Kenneth Hite

Where to begin? This is wonderful stuff so long as you are not daft enough to take any of it seriously.

The Nazis have been associated in the popular imagination with the occult with increasing intensity over time, much to the despair of professional historians. The introduction by Kenneth Hite perhaps does not have sufficient health warning here.

It is true that Germany was riddled with occultist societies and that this infected early German nationalist circles. The best source is always show more Goodrick-Clark who made a specialty of unravelling what was true and what was false about occult claims to great effect.

It is also true that astrology was possibly more important in interwar Germany as a cultural phenomenon than elsewhere and that secret magical societies could be found in many places - and that Hess and Himmler had occultist interests as others had neo-pagan concerns.

However, culturally fascinating though all this is, German politics and culture were as materially grounded as any other, there were no occult elements in the conduct of social control or military direction and Hitler himself found the interests of his colleagues laughable.

Having got the obligatory health warning out of the way, what we have here is a chaos magical approach to the subject - setting up the story of Nazi occultism as if it were true and then playing it out with the sort of solid illustrative work for which Osprey is well regarded.

What, however, Osprey, as publishers, are doing here is a bit mysterious. They have built a strong brand on reliable accounts of military matters - weaponry, campaigns, battles, sieges - and yet here they have embarked on a deliberate assault on the hokum market.

This is the first in a series called Dark Osprey so we canot wait to see what else they have in store for us (the Templars apparently!) - but this short dense illustrated book with its further reading in comics, games and movies is not what we are used to from the house.

But get past the surprise and we have some loony joys where the author has genuinely tried to make the nonsense plausible with historical and military fact - we are drawn into the madness through plausible enough accounts of the Ariosophists, Ahnenerbe and Thule Society.

Then we have mad science based on magical energies, death-wielding rabbinical literature, meetings with yeti in Tibet, the search for the Ark of the Covenant, witch soldiers on the Eastern Front, failed attempts to raise a zombie army, resistance werewolves ...

... and Nazi UFOs in Antarctica with the wonderful conclusion that, Byrd's Expedition to oust the Nazis having failed because of the threat of the globe-shattering Thorshammer weapon, an armistice was agreed to allow Majestic to come up with an Allied occult counter-weapon!

The odd aspect is that Hite has done his research into the actuality of Nazi Germany. The insanities are embedded in a framework of reality that might be quite seductive to imaginative teenagers. Should we be 'concerned'? I think not ... this is now popular culture, not politics.

In any case, any non-teenager who takes at face value such lines as "The Ryokuryukai [Japanese occult researchers] exchanged the Mireniamu data for nuclear material in March of 1945, and the Reich had true werewolves at last" or ...

... "Their program to create an army of Nazi zombies never altered the war's strategic balance: undead soldiers remained vulnerable to artillery ..." might suggest a serious failure in our general educational system.

At one level, of course, this could all be seen as an insult to the millions of dead of seventy years or so ago but we live in a free society and imaginative nonsense might be regarded as prophylactic - we can laugh at Nazis or we can turn them into symbols of dark evil.

In the end, national socialism was not very funny and was more a bunch of half-educated people lurching from chaotic crisis to chaotic crisis than anything so interesting as a force of deliberate evil harnessing occult forces.

It may be that we find it hard to cope with this truth. If we cannot laugh at them and don't want the explanation that they were just us only in different conditions, then, in a world without God, reconstructing them as a dark occult force exorcises something.

Certainly, this book is no encouragement to a political programme. The worst it might do is encourage some naive ceremonial magical play and, though that might frighten the local evangelical vicar, it should not frighten us.

So, if you enjoy imaginative play, then this book is amusing ... otherwise don't bother. show less

Night's Black Agents is Bourne meets True Blood. You a group of renegade soldiers, ex-spies, freelance analysts, and general spooks who have stumble upon a terrible specter haunting 21st century Europe: Vampires! Using your skills and networks, you have to send these bloodsuckers back to the grave for good.

There's a lot to like about this game. The GMing advice and conspyramid (conspiracy+pyramid) foe structure, with escalating levels of henchmen and shell organizations, is tuned for spies show more vs bloodsuckers, but brilliant and portable. The chapter on vampires summarizes tons of folklore, you decide what is true in your game. And the rules support multiple play styles, from high octane Stakes to the shadowy betrayal of Mirror to the psychological annihilation of Burn and the powerlessness of Dust.

This is my first time reading through the GUMSHOE system, and I am both impressed and a little confused. Roleplaying game systems are about managing the flow of information and the consequences of uncertainty. In GUMSHOE, clues are almost automatically revealed. No rolling perception to spot the shell casing, intimidate to coerce an uncommunicative witness, knowledge to retrieve an obscure fact. Characters have a pool of points, and they spend these for clues. A similar point spend mechanic is at play in the action sequences, with a d6+k vs N system. As long as players spend at least one point, they're guaranteed success on easy tests, and higher spends mean that exceptional characters can definitely make a critical check, at the cost of having nothing in reserve for the future.

I haven't played it yet, but it seems workable. I'm not a fan of attritional mechanics, and GUMSHOE is nothing but attrition, but it works. 8 years on from publication, it feels less sophisticated than the fiction-first fail forward-approach of games running on a pbtA or BitD-style fail forward engine. In a world of espionage, which is based around double-edged truths, secrets, revelations, and a fatal web of blowback, the GUMSHOE approach of 'yeah, it works' doesn't seem to model the source fiction. And finally, the layout is painfully old-school, triple columns and arbitrary section breaks that make using this book as a reference confusing. I'm still not sure how many points an agent starts with in a pool, which I guess is the same as the rating, but for such a key point of the system, I shouldn't have to guess. The combat sections are similarly confusing.

I'm sure that Ken Hite could run an amazing campaign of Night's Black Agents, but his decades of Suppressed Transmissions columns are the source for paranormal weirdness. Even after this book, I'm less sure I could do the same. show less

Kenneth Hite knows his Lovecraft. He very opinionated and and you won't always agree with him (He thinks the oft anthologized The Outsider is one of Lovecraft's worst stories, he does make a good argument), but he hits the nail on the head more often than not. He also has some good insight on cheerleader's and detractor's of Lovecraft's work.

Other than those of us that want to devour all things Lovecraft, I'm not sure who would like this other than those trying to pick up just the cream of show more Lovecraft and trying to avoid the weaker fare.

By his count there are just 17 classics, but as he does point out Lovecraft's mediocre fare is often better than another's best output. show less

It sounds like a great idea to have nine of your best authors fill an anthology with whatever they want to write about. Unfortunately, maybe there's a reason there's more editorial control over what gets published then was used in this anthology. On the other hand, some of my complaint was material that felt like rote GURPS filler.

Ghost-Breaking felt like a mundane chapter from GURPS Undead or something, not at all what I was hoping for from Hite. Alchemical Baroque, by Phil Masters, is an show more interesting little fantasy campaign setting that combines a number of traditional details with original material that's clearly not Middle Earth or Greyhawk or any other fantasy world. (I didn't fall passionately in love with the setting, but it deserves a full 4E book a lot more then Yrth did.) Mythic Babysitting is fun, but it's worse then Elizabeth McCoy's other setting, GURPS IOU, in that it marries a setting that doesn't bear nitpicking points and stressing over fine details, with, well, GURPS. (It's the only thing in this book I might run.) Meridian is a science fiction setting from David Pulver. I wouldn't classify it as space opera; it has tightly contained points of impossible (but necessary) tech in it, with the rest reasonable (for fiction) extrapolation. It wasn't something that excited me, but it was interesting. The Last Spartan, by Gene Seabolt, was a mini-historical handbook centered around the time period of the end of the Spartans, and what the last few might have done in that world. Underground was a bit of rote GURPS material about the underground, complete with scientific information and templates. Airships is a piece of real world description about airships. Precursors is back to sci-fi, covering the Ancients. The large section of advantages and disadvantages and how they might show up in precursors drags this down; a lot of it feels like obvious hackwork. I haven't read Chariots yet, but it's a historical book, the Near East in 1348 BC.

What did I want this book to look like? GURPS Horror: The Madness Dossier. Not once did this make me feel like "I could never run this, but this is incredible." Maybe that's somewhat specific to Hite, but large parts of it seemed like rote material, the same stuff you'd get if you assigned a chapter in a normal GURPS sourcebook to an author: We need a chapter about airships, or ghost-breaking, for example. The historical stuff may not have been my cup of tea, but were closer to what I would expect--though I'd point out that both the Spartans and the Chariots were set in the Mediterranean in times familiar to Westerners, and I can imagine GURPS books consistent with what they did put out that could contain those works as chapters. GURPS Ancient World wouldn't have seemed that unlikely at the time. They were hardly on 16th century Tibet or China of the 1930s. The three new campaign settings were my favorite; Phil Masters' fantasy setting really is unique. I might actually play Mythic Babysitters, but definitely not in GURPS. show less