Start of the Fantasy Months: October '19

Ah October.  People are busy with school work, or their office/teaching jobs start getting serious, and cars start to break down all while a distinct, if a bit distant in this part of Ohio, chill starts creeping in.  The start of what I like to call the Fantasy Season. The fantastical is embedded in our calendars, even more so than those obscure religious holidays for whatever religion; which are a lot of fun to begin with, but everyone gets to play these days. Sure its big marketing keeping the population distracted and still spending money, but we could do worse than Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years.

October with its Halloween festival has let loose from candy sales spooky movies, to being times where people research the medieval and pagan history around the fall season. Besides the semi-employed finding gigs at haunted houses, the unemployed writer can find something Halloweeny to write about, especially in the RPG field. Over employed non-writer RPG GMs have Ravenloft and dozens of other works to work into their groups. If Charles Brown's pan on big marketing folklore with the Great Pumpkin has halfway become a thing, even the most uninspired RPG writer can work in the Great Pumpkin into the Cthulhu mythos.

For me this year there are a couple things going on. My Call of Cthulhu homage mini-campaign for all of two to three players, "The Call of Kopfy." Why didn't I do my own Crawlspace? I, myself, needed to crack open the book and once again familiarize with the actual text. I also have two players that have never played in a CoC purists style campaign, which I was luckily to have both played in and ran for others in a dozen of from like 1982 until about 1999. I am brushing up on the rules, if not using them exactly (we're doing video chat and everyone is about 20 years beyond need a 1040-A tax return form for a Character sheet), we're sticking to the spirit of the Lovecraftian sub-genre in horror gaming. At the same time for the author/publisher in me, I've rekindled the Elder Tunnels web-magazine with an upcoming Halloween Special '19 . They tend to do well and fans of creepy, like JerryTel, Werdna, and Ajax Talbot (Ian), jump right in to do their thing.

Oh one day though, my Halloween setting (that's Ravenloft in D&D-speak), is going to come to print, or electronic-availability at least. A bunch of realms authored by different writers designed for horror role-playing in varied, yet attached, "realms." As I do more Wobble, I don't even think fluctuation in technology or time frame would matter to the Characters-- Never mind that, CoC and Crawlspace already do that just fine. Okay it'll be in a set period, but the NPCs will rock. The working title for this is "The Blood Moon Campaigns" based off of Scott Malthouse's (Werdna's) Peakville notes from about a decade ago. No I don't give up the ghost when it comes to Halloween. One day, my Gourde Lord, a Pumpkinhead homage, will have other "Blood Masters" to plot against. One day Lake Blood Moon will be where the Irish Sea meets Lake Erie and Lake Okeechobee (and now someplace in Arkansas... Texarkana sounds fun) where only bog lands with whispering cattails separate them. One day my "Halloween Land" collaboration will take the hobby by storm.