dealing from the bottom and cheating like hell in other ways.”

She learned early in her studies to be a chameleon, ingratiating herself with white patrons enough to get a shiny Chevy automobile to bomb around the South collecting folklore in, and convincing the poor people among whom she moved that the expensive car had been earned through bootlegging so as to assuage their fears that she was some kind of detective.

She traveled armed through the South in the 30’s, recording spirituals and folktales and recording the lives of sawmill workers and their white bosses, burned through two marriages, did some script work for Paramount Pictures, and earned a Guggenheim Fellowship to study the spiritual practices of Jamaica and Haiti. She produced two books on folklore from this, Tell My Horse and Of Mules And Men.

Proud and plucky, she once said;

 

 

“Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.”

Despite her colorful career, she ended her life in obscurity, working as a maid and finally expiring in a retirement home. Half of her personal papers were literally saved from the trash fire in the zero hour by a friend.

This incident of course, leaves her life’s work open for fictional exploration. What after all, were in the papers that didn’t survive? Much of her folklore writing is dismissed by modern scholars as sensational, but what if she was being deliberately distracting? I love writing secret histories, and  Zora’s strong spirit combined with her openness to the spiritual (in New Orleans she underwent initiation ceremonies with more than a few Hoodoo doctors) and her dizzying array of life experiences made her the perfect sort of fighting scholar protagonist in my mind for the story I wanted to tell here, and, it turns out, keep telling. Zora will be appearing in at least two more stories for GG Press, in the forthcoming Heroes of Red Hook anthology, and in a TBD novella.

Here’s an excerpt from Gods Of The Grim Nation. Look for more Zora later. She’s not done with me yet.

——————————–

The two dozen hounsi gathered in the yard and the dark, skinny mambo priestess, a rural empress regal in her purple headdress and white gown, traced a complex veve of cornmeal in the dirt, the beacon to call down Papa Ghede.  Her assistants laid out an old coat and pants and a high crowned hat which had seen better days at the foot of the cross. The drums began a steady beat, and the sacred calabash rattled.

“For Ghede, we dance the banda,” León explained, his pelvis jerking and swirling mesmerizingly. “Like so.” He smiled.

I felt my stomach heat up as I matched his movements, and wondered if he had taught this dance to Katie Dunham. He was a dark and beautiful man, but there was the silver ring on his finger with the E.F. inscription. He was promised to the goddess Erzulie and was as unavailable as a collared priest. To break that vow was to invite ill fortune. It was a damn shame.

León broke from the dance to assist the mambo, laying out a dish of peanuts and dried corn beside the bottle of clairin on the points around the veve. The ceremony became wild and as raucous as any juke party back home, the men and women dancing close, reveling in each other. We were not long turning about the cross, the drums thrumming through the marrow of our bones and guiding our hips as sure as a pair of firm hands, when one of the hounsi, a very large and dignified-looking woman, collapsed, her eyes rolling. The mambo and León knelt by her side to assist the mounting of the god upon his devotee.

The woman sat up soon, her previously neutral expression entirely changed to one of shifty-eyed mischievousness.  She smiled and leered at León as he set the patched coat over her rounded shoulders like a supplicant dressing his lord. She flitted her tongue in his ear and whispered things as the mambo crowned her with the hat and pushed a cheap cigar into her mouth and lit it. It was amusing to see the attention the woman was giving León, muttering obscenities to him through her teeth and puffing the cigar like an overbearing boss harassing his pretty secretary.

All around, the figures swayed and chanted, and the woman, now possessed, rose and smoked like a train engine. She snatched the ceremonial coco macaque stick from the mambo and placed it between her legs, thrusting herself provocatively at the other women as the mambo dusted her skin in ghostly white powder.

León came to me, wiping the sweat from his eyes. He was about to say something when abruptly the possessed woman seized his arm and spun him around.

The mambo rushed over, and the possessed woman snarled something at her. She backed away, shaking her head, but the big hounsi was adamant, and the mambo went to the drummers. In a few moments, they abruptly ceased.

The silence was startling in the grove, and the worshipers looked at each other in confusion, but the possessed woman drew herself up and spoke loudly in Creole, her eyes bulging and rolling hideously.

“Listen, horses! Do you hear? Do you hear the coco of the world tearing tonight? Do you feel the birth pains of the world? The Master of Pigs has eaten the last of you without salt and now ZoZo Le Entru Fè Nwa is crowning! No living man or woman can look upon it! The living will be the dead!”

I frowned. The Haitian brand of Creole wasn’t my forte, but what I could make out was troubling to hear.

The possessed woman still had a hold of León, and now she gripped his arm and pulled up his sleeve, bearing his forearm and squinting at a mark there.

“What will you do, ti couleve?” the spirit asked him.

“Guide me, Papa Ghede!” León stammered in naked fright.

The loa smiled through the woman and pushed the coco macaque stick into his hands.

“The Master of Pigs seeks to repay his ba moun with the whole of the world this night. ZoZo has promised to relieve his debt, but it will burn the minds of all who look upon it. It must be pushed back into the dark womb, and the bokor must pay.”

Then, to my surprise, she looked over León’s shoulder directly at me. It was strange to share the gaze of those god-taken eyes. She shoved León aside and lumbered toward me. For a minute I thought I would have to lay her out, but instead she stopped, squatted down, and plucked a rounded stone from the tall grass. She traced a shape on it with her pinky finger. To my amazement, I saw her nail was etching the very rock. When she was finished, she held it out.

“Take it, Lapli Pote. We will have need of a daughter of Chango.”

I narrowed my eyes.  In the firelight, I recognized it as one of the so-called sacred stones, a carved tool of an earlier aboriginal people which Voodooists believed to have been cast down by Chango the thunder god. If a person breathed upon one and the stone sweated, it meant there was a spirit inside. She had scratched a crude star shape into it.

“Watch out! The bourresouse are here!” the mad-eyed woman yelled.

It was then that a shrill whistle blew, and a party of newcomers crashed into the grove from the forest, slashing the clearing with flashlights.

The possessed woman swooned. León caught her, grunting.

“What did he say to you?” León hissed at me, ignoring the advancing men.

“He said the bourresouse are here.”

León whirled as the men reached the tree. There were about fifteen in all, dark men in the uniforms and badges of the Garde d’Haïti.

“All of you are under arrest,” announced the leader, a major, by his insignia. “Sergeant, round them up. We have a wagon waiting for you beyond those trees.”

“On what grounds?” one of the milling devotees called.

“There’s been another murder.”

“This is Fête Ghede!” the mambo protested. “No blood is being shed here.”

The major looked at the mambo, and I saw him toss something amid the paraphernalia. A dagger.

“They’re armed!” he called to his men, and to my surprise, he took out his pistol, shoved it in the mambo’s belly, and pulled the trigger, lifting her off her feet, setting the front of her white dress aflame.

---

On sale now –

http://www.goldengoblinpress.com/store/#!/Dread-Shadows-in-Paradise-Digital-Format/p/66101661/category=14026709

Extra Life! You know….for kids!

M’boys. Ready for action.

I’ve never been particularly athletically inclined. I did a little bit of basketball in middle school (I was terrible), the usual PE stuff in high school, and for a very brief period in college, some jogging and biking.

In high school though, I did discover and gravitate towards a certain group activity that in the 80’s was sort of a subcaste in terms of popularity strata, so far off the accepted social map as to be nearly clandestine (we gamed with a guy on the football team who the first day made me swear never to tell anybody he played -a secret I have upheld to his grave), and that was roleplaying games. First Dungeons and Dragons, the old gateway drug, then Cyberpunk, Rifts, Shadowrun, and Vampire: The Masquerade.

In college I ‘graduated’ from playing games to running them. I ran a West End Star Wars game for about two years, and I truly believe that this past time was instrumental in my development as a writer.

Thak fails his Wisdom save.

There’s something about tabletop roleplaying that develops the storytelling ‘muscle.’ It’s not just a buncha guys and gals huddling over a table snickering about elves. I really believe it’s a re-enactment of the primal form of human entertainment; sitting around in a group, telling stories to each other. Now we’ve got lightbulbs instead of a fire, and we chow on cylinders of Pringles and Diet Coke (though in my heyday it was Captain Morgan’s rum) instead of smilodon meat and fermented fruit juice (well, in some circles, that probably hasn’t changed much).

What part of “interactive gaming” is not a lie?

Roleplaying games sharpen the mind, quicken the pulse, and they’re a riot. Best of all, a tabletop game can’t be done alone, which dodges a troubling trend in entertainment geared towards youth. I love video games. As a multiple-kid-parent with a full time job and a burgeoning writing career, plug and play has been a godsend in terms of my own personal relaxation. I even worked in the video games industry for a little while. However, despite the interactive gaming tagline, you’re basically just staring at a screen for hours on end. The anonymity allows a lot of unsupervised, underage kids to spew a lot of horrendous garbage they would never dare say to a person whose eyes they could look into, and conversely, rather than teaching a kid to deal with somebody they might encounter in life who doesn’t have any social skills for whatever reason, you can just mute the little a-holes. Again, kind of foments universal disconnect rather than advancing the whole brotherhood of man concept.

But then at the beginning of this year, a friend of mine coaxed me back into rpging (D&D specifically) at the Local Gaming Store, and it’s been a revelation. Much more satisfying than vegging out to GTA (though I still do that too when I have the time).

Anyway, then Extra Life came along. As I mentioned, I have never been athletically inclined. I don’t run unless I’m being pursued or chasing down one of my toddlers, so I’ve watched the charity marathons some of my friends participate in a bit wistfully. I’d like to do something like that, I’m sure they’re having fun doing it, but it’s just not in my wheelhouse.

But this is.

Here’s the nitty gritty, straight from the mouth of the Extra Life bot –

“My local Children’s Miracle Network Hospital treats thousands of children each year, regardless of their family’s ability to pay. These kids are facing scary stuff like cancer, cystic fibrosis, and injuries from accidents to name just a few.

On October 25, 2014, I’ll be participating in this huge worldwide celebration of the social impact of gamers of all kinds from video games to board games and tabletop RPG’s! It’s my sincere hope that you’ll find it in your heart to support my efforts with a monthly pledge or one-time gift that will go directly to my hospital.

Your donation is tax-deductible and ALL PROCEEDS go to help kids.

I need your help to reach my goal.  Please make a safe, easy donation online today.  Click the “Support This Participant” button on this page to get started.  Thank you so much for supporting my efforts!”

My friend and I will be participating in a 24-hour marathon session of the new fifth editions of Dungeons and Dragons this October the 24th at a local gaming store, JJ’s Gaming Lounge in Chatsworth. It’s a mad little endeavor that I hope will raise awareness of the heinous problems the less economically fortunate and infirm children of our country face daily when it comes to finding the affordable healthcare many people with more stable lives take for granted.

I’m blessed that my own kids are healthy and that the safety net of a medical plan is there for them if they need it. I want to show that gratitude now by giving back in a small way. My chosen charity is the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, altruistic folks who can always use a helping hand helping others. I believe the D&D team for Extra Life has already pledged something over one million dollars total, so it’s not just a lark.

Please, if you have the means and are so inclined, catch the link below for a similar version of what I just posted here and the more-important donation button.

-Hasta pronto.

http://www.extra-life.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=donorDrive.participant&participantID=113334