Smile

Smile. The horror movie. Should've been called Frown, because it was a bummer. A good concept ruined by a monster who follows a standard operating procedure so broad that it grants the Smile Entity the power to do just about anything, especially if it involves a jumpscare.

I've been getting interrupted sleep lately. We share a wall with my wife's brother, it's a thin wall, he has a voice that resonates, and I'm a light sleeper. I wake up to everything, so I buy some Loop Earplugs, which I could do another mediocre review of right here... doesn't work enough for me. Then I blast pink noise out of my phone all night long, right over my head. The combination of those kind of work.

My wife calls pink noise something tragically incorrect... she calls it vag noise. I fall asleep to queefs on loop for eight hours.

2024: Celebrate

2024.

It was glorious. Two days in bed sleeping off a cold, with nothing but strange vivid dreams and a song stuck in my head for this god-awful moments awake.

Love is an Open Door, aka the song from Frozen where Anna and Prince Hans sing together at the start of the movie. It's not even Let It Go, it's the shitty B Side ear-worm you'd only get if your kids tortured you with the soundtrack for years, like mine did. Two years, Frozen every day. Love is an open doooooooooooooor!

DOOOOooooooooOOOOR!

Life could be so much more.

With you.

I'm in bed, soaked in sweat under my weighted blanket, 80 lbs of pure tundra-thick tuna-net on me. I'm determined to sweat it this demon inside me. Then I drift off.

My four year old daughter and I are going to my high school. Walking through the lobby was a precession of giants, moving a little like they do in a fox's wedding, except they're giants -- slow, skinny, and over two stories tall. They groaned these deep, cthulhu-esque whale-like groans. Grrrmmmmm. One decided it wanted a closer look, probably to sniff us and eat us. I picked my daughter up and ran down the hall, which was so small for the giant that it had to fall on its belly, shaking the ground, and crawl after me like a Marine going under a barbed wire fence. Its big bald head thrashing as he came for me, and I was just a little slower than the giant. Luckily there was a door I could swing open with a shoulder-hit.

Then I'm back in bed, trying to suck air in through my snot-cemented sinuses. Still sick, no life in me, then I'm out again.

My mansion is expansive like an airport, only an asshole would need this much space and luxury. But it's mine. And this dream is high-definition, not one of those hazy dreams where you're going to lose signal the second you have too much fun. It feels solid.

Something is amiss. There's a woman inside, stealing from me. I don't know how I know, but I know she's in here somewhere, and I'm hunting her, and she fucked with the wrong billionaire because I can fly -- like Zuckerberg. I pull two axes off the wall, because of course I have weapons mounted on my mansion wall. And I fly down the halls, ready to hack her up.

I'm pumped. Too pumped. My vision gets blurry, like I forgot my glasses. I'm waking up and losing the signal, but it's still strong enough that I can settle down again. I calm down it down a bit, breathe it out, gaze upon the splendors of my billionaire interior decorating.

I sense a disturbance in the force and know she's in the room next to me. I walk there, because I'm calm now. Yes, she's there, the she-devil who came to steal from the richest pimp in the world, just a tiny speck across this vast arena of a room just big enough to contain my glory. She's straight out of the 80s, big Dynasty hair, blue silk dress, blue silk scarf around her shoulders, walking like an empowered black widow. She's not just stealing, she wants to kill me, and look fine while doing it. And she has two spiky lantern things that look like flails, because sometime earlier in the day I was thinking about maces that doubled as lanterns and if those were cool or not...

It occured to me that this dream was written for a sitcom. It's filled with shenanagins and wish fulfillment. I'd go so far as to call it zany.

Aha! A distracting detail! Her purse is right there at my feet! She must've dropped it while grabbing dope lantern-flails off the wall. And her purse is filled with... six sets of car keys, and they're all mine! Hell... no... I did not drive beaters and hand-me-down cars for the last 20 years, saving up all my Galileo 2 royalty money, just to give up my six limos to this hag.

Oh, I know what'll really piss her off. I'm gonna hide her purse, then watch her freak out trying to find it in this giant place. Tee-hee! Nope, I'm not gonna hit her with my axe, I'm gonna tease her like a stinky little brother! It makes sense to me!

Hide her purse, quick!

I grab it and fly... and oh no, the dream, fading! Fading...

I got too giddy, and woke myself up... why didn't I just fight her? Did I even take back my limo keys?

Ugh. Is it 2024? Where did 2023 go?

I cleaned shit out of a hellish hoarder duplex, then I had to make it livable, and after six months of that my own life wasn't livable, so I told my wife I didn't want to do it anymore, can we hire a contractor? She said "of course, honey! It'll cost us around $30, 000, and we're broke, but you said Galileo 2: Judgement Day was selling well, so we can just all that royalty money!"

Then I said "Actually, I'm totally satisfied doing this job myself." Then I tapped my hammer on a piece of wood. "Yup. Solid as a rock."

SADs

It's that dark, rainy time of year in Vancouver. I always get hit with SADs. Seasonal Affect. It feels like I'm living underwater, everything is slow and dreamlike, and I start to beat up on myself for everything and anything, real or imagined. I want to spend more time with my kids but I have a house which needs to be livable eventually.

Yesterday I showed up at the renovation; it was an icebox inside. I had to wait there for half a day for the delivery men to drop off the stove, fridge, and dishwasher. It was too icy to be productive. My hands were so cold they ached, my feet were numb, I set up a portable heater under a lawn chair (in my kitchen) and sat there, warmed my ass, and burnt my ankles.

This is my House

"There are two kinds of sufferers in this world: those who suffer from a lack of life and those who suffer from an overabundance of life. I’ve always found myself in the second category. When you come to think of it, almost all human behavior and activity is not essentially any different from animal behavior. The most advanced technologies and craftsmanship bring us, at best, up to the super-chimpanzee level. Actually, the gap between, say, Plato or Nietzsche and the average human is greater than the gap between that chimpanzee and the average human. The realm of the real spirit, the true artist, the saint, the philosopher, is rarely achieved.

Why so few? Why is world history and evolution not stories of progress but rather this endless and futile addition of zeroes. No greater values have developed. Hell, the Greeks 3,000 years ago were just as advanced as we are. So what are these barriers that keep people from reaching anywhere near their real potential? The answer to that can be found in another question, and that’s this: Which is the most universal human characteristic – fear or laziness?”

Louis MacKey, from one of my favourite movies, Waking Life.

I don't know who MacKey is, I just think about this segment every now and then, and relate to it. Suffering from not enough life, then sometimes suffering from an overabundance. And the thing that bugs me about this quote is that it digs into laziness but doesn't reflect much on suffering, even though that's what it opens on.

I understand why a lack of life causes suffering, you're bored and want things to happen. I can understand why an overabundance of life causes suffering, because that's what I'm experiencing now. But that little monologue says nothing more about suffering. All it does is dump on slackers. I wonder if the director, Richard Linklater, wanted this to be a counter point to his otherwise strong showing for Gen X ideals in Waking Life.

I wanted to know what to do when you suffer from the overabundance of life.

An overabundance of life for me is cleaning the house of a hoarder of 46 cats, who shared one litterbox -- the entire house. There's wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling garbage, but it's been pissed and shit on by 46 cats who were neglected, abused, and suffered greatly. A few kittens died in the house. I found the bones, said a quick prayer for them, and wished them peace in the afterlife. The cats were taken by the SPCA but sadly most had to be put down. They were severely constipated because they didn't want to be pooping in garbage, or in the corner behind the TV, or on the granite kitchen counters which were never used for cooking, or pooping all around the first floor powder room toilet. They wanted to be taken care of. These hoarders, who claimed to love cats so much, also killed them painfully and slowly with neglect.

The cats were taken in 2019. It's 2023 and the mountains of cat shit are still everywhere.

The house smells like the last stewed toxic shit in an old invalid's diapers after they'd died in a heatwave. The smell was horrific, truly in the sense of the word - horror - it caused the panic you'd feel if zombies came after you. The horror I imagine feeling at the sight of a zombie coming after me wouldn't just be the dissonance of seeing the dead move, but also the idea of being touched by something stinking, putrid and rotten, dripping in disease.

Then I was inside it, for days at a time, crawling in it, cleaning it. I found bed bug cities living in the couch, right overtop of a neighbourhood of black widow spiders. They have a mythical feeling to them, their shiny black metallic bodies. I scooped one up and put it outside, and did so for a few more before realising I was trying to save black widow spiders while there was an everest of garbage to climb into and clean out.

Every day I cleaned I thought I'd seen the worst of it. We did the living room, the bedrooms would be easier. Nope, the bedrooms have dead cats in them. Once the garbage was all out, I thought that was it, over the hump.

Then I looked in the utility closet and it was a rotten asshole of Satan - black mold everywhere, black widow spiders crawling in all crevaces, and a moat of cat shit that had absorbed an endless leaking of water from shitty plumbing. In the center of it all, resting like Jabba, was an oversized turd that had grown on moat-water to the size of a human fetus. I shoveled it out, bagged it, mopped out its afterbirth, and stopped the leak. A black widow spider ran up my bare arm and I screamed, slapped it off, slapped shit on my arm, and then went back to work. I sprayed the black mold with mold-x, wiped, sprayed, wiped, then poof my hand went right through the drywall and spiders fell all over me like confetti. Jabba laughed at me from inside the garbage bin.

I thought that was the worst of it.

Then we pulled up the carpets and caused a dust-storm of dried cat shit and bedbug turds. Fortunately we were in our hazmat gear, plastic wrapped from head to toe, on a hot day. We filled our goggles and gloves with sweat, panted for breath as we tugged on nasty piss-soaked carpet, and yanked as hard as we could. I put my tetanus shots to the test by cutting myself on the nails from the tacking as I'd forget where my hand was resting and plopped it down on a strip of upright nails. After doing one stairwell, one hall, and one bedroom, I tapped out. My endurance failed.

I thought that was the worst.

Then we did the laminate flooring in the living room. Dust of catshit everywhere - check - but it was surprisingly wet underneath each board. Actually it was really slimy with this brown goop. Each board came out like a used sex toy. Plop. Pill bugs crawled underneath. The wall looked a little black and crumbly where we exposed the wood. Yup, that's the frame of the house that looks rotten. The moisture from the endless leak must've traveled under the floorboards, under the insulation, and to all corners of the house.

That was the worst, because it confirmed this place was cursed unhallowed grounds, like the Pet Sematary.

I want to pull a Dr. Gonzo and thrash and moan in the bathtub, waiting for that one fantastic note when the rabbit bites his own head off, before somebody throws the radio into the tub and I am free.

Galileo 2 Goes Live

Galileo 2: Judgment Day made it's debut at Ropecon and Gen Con, and is now live on the Lamentations e-store. I'm incredibly proud of the sales, I'm proud that anything I've done has materialized into reality. http://www.lotfp.com/store/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=441 On a counter-note, I'm crawling out of a pit of burn out, but am likely going to groundhog right back in. The book editing involved a week of all nighters writing, early morning calls to be a daddy to my kids, and going to work during the day. I survived that on manic hyperfocus but once it was done I nose-dived. But then we had to move, in a heat wave, with no help and a broken elevator and 10 flights of stairs. Then uhh... we bought a place which was destroyed by hoarders and water damage, and is filled with shit, and I gotta clean it out and renovate it. Adventure Idea. 17th Century Janitor. You play an adventurer who's hard up for cash, and there's a chateau that needs cleaning, with a hint of treasure protected by a great evil within. But there is no monster or treasure, they trick adventurers into pushing a broom with some bullshit story, but it's just work and that's the scary part.

Running From A Slasher

Spoilers ahead for Galileo 2: Judgement Day.

The chase through a dark forest in G2JD is an homage to Slasher movies. Creating the mechanics for the chase became my own personal Slasher, and dogged me like LaChappa running from  Jason Vorhees.

The first draft of Galileo 2: Judgment Day had a simplified chase; survive 5 rounds, three fails and the Automaton makes an instant grapple attempt at you — if successful, you both stop running, and the next round if he wins initiative or maintains the grapple, you get twisted up into a human pretzel. 

Each round of running had its own unique obstacle. It felt very 5e. It wasn’t perfect; it was on rails, and didn’t plug and play neatly into other scenarios where players ran off the rails.

My editor wanted to see a system to handle the running so that Referees could improvise. Totally. Made sense. My wife and I put the kids to bed, walked the dog, then from 9 PM to 2 AM I grinded it out until I fell asleep at the laptop. Nobody told me to do it like this. I took the initiative. This book is my first published work, I wanted it to be great. It also had a tight but vague deadline of “get it done ASAP so it can go to Gen Con.” 

First I needed game mechanics. I started with the Lamentations of the Flame Princess Player Core Book, Rules & Magic, which has two sections on running. 

In the Encumbrance & Movement section, Running speed is the same as Exploration speed but is done in a round, not a turn. Example: a character wants to run. Look at the encumbrance & movement chart, say they’re lightly encumbered, they can run 90’ a round, which is fine if nobody is chasing them. What if somebody with the same movement speed chases them? It’s two people running at 90’ forever. 

That’s what Pursuit is for. The Pursuit section on page 61 proposes a roll off between the chaser and the runner, each side rolling 1d20 + 10% of their Running speed (+9 if you have a 90’ Running speed). No Initiative, just roll your d20s. Simple enough for me. 

Agh, I’m having flashbacks of running The God That Crawls and not being aware of these rules. Everybody ran 3-4 squares away, when they could’ve run so much more, and possibly saved themselves from a gooey death.

Initial Encounter distance is 3d6 x 10’. Okay, perfect, first establish encounter distance, then begin a Pursuit. It all looks neat when written on the page, it’s from official books, that’s one night of writing. Believe it or not that did take me like… 5 hours.

The next day I sit with my daughter to watch Sleeping Beauty, when something starts bothering me, I don’t know what, it’s just an itch somewhere in my subconscious. I keep seeing numbers in my head: 3d6 x 10’… 1d20s… why is that bothering me so much?

I get up, sit down at the laptop, and start running numbers. It hits me. It’s an unplayable turd when you actually try to use that system. It’s a game of duelling calculators that was about as fun as passing a kidney stone.

Here’s how the game goes:

1. Encounter Distance: 3d6 x 10. Lets say it’s 120’. You see the Automaton at 120’. 

2. He rolls 1d20 + 9… 19. Subtract 19 from 120. 101. 

3. Players roll their 1d20+10%. Now there are 5+ different numbers to track.

4. Automaton rolls 1d20+9, subtracts that from each of the new numbers.

5. Roll 1d20+10%. Add that. 

And repeat for fucking ever.

No shade to LotFP, it wasn’t in the OSE rulebooks either (unless it is and being sleep-deprived and ADHD meant I skimmed it — which never happens). Maybe it’s a gap in OSR gaming. I’m sure there are brilliant hacks out there, but I couldn’t bring myself to invest time late at night to scour the internet for something workable. I had to just make something up. 

First, lets just look at the numbers I need to create a system for. What’s the distance? Point A in Arcetri, point B in Ponte Vecchio. Approximately a half an hour walk by road according to google maps. But this is off-road, cutting through forests and farms. Lets call it 1 km. 

Some hypothetical math… I failed math in high school… am I going by 10 second increments of running at 90’ per 10 seconds, or uhh… square root of pi… calculator says it’s anywhere from 37 to 170 rounds. 

Oh. Easy! 37 to 170 rounds of edge of your seat dice rolling… a true OSR fan would love that challenge. Just kidding. Trash it and move on.

New Problem: Distance is too great for counting by rounds.

Solution: Count by turns.

Well, you can’t run-for-your-life by turns. 

Okay, what if it’s treated like a hex-crawl? Or like Final Fantasy, where you’re running on a world map then uh-oh — random encounter! — whoosh you’re zapped into some kind of a generic gladiator ring to do battle. Unlike Final Fantasy, what I’d be doing is zapping player characters into a mini-map running challenge, where distance doesn’t affect travel.

Divorcing the concept of running in encounters from traveling toward your destination solves this problem. Good. Travel and Running are separated, moving on.

Last Problem: A quick and dirty pursuit that doesn’t bog the game down with math.

My wife suggested that the automaton only runs at one speed because he’s a tireless robot. That… makes perfect sense to me. That sets a static difficulty class to beat, and is a lot less dice rolling. Lets make it DC 12. Characters may get a modifier if they’re more or less encumbered than the Automaton. An unencumbered character gets +3, a heavily encumbered player gets -3, and a severely encumbered gets -6. That’s still in line with the movement bonuses as per Movement & Encumbrance from the player core book, too.

What happens if on a failed roll? There needed to be building tension, and that required a sense of distance — getting smaller each round as your impending doom closed in. I wanted to avoid measuring by feet, remembering the duelling calculators. How about a made up unit… paces? Perhaps 30’ per 1 pace, which isn’t how paces are measured in real life, but the term has dramatic tension, “he’s 3 paces away, now 2.”

The Pace Chart shows where you are in relationship to death or escape. At 1 pace, failure means a grab attempt. At 7 paces you’ve escaped the encounter. The further you are, the easier Stealth checks are — on success you’re safe until you’ve moved again.

It was a choice to not have failed Stealth checks result in a foregone conclusion, it may result in a lucky escape because the Automaton has to make a Search check. The Automaton is tracking multiple targets, line of sight is easily broken in a forest, and it’s a little fried from previous damage. A successful Stealth check means you’re immune to Search checks, but an unsuccessful Stealth check means you have the choice to gamble, as opposed to being promised you’re next. It works even better if the Referee should rolls all Stealth checks and gives no indication of success or failure.

The playtest worked out great for everyone aside for the last person running from the Automaton, that person was always fucked, even if it created a heart breaking series of narrow escapes from grapple attempts. One playtest resulted in a runner evading 10+ times before finally dying. It was a heartbreaking self-sacrifice, the runner pulled the Automaton 7+ paces away from their friends, so they all successfully escaped.

That inspired me to add Stamina mechanics, to give it a sense of limitations. You have X number of tries before you run out of gas. Stamina is just your Constitution Ability Score, so if you have a Constitution of 12, you have 12 rounds of running before you’re gassed and any further rounds of running require a save versus Poison or take 1 damage. Then resting a turn regained 2 + Con Mod in Stamina, and somebody with a -2 or -3 mod would have to sleep it off.

To replace Encounter Distance, each encounter at 1d6 Paces, re-rolling 1. 4+ means the players get a shot at a Surprise round. The Automaton is too loud to surprise anybody. It worked, quick and dirty.

For reference I’ve included the tables below, though it may not be exactly what you see in the book.

Travel Table

Pace	Turns till Florence	Automaton Encounter	Automaton Arrives
Regular	6	3-in-6	1d4 turns
Quick	4	4-in-6	1d2 turns
Stealthy	8	2-in-6, roll again after 4 turns.	3 turns

Run Tables. 

Run 1d20	Normal Run  (1 Stamina per round)	Sprint  (2 Stamina per round)	Automaton Stops Running  (1 Stamina per round)
1	-2 Paces	-2 Paces, 1 damage	No Change
2 – 11	-1 Paces	No Change	+1 Pace
12 – 17	No Change	+1 Pace	+2 Paces
18 – 19	+1 Pace	+2 Paces	+3 Paces
20	+2 Paces	+3 Paces	+4 Pace
Forest Hazards (page XX)	Roll 1d6 = X, where X= # of rounds before rolling another forest hazards check.	Roll every round sprinted	No roll

1 Pace	30’ or less	Stealth not possible	Automaton Search roll automatic success
2 Paces	31’ – 60’	Stealth 1-in-6	Automaton Search 5-in-6
3 Paces	61’ – 90’	Stealth 2-in-6	Automaton Search 4-in-6
4 Paces*	91’ – 120’	Stealth 3-in-6	Automaton Search 3-in-6
5 Paces	121’ – 150’	Stealth 4-in-6	Automaton Search 2-in-6
6 Paces	151’ – 180’	Stealth 5-in-6	Automaton Search 1-in-6

*Encounters beginning at 4+ Paces allow the players to roll for a Surprise Round

The Pace table has an equivalency in feet to aid for theatre of the mind.

To reiterate, escape is achieved by reaching 7+ paces, a successful stealth check (and not moving again), or getting lucky with an unsuccessful stealth check. The Automaton’s search has a 6 pace radius, and automatically detects anyone moving in that range.

Dear Reader, I hope this system recreates the fear of a Crystal Lake camp counsellor for you and your players!

First Entry

Hi. My name is Bradley Anahua and I wrote Galileo 2: Judgement Day, soon to be published by Lamentations of the Flame Princess. 

This means everything to me. As ridiculous as it sounds, this is a dream come true, it’s just how it came true which is the part I’m gagging on.

I’ve been hoping and plotting for years, overthinking my first published piece as a writer and what it’d say about me. I’ve been writing for over 20 years, short stories, articles, screenplays, rough drafts of novels, and they’re never going to see the light of day because as of now Galileo 2: Judgement Day is the cream of the crop. I might need to see someone about that.

It’s great, I’m elated, I’ve been dreaming of being a published writer since I was a kid. James Edward Raggi IV gave me that. He shouldn’t have. He didn’t even read the thing, he just liked the title.

After 15 years as an entry-level goblin in the film and TV industry, meeting somebody who accepts work from a creditless person and backs it with investments of time and money, I didn’t think that happened. It’s incredible and I’m speechless to be a part of it.

I just watched that movie Pearl. It had heavy Hitchcock influences with the minimal editing and long-held shots that built up this weirdly funny tension. For at least two murders they’d cut away to the wall, another nod to Hitchcock I guess, and the lack of violence kept the focus on the character development.

Mia Goth looked like she’d studied toddlers for the role of Pearl. She reminded me of my kid with these angry outbursts and the way she’d commit these little acts of evil with this deranged casual impishness. Honestly, parenting a toddler, sometimes you wonder. Goth would swing between vulnerable and sympathetic to berserk, and with those long-held shots and minimal cut aways, she’d carry the scene on her performance alone.