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Month: October 2016

Old Dark House Double Feature IV: Two Haunted Honeymoons

Old Dark House Double Feature IV: Two Haunted Honeymoons

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For this Old Dark House Double Feature I’ve chosen two films that are unrelated except for the fact that they share a title — Haunted Honeymoon. You might rightly make the argument that the earlier of these movies is more of a standard whodunit than an old dark house movie, but the coincidence was too good for me to pass up.

Haunted Honeymoon
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (1940)
Directed by Arthur B. Woods
Screenplay by Monckton Hoffe, Angus MacPhail, and Harold Goldman
Starring Robert Montgomery and Constance Cummings

Dorothy Sayers isn’t really a household name nowadays but she was a rather well-known mystery writer during the so-called Golden Age of mysteries, which lasted for a few decades, starting more or less in the Twenties. Busman’s Honeymoon, the source for this movie, first saw the light of day as a play, in 1936. A year later Sayers converted it to a novel and a few years after that it made its way to the big screen. Over on this side of Atlantic the movie was given the name Haunted Honeymoon, since few of us Yanks probably known what a busman’s holiday is (a holiday where you spend doing the same kind of thing that you usually do for your job, says Merriam-Webster).

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Future Treasures: The Wall of Storms, Book II of The Dandelion Dynasty, by Ken Liu

Future Treasures: The Wall of Storms, Book II of The Dandelion Dynasty, by Ken Liu

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The Grace of Kings, Ken Liu’s debut novel, was nominated for the Nebula Award, and won the Locus Award for Best First Novel. It was also one of four launch titles for Saga Press, and it helped make that fledgling publisher one of the most respected publishing houses in the genre.

Next week Saga release The Wall of Storms, the second volume in what’s now being called The Dandelion Dynasty. It arrives in hardcover on October 4th. Here’s the description.

In the much-anticipated sequel to the “magnificent fantasy epic” (NPR) Grace of Kings, Emperor Kuni Garu is faced with the invasion of an invincible army in his kingdom and must quickly find a way to defeat the intruders.

Kuni Garu, now known as Emperor Ragin, runs the archipelago kingdom of Dara, but struggles to maintain progress while serving the demands of the people and his vision. Then an unexpected invading force from the Lyucu empire in the far distant west comes to the shores of Dara — and chaos results.

But Emperor Kuni cannot go and lead his kingdom against the threat himself with his recently healed empire fraying at the seams, so he sends the only people he trusts to be Dara’s savvy and cunning hopes against the invincible invaders: his children, now grown and ready to make their mark on history.

The Wall of Storms is 880 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover and $7.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Sam Weber. Read an interview with Ken, and an excerpt from the book, at io9.

Tabletop Terror: Pathfinder Edition

Tabletop Terror: Pathfinder Edition

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Pathfinder Occult AdventuresHumans hate to be frightened … except when we love it. There’s a small, sinister part of our brains that love terror and menace, not in real life so much as in our entertainment. This shows up regularly in our fiction and films, of course, as shelves are stocked with horror and thriller novels, as well as slasher flicks and suspenseful films and television series (some of which, I hear, even feature zombies).

Over this month leading up to Halloween, I’ll be focusing on how this horror element manifests itself in some great tabletop games which, among other things, can add immense fun to the Halloween holiday seas. (Am I the only one who celebrates all month long?)

To begin, I’d like to focus on some recent releases from one of my favorite RPG systems: Pathfinder RPG. While there has never been a shortage of monsters in the Pathfinder world of Golarion, over the last year they have had two major releases that really up the ante on the terror quotient, by introducing dynamic new game mechanics related to exploring these horrors. These manuals, together with their current Lovecraftian-themed horror Adventure Path series Strange Aeons [Paizo, Amazon], means that if you want to dive directly into a world full of terror and occult mysteries, you’ve got everything at your disposal to do so.

Occult Adventures

Released in August of 2015, Occult Adventures [Paizo, Amazon] formally introduces a psychic-based magical system into the Pathfinder RPG. These powers draw from the internal mental powers of the individual (or other individuals), rather than from the sources that fuel arcane or divine magic, and they provide a wealth of new approaches to magic to mix things up for people who have been playing wizards and clerics for several decades. In addition to six new psionics-based occult classes, and a variety of archetypes to offer psionic variations on existing classes, it introduces psychic magic, various new occult rules and mechanics, and occult-related equipment and magical items.

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