GREY SEAS ARE DREAMING OF MY DEATH (Wm Hope Hodgson rpg)

 So, my softcover hardcopy edition of the new Kickstarted rpg based on the Sargasso Sea stories of Wm Hope Hodgson has now arrived: GREY SEAS ARE DREAMING OF MY DEATH: A William Hope Hodgson rpg by Derek Sotak w. Kevin Ross & J. R. Hamantaschen.

With a boutique game such as this the first requirement for success is to avoid being generic. The more individualistic the better. A game based on a particular author's work shd strive to capture the flavour of that author's world, characters, and plots --in this case, Hodgson's Sargasso Sea stories as recorded in such works as "The Derelict", "The Voice in the Night", "The Stone Ship", THE BOATS OF THE GLEN CARRIG, &c. 

Since I'm hoping to play this game at some point down the road I'm going to hold off reading any of the three adventures (or 'Shanty') included in the rulebook, so lrt's skip over those for now.

The whole game is laid out in one modest booklet of about a hundred pages, of which the following hight points shd give a good idea of the game.

The DM who runs the game is here known as The Captain.

The rest of the PCs all take up positions as members of 'The 'Crew'. 

Players can choose characters from twelve pregenerated roles:

The Bosun, The Captain's Boy, The Carpenter, The Castaway, The Cook, The First Mate, The Fungal Human, The Jonah, The Second Mate, The Shore Dweller, The Surgeon, and The Whaler.

Each character has eight Stats. Instead of the familiar Strength, Intelligence, & Wisdom et al of D&D here we find

Brawn, Nimbleness, Perspicacity, Backbone, Physique, Seaworthyness, Salt, and Mettle.

The designer also provides an example of the combat system and of the overall resolution system.

Miscellaneous points include ships, weapons, available medicines, food and Monsters. 

This lengthy section covers not just the giant squid, octopuses, and giant crabs that populate Hodgson's sea-stories* but ranges further afield to include some creatures found in W.H.H.'s other work: 

Ab-humans (THE NIGHT LAND), Swine-Thing (HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND), The Watchers (THE NIGHT LAND; essentially Great Old Ones) . 

All in all, it looks like a quirky system. The designer's determination to re-name every stat and function in an effort to make the game more distinctive will annoy some and amuse others: to each his or her own.

I'll post again somewhere down the line with an update of what the game plays like.

Dibs on the fungal human.

--JDR

--current reading: collection of Hodgson stories, the newspapers

*who cd resist the chance to fight a bathypelagic centipede?

William Hope Hodgson: The RPG

So, here's something I had on Kickstarter which has now arrived: the new rpg based on the Sargasso Sea stories of Wm Hope Hodgson. Called GREY SEAS ARE DREAMING MY DEATH, it draws on such classics as "The Voice in the Night" and "The Derelict" to craft a horror-at-sea game. I've now skimmed this but haven't looked at it in detail because (a) I definitely want to play this but (b) one of the other people in my gaming group may opt to run it,* (c) in which case I wdn't want to know any spoilers. But (d) I may wind up running it if no one else wants to be Captain (i.e., DM).

It looks like one of those games with a v. narrow focus, which is what you want in a specialty themed rpg such as this one. I hope they've captured the theme of doomed pluck that is so distinctively Hodgsonian, while at the same time introducing some more readers and gamers to one of the greats (and one of the most overlooked of authors of his era who deserve to be called great).

It staggers me that forty-plus years on from D&D there's still no rpg based on Hodgson's masterpiece, THE NIGHT LAND.** They've borrowed a few monsters Hodgson's other works (HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND, the end-of-time NIGHT LAND); a closer look shd tell whether they've successfully integrated this into their late nineteenth/early twentieth century sea setting. One way or the other I'm looking forward to finding out.

--John R.

*This is made all the more probable when I found out tonight that three of the seven people in our Monday night game backed the Kickstarter.

**I initially thought DARK SUN wd be that world but was sadly disappointed to discover it was an uberConan setting instead. 

When Less Is More, or, Wm Hope Hodgson gets Colley Cibber'd

So, a week ago (W.9/4) I was pleasantly surprised to find that the local Barnes and Noble had a copy of Wm Hope Hodgson's dark masterpiece, THE NIGHT LAND, right there on the shelf. Since I consider this one  of the ten greatest works of fantasy ever written, seeing it available and out where it might entice new readers is altogether a good thing. But when I pulled it off the shelf for a closer look, my enthusiasm took a hit.

 For one thing, this is not the whole book, but an abridged text, lacking the first chapter and the final third of the novel.  You can make a case of abridging THE NIGHT LAND, which is a long and difficult book.  Hodgson even invented his own dialect of English to write the story in, one that leans heavily on infinitives and emphatics. As a distancing device it's brilliant, but it's not for those who want an easy read: like Clark Ashton Smith he requires effort, and like Smith he vastly repays it.

But abridgment is one thing and drastic surgery another. As Erik Davis makes plain in his Introduction to this HiLoBooks edition (part of their 'Radium Age of Science Fiction' series*), they feel they've done Hodgson a service by censoring his novel, improving it by lopping off the happy ending. This is the equivalent of preparing a new edition of THE LORD OF THE RINGS and dropping the first chapter (since it deals with Bilbo, not Frodo, and forms the prologue to the main story) and everything after Frodo and Sam collapse on Mount Doom. It certainly makes for a more Stephen Donaldish ending, but in Tolkien's case the long denouement is a key part of the novel, as prophecies come to pass, demonstrating the fading of the old world into reality as we know it. Similarly, the final chapters of Hodgson's THE NIGHT LAND contain one of the purest eucatastrophes ever written, on par with that which ends Hughart's THE BRIDGE OF BIRDS. To lose it is a pity; to be forced to omit it a shame; to boast about mutilating Hodgson's book a sign that you really, truly, don't understand Hodgson.

What's more, we know that Hodgson himself would have rejected this procedure. When he himself produced a drastically abridged version of this book (called THE DREAM OF X) in order to secure American copyright, he cut almost 90% of the original but was careful to include the eucatastrophe, devoting a good bit of his precious space to that most important moment in the book. So we know that while Hodgson was open to abridgment, even radical abridgment, this was one of the few sections of the long story which he felt must be included.

So, good intentions, but regrettable results. Cutting THE NIGHT LAND is like cutting Lindsay's A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS (another complex and difficult work that rewards those who get caught up in its daemonic energy): why would anyone read a large percentage of a masterpiece? Is there anyone who wishes Tolkien had let Collins cut THE LORD OF THE RINGS back in 1952? Or anyone who'd prefer a Reader's Digest version of Eddison's THE WORM OUROBOROS?

For those who just want a taste to see what Hodgson's best is like, THE DREAM OF X is ideal for that purpose, presenting a sequence of excerpts of the major scenes. Those unafraid of a long book (a description that can fairly be applied to many of the most beloved books in fantasy) I'd advise to take the plunge and read THE NIGHT LAND as Hodgson actually wrote, and published, it. If it's not for you, you'll probably put it down after a few chapters; if it is, you'll be enthralled and want to read the whole thing. A skillful abridgment might do to give you a taste of the real thing, but this HiLo abridgment reshapes the book into the one the editor wishes the author had written.

Alas.

--JDR
current reading, Kindle: THRONE OF THE CRESCENT MOON (reads like an al-Qadim novelization)
current reading, actual book: THE GHOST STORIES OF EDITH WHARTON (bought in the Brookfield Schwartz in 1993, back when there was still a Harry Schwartz bookstore in Milwaukee).
current music: several early EMERSON, LAKE, and PALMER albums, courtesy of Sam (thanks, Sam).




*minor works by Jack London (The Scarlet Plague), Conan Doyle (The Poison Belt), Kipling (the two Night Mail/ABE books), Haggard (When the World Shook), et al.   The introduction does a good job relating Hodgson's book (the first written but last published among his four novels) to contemporary traditions of fantasy, science fiction, and horror.