Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: Armchair adventuring


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See you at the Aethercon!

What about a virtual gaming convention?

Selection_893Aethercon is the largest online convention for roleplaying games and gamers, and it will take place on the next weekend, between November 10 and 12. It will feature demo games, speed painting tournaments, panels and interviews. There will be publishers’ stores and vendor booths.
Everything online, managed through Hangouts, Skype etc.

I will be there with my friends of GGStudio and Savage Worlds Italia, and I’ll bring Hope & Glory to the table.
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The face of Nefertiti

Nefertiti.
Chief consort of Akenathen.
Hereditary Princess.
Nofretete_Neues_MuseumGreat of Praises.
Lady of Grace.
Sweet of Love.
Lady of The Two Lands.
Main King’s Wife, his beloved.
Lady of all Women.
Mistress of Upper and Lower Egypt.
Queen of Amarna.

Briefly, this last one: after the death of Akenathen she moved from Amarna, by now a fallen city, back to Thebes, where she probably reigned as pharaoh.
And she had a weird taste in headgear. Continue reading →


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In bed with the vampire Genevieve

Sort of a follow-up to yesterday’s post, this one.
A few days back, on my Italian blog, I mentioned The Vampire Genevieve, a volume that collects Kim Newman’s contribution to the Warhammer Fantasy line of books.
Thebook, that’s been resting on my nightstand for ages, is worth a new read – because it’s true, I re-read, year-in, year-out, either Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun or Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, but there is sitill room enough for other big, massive books.
In particular, two books I return always happily are Roger Zelazny’s Amber Chronicles and Kim Newman’s The Vampire Genevieve.

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As Newman himself explains in the funny, insightful introduction to the volume, the Warhammer novels were mercenary work the young writer did to make ends meet, lured by a promise of unimagined riches and literary fame.

The end result is weird, in a very good way.
Let’s see a little bit of history. Continue reading →


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Hammer-style sword & sorcery

coverThere’s a thing we’ve been talking for a while, with my friend Alex – that is a fine Italian writer of genre fiction – about doing something somehow similar to the legendary Hammer “failed pilot” Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter1.
And indeed Alex did something like that, with his series about the Uhlan, a fine line of horror/adventure books.
As I said, we talk about something of that kind roughly once a year, usually in the whereabouts of Halloween, when we reminisce like old men about old Hammer movies, old games of Ravenloft and even more obscure geekeries like Chill, the old, classic horror game.
We might call it Hammer Style Sword & Sorcery – that is not a thing, as far as I know, but works with us.

Let’s sum up the basic elements of this project that will never be… Continue reading →


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Pulp Egypt

Gaming supplements can sometimes be wonders of research and scholarship.

Selection_885I mentioned a while back the monumental Masks of Nyarlathotep Companion.
Now, from the depths of my collection, I have recovered another wonder of a lost age – Peter Schweighofer’s Pulp Egypt – Adventures along the Nile, 1933-1939.
One of the best generic gaming resources I ever bought.
In 176 pages, Peter Schweighofer packed a ton of useful information.

  • Timeline from Predinastic era to the 1930s? Check
  • Gazzeteer and visitor’s guide to 1930s Egypt? Check.
  • Egyptian odds and ends and strange artifacts? Check.
  • Lots of information for game-masters interested in running various kinds of Egyptian adventures? Check.

The lot with maps, photos, and a very neat layout.
The information is synthetic and to the point, and nicely indexed.
There’s even an article on assembling a pulp adventure soundtrack.
And it’s system agnostic, as they say – you can run it on whatever system you like.
Beautiful.

And this beauty will be particularly useful both for my long-in-the-coming re-run of Masks of Nyarlathotep and for my current serial project.
How neat is that?


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Three evenings with the Green Man

Ghost stories.
It’s the season, isn’t it?
ffdgfdgSo, stop me if you’ve heard this one: there’s a haunted inn on the road to Cambridge, called The Green Man. It’s haunted by the ghost of a 17th century dabbler in the mystical arts, a man that was denied a proper burial because of his trafficking with pagan rituals, and maybe because he killed his wife. And there’s the current owner of the inn, slowly soaking himself in scotch, and trying to get both his wife and his mistress in the same bed together. And maybe he sees ghosts, or maybe it’s just DT.
And there’s a bit of satire of the Cambridge environment, and of academia, and of modern people and of modern Church. And God makes an appearance, and everything is so witty, and sometimes so sexy, it’s hard to believe it can also be so scary.

It’s Kingsley Amis’ The Green Man.
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NoNaNoWriMo

crest_square-b23dbe8d9b80265765b27ccd9b5d4811I mentioned NaNoWriMo, in a previous post.
I will not be doing the NaNoWriMo – but this does not mean I do not respect and support the brave souls that give it a spin.
Way to go.

My suggestions:

  • get yourself a good writing software: I am partial to Scrivener that usually is available at a discount in this time of the year (you find a link in the sidebar)
  • get yourself the free and excellent WorkRave or a similar software that forces you to take pauses and do relaxation exercises
  • stock tea and biscuits or your comfort food of choice
  • tell naysayers to get lost

The reason I will not be doing the NaNoWriMo, now, is… Continue reading →