100 Days of Halloween: Tomb of the Witch Queen

I obviously had to buy this one as well. Though if you have been following me all week you know we have gone to many tombs of many witch queens.

This one has the unenviable task of following up on all of those. 

As always I will be following my rules for these reviews.

Tomb of the Witch Queen (5e)

PDF. 13 pages. Color cover and interior art. 

Truthfully it is not fair to compare this one to ones done by professional teams with Kickstarter money. This is just one guy, Jon Paget, doing things on his own.  The adventure is for 5e and claims to be for characters 1st to 12th level. Ok.

We start this one like so many of the other witch queen tomb adventures. The PCs hear of about the tomb and the riches within. Officials have gone to seek it out but never returned. So it decided that expendable experts are needed. That's the PCs. 

The adventure can be scaled to three different levels Low (levels 1-4), Mid (levels 4-8), and High (9-12). The adventure is divided into four separate "layers." Each follows the last and increases in difficulty. Until you reach the tomb of Sassaya herself.

I can see this being a good Convention style game when people could bring their own characters. 

But I am not sure if even this idea overcomes some of the shortcomings of this adventure. The adventure is as linear as it can get. While I am ok ignoring this in some older adventures, this is a 5e one published in 2021. The rewards at the end are uninspired. Sure there is a table to scale the rewards, but this sort of thing comes right out of the DMG of many editions. I don't need an adventure for that. Give me some new magic or something interesting. NOW there are some here. There is a d12 table of interesting additional rewards. THAT should have been the model for the main rewards. Again I have said it many times, if I am going to plunder a witch's tomb I better find some cool spell books.

I mentioned the adventure was linear. Well it is so much so that there are no proper maps. The Labyrinth, Level (or Layer previous) 3 has a kind of a flow-charty color-coded thing that the author obviously is proud of AND it is a neat idea in theory. I am not sure how it acts in practice though. Maybe I am getting hung up on the word "Labyrinth". This piece does look like it scales well. 

The list price is just under $5. Even by my revised guidelines of 25 cents a page for content (this has 10 pages of content for 13 overall pages) that only gets us to $2.50. There is not much in the way of art; no imagery of what the characters might see for example. Only one newish monster with a stat block. Mostly skill checks really. If it had been at or under $2.50 I could have merited giving it another star.

October Horror Movie Challenge: Pagan Night

I love tales of the struggle of Pagans against Christianity and the resulting Folk Horror that would later grow up in the aftermath. So tonight are two different movies from two different points of view on the same topic.

Midsommar (2019)

Believe it or not, I had not seen this one yet. I had heard a lot about it, both good and bad, from a lot of people whose opinions I trust, so that was my hesitation. I also wanted to save it for a night my wife and I could watch it. We had been watching a lot of "Vikings" so I thought she might like this. 

The basic plot I think is pretty well known by this point and I really don't want to spoil it. I just want to say that Florence Pugh is amazing in this. She was wonderful both when her character was low (and there is a lot of that, poor Dani) and especially at her highs. The movie reminded me a lot of the original Wicker Man in a good way.

I am also one of the ones that loved the ending. Dani smiling at the end was all about her release from all the toxic relationships she had been in; her sister, her boyfriend, her friends.

I am really, really getting to love the movies from A24. 

Black Death (2010)

During the first round of the bubonic plague in England and Sean Bean needs Eddie Redmayne to help find a village that is protecting a "necromancer" and does not suffer from the plague.

Redmayne plays young monk Osmund who is secretly in love with a local girl. They plan to run off together as soon he can get free, but he wants her out of their village now to protect her.  They plan to meet at a shrine in the woods.  She leaves and Bean, looking every bit like Boromir and Ned Stark, plays Ulrich a man charged by the Bishop to seek out and kill this Necromancer.  Osmund volunteers.

We meet Ulrich's men, a band of cutthroats and killers, who are charged with hunting witches.

They travel through the land with Osmund as their guide. Osmund sneaks off one morning to find Averill but only find her bloody clothes and local bandits.  The bandits chase him back to the camp where they all fight. They manage to kill most of them but the last two make off with their horses.

The band enters the village where no one is dying from the plague.  They are greeted by Hob (Tim McInnerny) and Langiva (Carice van Houten) and then it becomes a game of "Spot the Game of Thrones actor." 

Langiva has all the men drugged while she takes Osmund to see her villagers in full pagan get up raise Averill from the dead. Osmund cries out in terror. Next thing we see is Osmund, Ulrich and the rest all in a pit full of water tied up. Langiva tells them they can go free if they renounce god. Unwilling she starts having them killed one by one. She allows Osmund to see Averill while they tie Ulrich up to horses.  Osmund finds Averill alive, but feeling she is in Purgatory he kills her to free her soul.

Langiva seeing this tells her village this is Christian love and they should have no part of it. She has Ulrich drawn and quartered, but before he dies he reveals to Osmund he has the plague and has brought death to this village. He is killed and in the chaos two of his men escape and pretty much kill everyone.  Osmund chases Langiva into the marsh where she tells him that Averill had only been drugged, she had been alive all this time and it was he Osmund who killed her.  She escapes.

Osmund and the remaining witchhunter return to the monastery and we learn later Osmund left the brotherhood to become a witchhunter on his own and a particularly cruel and violent one.

This one was also pretty good. Carice van Houten was nearly unrecognizable as a blonde but once she began to speak you knew it was her. Eddie Redmayne was great in both aspects of his role, the innocent but fallen monk and the vengeful, hard hearted witchhunter. And as always Sean Bean dies in the end.

--

It's been a full Pagan and Folk Horror weekend really. This solidifies my desire to maybe do a Coda for the War of the Witch Queens in NIGHT SHIFT.  I might to drink some of my mead to think about it.

October Horror Movie Challenge 2022
Viewed: 24
First Time Views: 19

100 Days of Halloween: Sepulcher of the Sorceress-Queen

Robert E. Howard casts a long shadow over Fantasy Role Playing in general and D&D in particular.  This is best seen in two different near clones, Adventurer Conqueror King and Hyperborea. So when ACKS did an adventure that was an homage to Taramis, well I had to check it out.

Sepulcher of the Sorceress-Queen

Print and PDF. 56 pages. Color cover and interior layout art with black & white art.

For Character levels 7th to 9th.

Ok. So another tomb with a sleeping undead witch. It is a powerful trope. This one features the Sorceress-Queen Semiramis of Zahar who has been dead, but sleeping, for 1000 years. She had been betrayed by a former lover (and having killed her first 100 lovers she should have seen this one coming) and is now waiting for her chance to rise and rule again.

The adventure is part of a loosely connected series but it is mentioned that it can be used as a stand-alone adventure and placed anywhere. 

The adventure involves going into her tomb, stopping her from rising, and maybe make off with some treasure. The tomb is full of undead horrors and other dangers. To make things more interesting there is a group of lizardmen in the tomb trying to do the same thing as the characters. 

It then becomes a race against time, times 2. Get to the queen before she gains her full power and get to the treasures before the lizard men do. 

The adventure gives us a bunch on new magic items, a new spell, and five new (ish) monsters. The adventure itself is cut from familiar cloth but the map is quite good and great for groups that like to explore old tombs.

Use with my War of the Witch Queens

For this campaign, this adventure covers more than just familiar territory. This will be the third or fourth "tomb of a long dead witch coming back to life" they have seen if I stay on current plans. So...what am I to do?

Well. I do love the map here and the tomb itself is an interesting place. Maybe...I can merge this with my other Howard/Hyperborea-influenced adventure The Lost Caverns of Acheron.  I mentioned all the pluses that using this adventure gives me when I reviewed the V series from BRW Games. There is one thing I failed to mention though. I have already taken my players through module S4 The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth. Once they get to that spherical room they will remember they have been here already.

I could use this as a base and bring notes from The Lost Caverns of Acheron. I certainly do not need to run both adventures no matter how fun they are. But I also really love the idea of using Xaltana.

Do I go with Xaltana or Semiramis? 

I thought maybe the unnamed Witch-Queen of Yithorium from Hyperborea might be a good substitute. Both come from the same sources. Semiramis has a name, the Witch-Queen does not (even though I named her Miriam). Semiramis is a Zaharian Sorcerer which reads a lot like a warlock or a witch and has a strong Howard/CAS vibe. Same with our Witch-Queen of Yithorium. 

Yithorium is surrounded by the Zakath desert. Zahar is now described as a desolate wasteland like a desert. Ok, that's a stretch but you see where I am going here. 

Why mix or merge them at all? Simple I want to get as much of all the great material out there I can for this adventure campaign and knowing full well I can never run everything. Also by picking and choosing different OSR systems, publishers, and products, I am naturally going to get similar results; we all draw from the same wells. 

So in my campaign, the Sorceress-Queen Semiramis of Zahar and the Witch-Queen of Yithorium become the same person. 

Maybe I'll keep Miriam around as the descendant of Semiramis. She is every bit as evil as her forebearer. Maybe Miriam leads them to the tomb in order to gain her ancestor's power but ends up getting possessed in the process.  I do like this idea.

Use with my Second Campaign

My original idea for this was to run it mostly as is for my Second Campaign. I'll have to see how that one develops when the characters get to the right levels.

October Horror Movie Challenge: Daughters of The Craft

Over the years I have noticed a trend in movies to try to recreate the..hu...magic that was in the movie The Craft. AKA the move that made a thousand teen witches in the 90s. I have taken to call these movies Daughters of the Craft since that is what they obviously desire to be. 

Here are a few I watched starting on Friday till tonight.

The Coven (2015)

Take the Craft (sorta) and put them in an English boarding school. No not Hogwarts, but they do name-drop Margaret Murray, Robert Cochrane, and Gerald Gardner (though they call him Joe) so that is something. 

There is a new teacher, Mrs. Belial, who takes over the class and teaches them about Uri Clef (an anagram for Lucifer). We see her eating raw meat later on. 

The girls head out to Queens Woods where Robert Cochrane used to meet with his Wiccan group. They are joined by two boys, Eddie and Louie, the five girls and two boys realize their first names all spell out Lucifer. Now strange things start to happen. They are joined by the at first uninvited Eve (who has been at home researching all of this) and soon they are being chased through the woods by the guy on the motorcycle...who might be Eddie? All the names appear including Eve's but not Eddie's and they all get sucked into a burning tree.

Yeah. Ok, that one was rather bad, to be honest. I had such hopes for it in the beginning.

Ouija Craft (2020)

This one is "What if the girls from the Craft were in college with an Ouija board.

And man is this one starting out bad. There are two characters who look like they are some time in the past, running through the woods. The woman uses magic to try to heal the man but it doesn't work. What else that doesn't work is their acting. Cause they are both terrible. Not a great start here. Anyway, there is a demon girl of some sort and an Ouija board.

Fast forward to the present day. Abby, Rory, and Jess are in a barn somewhere practicing magic. Jess is trying to get a spell to work with only a little success, Abby and Rory, along with Abby's boyfriend Sam, are making potions. Abby and Rory are obviously better at magic. Rory drinks a potion and is able to levitate for a bit. Abby decides she wants to mix a temporary immortality potion with a healing potion to live forever. The potion seems to work at first, but soon she is convulsing. I guess she never saw the Potion Miscibility table in the 1st Ed DMG because she rolls a 01% and her whole chest blows up. 

At the wake, Rory and Jess are each dealing with grief in different ways. Jess keeps thinking she hears Abby. Finally, she does and she wants her and Rory to take the Ouija board to the graveyard where she is buried and try to contact her. This is of course breaking the rules of Ouija. Anyway, Abby comes back but needs a real life so she has to kill someone who saw her die, Rory or Jess.  There are some magic battles between the three and in the process, Sam is killed and Abby brings him back. 

They learn from the ghosts from the opener they have to burn the Ouija board. Oh and that Jess is not a witch but a psychic. Jess gets stabbed by Sam, but Rory gives up her life force so she can live. Since Jess didn't see Sam die he falls to dust. Now Jess and Abby fight it out and Jess is able to TK the board into a fire burning it and Abby, but not before Abby stabs Jess. JEss drinks the temporary immortality potion and passes out waiting for the paramedics. 

Months later Jess is still recovering and she sees Abby's ghost who apologizes for everything. She tells Jess that she could become a very powerful psychic, but Jess takes all her books and potions and witchy stuff outside and burns them all.

Ok. Not great and some really terrible acting. I felt though the two leads Jess and Rory, Ivy Rhodes and Lacy Hartselle respectively were actually fairly good and made the movie watchable. 

Coven (2020) 

Also known as Akelarre and Coven of Sisters it is not to be confused with the 2019 movie Coven.

This one just sneaks in with the theme. Maybe Great-Great Grandmothers of the Craft is a better descriptor for this one.

This one is horror, but not for the reasons the first two are.

In 1609 in the Basque Country of Spain five girls are all arrested and charged with witchcraft.  One of their friends tries to rescue them and she is captured too. At first, the girls are afraid but then they begin to joke about it, not believing that this is happening to them.  Then the torture begins.   

It's all rather horrible to be honest.  Worse, because you knew this sort of thing happened all the time. 

Amaia Aberasturi stars as Ana and she is the real stand-out here. She keeps stringing along her accusers to drag out the proceedings to help save the other girls. Ana easily strings along the horny men till the full moon.

The girls decide that in order to delay their execution longer they tell the judge they will re-enact the Black Mass, or the Sabbath, for his records. They do so and get him all involved as Lucifer.  Once they had frightened the men, or turned them on, enough they run into the woods. They are chased by the men and soldiers till they get to the edge of a cliff over the ocean.  The other women, the ones not accused of witchcraft, sing a song about the full moon and the high tide.  Ana, realizing the message, tells the other girls they can jump.

They jump over the side, not knowing if they lived or died. 

I thought this movie was great honestly. Not the typical sort of horror, but also not exactly what I thought it was going to be either. 

Really good to have this one the last of the night to wash the taste out of my mouth from the first one.

Of course, I have heard this word, Akelarre, before and named a witch-focused demon after it.

October Horror Movie Challenge 2022
Viewed: 22
First Time Views: 17

I Got My NIGHT SHIFT Mead

Got a special delivery the other day!

Our NIGHT SHIFT Twilight's Queen mead from Apis mead and wine is in.

I have three bottles and I am saving them for Halloween night. Certainly a great night for it!

You can order yours from Vino Shipper.

100 Days of Halloween: The Baleful Coven (5E)

Let's do a 5e adventure tonight. Unlike the others I have reviewed so far I do not have a spot for this one figured out. So maybe something will come to me while I type.

The Baleful Coven (5E)

Print and PDF. 24 pages. Color cover and interior art.

For five to seven characters of 6th to 7th level. 

It is described as bringing standard fantasy characters into contact with threats of the "Far East." Which is cool, to be honest. Not sure if it will fit into my game just yet, but I like the promise of it so far. It does have one of my favorite archetypes, the white-haired witch, and there is a coven made up of a hag and two warlocks. 

I am going to pause here to note that this was originally a Pathfinder adventure. I bought the PDF of it a while back but I now notice it is gone from both DriveThru's and Paizo's websites. I mention this because I feel some of the fingerprints of Pathfinder, and in particular how they handled witches and hags, can be seen in the 5e version here. For example, while a warlock here, Masami Onishi is very much a "White Haired Witch" from Pathfinder. This is not a complaint mind you. Save in only I wish the Pathfinder version was still available. Granted it was released 10 years ago.

The bulk of the adventure takes place on the demi-plane of The Dream of Vengeful Reckoning. Ok, I do rather like that too.  The adventure then becomes a search for how to leave this demi-plane. Naturally defeating this coven of "witches" is one of the ways to do it. 

The adventure is actually rather well put together and I can see it being run over a long afternoon-evening or a could of smaller sessions. This is exactly what it was designed for. There are memorable NPCs which is the real hook for me. 

So yeah a fun adventure with some great ideas. 

Use with my War of the Witch Queens

There is a solid idea here, but not the one I think Legendary Games wants me to hook into. I mentioned the NPCs were memorable, and they are interesting, but you know what would be better? If I took three witches from three different adventures the characters had "defeated" and used them. I have seen enough movies this month where witches come back to some form of life to get vengeance on those who killed them.  Set them up into a demi-plane, or for my purposes, a Liminal Plane, where the dead witches can get their vengeance on the still-living PCs.

This is for 6th to 7th level so it would need to be part of an earlier adventure. My top choices right now are Trilena (Rahasia), Llorona (The Witch of the Tarriswoods), Kyleth (Saga of the Witch Queen), and Morfa (The Witch Queen of Cair Urnahc). I just need to pick three. Though Morfa and Trilena have both come back from the dead once already. I do admit that Kyleth on the top of the list to replace Masami Onishi.  While I know a couple are supposed to be hags I feel that is a hold-over from the Pathfinder adventure where only witches with hags can make covens. Also no need for me to add more winter witches, my cup is over flowing with them!

But what good is killing a villain if you can't bring them back from the dead to terrorize your players? I mean characters. Yeah. Characters.

October Horror Movie Challenge: Night of The Necromancers

This is another one that has been on my list for a bit. Napoleonic Wars. The Black Forest? Dark Elves? Yeah, that sounds great. Does the movie live up to it? 

The Necromancer (2018)

A group of British soldiers gathers after a particularly bloody battle where they learn they are being sent to Waterloo where they will certainly be killed. So they all decide to become deserters and leave for England. To do so they have to cross into Germany and through the BlackForest. 

Along the way the tensions rise and get higher as they all begin to think about what they had left behind in England. Logan for example thinks about his wife on his estate. As they move through the forest though Logan begins to hear voices and sometimes the voices sound like his wife. While searching he sees a naked woman with horns running through the forest. He follows her but can't find her.

They stumble on another British soldier who appears to be shell-shocked. Unsure what to do with him they take him along.  Deeper in Logan hears the woman more. We learn in flashbacks that he argued with his wife before leaving. He accused her of cheating on him with another man. As he gets deeper and deeper into the forest he sees more and more of this mystery woman. As we learn more about Logan and how he beat and eventually killed his wife before he left for war.  He encounters the woman who calls herself a "dark elf" or a "Moriquendi" (ok more on that later). She convinces him to eat berries, which are really stones, and this kills him.  We soon see two other dark elves who also tempt the other men, but they don't get the same level of detail that Logan did. But basically, all of them have dark secrets. One had sex with a woman he was not supposed to (couldn't tell why), and one had a prostitute kill herself, things like that. 

The movie doesn't really get going till about the last 20 minutes. The soldiers, once they see the dark elves and remember their horrible deeds, begin to kill themselves in horrible, but imaginative ways.  We learn that the injured soldier is in fact The Necromancer. He had been a child living in the Black Forrest when he and his family were all killed by Vikings a 1,000 years before. He claims he came back by drinking the blood of unicorns (sounds oddly familiar) and now he feeds on the pain of people that come into the forest.

There are some issues with this movie. I love the idea of strange forgotten creatures living in dark places like the Black Forest. And I love the idea of karmic payback. Even the dark elves looked cool. The biggest issues with this film are they spent too long to get to the interesting bits and too long on just Logan's backstory and so little on everyone else's. Honestly, they were all mostly interchangeable. 

I mean really all really old forests should have something like this in them. Reminded me of driving through the Appalachian mountains last year. 

So, Moriquendi. I knew I knew the word but could not recall where. So I looked it up. Yes, it means "Dark Elf" but in Sindarin in Tolkien's Legendarium. I am pretty sure they Googled "Dark Elf" and they got "Moriquendi."

Necromancer (1988)

It was an early night so I popped this one on. I remember it from the late 80s and thought, hey let's do a a Necromancer night. 

So this is a Rape-and-Revenge movie with a supernatural twist. College student Julie (Elizabeth Kaitan/Clayton) is working late in her professor/lover's office when some dudes break in to steal a test. They find her and one of the dudes, Paul, rapes her.  

Naturally upset she tells her friend (but not her boyfriend because is a self-absorbed prick) who convinces her to see a psychic who is advertised in the local campus paper. They see her, the weird magic/psychic chick Linda, (though sometimes the actors screw up and call her by her real name, Lisa) casts a spell raising the Demon of Vengence.  They think it is a joke until the special effects department gets their say and Julie and her friend run out.

Soon the guys that rapped Julie begin seeing her naked form (coming out of water for some reason) trying to seduce them (they are college guys, this is not a lot of work) in their embrace the form turns into a demon and kills them.  Julie seems to be somewhat aware of what the demon is doing, seeing it in her dreams. Oh and much like poor old Susan from Mausoleum, her eyes glow green before she goes all evil. Must be an 80s thing.

Though soon the demon begins to go after other men in her life. Like her boyfriend (though her professing her love for him stops the attack before it happens) and creepy professor (played by usually better than this Russ Tamblyn) a murder the real Julie gets to witness and we get our first good look at the demon in its true form.

Waide Aaron Riddle plays Earnest who...well, I am not sure what he adds to this other than keep calling Linda Lisa and looking like Patrick Wilson ordered from Wish. I guess he keeps trying to cast protection spells on Julie himself. He does try to give her an athame but it turns out to be the demon/Linda/Lisa again. She gets him to kill himself.

Julie has another "fight" with her boyfriend Eric. Well, she is trying to explain herself and ask for help and he is being a dick. And the demon shows up in his room.  At this point, I am rooting for the demon. Though Lisa/Linda seems to be somewhere else summoning something from the "bowels of Diva" and the demon is in Eric's room. But then she turns from Demon Julie to Linda/Lisa again.  So Julie and Demon Julie are wrestling each other with a knife. And one of them gets killed with a knife to the eye. We assume it is real Julie, but we later see Linda/Lisa laughing in her home.

Yeah this one was not good. 

While both movies share a name, Necromancer, they also share a theme; vengeance on men that have wronged women. Which of course next to nothing to do with a Necromancer.

BUT I do love the idea of a vengeful spirit that a witch in particular can call on.  I did this a bit with The Dirae, but a demon of vengeance would also be nice. The idea from this movie was later "used" in the Buffy series, but I think I could do better than either, to be honest. The Erinyes are a good choice, but they have a lot of baggage of their own.

What ever I decide the demon needs to have glowing green eyes.

October Horror Movie Challenge 2022
Viewed: 19
First Time Views: 14