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Skip to content * View menu * View sidebar TASKERLAND A JOURNAL OF HORROR AND ROLEPLAYING GAMES. * Home * About * Contact CATEGORIES Categories Select Category Ideas (23) Prehistory (3) Reviews (139) Films (5) Non-Fiction (30) Novels (40) RPGs (14) Scenarios (26) Sourcebooks (13) Series (170) Canon Fodder (66) Ligotti (18) Lovecraft (48) For Real (7) Games Half Remembered (17) Gardens (11) HHQ (6) INSPO (10) Into the OSR (9) Origins (7) Purovoku (2) Shrink-Wrapped Recall (9) Watching the Detectives (14) Zine Corner (12) RSS FEEDS RSS - Posts RSS - Comments * On “The Loved Dead” by C.M. Eddy Jr and H.P. Lovecraft * The Gardens at Taskerland – V3.5? * REVIEW: Branches of Bone for Cthulhu Dark Ages * On “Vastarien” by Thomas Ligotti * ZC: Hellebore, Issue 4 (Yuletide 2020) * HHQ6 – Wizard’s Challenge II * On “The Ghost-Eater” by C.M. Eddy Jr and H.P. Lovecraft * Purovoku #2 * Photography, RPGs, and Art-making * On “The Journal of J.P. Drapeau” by Thomas Ligotti * HHQ5 – Fighter’s Challenge II * ITO: Joy and Devilry in the Films of Terrence Hill and Bud Spencer * On “Ashes” by C.M. Eddy Jr and H.P. Lovecraft * Origins: What I mean when I talk about being Good at RPGs. * REVIEW: Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark * On “The Music of The Moon” By Thomas Ligotti * ZC: Undefined Boundary – Volume 1, Issue 1 * HHQ4 – Cleric’s Challenge * On “The Unnamable” by H.P. Lovecraft * REVIEW: The Bloom by Josh Domanski and Goblin Archives Search Search Books Call of Cthulhu Canon Fodder Comics Fantasy Film For Real French RPGs Games Half Remembered Gardens HHQ History Horror Ideas Inspiration INSPO Into the OSR Ligotti Literature Lovecraft Me Stuff Nephilim Non-Fiction Novels Origins OSR paranormal Paranormal Investigation Podcast Reviews RPG Community RPG History RPGs RPG Theory Scenario Shops Short Fiction Shrink-Wrapped Recall Social History Sourcebook TV Video Games Watching the Detectives Zine Corner Zines Apr 25, 2024Apr 23, 2024 by Moreau Vazh ON “THE LOVED DEAD” BY C.M. EDDY JR AND H.P. LOVECRAFT * Canon Fodder, Lovecraft * Horror, Literature, Lovecraft, Short Fiction * 2 Comments Canon Fodderis an occasional series in which I write about classic works of horror fiction. This particular part of the series is devoted to the complete published works of H.P. Lovecraft, which I will slowly be working my way through. The story that nearly destroyed Weird Tales magazine. A hundred year-old work of splatterpunk provocation that still strikes a resonant power chord. Ignore the haters, this is Edgelord Lovecraft. Continue reading → Apr 23, 2024Apr 24, 2024 by Moreau Vazh THE GARDENS AT TASKERLAND – V3.5? * Gardens * Gardens, Me Stuff, RPGs * 6 Comments The keen-eyed among you will have noticed that I didn’t post last Thursday. This was the first unplanned outage since the blog switched over to focussing on RPGs and I adopted the current two posts-a-week schedule. The most obvious reason for the outage is that I was away for a week taking pictures and exercising my social skills. The deeper reason for the outage is that I didn’t manage to come up with anything to fill the gap before packing my bags and heading out the door. This was somewhat unusual as there have been times when the posting on here flowed with such frequency that I would build up a two-month lead time. I have never struggled to find anything to write about before and yet I not only struggled to post, I also found myself largely indifferent to said struggle. This too was unusual. My wandering focus is partly a result of having broken a long-standing creative log-jam resulting in my returning to various photography projects with a clearer head. It is also a result of a growing sense of frustration with where I stand in relation to the world of contemporary TTRPGs. This is a post about re-orienting my cultural antennae and re-focussing this blog. Continue reading → Apr 16, 2024Apr 12, 2024 by Moreau Vazh REVIEW: BRANCHES OF BONE FOR CTHULHU DARK AGES * Reviews, Scenarios * Call of Cthulhu, Reviews, RPGs * Leave a comment Published in 2022 by MJRRPG, Branches of Bone is a Viking-themed one-shot adventure for use with Cthulhu Dark Ages. It waswritten by Michael Reid and features cover art by Linus Larson, sigil artwork by C.Reid and a load of (appropriately credited) photographic and illustrative artwork licensed through Unsplash. The module is 40 pages long including about 19-pages of actual scenario, a selection of hand-outs, a selection of pre-generated characters, and additional rules for creating Viking characters from scratch. Michael Reid’s Branches of Bone is as good a Call of Cthulhu adventure as I have read since returning to the hobby: It is well-written, thoughtful, evocative in its details, and well-hones in its mechanisms. It is easy to run and full of fun ideas and situations but, like a lot of Call of Cthulhu scenarios, its rigour is manifest in restrictive plotting and a good deal of GM hand-holding. I ran it for my group and everyone enjoyed themselves but, as great a scenario as this may be, it is not the type of adventure that I am interested in running… though you may well be different. Continue reading → Apr 11, 2024Apr 7, 2024 by Moreau Vazh ON “VASTARIEN” BY THOMAS LIGOTTI * Canon Fodder, Ligotti * Canon Fodder, Horror, Ligotti, Literature, Short Fiction * Leave a comment Canon Fodder is an occasional series in which I write about classic works of horror fiction. This particular part of the series is devoted to the complete published works of Thomas Ligotti which I will slowly be working my way through. This perfect conclusion to Ligotti’s first collection Songs of a Dead Dreamer is not only an immense downer that calls into question the wisdom of bothering to read books, it also serves to collect, condense, and consume ideas and imagery barely nibbled upon in previous stories. Beautifully written and intensely creepy, “Vastarian” is a powerful riff on the theme of cursed books including both Lovecraft’s Necronomicon and Chambers’ The King in Yellow. Continue reading → Apr 9, 2024Apr 8, 2024 by Moreau Vazh ZC: HELLEBORE, ISSUE 4 (YULETIDE 2020) * Reviews, Zine Corner * Reviews, Zine Corner, Zines * 1 Comment Zine Corner is an occasional series in which I talk about individual issues of zines I have come across on my travels. Some of these will be about RPGs, some of them will be about horror, some of them will be about folklore, and some of them will just be weird and cool. The rest of the series can be found here. This Christmas-themed issue of Hellebore explores a number of really fascinating ideas but both the visuals and some of the writing feel somewhat rushed. It is still an amazing magazine that is fully worthy of your time but there were obvious trade-offs involved in the decision to add an extra issue in time for Christmas. Continue reading → Apr 4, 2024Apr 3, 2024 by Moreau Vazh HHQ6 – WIZARD’S CHALLENGE II * HHQ, Reviews, Scenarios * HHQ, Reviews, RPGs * Leave a comment HQ is an occasional column about the HHQ series of modules published by TSR in the early- to mid-1990s. Designed to be played either by a single player or by very small groups, the HHQ series offers a fascinating portrait of what D&D adventure design looked like before the collapse of TSR. The rest of the series can be found here. Something of a return to form for a series that had experienced a period of rather intense decline. Not a great adventure but good sentence-by-sentence writing, well-drawn NPCs and an evocative conclusion make for a more engaging and evocative module than one might have expected given the last two outings in the series. In the hands of a decent GM, this could be expanded into a nice little mini-campaign. Continue reading → Apr 2, 2024Mar 31, 2024 by Moreau Vazh ON “THE GHOST-EATER” BY C.M. EDDY JR AND H.P. LOVECRAFT * Canon Fodder, Lovecraft, Reviews * Canon Fodder, Horror, Literature, Lovecraft, Short Fiction * 1 Comment Canon Fodderis an occasional series in which I write about classic works of horror fiction. This particular part of the series is devoted to the complete published works of H.P. Lovecraft, which I will slowly be working my way through. The second of Lovecraft’s ill-conceived but reportedly well-paying collaborations with the established Weird Tales author CM Eddy Jr is just as much of a muddled and over-inflated mess as their first. Silly and unintentionally funny when it should have been scary, this is the type of rubbish that gave the pulps a bad name. Continue reading → Mar 28, 2024Mar 28, 2024 by Moreau Vazh PUROVOKU #2 * Purovoku * Purovoku * Leave a comment The second episode in my free-floating strand is going to be long on links as the real-world nibbles at me. The last few weeks have been hectic both professionally and creatively. A long-term photographic project that had been blocked for well over a year suddenly worked its way free just as the gods opened the freelancing tap. Blogging has been a bit weird. My productivity with this blog rests upon the fact that I have a number of different on-going threads that I can move between whenever I get bored. Unfortunately, I appear to have hit a point where both the reading and the writing for various threads have felt like a bit of a chore and I am aware that a degree of tetchiness has started to creep in. As a result, I tried to re-orient myself by trying to connect with and articulate what I enjoy about RPGs resulting in some pieces that turned out quite nicely: * What it means to be good at playing RPGs. * Why you shouldn’t need mechanical incentives to have fun. * Art-making should be central to the RPG hobby. I think this desire to articulate my vision of what it means to engage with the hobby is, I part motivated by the fact that I read Justin Alexander’s wretched book on how to be a GM and found it to be both spiritually stunted and intellectually dead. Normally I’d get the sour taste out of my mouth by reviewing the book but I think my conception of the RPG good life is so radically different to Alexander’s that the only proper response to his book would be to write a book of my own about how to run games and, frankly, LOL. Anyway, here are some more interesting things to read… Continue reading → Mar 26, 2024Mar 26, 2024 by Moreau Vazh PHOTOGRAPHY, RPGS, AND ART-MAKING * Ideas * Ideas, Me Stuff, RPG History, RPGs * 3 Comments When Jennell Jaquays passed away earlier this year, a number of venues paid tribute to her long career as one of the most influential artists and designers from the early days of Dungeons & Dragons (Shannon Appelcline’s piece is typically engaging). Nowadays, Jaquays is best known for the non-linear approach to dungeon design that unambiguously bears her name but she also produced memorable covers and some of the most iconic pieces of internal black and white illustration in the history of D&D. However, while there is a lot to love and appreciate about Jaquays’ artistic legacy, the piece that leapt out at me was the cover to a 1979 Judges’ Guild collection of mini-dungeons entitled The Book of Treasure Maps: I cannot speak to the book’s interior as I am not in the least bit familiar with its contents (though it has, of course, been reviewed) but I am struck by how unusual and striking it is to see an RPG book with a photograph for a cover, especially when the book’s credited author was a legendary Fantasy artist in her own right. I would love to know the story behind the decision to use that picture for the cover. Rumour has it that the picture includes Jaquays as a model and that it was taken during a LARPing event rather than as part of a planned photo-shoot. Either way, I find the picture really quite charming. This got me to thinking about the place of photography in RPG-adjacent art and how taking pictures can help us not only to prepare and run more interesting games, but also to relate to RPGs in a more fulfilling manner. Continue reading → Mar 21, 2024Mar 21, 2024 by Moreau Vazh ON “THE JOURNAL OF J.P. DRAPEAU” BY THOMAS LIGOTTI * Canon Fodder, Ligotti * Canon Fodder, Horror, Ligotti, Literature, Short Fiction * 1 Comment Canon Fodder is an occasional series in which I write about classic works of horror fiction. This particular part of the series is devoted to the complete published works of Thomas Ligotti which I will slowly be working my way through A series of colourfully-written vignettes collected under the rubric of a 19th Century author writing about his home town of Bruges. Feels less like a story and more like notes taken while on holiday in Belgium but the prose is bleak and sonorous. Continue reading → Mar 20, 2024Mar 20, 2024 by Moreau Vazh HHQ5 – FIGHTER’S CHALLENGE II * HHQ, Reviews, Scenarios * HHQ, RPGs * 1 Comment HHQ is an occasional column about the HHQ series of modules published by TSR in the early- to mid-1990s. Designed to be played either by a single player or by very small groups, the HHQ series offers a fascinating portrait of what D&D adventure design looked like before the collapse of TSR. The rest of the series can be found here. Bloated and mired in spurious mechanical precision, Fighter’s Challenge II is a single-track railroad with stops at Generic NPCs, Dull Encounters, Terrible Dialogue, and Linear Single-level Dungeon. A cohesive tone and some unexpectedly evocative background detailing do provide some relief but fail to raise the quality level much above “trash”. Continue reading → Mar 19, 2024Mar 18, 2024 by Moreau Vazh ITO: JOY AND DEVILRY IN THE FILMS OF TERRENCE HILL AND BUD SPENCER * Into the OSR * Ideas, Inspiration, Into the OSR, RPGs * 7 Comments Into the OSR is an occasional series in which I write up some of the creative decisions I have made in the preparation of my old school sandbox RPG campaign. The rest of the series can be found here What can be learned from a series of half-forgotten foreign films in which a pair of scumbags eat beans, buy fancy clothes, and blow shit up because it’s more fun than working a steady job? EVERYTHING. Continue reading → Mar 14, 2024Feb 27, 2024 by Moreau Vazh ON “ASHES” BY C.M. EDDY JR AND H.P. LOVECRAFT * Canon Fodder, Lovecraft * Canon Fodder, Horror, Lovecraft, Short Fiction * 2 Comments Canon Fodderis an occasional series in which I write about classic works of horror fiction. This particular part of the series is devoted to the complete published works of H.P. Lovecraft, which I will slowly be working my way through. This early collaboration between Lovecraft and an established author who paid him for “revisions” is laughably awful but it does involve accidental murder and people getting turned on after watching someone dissolve a rabbit in toxic chemicals. Continue reading → Mar 12, 2024Mar 12, 2024 by Moreau Vazh ORIGINS: WHAT I MEAN WHEN I TALK ABOUT BEING GOOD AT RPGS. * Ideas, Origins, Reviews * Ideas, Me Stuff, RPG History * 1 Comment Origins is a series of posts in which I reflect upon my relationship with RPGs as well as the events that shaped my tastes and understanding of games. The rest of the series can be found here. We talk too much about how to be a good GM and not enough about how to be a good player. This is a piece about what I think makes for a great player of RPGs and how I came to those beliefs. Continue reading → Mar 7, 2024Mar 7, 2024 by Moreau Vazh REVIEW: RING SHOUT BY P. DJÈLÍ CLARK * Novels, Reviews * Book, Books, Fantasy, Horror * Leave a comment Winner of the Nebula, Locus, and British Fantasy Awards for Best Novella, Ring Shout was first published in 2020 by Tor.com. Set in 1920s Macon, Georgia the story revolves around a rag-tag bunch of African American freedom fighters who use magic and high-explosives to battle a horde of demons summoned by the projection of D.W. Griffiths Birth of a Nation and now possessing the bodies of Ku Klux Klansmen. Built around a powerful central metaphor and an utterly bewitching vision of 1920s Black Culture, Ring Shout is a great idea let down by poor writing. Continue reading → Mar 5, 2024Mar 5, 2024 by Moreau Vazh ON “THE MUSIC OF THE MOON” BY THOMAS LIGOTTI * Canon Fodder, Ligotti * Canon Fodder, Horror, Ligotti, Literature, Short Fiction * 1 Comment Canon Fodder is an occasional series in which I write about classic works of horror fiction. This particular part of the series is devoted to the complete published works of Thomas Ligotti which I will slowly be working my way through An early work that features not only a nice spin on the very Ligottian trope of the half-abandoned city that somehow overflows with sensory promise, it also considers the question of addiction and how high a price we might be willing to pay to stop being bored. Continue reading → Feb 29, 2024Feb 21, 2024 by Moreau Vazh ZC: UNDEFINED BOUNDARY – VOLUME 1, ISSUE 1 * Reviews, Zine Corner * Occult, Reviews, Zine Corner, Zines * Leave a comment Zine Corner is an occasional series in which I talk about individual issues of zines I have come across on my travels. Some of these will be about RPGs, some of them will be about horror, some of them will be about folklore, and some of them will just be weird and cool. The rest of the series can be found here. The first issue of a refreshingly free-wheeling and wide-ranging journal that draws on the methods and currents of both Psychogeography and Hauntology while refusing to be hemmed in by either. Full of passion, weirdness, and intelligence, Undefined Boundary feels like the start of something new. Continue reading → Feb 27, 2024Feb 27, 2024 by Moreau Vazh HHQ4 – CLERIC’S CHALLENGE * HHQ, Reviews, Scenarios * HHQ, Reviews, RPGs, Scenario * 2 Comments HHQ is an occasional column about the HHQ series of modules published by TSR in the early- to mid-1990s. Designed to be played either by a single player or by very small groups, the HHQ series offers a fascinating portrait of what D&D adventure design looked like before the collapse of TSR. The rest of the series can be found here. Easily the weakest adventure in the HHQ series thus far. Under-imagined and under-written, this module is a creature of pure bloat: A combat-heavy railroad from one generic encounter to another. So devoid of charm that it constitutes damming evidence that end-stage TSR’s reputation for terrible module writing may have been well deserved. Continue reading → Feb 22, 2024Feb 22, 2024 by Moreau Vazh ON “THE UNNAMABLE” BY H.P. LOVECRAFT * Canon Fodder, Lovecraft * Canon Fodder, Horror, Literature, Lovecraft, Short Fiction * 3 Comments Canon Fodder is an occasional series in which I write about classic works of horror fiction. This particular part of the series is devoted to the complete published works of H.P. Lovecraft, which I will slowly be working my way through. An experimental and self-aware piece of writing that delves into Lovecraft’s infamous (if overstated) tendency to fill his stories with monsters that are so horrible that they cannot be described. A clever and technically impressive piece by an author who really was starting to master his craft but you probably need to be at least a level 3 Lovecraft Nerd in order to fully appreciate it. Continue reading → Feb 20, 2024Feb 19, 2024 by Moreau Vazh REVIEW: THE BLOOM BY JOSH DOMANSKI AND GOBLIN ARCHIVES * Reviews, Scenarios * Horror, OSR, RPGs, Scenario * Leave a comment First published in 2023, The Bloom is a 48-page adventure for Liminal Horror. Written by Josh Domanski and Goblin Archives with design by Josh Domanski, editing by Gabriel Reich and illustrations by Zach Hazard Vaupen and Joshua Clark, this adventure can be purchased digitally through both Itch and DriveThruRPG while printed copies can be obtained through Space Penguin Ink. Set in a pitoresque but fading mountain town with vibes reminiscent of Twin Peaks and The Last of Us, The Bloom is a densely-written and lavishly-designed adventure that could easily support several sessions of play or (with a bit of additional work) form the backdrop to a longer campaign. A lavishly detailed adventure that takes a radically new approach to investigative horror. Perhaps more suitable for story-gamers than fans of either Call of Cthulhu or the OSR, this module’s flashes of brilliance require a lot of work from anyone looking to spin them into a compelling game. Continue reading → POSTS NAVIGATION Older posts Create a website or blog at WordPress.com Taskerland Create a website or blog at WordPress.com * Subscribe Subscribed * Taskerland Join 88 other subscribers. Sign me up * Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now. * Privacy * * Taskerland * Customise * Subscribe Subscribed * Sign up * Log in * Report this content * View site in Reader * Manage subscriptions * Collapse this bar Loading Comments... Write a Comment... Email (Required) Name (Required) Website