A Short Bestiary of "The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus"

"The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus" by L. Frank Baum is an adventure I read every year these days, and I was struck by how well some of the descriptions of immortals and their foes would translate to an old-school RPG. So here they are. It's public domain, so read it yourself and write your own monster stats if you disagree, Merry Christmas.

As always, images from the original 1920's book when available, and Rankin & Bass when not. 

Not included, though interesting, are the Water Sprites, Sleep Fays, Sound Imps, Wind Demons, and Light Elves.

Ryls

 

HD 1 AC none Thorns 1
Move Normal Int Low Morale Normal
Wants protect plants, destroy ravagers

Little first cousins to the nymphs, who watch over flowers and plants. They are merry and light-hearted, loving laughter. Their king lives in a distant meadow of gay flowers and luscious fruits.

Each attends a particular type of flower and takes its color for its name and simple garb. (The Yellow Ryl tends the buttercups, for example.)

Gifts: Can bring food, and paint the color of their plant.

Fairies

HD 2 AC as chain (flitting) Golden Wand deflect
Move Fast, flight Int High Morale High
Wants protect mankind, destroy tempters

Dressed in white gauze with rainbow-hued wings and golden wands. They are usually invisible and unknown to mortals. They honor a great queen who protects a magical pool which grants beauty to those who bathe in it.

Golden Wand: Each turn, a fairy can reduce the damage from one attack by 2d4. The attacker takes the same amount as the damage flows back to them (but no more than the attack could have caused). Multiple fairies working together can turn back dragon breath. 

Gifts: Can bring cloth and tools. 

Knooks

 

HD 3+1 AC as leather (gnarled) Spear 1d6
Move Normal Int Normal Morale Brave
Wants protect beasts, destroy monstrosities

Old and worn and crooked, anxious and rough, gray beards and scowling brows. They love courage, and are gruff but friendly. Knooks are known by names like "Will" and "Peter". Their great king lives in a distant jungle.

Each band are particular to one woods, but they share a secret language of whistles by which friendship is known. They can teleport creatures between their woods if all parties are willing and friendly.

Stinging Gnats: Once per day a knook can set a swarm of stinging gnats against a foe or recalcitrant beast. The target is blinded and slowed and cannot concentrate. Any area damage destroys the gnats, but damages the target as well. Submersion or strong winds may help.

Gifts: Gather and work (dead) wood and leather from animals that died of old age.

Nymphs

HD 4 AC as chain (wooden flesh) Ash Switch transmute
Move Normal Int Normal Morale High
Wants protect trees, destroy defiers

Tree colored, slender, dressed in oak-leaf green and sandals. They are curious and proud.

Cause Fear: In defense of forests and trees, a nymph can cause 2d4 HD of creatures that can see her to save or flee in fear.

Ash Switch: A creature struck by a nymph's ash switch has its speed reduced by a category. Anything rendered immobile by this effect is transmuted into a clod of dirt.

Gifts: A nymph can seal a dwelling against unwanted incursions.

Awgwas

 

HD 6 AC as chain (huge, tough) Stone d10
Move Slow Int Average Morale Proud
Wants tempt mortals to mischief, become king

They were of gigantic stature and had coarse, scowling countenances which showed plainly their hatred of all mankind. They possessed no consciences whatever and delighted only in evil deeds.

Their homes were in rocky, mountainous places, from whence they sallied forth to accomplish their wicked purposes.

The one of their number that could think of the most horrible deed for them to do was always elected the King Awgwa, and all the race obeyed his orders.

Limited Invisibility: Invisible to mortals, but not immortals.

Tempt Mortals: Whisper in a mortal's ear to give them advantage on their next check or attack to a petty, cruel, or quarrelsome action.

Bat-Winged Demons from Patalonia

HD 3 AC as leather (flapping) Immiserate d6 morale
Move Normal flight Int Average Morale High
Wants flap through the air spreading misery

Three-Eyed Giants of Tatary

HD 8 AC as plate (gigantic, thick walls of flesh) Slam x3 d8
Move Slow Int Average Morale Brave
Wants fight!

Goozzle-Goblins

HD 1 AC none Sword-Talons d6
Move Normal Int Average Morale High
Wants flay flesh from bones

Wherever a goozle-goblin dies, a thistle will grow.

Books Completed November 2022

I worked too much this month, but still managed to read a bit.

 

 

The Song of Roland, translated by Frederick Goland - Another one pulled from my wife's history master's bookcase, though she has no recollection of owning this or reading it. I would swear it was her copy--there's notes about wanting a dog and getting a power wheelchair and calling out all the whatever might pass for romantic moments in the text, but she'd also sooner put a knife through her hand than write in a book so I guess I have to believe her.

Goland's introduction is a text in itself. An efficient primer of French pre-history with a summary of the song, and then a really gripping few pages of how a modern reader can try to understand the nigh-mythic history among the "religious time" the song lays out. I read The Bright Ages earlier this year and that was an important primer to this concept. Then we whiplash to a lesson on poetic meter that I tried to carry forward into my reading but, hey, sometimes medieval French syllabaries don't carry into modern English perfectly.

 

Now, the song itself. I read it in two minds. As a D&D player, I cast my mind back a bit to the 70s, and earlier, where this might be a place you could get heroic two-handed swords (repeatedly) shearing through shields and skulls and hauberks. You can worry about supply lines! You can be operatic! The oliphant! The linens and silks strewn under the bowers for war councils! Really, if you can divorce yourself from the slaughter, the imagery is lovely.

 

But it's also a propaganda text. It's about the creation of a state and the glory of dying for your lord, who will be so very sad for your sacrifice. But now that you've martyred yourself, he's free (and obligated) to abduct the heathen queen you've liberated. Thousands of people die in "glory", but Charlemagne gets to be great!

 

Horses and swords and shields all get cool names though!

 

The Three Imposters and Other Stories, by Arthur Machen - I started reading this in October, in line with Halloween goals. For whatever reason, though I'd read this a couple times before, this collection really shone this year for whatever reason.

Now, I could write a whole post about each section of this book, and I started to, but there are only so many hours. Here's what stands out: The whiplash of each story's plodding Victorian pacing and the sudden, shearing terror that cuts through the moments of revelation.

Here again we have the impossible drug from a weird chemist formula, btw.

I wish I was a little better tracking characters across stories. "Inspector" Dyson is here several times, and I think the joke is that he's worthless but lucky? Not sure, I'm bad at this.

There's a wordy introduction by Joshi here too but eh, this guy.

That poor man with the spectacles. Should have shaved.

Atlantis and Other Lost Cities, by Rob Shone, illustrated by Jim Eldridge - This is just a kids' book I found in a little free library, but look at this cover. This cover is awesome, if I were 11 when I found this I would be obsessed with lost cities all my life.

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/2fEAAOSw0Z1fqKrp/s-l1600.jpg

 

The Goon Library Volume 2, by Eric Powell -  Let's read more The Goon! It's like 80% great and 20% embarrassing!

Books Completed October 2022

 

The October Country by Ray Bradbury - I read this every October. This year, for whatever reason, I was struck by how many of the stories really revolve around bad or damaged relationships, regardless of what weirdness is also going on.

• "The Dwarf" - The two non-titular characters have an abusive relationship. It's not clear if they're friends or dating, but the carnie belittles the woman at every opportunity.
  
• "The Next in Line" - The worst of them all. It's sort of the point of the story, but the husband in this one is just awful.
  
• "The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse" - The marriage is actually pretty okay, and they seem supportive of each other. But then the story is really about a sort of tug-of-war of exploitation between the main character and the hipsters.
  
• "Skeleton" - Guy's doctor hates him, guy's wife is mildly supportive but doesn't really seem to care about her husband starving himself to death and puking in the flowers.
  
• "The Jar" - Another one where it's the terrible relationship driving the plot. There's a veil over it but it's also heavily implied the husband kills his wife for cheating on him which... cool.
  
• "The Lake" - Seems to be going good then the whole marriage turns out to be hollow and perfunctory.
  
• "The Emissary" - Kid's mom is clearly exasperated with him being sick all the time. Half of the good relationship dies on page 3, and that absence drives the rest of the story.
  
• "Touched With Fire" - This one does not hold up well. The concept is relatable, with temperatures rising these days, but holy hell Ray poured every vile stereotype about women he could dredge up into the woman on floor 3.
  
• "The Small Assassin" - Almost! The husband actually seems to be taking his wife's concerns and stress seriously. Not quite enough to save her, though. And the doctor is in this one is, again, a twit.
  
• "The Crowd" - The only real relationship in this one is between two friends, and it's pretty believable actually.
  
• "Jack-in-the-Box" - Just 20 pages of screwed up mother issues.
  
• "The Scythe" - Pretty believable and supportive marriage, particularly when you consider what people will do to feed their kids.
  
• "Uncle Einar" - A straight-up happy marriage, with passages that dwell on how they bring out better things in each other. Nice! (For some reason I always picture Einar as Gilbert from The Sandman, but with wings.)
  
• "The Wind" - Two friends, one with a problem, and the other trying to support him. The latter's wife though berates him constantly for being concerned about his friend, and doesn't believe anything he says about the troubles. Nice trust setup there.
  
• "The Man Upstairs" - This is probably my favorite story in this book, it's extremely Bradburyish. There's the relationship between the main boy and his grandparents, which is loving in that kind of bemused way.
  
• "There Was an Old Woman" - It's the absence of relationships here at all that feels weird.
  
• "The Cistern" - Jesus.
  
• "Homecoming" - Probably my second favorite, and Einar's here again. The story centers around a normal boy's relationship with his monstrous family, and it's... sweet and sad at the same time. About as healthy as you can imagine.
  
• "The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone" - And they all lived happily ever after.

I found The Ray Bradbury Theater on streaming and watched a few episodes based on stories in this collection (The Crowd, Skeleton, and The Man Upstairs). The show does not hold up too well, to be honest.

The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury - Another one I read every October. It's a young adult book so it's not that much of an investment, but it's a fun little tradition. I don't know how well the history of Halloween presented here would hold up to modern theory and research, but I don't particularly care, it's a romp, and I love the illustrations by Mugnaini.

This has one of my favorite Bradbury lines, set off in a paragraph by itself: "The scythe fell and lay in the grass like a lost smile." However, I did notice on this reading that Ray could never pass up the opportunity to make a smile simile when describing scythes, I think there were four in this book alone, and he does it in "The Scythe" in the collection above, as well.

I looked up the animated movie after reading this, too. I didn't watch it because I remembered doing so a year or two ago and thinking it was pretty bad. I was surprised to read that Bradbury considered it one of the better adaptations of any of his work.

Hokushai, a Graphic Biography by Giuseppe Lantazi & Francesco Matteuzzi - This is a graphic biography of a man I admit I knew very little about at all. It was a birthday gift for my wife from a friend, so it was out on the table. It's also a brief history lesson on the Edo period. Nice art, well-told story, interesting framing. It did bust out the "samurai didn't use guns because they weren't honorable" chestnut though which makes me wonder how accurate the rest of the facts were. I did no additional research to find out.

The Goon Library Volume 1 by Eric Powell - I picked up 5 volumes of this on sale years ago, and pulled this one on a whim. I hadn't read any The Goon in a long time and was surprised how well it holds up. There's a lot of early-2000's "lolrandom" going on but if you get past that there's genuine pathos here, and fear sometimes and the art's great, and the core story is still just spot on. Plus you get "Release the giant zombie chimp!" Will probably dust off the other volumes soon.

The Willows and Other Nightmares by Algernon Blackwood - This is the very fancy Beehive Books edition, illustrated by Paul Pope. "The Willows" really is an eerie little tale and a good one to revisit around Halloween. It never sits quite right with me, though, how The Swede conveniently knows all this arcane knowledge.

 

This volume also contains "Accessory Before the Fact", "Smith: An Episode in a Lodging-House", "An Egyptian Hornet", and "The Man Who Found Out." I don't think I'd read those last two before - "The Man Who Found Out" is bleak.

A lot of care went into the production of this edition - it won some design awards when it came out. It very much feels like you are Reading A Book when you're reading this book. The illustrations are evocative, particularly given the vague and otherworldly nature of the subject matter, and are placed through the stories really well to not break the flow or spoil anything.

Books Completed September 2022

 

 

 

Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920 by Robert K. Murray - Another one from my wife's college history bookshelves, though she says she has never heard of this book. Spooky. 

This is a discussion of how terror at an invasion of "the Reds!" and "Bolshevism!" gripped the nation for a couple years then quickly faded away when the populace realized surrendering their rights to keep their rights wasn't working out too well. Let's hope for a repeat performance soon please.

Also of note, this was written in 1955, so the constant theme is "Obviously communism is terrible but don't you think we might have overdone the reaction a bit when we were lads hmm?". The focus on the labor strikes of 1919 as a driving factor off the hysteria was an interesting angle.

 

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman - A watercolor of a book my friend Jen recommended and then went ahead and mailed me. I've already loaned it out to another friend who likes a creepy but not too creepy story for October. It does a lovely job of capturing the feeling of the end of childhood, at least as well as can be remembered by one middle-aged man and experienced by another. The man can describe a cosy kitchen scary well, apparently the more so for populating one with his favorite tripartite. The bag of broken toys as spell components were a bit twee, I gotta say.

 

Hellboy: The Wild Hunt by Mignola/Fegredo - I picked this up at a comic store pretty much at random in Salem years ago as something to read during one of my wife's appointments. It might not be fair to critique much, since it's the middle volume of a trilogy in a long-running story I have not read much of at all, though I've seen the first two movies. So I'll just say it doesn't stand as its own story very well, there's a big "it was all a dream" section which, no don't, and there's a strong "guys I just learned about this in my mythology research and now you have to, too" undercurrent. The art's great and getting lost in the action sequences is fun, and the pig-elf-guy is a well-written pitiable character.

Books Completed August 2022

Two photos this month because I wasn't expecting to tear through one book in the last few days of the month after already having mailed out another I'd finished. Whoops!

The History of the Buccaneers of America: Containing Detailed Accounts of Those Bold and Daring Freebooters by Alexandre Olivier Esquemelin - I found this in a little free library while I was walking along humming an Alestorm song and thinking about rules for a pirate RPG I was writing, so that's fate. It took me most of a year to get through a page or three at a time, as it's pretty dense, fairly archaic first-hand account from the late 1600's. Though there was lots of content that would make great additions to a game (and I started keeping notes for that way too late in my reading), to be honest it kind of put me off making anything about the pirates of that time into a game. They were desperate and brutal men, and all the excitement is bound up with suffering and wanton cruelty. After I finished, I mailed it off to my friend Matt, who happens to be a historian and the author of:

Free Hands #1 by Matt Wilding and friends - Got this through the Kickstarter. It's the first issue in what promises to be a bloody, piratical romp from Sequential Decay comics. I should take some inspiration from this that perhaps there is a way that we can tell stories of the pirates of yore in a meaningful way. My only gripe is the colors in my copy seem dark or murky. Might be an artifact of the production.

The Urth of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe - I finished the Book of the New Sun tetralogy last month, and immediately ordered this when I found out he had written a fifth book as a "coda". In a way, I wish I hadn't. There's praise aplenty heaped on this book, and from a technical perspective it's really interesting. Wolfe managed to create a work he clearly hadn't planned as part of the original and have it fit seamlessly into the continuity. However, it reminded me a bit of Sandman Overture: The author seemed compelled to come back to a completed work which contained loose ends and ambiguous events as part of its appeal and wrap them all up, taking most of that opportunity away from the readers. Also, this book introduces a whole bunch of time travel to make it happen which... I'm not a time travel fan.

Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery - Another little free library find I happened past and grabbed on a whim because I realized I'd never read it despite seeing the old PBS miniseries several times in my youth. Though it's not much of an achievement for a kid's book, I read this in two sittings in two days and found it delightful. Some of it's surely pure nostalgia for a time and place that basically never existed, but the characterization is so precise and delicate, and the descriptions of the land so loving, it just skims along. It somehow manages to capture the whole of a childhood and the melancholy of growing out of that in just a few hundred pages. I know there are sequels, but I think I might just let this one stand alone in my memory for a while.

Books Completed July 2022

 Again with the month delay.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley - I'd read this before, but it had been years and years. The writing itself is quite dynamic, Huxley could weave three or four plot threads together, dashing between them paragraph by paragraph, carrying the reader along deftly. I could picture Bernard Marx skulking the depths of Reddit, his character was possibly the most prescient part of the book. The old "Shakespeare is the pinnacle of English literature" chestnut gets taken out and shaken around more than is to my taste.

Sword & Citadel by Gene Wolfe - These are the second two books in the Book of the New Sun tetralogy of which I read the first two, oh, a couple years ago. I really think they're meant to be read back to back though, there are so many references to characters and events of those first books. Apparently Wolfe wrote them that way, too.

Reading about this book, there are many discussions about how a clever or attentive reader will pick up on Severian's status as an unreliable narrator, and also how the archaic vocabulary will send them scrambling for a dictionary. Well joke's on them because I'm not that kind of reader at all and when I hit a logical inconsistency or a word I don't know I just chalk it up to not paying the right kind of attention and plow ahead.

Anyway I kept thinking the strangeness of the encounters and the episodic, tightly contained nature of the chapters made this feel like it would make a great anime.

I think I originally heard about this series from an artist whose RSS I used to follow did some fan art. Here it all is on Art Station - I still think it's pretty great.

Apparently there is a "coda" fifth book, which I ordered.

Into The Odd by Chris McDowall - Hooray for Kickstarters you forgot about that turn into little presents from your past self. A clean little fantasy RPG that I've run a couple of times as a one-shot. The production values on this edition are quite nice - paper is heavy, binding feels solid, color and bleed are crisp. It does seem to be missing a chapter about the city of Bastion for all the references it makes to its being "the only city that matters". Also the main example dungeon didn't seem to have a consistent theme, but maybe it would become apparent in play. The Arcanas are cool. I'd still run this if the opportunity came up.

Oglaf Books One, Two, and Three by Trudy Cooper and Doug Bayne - My wife got me these for my birthday. I follow the comic on RSS so am up-to-date, but it had been a long time since I read the back catalog. Still, just, hilarious on the whole. Sithrakism is the closest I have seen to a believable religion: "God hates you and will torture you forever when you die, so stay alive as long as you can!". We use the punchline from this one in day-to-day conversations still. Reading them back to back I did notice that like 40% of the punchlines are basically "you don't think they're gonna have sex, but then they do", though.

Books Completed June 2022

I keep writing these almost a month late. Not a great pattern!

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift - Everything that's social commentary here has already been written. I'll just say that the tone holds up even if the specific targets have faded. But if you've ever read a published RPG module or supplement, it's hard to imagine how this hasn't influenced it. The Atlas of The Planet of Hats!

It's worth calling out the misogyny is troweled on so heavy none of the discussions I've read are sure if it's the author's own prejudices bleeding through or part of the satire. I didn't find similar discussions around the assumptions that every society encountered would be broken into labors and "betters", but, again, that's Swift?

Let's take some gameables from each book.

• Give your players a coloring book conflict. Make them the biggest players on the stage. Let them think their actions are unaccountable.
• Make your players weak and unaccountable, physically. Let them try to play factions against each other. Introduce a medium between the two scales.
• Flying island. Math worship. There's not a lot here that isn't just a shitty 1E module, other than that the clothes made by math are bad and that immortality destroys in kind.
• Infectious philosophy. Your "race" is a degenerate servant here.

The Mammoth Book of Terror edited by Stephen Jones - I was going to throw this into a purge box, but noticed one of the authors was Manly Wade Wellman, an author I have been interested in recently. Flipping the pages, I realized this is a book that had a whole bunch of stories I vaguely remembered reading through the years but had given up hope of discovering the source. No idea where I got this thick old volume to start with, but let's try to consider each story. I'm going to pull the list from this Goodreads review because, well, this is enough to type already. 

(Hate the cover of this edition btw.)

• "The Yougoslaves" by Robert Bloch: Wouldn't have been so creepily racist if the author hadn't acknowledged it was a self-insert in the intro. 
• "The Last Illusion" by Clive Barker: The novelette that apparently inspired the Lord Of Illusions movie, but branches off from it wildly after the first paragraph other than the characters' names.
• "The House of the Temple" by Brian Lumley: I love the idea behind this and want to steal cosmic horror parasites as a lower-level encounter.
• "Murgunstrumm" by Hugh Cave: Pulpy as fuck.
• "The Late Shift" by Dennis Etchison: Cyberpunk as fuck.
• "Firstborn" by David Campton: Ehhh, no.
• "Amber Print" by Basil Copper: Makes a little more sense now that I've seen The Cabinet, but not my favoite.
• "Crystal" by Charles L. Grant: I couldn't follow what this was trying to do, but a lot of Londoners died.
• "The Horse Lord" by Lisa Tuttle: THIS IS LEGITIMATELY ONE OF THE SCARIEST STORIES I HAVE READ. I was so glad to rediscover it here. If I ever edited a collection of horror, wow, I would feature this. I need to find more by Tuttle, I adore this story.
• "Bunny Didn't Tell Us" by David J. Schow: Good for the mud imagery, not much else.
• "Out of Copyright" by Ramsey Campbell: Weird revenge fantasy from a fiction author against the concept of EDITORS.
• "Pig's Dinner" by Graham Masterton: Gore. I was already off pork before I read this but, it'd help.
• "The Jumpity-Jim" by R. Chetwynd Hayes: Steal this for a simple D&D module: Demonic entity can be summoned by non-magical but very specific circumstances.
• "Junk" by Stephen Laws: What. At least the guy liked his dog.
• "The Satyr's Head" by David Riley: Basic cursed item story, but wet London. 
• "Buckets" by F. Paul Wilson: I thought I imagined this story, but someone wrote it. 
• "The Black Drama" by Manly Wade Wellman: Worth saving the volume from the trash. This is a weird bit, but it stood out to me as the first time I remember any character in a 30s/40s story wearing anything but a suit or dress. The guy puts on jeans and "canvas sneakers" while he's changing in the boathouse! A fun story in any way even if you can see what's happening a mile away. Good job, Manly Wade Wellman (what a name).
• "The River of Night's Dreaming" by Karl Edward Wagner: Invokes a fever dream well, but not sure what's going on here. Wet.

The Great Outdoor Fight by Chris Onstad - Achewood is brain tape for me, but it's fun to revisit the classics. I'd forgotten this volume includes (terrible) old recipes.

The Walking Dead Vol.10-22 by Robert Kirkman and friends - Flowed over from last month. Mostly an excuse to lie on the floor while my back healed up (much better now, thanks), but still interesting to compare to the memories of the show. By the end of this run I hated all the characters so good job.