Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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Introducing Tenn Ford

The joys of planning a serial: you can just chance upon a bit of fluff that suddenly turns your story around.
The sort of serendipity my friend Claire loves so much.

It went like this: I was laughing with my friend Lucy a while back and this quote from Sir Alec Guinness came up:

bf9e9b7006b725a3791d2a2a9af0d3d8Can’t say I’m enjoying the film. … new rubbish dialogue reaches me every other day on wadges of pink paper—and none of it makes my character clear or even bearable. I just think, thankfully, of the lovely bread, which will help me keep going until next April even if Yahoo collapses in a week. … I must off to studio and work with a dwarf (very sweet—and he has to wash in a bidet) and your fellow countrymen Mark Hamill and Tennyson (that can’t be right) Ford. Ellison (?—No!)—well, a rangy, languid young man who is probably intelligent and amusing. But Oh, God, God, they make me feel ninety—and treat me as if I was 106.—Oh, Harrison Ford—ever heard of him?

And I said, damn, I need to have a character called Tennyson Ford!
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A busy weekend, and beyond

Selection_893It’s going to be a busy weekend.
There’s the Aethercon, of course.
We kick-off tonight with an interview with me and my boss Gionata dal Farra about GGStudio.
It will be 10PM for us.
Then, tomorrow, I’ll start at 6PM local time with the panel about sandbox games, and then after an half-hour pause, I’ll start the first demo game.
It’s going to be fun, and it’s weird to thing just two months back, with my old connection, this would have been impossible.

But there’s other stuff in the works. Continue reading →


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A tour guide to strange, (not so) far places

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands.
(H.P. Lovecraft)

Selection_897I’m taking a moment to plug a book that’s been a great resource for my stories and a great read altogether.
I’ve been checking it out again during the Halloween season, because there is an increase in the request for ghost stories and supernatural horror, and before that it provided me with one of the two ideas on which I built my story in the Zappa & Spada anthology.

The book is called The Lore of the Land and it is a massive tone by Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson. Continue reading →


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English Eerie – a solo rural horror game

What_fearful_shapesI write a lot about games, these days.
English Eerie is a single player roleplaying game written by Scott Malthouse.
Described as a Rural Horror Storytelling Game for One Player, that’s what it does, and it does it quite nicely – using narrative cues to help the player tell a ghostly story in the form of a diary or journal.

Inspired by the works of M.R. James, Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen, English Eerie is a writing game – the player is required to build a story, and write it down, based on a set of details presented in a “scenario”, plus random factors represented by playing cards and a die. Continue reading →