Preacher Alisdair MacLeod
Father Alasdair MacLeod was born in the Scottish Highlands, the son of a crofter whose family possessed little beyond stubbornness, faith and a collection of stories about things that sensible people insisted had never existed. As a young man Alasdair dismissed most of these tales as remnants of an older Scotland, useful for frightening children…
Two Crusaders of the Twilight Order
The Twilight Order had crossed an ocean in pursuit of Dracula, but it quickly discovered that America required a different sort of Crusader. Armour and ancient knowledge remained useful, particularly when the enemy possessed claws, fangs or an inconvenient habit of refusing to remain dead, but the frontier rewarded men who could draw quickly and…
Warsaw 1920: Lenin’s Failed Conquest of Europe by Adam Zamoyski
The Polish Soviet War is one of those conflicts whose importance seems considerably greater than the attention it receives in most general histories of the twentieth century. Adam Zamoyski sets out to correct some of that neglect in Warsaw 1920: Lenin’s Failed Conquest of Europe, first published in English by HarperPress in 2008. It is…
Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World by Vicki Myron, with Bret Witter
I picked up Dewey expecting a story about a remarkable library cat, and for the most part that is what makes the book work. Dewey was found as a tiny kitten in the book return chute of the public library in Spencer, Iowa, and from that unlikely beginning became not only a fixture of the…
Two Thousand Days Without Missing One
Apparently, today marks 2,000 consecutive days of posting on the blog. When I started this little exercise on 3 April 2021, I had absolutely no idea that I was signing up for what has now become 5 years, 5 months and 20 days of turning up every single day and finding something to write about.…
The Art and Science of Narrative Gaming
Abstract This article examines narrative gaming as an emergent process created through the interaction of game mechanisms, player agency, uncertainty and interpretation. Moving beyond the proposition that character backgrounds and fictional context create player attachment, it argues that narrative can be generated by the game system itself when mechanics produce meaningful decisions, uncertainty creates consequential…
The Twilight Order
After completing the Church of Dagon, the Dark Confederacy and the Crimson Coven of Salem, it seemed only reasonable to recruit another group who might, with considerable generosity, be described as the good guys. The Twilight Order is an ancient brotherhood of monster hunters whose origins reach back to the Crusades and whose long war…
THE AWAKENING OF DAGON – A Dracula’s America Scenario for the Church of Dagon
Something has been found beneath the old mission. For generations there had been stories about the place, although sensible folk treated them in much the same way as they treated tales of haunted mines, lost Confederate gold and things seen moving beneath the water after dark. The Church of Dagon knew better. Beneath the ruins,…
An Accidental Brush with History by Elizabeth Marshall
There are many histories of Nazi Germany written with the considerable advantage of hindsight. We know where events were heading, we recognise the significance of developments that contemporaries could easily dismiss, and we inevitably read accounts of the 1930s with Auschwitz, the Second World War and the destruction of much of Europe already in our…
You Cannot Have a Church of Dagon Without the “Big Guy” Himself
There was always going to be something missing from my Church of Dagon posse. I could have the priests, the faithful, the Deep Ones and all the other unpleasant things that crawl out of the dark places, but sooner or later somebody was going to ask the obvious question. Where is Dagon? The answer is…
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