Halloween Book of the Week: World War Z

This week's Halloween pick is another zombie book, but in World War Z: an oral history of the zombie war, author Max Brooks takes a different approach to the traditional zombie story, recounting a world-wide zombie plague after the fact.

World War Z, by Max Brooks, 2006,
published by Three Rivers Press

 World War Z is written as an after-action report prepared for the United Nations to piece together how the zombie plague began and proliferated across the globe.  The narrator travels the world collecting accounts of the survivors to tell the whole story from the plague's genesis in a small Chinese village, which spread and caught the nations of the world unprepared when the dead arose.  His report is, in equal measures, academic  and poignant as he interviews the men and women who witnessed and battled the horror, allowing them to tell their stories firsthand.

This is an incredibly fun story.  It is not a tense or scary book; the war is over, after all, and mankind won.  But it is a very interesting and entertaining thought experiment, in which Brooks makes some pointed criticisms of contemporary society and our disposable consumer lifestyle.  As the zombie plague spread across America, a secure zone was eventually established in California, where an interim government was established, tasked with rebuilding American civilization and organizing an offensive to retake the country.  One interview with the government's Director of Strategic Resources explains the difficulty he had with human resources: 65% of the civilian workforce had no useful vocation or skills.  Lawyers, executives, analysts, and consultants were of little use in  world that needed carpenters, masons, machinists and gunsmiths.  Brooks makes an interesting point that so many people in contemporary society have no practical skills; many, in fact  cannot even grow their own food or undertake simple  home repairs - skills that would have been taken for granted just a generation ago.

World War Z is a 'must read' for anyone interested in zombie fiction, and highly recommended for its speculative approach to survival in a post-apocalyptic environment.

I rate it 3 out of 5 pumpkins for a scary Halloween read, and 5 out of 5 pumpkins as an original and highly thought-provoking zombie story.

The Tyranny of Magic Missile

When I was young, my favourite class to play was, hands down, the magic user.  Nothing exemplified fantasy adventure so well as a mysterious robed wizard with miraculous powers, and I delighted in finding cool new ways to use my spells.

In one of my very first games, my friend, Peter, played a magic user named Orpheus, and he always picked magic missile as his sole spell at first level.  This selection puzzled me, since it was of such limited use and as we were using the Holmes rules, he even had to roll to hit with it.  I asked him why he chose magic missile for his spell, and he replied that it was the only offensive spell he had, the implication being that it was, therefore, the only rational choice.  This is a mentality that I like to call "the tyranny of magic missile," wherein we become so focused on damage dealing spells that we forget about the many offensive uses of non-damage dealing spells.

I used to make a point of selecting spells that were generally considered useless by my friends and tried to find ways to use them creatively as offensive spells.  Dancing lights was one of my first dalliances with creative spell casting and quickly became one of my favourite spells.  I can't recall just how many times I lured pursuers over the edges of cliffs, into traps, and so forth, with a simple dancing lights spell.  I've killed more orcs with a single dancing lights spell than I ever have with a fireball.

Enlargement is another spell with great potential that I always had fun with.  There are just so many different ways one can use it because it can be used on both animate and inanimate objects - it is such a versatile spell. Of course there are far too many uses for enlargement to describe them all, but here are a few of my favourites:  When being chased by a group, duck into a crawl space, tunnel, or other tight squeeze.  Wait for the first pursuer to follow then enlarge him so he becomes stuck and blocks the way for the other pursuers.  When someone lifts something heavy, perhaps to throw at you, enlarge it, doubling its size and mass.  If you've ever seen the "Biggy-Wiggy/Teensy-Weensy sequence from Loony Tunes, you'll get the picture.  I also like to use it on myself to intimidate people.  One time, when we were being rushed by a group of bandits, I enlarged myself while threatening to summon a demon to drag them all to the abyss.  They ran away screaming.  I was very pleased, many years later, to see Ian McKellen use the exact same tactic in the movie, Fellowship of the Ring, although he only used it to bully an elderly hobbit - pffttt...amateur.

Even the lowly light spell can be used for more than just to light your way.  A popular tactic with my friends was to cast it on face of an attacker, effectively blinding him.  As your opponent is stumbling around clutching his head and bellowing in rage, you can further taunt him by serenading him with a Manfred Mann song.

Given the many fun, challenging and effective spells available to a 1st level magic user, why would anyone ever choose magic missile?  Sure, it's handy at higher levels when more first level spell slots are available and you can fire multiple missiles with a single casting; and it is awfully comforting to be able to be able to rely on dishing out guaranteed magical damage when you really need it, but pound for pound, it is one of the least useful spells in a magic user's arsenal.  You certainly can't use it to see off an entire band of orcs and single-handedly save the party from imminent doom.

Yet, magic missile has a certain traction in the hobby.  It has come to be seen as one of the signature spells of D&D.  During the early days of 4E's development, I followed the designers' podcasts with some interest to see what they intended to do with the new edition.  One of their stated goals was to give the magic user something to do every round, even at low levels, instead of forcing him to shoot a crossbow every round (magic users were allowed crossbows in 3E) after casting his few spells for the day.  So how did they achieve this goal?  By making magic missile an 'at will power,' and they balanced this by requiring a roll to hit.  So now instead of the poor magic user having to shoot his crossbow every round he gets to shoot his magic missile every round.  I fail to see how the slightly different aesthetic is any more exciting or fun.

Worse, though, the 4E designers did away with all vestiges of creative spell casting - sorry, power use; spells no longer exist.  The first time I played 4E I chose my favourite class of youth.  Gone were my favourite spells.  Almost every single power is a straight forward offensive power, there are no versatile powers that can be used creatively to overcome a foe.  Nowadays you just blast them until they fall down.  The wizard is now just a 'blaster' or 'controller' to use the MMOG terms.  No imagination required.  And thus, in 4E, the tyranny of magic missile has become entrenched not only as a mindset, but in the rule set as well.

I know lots of people that have always played this way, and I always thought that they were missing out on the real fun of playing a magic user.  It's true that the class isn't much fun to play when you only select damage spells - you cast off your magic missiles, deal a few points of damage and then you're effectively out of the fight.  I'm sure this must have been the way that 4E's designers played too.  They, like so many others, never 'got it.'  A low level magic user might not have had many spells at his disposal, but he had some real doozies, and used creatively they were awesome.  But these old magic users were the by-product of a game that emphasized problem solving - they were "not as clumsy and random as a blaster, but elegant weapons from a more civilized age."

If you know people who are still enslaved by the tyranny of magical missile try this as an experiment: disallow any direct damage spells for starting characters (including sleep - it's way too easy), and force them to find new ways to use the so-called utility spells.  They might just have more fun than ever before and become better spell casters in the process.

Creature Feature: Hand Maidens of Dagon

Like twisted parodies of Valkyries, Dagon's Hand Maidens usher sailors into the watery abyss.  Riding bizarre sea horses, they serve as agents of Father Dagon's inscrutable desires and often aid land-borne cultists in their sinister machinations.

Games Workshop's Seekers of Slaanesh

The Hand Maidens appear to be humanoid females, with either sea green hair that undulates like seaweed in the tide, or spines that resemble the dorsal fins of fish.  Instead of hands they have crustacean-like forelimbs that can impale or eviscerate a foe with deadly efficiency.

Their steeds are bipedal creatures with both reptilian and ichthyan features.  When on land they stalk their prey by 'tasting' its scent with their long, fleshy tongues, then transfix it with their soporific gaze; anyone looking into the limpid pools of their eyes become lost in their depth, unable to act.

Hand Maidens of Dagon              No. Encountered: 1-6

Armour Class: 4                             Special: spell-like abilities
Hit Dice: 5                                         Move: 12" (9" swimming)
Attacks: by appendage type     HDE/XP: 6/400
Morale: 11

The Hand Maiden's appendages resemble either lobster claws or long chitinous blades.  Those with claw appendages deal 1d6 damage, and if they have two such claws they may attack with both, making a single attack at +1 bonus to hit.  Those with a long chitinous blade appendage may make a single attack that deals 2d6 for damage,  choosing the highest single die roll.

Hand Maidens  are the beloved of Dagon and are sheltered by his aegis.  They are permanently under the influence of Protection from Law, and once per day they may Summon the Drowned, which functions exactly as an Animate Dead spell, calling forth 1d6 zombies - the remains of sailors that the Maidens dragged to the depths and who now serve them in unlife.

Dagonic Steeds             No. Encountered 1-6

Armour Class: 7                  Special: Tracking, Soporific Gaze
Hit Dice: 3                             Move: 18" (18" swimming)
Attacks: Claw                      HDE/XP: 4/120
Morale: 10

The Dagonic Steeds are equally swift on land and in the sea.  They can taste the scent of their prey, and so track it.  Anyone caught in the gaze of a sea horse must make a Charisma save or lose their action for the turn.  They may make a save every turn to attempt to break out of their stupor.  Anyone making a successful save can no longer be affected by Soporific Gaze for the rest of the encounter.

New Spell: Summon Hand Maiden
Spell Level: C3
Range: Referee's discretion
Duration: Until service is completed

This spell is granted to favoured priests of Dagon, allowing them to summon the aid of his Hand Maidens.  The Hand Maiden will appear the round after the summoning is complete and will serve the caster in any way that furthers the interests of Father Dagon.

Halloween Book of the Week: The Rising

The Rising, copyright 2003 by Brian Keene
published by Dorchester Publishing Co.

I've always enjoyed horror fiction and I've read a lot of it by masters of the genre both past and present.  But while I enjoy the genre and admire many of its writers, particularly Lovecraft's evocative imagery and King's characterization, I've never really been frightened or disturbed by any horror novel.  Indeed, it is so difficult to evoke feelings of fear in a reader that it is becoming increasingly less common for authors and publishers to refer to the genre as 'horror,' preferring instead to use less loaded terms, such as dark fiction, or supernatural thriller.

That said, The Rising is the scariest damned book I've ever read.

The dead scrabbled for an entrance to his grave.  His wife was among them, as ravenous for Jim in death as she'd been in life.  Their faint, soulless cries drifted down through ten feet of soil and rock.


The kerosene lamp cast flickering shadows on the cinder block walls, and the air in the shelter was stale and earthy.  His grip on the Ruger tightened.  Above him, Carrie shrieked and clawed at the earth.


She'd been dead for a week.


With these opening lines, Keene sets the scene in media res, of a world gone wrong.  The protagonist, Jim Thurmond, is hiding in an underground shelter he'd built in his back yard during the height of the Y2K scare.  Scared and alone, and slowly going mad, Jim is startled when his cell phone starts to ring.  Half afraid of what might be on the other end, he doesn't answer, but is surprised to find that the caller left a message.  It was from his little boy, Danny, who lives halfway across the country with Jim's ex-wife, and is hiding in his mother's attic afraid of what is moving around the house below and crying out for his Daddy to save him.  Jim tries to call back, but having forgotten to bring a cell charger into the shelter, his phone dies.  Galvanized into action, thus begins Jim's cross country odyssey through zombie-infested territory to try and save his son, joining up with an elderly preacher, and ex-prostitute, and a guilt-ridden scientist along the way.

The premise of the story is nothing new, but it's in the execution and his visceral use of language and imagery that Keene shows his brilliance in telling a truly scary and disturbing story.  Playing upon topical fears associated with Large Hadron Collider experiments, which can hypothetically go wrong by a) creating a miniature black hole that could expand and devour the Earth, b) produce strangelets that absorb all particles they come into contact with, converting them into strange matter, and inevitably transforming the Earth and all living things into an inert blob, and c) creating a vacuum instability in the space around the Earth that could trigger a high energy phase transition that could destroy the entire universe.

In The Rising, Keene imagines a Large Hadron Collider experiment tearing the bounds of reality and freeing demonic alien spirits that seek corporeal existence by inhabiting the bodies of the dead.  There are limitless spirits waiting in the void, and the newly risen dead seek to create more vessels for their brethren to occupy.  Unlike a Romero-esque brainless shambling corpse, these zombies not only possess malign alien intelligence, but also possess the memories of their host.  Furthermore, since the spirits can inhabit any corpse, anything can be a zombie - dogs, deer, birds, even insects, and they all act with a singularity of purpose that is truly frightening.

To me, though, the truly scary thing about this book is not the zombies, it's Keene's commentary on human nature that, sadly, I find all too believable.  Once society collapses, Keene paints humanity in the unkindest light, wallowing in cruelty and selfishness, culminating with a National Guard army led by a psychotic officer, Colonel Schow.  Schow and his men use any means to obtain their ends, and demonstrate little regard for civilian life.  They forcibly conscript all citizens they find, forcing women to serve as sex slaves and men as manual labourers and expendable zombie bait to lure the undead into ambushes.  The army consists of two types of men, those who relish the chance to embrace their basest desires, and those too afraid to speak out.  Any soldier who objects to the Colonel's methods is subjected to a unique brand of discipline: bungee jumping out of a helicopter hovering over a zombie horde.  As the offender bounces up and down into the zombies he is very slowly torn apart.

Make no mistake, this is an intensely disturbing book, but well worth the read.  Keene's pacing keeps the tension level high throughout the entire story and his no-holds-barred story telling, much like that of George R. Martin's Song of Fire and Ice series, promises no fairy-tale happy endings.

The Rising gets four out of five pumpkins as an entertaining seasonal read, and five out of five as a gut-wrenching thriller that might just give you nightmares.

After Dark

I went out for a walk through my neighborhood last night, strolling along Scotia Street on the banks of the Red River, enjoying a perfect October evening.  It was a warm night and the air smelled of burning leaves, though this may only have been my imagination.  I haven't seen anyone actually do that since I was a kid, and I'm not sure if it's even legal anymore.  Regardless, it felt and smelled like October; it was a perfect evening to let my mind run free as I walked and my feet carried me, almost of their own volition, to the old graveyard near St. John's Park, before turning around and heading for home.

Throughout the walk, my favourite Tito & Tarantula song, After Dark, ran through my head, which you might remember as the song that vampire/stripper Salma Hayek danced to in the movie Dusk to Dawn, and I had to resist the urge to look over my shoulder to check for any pallid women haunting my footsteps in the dark.  Yep, it's beginning to feel a lot like Halloween.

After Dark - Tito & Tarantula

Weird Wonder: Andrewsarchus

One of the largest predatory mammals ever to have walked the earth, Andrewsarchus mongoliensis, named for explorer Roy Chapman Andrews, lived during the Eocene Epoch of the early Tertiary Period 34-56 million years ago.

The species is known only from a single fossil skull discovered in the Gobi in 1923 by a member of the American Museum of Natural History's famous Central Asiatic Expedition.

Although its exact size is uncertain, it is estimated that the animal probably massed about 1,000 kg (~2,200 lbs) and probably would have made a pack of dire wolves look like a litter of puppies.  Obviously, because of the lack of fossil specimens, little is known about the palaeoecology of Andrewsarchus, and it is unknown whether it hunted singly or in packs or whether it subsisted entirely by predation or was a scavenger as well.  In my experience, however, like graduate students, few predators will pass up a free meal, and it is likely that Andrewsarchus scavenged when it could and hunted when it needed to.  Its large jaws supported powerful muscles and it could easily have crushed bone, and it has been suggested that it preyed mainly upon brontotheres - enormous mammals related to horses and rhinoceroses.

Fighting over a baby brontothere

Andrewsarchus will remain largely a mystery until new fossil specimens are found to fill in the missing gaps in our knowledge, but until then reconstructions such as this will give us our best picture of what this enormous beast must have looked like - certainly not something I'd want to run into on a dark night.

Naturally, anything that I wouldn't want to run into on a dark night is something that I definitely want to add to my campaign, because what adventurer worth his salt doesn't love running into dangerous things on dark nights?

Sark        No. Encountered: 1-2

Armour Class: 8               Special: See below
Hit Dice: 6+4                     Move: 15"
Attacks: Bite                      HDE/XP: 6/400
Morale: 9

Sarks roam the plains of Lemuria, hunting singly or in mated pairs.  They are vicious and difficult to manage, but they are sometimes captured and trained as mounts by savages of the Lemurian steppes.  The sark's bone crushing bite is so powerful that 3d6 are rolled for damage, and the lowest two scores discarded.

Halloween Book of the Week: Dragonfly

Somehow, almost without my noticing it, summer has passed into autumn, my favourite time of year.  October is probably my very favourite month: I love the crispness in the morning air, the lingering warmth of sunny afternoons, the colour of the leaves as they wither and fall from the trees, and the sense of melancholy presaging the end of another year - all of which culminates in Halloween a magical night pregnant with half-dreaded possibilities that I have loved since childhood and that I've never really outgrown.

This time of year I always find myself yearning to read books that suit my mood and psych me up for Halloween, and I thought it might be fun to share some of my current favourite seasonal stories.

The first of these, Dragonfly, by Frederic S. Durbin has been one of my Halloween favourites for nearly a decade, and I still haven't found anything to knock it from the top spot.

"Dragonfly" copyright Frederic Durbin, 1999
published by Arkham House

Dragonfly is the story of a ten-year-old girl nicknamed "Dragonfly" who follows an enigmatic, priestly plumber named Mothkin through a secret door in her Uncle Henry's basement into the underground world of Harvest Moon.  Harvest Moon is ruled by the tyrannical despot Samuel Hain and his vile henchmen, Mr. Snicker and Eagerly Meagerly who have enslaved its inhabitants and who, over the course of centuries, have inflicted horror and suffering upon our world, including the Black Plague in the 13th century.

Dragonfly becomes separated from Mothkin and embarks upon a series of terrifying adventures as she struggles to elude Hain and his minions and find a way back to Uncle Henry's basement.  Upon her escape Dragonfly must face the greatest threat of all, Hain's invasion of the surface world.

I find that I can usually judge a book by its first paragraph.  A good writer should be able to capture my attention in that time and Durbin writes one of the most compelling introductory paragraphs I've ever read.  It overflows with rich, evocative imagery, and I would give my left hand to be able to write like this:

Bad things were starting to happen again in Uncle Henry's basement.  These were things that had happened before, when the wind swung round, when the trees all felt the blood rush to their leaves after the exertion of August and the idling of September; when the chuckle-dark harvest moon shaped pumpkins in its own image, brought its secret wine flush to the scarecrow's cheeks; when the rich bounties of the land lay plump for the taking and the light left them alone for longer and longer at a time.  But when the trouble started before, I was too young to remember.


Reading Dragonfly always makes me feel like a kid again; it evokes memories of being nine years old and reading books like Scott Corbett's Red Room Riddle, and Here Lies the Body.  But though Dragonfly has a childlike feel to it, it is no children's book.  It is a dark fantasy, quite frightening in places, and likely too intense for most children.  Frederic Durbin cites H.P. Lovecraft and J.R.R. Tolkien as his earliest literary influences and elements of both can be seen in his work, but his writing is also reminiscent of Ray Bradbury particularly, Something Wicked This Way Comes.

As a fun, spooky Halloween read, Dragonfly gets five out of five pumpkins.