I said I should do a post about Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter, and why not do it now?
It’s always fun to watch the movie again.
If you areinterested, there is an acceptable copy on Youtube, and to give you an idea, here’s the trailer…
The trailer lies.
Or it practices a nice bit of misdirection.
“In the 18th century, in central Europe…” Continue reading
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.
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
There’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
Gaming supplements can sometimes be wonders of research and scholarship.
I 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.
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?
Much as I liked my hooded Silk Road travelers and their overloaded pack horses, I’ve been looking for a better header for a while.
As luck would have it, yesterday I got a new blog logo, designed by Nadine Shirley (here’s her Facebook page, go say Hi! to her), and with a modicum of graphical tweaking, I got a slimmer, more modern header.
I hope you like it.
So, now is the time for the sort of post that goes things that I have learned writing a short srtory in one day.
My guru tells me this is the sort of post that brings readers like, in cartloads, and so here we go.
The first thing one learns in this kind of exercise is I can still make it!
Which is very good because if we do not boost our enthusiasm ourselves, nobody will.
This time I did it as a game, but the ability to stick to the story and bring it to a (satisfactory? One hopes so) conclusion, is vital.
Deadlines are a thing. Continue reading
Karavansara 