Race, gender, and 1990s comic books 3: Ghost

Malcolm Svensson asked for more of these, so blame him for this. Previous posts on Shi and Warrior Nun Areala here and here.

Ghost was part of the same wave of comic book action heroines that gave rise to Warrior Nun and Shi. She slightly predates them both, first appearing in 1993, but her story proper began with the 1994 Ghost Special: her comic was then published almost-monthly by Dark Horse until 2000. Like Shi she appeared in 65-odd issues overall, but her stories were much less fragmented, tending towards long-arc storytelling reminiscent of the better sort of 1990s genre TV rather than a staccato rattle of throw-away miniseries. This post is mostly about the first 36 issues, which were written by Eric Luke.

Like Shi and Warrior Nun, Luke's run on Ghost is a story about wielding female power in a male-dominated world. Like them, it was written by a man; but unlike them, it initially took an openly and confrontationally feminist stance. Especially in its early issues, its heroine, Elisa Cameron, is very blunt about why the world is such a mess: it's because men are cruel, violent, and selfish, addicted to the power they wield over women, and her solution is to take them down one headshot at a time. Her targets are embodiments of exploitative patriarchal power structures: pornographers who pressure reluctant women into sex work, cult leaders who use religion to amass harems of female followers, sexually predatory businessmen who exploit their female employees, and cruel misogynists who get off on hurting and humiliating women. The cure is always the same: .45 calibre death. 

These days, people often get anxious about who has the right to tell which stories. There are certainly parts of Ghost that I suspect would have been done differently if it had been written by a woman: it can be a very male-gaze-y comic, with quite a lot of gratuitous female nudity, and it does feature an awfully large number of rape monsters. (In a particularly blunt bit of symbolism, at one point Elisa destroys a whole nest of rape-demons with the aid of a bottle of oestrogen.) At other times, though, Luke's perspective can be a positive asset: he clearly sympathises with the rage and pain of women, but he also understands something important about the ghastly force of male desire, depicted here not as some kind of accidental and easily fixable social quirk but as something horrible, primordial, and endlessly destructive. It doesn't always work, but when it does it's powerful stuff.

Ghost has a superb hook: a woman wakes up amnesiac, invisible and intangible in a bathroom, concludes she must be a ghost, and decides to solve the mystery of her own death. As following the trail leads her to one scene of injustice after another, she becomes not just a ghost but a vengeful revenant, cutting a bloody swathe through the evildoers who plague the city of Arcadia. She's terrifyingly powerful: she can control the tangibility of both her own body and whatever she's currently touching, allowing her to, for example, render her bullets solid while her body remains untouchable, or to grab someone, ghost them, push them inside a wall while they're intangible and weightless, and then let go, causing them to die messily as they rematerialise inside a solid object. But even though she can kill almost anyone, she's a complete outsider when it comes to the hidden power structures of the city. It takes her twenty-five blood-soaked issues to gradually murder her way to the truth about what is actually going on in Arcadia, and even longer to solve the mystery of her own origins.

Given the level of carnage that gets meted out in every issue, with Elisa regularly mowing down whole rooms full of men at a time, the comics very wisely make no attempt to present Arcadia as a credible American city, the kind of place where ordinary people might live and work and raise families. Exaggerated urban decay was standard in comics of this era, but Luke's run on Ghost goes much, much further, depicting Arcadia as a Gothic Art Deco hellscape of perpetual night: a kind of stylised Film Noir nightmare world in which violence is omnipresent, life is cheap, and everyone is either a criminal or a victim. (The artwork of Adam Hughes in the early issues does a great deal to define Arcadia's visual identity in this respect.) Several of Elisa's battles involve the destruction of entire city blocks, but no-one seems to care, or even really notice. Apparently Arcadia is the kind of place where a demon can crash a blimp into a skyscraper and everyone will just shrug and get on with their day. 

The airships and the Art Deco architecture, like the 1940s fashions that so many of the male characters seem to wear, serve to anchor Ghost more in the world of pulp fiction than that of conventional superheroics. Elisa's costume owes as much to 1940s 'good girl' art as to modern superhero design, and when it's revealed that the city of Arcadia was originally built by a GLOBAL CRIME CONSPIRACY as cover for an UNDERGROUND CRIME CITY built around a SECRET CRIME MACHINE - a plotline that wouldn't have been out of place in Doc Savage - it feels like a logical extension of what's come before, rather than a random asspull. (In fact, my reaction on reading the relevant issue was: 'OK, that explains so much about this place...') Elisa's twin .45 pistols are an obvious homage to The Shadow, but whereas the pulps 'explained' crime in terms of individual psychopathy or racial degeneracy, Ghost depicts it as an expression of masculinity gone berserk. A city of phallic towers ruled over by violent, abusive criminals is, for Ghost, the logical result of a society in which men think less with their brains than with their dicks.

By far my favourite part of Ghost is the way that it plays on the symbolism of this 'nightmare city' material. Elisa frequently waxes lyrical about her sense of connection to the city, the way that she experiences it as her shadow or reflection, and this connection works on at least two levels. On a personal level the city is a reflection of Elisa herself, mirroring her pain and trauma back at her: it's full of crime and violence because her mind is full of crime and violence, meaning that these are the only parts of the city she is capable of seeing. But on a collective level she mirrors it: she's the city's ghost, the composite ghost of Arcadia's innumerable anonymous victims, risen from their graves and back for blood. (Her amnesia means that she identifies less with the person she once was than with the city in general.) There's an awful lot of as-above-so-below symbolism: Elisa literally has a version of the city inside her head that she uses for teleportation purposes, while the 'real' city outside is terrorised by a demon who escaped from Elisa's subconscious, a demon who embodies everything that she hates and fears about men. When it turns out that, for example, Arcadia is the way it is because it is inhabited by a giant psychic envy monster whose tendrils grow inside the walls of every building, or because it is secretly ruled by a man with the psychic power to induce suicidal despair, these figures are simultaneously wholly symbolic and entirely literal. This wasn't new ground: back in 1989, Morrison's brilliant Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth had already made explicit that Gotham is Batman, Arkham Asylum is Batman's head, and all Batman's fights with his villains double as metaphors for his struggles with his own worst urges and deepest fears. But it's still pretty well done, and the moment where Elisa is given the key to the city by a hundred-year-old PSYCHIC CRIME SOLDIER and rises up into the sunlight, finally transcending her own inner darkness, had me grinning from ear to ear. 

As the comic goes on, and Elisa faces down her literalised inner demons one after the other, she gradually mellows out. She goes from avenger of the dead to champion of the dispossessed, toning down her anti-male rhetoric as she does so. In some ways I found this a bit of a disappointment, as the earlier issues gain a lot of their strength from the clarity of Elisa's feminist anger, but it obviously came as a relief to many of the comic's male readers, who were writing in from very early on expressing their hopes that Elisa would calm down and realise that #notallmen are rotters. It also allows her to gradually escape the 'strong female character' box she's initially trapped in, within which - like many other 1990s antiheroines - the only way to be strong and female is by actually embracing a kind of parodic ultra-masculinity, communicating entirely through violence and feeling no emotions other than rage. (See the earlier issues of Witchblade and Fallen Angel for more examples of the type.) All Elisa's complaints about the stupidity of male violence, and the absurdity of men clinging to their guns to compensate for their own sense of inadequacy, look a bit hypocritical when her own go-to problem solving technique is 'shoot everyone to death forever'. It's thus probably for the best that she's ultimately able to develop beyond it, tapping into empathy as well as rage, even if the comics do lose some of their edge as she does so.

The elephant in the room is the way that Elisa's militant feminism collides with the very male-gazey fanservice of the art direction. Elisa may talk like a particularly angry Riot Grrl, but she dresses like a showgirl - much to the perplexity and irritation of the comic's female readers, who quite reasonably wanted to know why its man-hating heroine insisted on fighting in high heels. Nor was she alone: this was a comic that featured a lot of fanservicey character designs and nearly-naked women, including supposedly 'empowered' characters like Mindgame, a female psychic whose teammates apparently couldn't come up with a better way to keep her from injuring herself during her trances than tying her up in leather bondage gear, complete with a ball-gag. At times this lends the comic a queasy sense that it's trying to have its cake and eat it: Elisa gets to take down creepy misogynist villains like Hunger and Reverend Scythe, but only after the reader's had a good chance to ogle at the debasement of their female victims, who very frequently include Elisa herself. Some of this may have been editorial mandate, based on the desire to drive sales - the editor admitted to having been the one behind Elisa's footwear choices, for example - and one reader mournfully wrote in to describe Ghost as 'a well-written comic [...] that can only survive by the grace of the lead character's cleavage'. But it remains an uncomfortable fit for a series whose heroine holds a special contempt for pornographers, and who repeatedly critiques the way that media objectifies women. In issue 30 a villain demands that Elisa engages in a 'sexy nurse' striptease for him, a process that she finds so degrading and destructive to her sense of self that she freaks out and shoots him, instead. But as he himself points out, he's not asking her to do anything all that different to what her costume does for her every issue.

Interestingly, Dark Horse assigned a female staff member, Debbie Byrd, to answer the letters columns for most of Luke's run on Ghost, making very clear that they did so because they wanted the comic to have a female 'voice'. Debbie steadfastly defended the comic's feminist politics, and sometimes poked fun at it's sillier aspects (like Elisa's costume), but her role sometimes put her in the awkward position of also having to defend things that didn't make much sense, like the issue in which Elisa is magically able to defuse an apparently hopeless situation by kissing another woman. (The amount of lesbian queerbaiting in 1990s comics was incredible.) Her position, as a woman defending a woman written by a man, feels somehow symbolic of the whole situation. Ghost was a comic that supported women in every way other than letting them actually draw or write it. 

Race-wise, Elisa inhabits a world that is, for the most part, as snowy-white as her costume - probably partly because it takes so many of its cues from 1940s film noir, where non-white people scarcely exist. On the plus side, this meant that the reflexive Orientalism that ran rampant through so many contemporary series is absent here, and Arcadia may well have the lowest ninja-to-civilian ratio in all of 1990s comics. Interestingly, though, one of Elisa's closest allies - and the man who first starts her on the road to wondering whether not all men are bastards - is King Tiger, an Asian martial arts mystic who assists her many times over the course of her story. Despite his decency and ethnicity he's not desexualised, prompting one Asian female reader to write in in issue 29:

And thank God, finally, an Asian-American superhero (Okay, so he still does the stereotypic Asian mystic stuff). And he gets the girl, too!

It all makes a welcome change from the endless sexy Japanese ninja girls with whom most other 'bad girl' comics at the time were overrun. Sadly, King Tiger - like most of the comic's character's - got thoroughly wrecked when Ghost changed hands.

Eric Luke's run on Ghost lasted for one special plus 36 issues, of which issues 1-25 were the best. After that it passed into the hands of other writers, who ditched everything that made the comic distinctive, including its feminist themes and its Deco-Gothic aesthetics. Soon it was just another 'action girl' comic book, full of boobs and gunfire, signifying nothing. But for a few years at the start it was genuinely something pretty special.

Next in line: Witchblade!

The Undercellars - a playable dungeon for Patrick's Dungeon Poem challenge

This is my (characteristically late) contribution to Patrick's Dungeon Poem challenge. It's not especially artpunk, but it is functional. Pdf version available here.

The Undercellars – to be placed beneath the next house your PCs visit the basement of…

(For PCs of levels 2-4)

1: Rotting door in the darkest and least-visited corner of the basement, three-quarters covered in heaps of old junk. Ignored by the current residents, who assume it leads to an old cupboard or something. Crumbling carvings of horned figures and winged animals just visible in the surrounding stonework. Held shut by seven locks, once strong, now rusted almost to nothing. One good kick would smash it wide open.

On the other side are stone stairs leading steeply downwards and a skeleton in rotted rags, arms desperately outstretched. Ancient scratch-marks show it died clawing frantically at the door.

2: Six rusted cages along south wall. Five hold ancient skeletons. The door of the sixth hangs open.

As soon as the PCs enter the room the skeletons animate and begin rattling frantically in their cages, shaking the doors and clacking their jawbones in agitation. (Note that the width of the room means PCs are likely to hear them before they see them.) If their cage locks are smashed they run out of the room, up the stairs, and leave the building via the nearest door or window, attacking anyone who gets in their way. They disintegrate into dust the moment sunlight or moonlight touches their bones.

For each minute the rattling noises continue, or each time a loud noise is made in this room (e.g. a cage door being smashed open), there is a 1-in-10 chance that the beast in 3 awakes. 1d6 rounds later, it will crash through the door to its chamber and begin hunting the PCs.

Rusted iron hooks on the north wall hold the rotted remnants of dozens of green robes. The pocket of one holds a silver necklace set with small garnets (120 GP). The eastern wall is carved with a long list of names – several hundred in all, including the ancestors of many prominent local families. Wooden wreckage fills the middle of the room, warped by time and damp. Rusted iron door leads east to 3. Gaping, dripping hole leads south to 7.

3: The iron door that leads into this room is rusted shut. Bashing it open requires a Strength check. Each attempt made has a 1-in-3 chance of awakening the beast.

At the bottom of the stairs a huge creature lies sleeping, curled up on itself. Resembles an immense horned snake with six clawed legs. A glint of gold can be seen protruding from beneath its bulk: a white gold idol of a bat-like beast (500 GP). The beast can be woken by loud noises, or by taking damage: otherwise it sleeps through virtually anything, including having the idol slipped out from under its coils.

Once it wakes it tracks intruders by scent, patiently pursuing them around the complex. It isn’t fast, but it is very persistent, and once it has cornered someone it will methodically rip and bludgeon at them with its teeth, claws, horns, and sheer scaly mass until they are dead. The only ways to escape are to kill it, to leave via the stairs at 1, or to escape along the river. It cannot swim, so if anyone leads it to the river and then swims or boats away from the shore it will abandon the hunt and return to its lair.

4: Alcove holding heap of rubble that was once a statue. Clawed outstretched hand now the only part still recognisable. Wedged behind it is a rotted corpse in a tattered green robe, with a copper and malachite ring around one finger (25 GP). The present residents of the building above can identify it as having belonged to an eccentric great-aunt who went missing several decades ago.

5: Six stone pillars hung with rusted chains. Ancient bloodstains splatter the floor around each pillar for a range of several feet. Bone slivers wedged between the flagstones.

Clinging onto the ceiling are six black-winged murder-birds, in a state of deep hibernation. They will awaken 1d6 rounds after the PCs enter, and attack anyone not wearing a green robe. If routed they fly off to the river and away, not returning to their roosts until 1d3 days later. The beast from 3 will stop and eat the corpses of any dead murder-birds it comes across during its pursuit.

6: Walls engraved with crude carvings of human figures engaged in improbable-looking sex acts. Floor strewn with rotting pillows and bedding. Rack of cracked white clay pipes in northwest corner, beside a dented copper bowl containing a black tarry sludge, dried-out and unidentifiable. In the northeast corner are broken wine bottles, battered pewter cups, and a still-intact copper flask containing 8 doses of potent laudanum laced with hallucinogenic herbs. (Drinking a dose induces 1d6 hours of deep sleep filled with vivid and disturbing dreams – worth 10 GP per dose to an artist or insomniac. The whole flask at once would suffice to knock out the beast from 3, if it could be somehow tricked into swallowing it.) A shelf on the wall holds two silver goblets engraved For the Champions (15 GP each), and a golden chalice engraved For the Queen (160 GP).

At the bottom of the pit to the south lounges Dryden, an immortal violet-skinned youth in tattered orange rags, dozing away the centuries on a pile of rotted silk. His long purple fingernails are still immaculate, even after all these years, and he wears a golden bracelet set with topaz jewels (240 GP) around his left wrist. He is beautiful, flirtatious, sexually omnivorous, and utterly incurious, answering all questions about himself and the complex in the vaguest possible terms. (‘It was built by… people… who’ve been gone for… quite a while?’) He would like the PCs to help him escape, but if they don’t then he won’t push the matter. He can always just sleep until someone else comes along.

Anyone who comes into skin-to-skin contact with Dryden will feel temporary elation followed by a strange sense of weakness, and will lose 1 HP per hour for the next 1d3 hours.

7: Irregular tunnel, damp and dripping, rocky floor slick and uneven underfoot. Three spindly pale-skinned proto-humans wedged into cracks in the rock, sleeping – they can sleep through all but the loudest noises, but bright light will bring them stretching and blinking from their crevices, long white limbs unfolding themselves from the walls, pale tongues licking across wide mouths full of needle-like teeth. They have no language, but can be placated with offerings of food – otherwise they will attack the plumpest-looking PC, seeking to drag them off into the darkness and drown them in the river before eating them. If routed they flee south and along the river to 8 – they are unaffected by the ghosts at 10. If the PCs pursue them to 8 they will make a final stand and fight to the death. Their crevices contain a haul of old, cracked bones and a rusted dagger with a large pearl set in the pommel (120 GP).

8: Smuggler’s camp. Corroded lanterns, rotted barrels, a crate of packed with bottles of contraband brandy (400 GP, but far too heavy, bulky, and fragile to carry around while adventuring). A rowboat has been pulled up onto the shore here. Its timbers are warped and leaky: it could be used to travel between this location and areas 10, 12 or 14, but would undoubtedly sink if used on a longer voyage.

9: A bare stone span crosses the river, its wooden handrails rotted to nothing. Ancient clawmarks on the stone. An undead smuggler named Redmud Bill crouches on the bridge, clutching his burned-out brass lantern. He wears threadbare work clothes and a jaunty black tricorn with an opal bead at each corner. Will not let anyone pass, threatening to ‘rouse the river’ if anyone tries it.

Bill’s mind is so eroded that all he can remember is that he came here in search of treasure, and he’s meant to wait here and guard the bridge ‘until his mates get back with the loot’. Nothing can induce him to leave his post, but he will permit the PCs to pass if bribed with treasure worth 100 GP or more. If shown the corpse of the smuggler-chief from 15, he emits a grief-stricken wail and leaps into the river. He will not resurface.

If the PCs attack or push past him, Bill rips one of the beads from his hat and throw it into the river. Moments later, massive blasts of freezing water mingled with stone and bone start exploding upwards, causing everyone standing on the bridge (including Bill) to save every round or take 1d6 damage and be knocked into the roiling, churning water below. Anyone in the water takes an additional 1d6 damage per round from crushing and drowning, and is permitted a Strength check each round to fight their way onto the shore. (If Bill falls into the river, he takes only half damage and automatically clambers back onto the bridge after one round.) The river remains roused for 1d8 rounds, and then falls quiet, though if Bill is still alive and fighting at this point he’ll throw in a second bead to rouse it again.

PCs who obtain Bill’s hat may find it a useful way of getting rid of the beast from 3, as once knocked into the river it will simply thrash around helplessly in the water until it drowns.

10: Graveyard. Along the side of the river stands a row of uniform grey headstones marking the graves of illegitimate children, secret spouses, disowned relatives, and murdered rivals, engraved with cryptic symbols meaningful only to the hands that carved them. The ghosts of those buried here are desperate for acknowledgement, but over the centuries their stories have all become jumbled together, an endless tangle of scandals and secrets without beginning or end. Anyone approaching them will find their mind filled with pleading whispers, and must save or stand, transfixed, listening to the stories of the dead until they are physically dragged away. Anyone left among the graves for more than an hour will be possessed by a confused composite ghost, and will flee the scene on an impossible mission to prove that they were covertly murdered by their illegitimate father who was also secretly their wife, or something of the sort. This possession lasts for 1d6 months, or until a Bless spell is cast on them.

11: The river is slow-flowing, icy cold, and deep enough to swim (or drown) in. The riverbed is covered with drifts of ancient bone – several hundred skeletons worth in all. Diving beneath the surface with a waterproof light source (e.g. a Light spell) will reveal light glinting off a suspiciously pristine greataxe still clutched in the hands of a skeleton encased in rusted armour, its copper haft engraved with astrological symbols. This is the axe Starshine, which normally functions as a Greataxe +1, but serves as a Greataxe +4 when wielded in starlight beneath the open sky.

12: A lone proto-human (as room 7) sits here, singing wordlessly to itself in the dark, casting nets woven from the sinews of strange subterranean beasts. If approached by PCs bearing lights it abandons its nets and dives into the water, swimming rapidly downriver. Its nets are especially effective against winged creatures such as those in 5 and 15, which if hit with them must save or crash, wings entangled, to the floor.

13:  Tattered parchments nailed to the walls in flapping sheets, bearing mostly-illegible genealogies and family trees stretching back through the centuries. Warped wooden tables heaped with dried-up inkwells and mouldy parchment. Skeleton sprawled on the floor in rotten green robes, its skull staved in by a blow to the back of the head. A wide flight of stairs leads eastward down to 14, strewn with the remains of another two hacked-up skeletons in green robes.

A huge coffer made from beaten black iron stands in south-west corner, packed with centuries worth of accumulated blackmail material: documents bearing witness to false marriages, forged inheritances, land grabs, rigged elections to civic offices, etc, etc. Most are so old as to now be of only historical interest, but a patient sift would yield enough material to ruin 1d6 prominent local families if revealed. All would be willing to kill to prevent this information becoming public.

14: Three crudely-carven statues of horned figures. Those to the left and right are male. The one in the centre is female. All are enfolded in drapery and depicted reaching outwards with long, clawed hands. Bronze bowls at their feet, stained by centuries of offerings in wine and blood.

Anyone pouring wine or blood into the bowls before the male figures gains +1 strength permanently, and is filled with belligerent and vengeful urges. If they ever back down from a fight, or fail to avenge a slight or wrong done to them, then the next time they sleep they are tormented in their dreams by terrible horned figures, gain no rest, and suffer 1d6 damage. This curse can only trigger once per day.

Anyone pouring wine or blood into the bowl before the female figure gains +1 wisdom permanently, and is filled with impulses of pragmatic cruelty. If they ever make a decision that causes material disadvantage to themselves in order to benefit someone to whom they are not directly related by blood, then the next time they sleep they are tormented in their dreams by terrible faceless beings, gain no rest, and suffer -1 to all saves for 7 days. This curse can only trigger once per day, but it does stack with itself, to a potential maximum of -7 to all saves.

A Bless spell removes both the positive and negative effects of these blessings, but the recipient takes 2d6 damage as the dark forces within them burst bloodily out of their body, leaving gory stigmata.

In the southernmost corner is huddled a skeleton, its once-green robes black with ancient blood. Its bony hands clutch a silver talisman engraved with a horned figure (10 GP).

15: Immense vaulted subterranean hall, the product of incalculable labour. Rotting divans litter the floor. Walls engraved with bass reliefs showing robed men prostrating themselves between a horned female figure. Floor strewn with ancient corpses spitted upon one another’s swords, some in the drab clothes of dockworkers, others wearing rotted green robes. Corpse of the smuggler-chief lies at the foot of the stairs to 13, rusted cutlass still clutched in one skeletal hand. His leather backpack contains a miscellaneous tangle of looted coins and jewellery worth 370 GP. Before him lies a sundered skeleton in a green robe, a heavy gold chain glinting around its neck (140 GP).

In the centre of the room a huge brass brazier hangs suspended from the ceiling on an iron chain, and on this brazier the Winged Guardian – a great leathery bat-like beast with a single huge yellow eye – dozes over the bones of its dead masters. It will not attack PCs who hold up the idol from 3: otherwise it launches itself up with an ear-splitting shriek and assails them, buffeting them with its wings while spraying them with the searing, tar-like venom it drools continually from its maw. It will pursue fleeing PCs as far as the river, but not beyond. If routed it flies up to the ceiling and clings to the roof, but if the PCs continue to persecute it with missile fire it flies back down and fights until slain.

The Winged Guardian and the beast from 3 are mortal enemies, and if they ever encounter one another they will fight to the death.

Three pits in the east lead down to 16, coils of rusted chain heaped next to each one. In the south-west corner stands a broken-down divan: a green-robed skeleton sprawls beside it with a crossbow bolt wedged between its vertebrae, clearly shot in the back in the act of trying to crawl underneath it. Beneath this divan is a concealed trapdoor leading to 17 – anyone opening this can look down onto the Queen’s bier without awakening her, potentially allowing a round of surprise attacks.

16: Dank dungeon scattered with rusted chains, slumped skeletons in rags fettered to walls, a faint smell of ancient human waste. Two mutant shame children lurk here, wordless and feral, too warped to die, their mottled skin dotted with patches of scale and hair. Skilled trapmakers, they have set up a line of hidden snares across the room that snap taut when triggered, entangling victims legs in lengths of weighted chain: the children then leap forth to garrote their immobilized victims. If routed they run and hide in dark corners. Child-like in intelligence, they respond positively if shown any kind of affection, and will loyally follow anyone who feeds them or treats them with kindness.

17: Here the Horned Queen sleeps through the centuries on her bier of bones, resplendent in shimmering robes of green silk embroidered with golden thread (120 GP if intact, 12 GP if hacked and stained). She wears a golden circlet set with three cut emeralds (950 GP). Her two champions lie curled up on the floor beside her like dogs, naked save for a few rags of clothing, huge rusted greatswords lying on the ground beside them. All three are horned and clawed, their bones clearly visible through their leathery grey-brown skin. Their yellow fangs are very long and very sharp. On a stone table next to the bier stands an engraved silver flask (30 GP) containing nine doses of dreamwine, which – if swallowed – place the imbiber in a dreamlike and disorientated mental state for the next 3d6 hours, during which they are extremely suggestible. (Trying to make someone do something heinous or self-destructive allows them a save to break the effect.) Dreamwine is worth 50 GP per dose to criminals or cult leaders.

If the PCs enter the chamber the Queen will awaken instantly. She is unaware that her followers have perished while she slept, and will assume that the PCs have come to worship her if any of the following are true:

·        The PCs are all wearing green robes.
·        The PCs all have blessings from the statues in 14.
·        The PCs come bearing offerings of blood and/or wine in the goblets and chalice from 6.
·        The first PC into the room holds up the silver talisman from 14.

If the Queen believes the PCs to be worshippers, she will enquire after the state of her followers: whether their numbers are growing, whether their bloodlines are strong, whether their secrets remain secure, etc. If the PCs give plausible-sounding answers she will bestow a ritual blessing and dismiss them before returning to her sleep. (They can then attack with the benefit of surprise, if they choose to do so.) She will become increasingly suspicious if reawakened by the same group of ‘worshippers’ more than once. PCs who tell her that the complex is under attack may be able to trick her and the champions into a trap. She is unaware of the snares in 16, and will blunder straight into them if lured there.

If the Queen does not believe the PCs are here to worship her, she gives them a stark choice: follow her or die. PCs who submit will be relieved of their weapons, and required to drink one dose of dreamwine each: they will then be subjected to a nightmarish initiation by ordeal, which they will never subsequently be able to remember except as a confused nightmare of scorching flames, icy waters, and monstrous faces looming out of the dark. Any PC who is affected by the dreamwine for more hours than their Wisdom score will succumb, and become a dedicated cultist of the Horned Queen. Others may save once per day, with a cumulative -1 penalty for each day that passes: success means they emerge from their fugue state of terror and trauma for long enough to try to escape. Cultist PCs who are rescued from the Queen may eventually recover after 1d6 months of systematic deprogramming.

The Queen is utterly ancient, and believes in little save the sanctity of bloodlines and of secrets. In battle, her champions attack with their greatswords, while the Queen uses her curses. If her champions are killed, the Queen will offer the PCs her circlet and dreamwine in exchange for her life. If they refuse this offer, she fights to the death. 

Monster Stats

5 Skeletons (room 2): 1 HD (3 hp), AC leather, claw (1d3), morale NA.

The Beast (room 3): 8 HD (37 hp), AC plate, move as dwarf, morale 9. The beast has enough teeth, claws, horns, and coils to attack everyone adjacent to it every round for 1d8 damage. Its blood is deathly-cold and horribly poisonous: anyone wounding it in hand to hand combat must save to avoid being splattered, suffering crippling, burning agony (-4 to all rolls) until the venom is washed clean. Characters with no exposed skin are immune to this. (The robes from 2 may be useful, here.) If the beast is killed, 2d10 doses of blood may be collected from it, usable as blade venom or contact poison.

6 Murder-birds (room 5): 1 HD (4 hp), AC chain, beak and claws (1d4), morale 6. Anyone wounded by a murder-bird just keeps bleeding, losing 1 HP per round until they take a round to bandage their wounds. Magical healing instantly ends the bleeding.

Dryden (room 6): 2 HD (11 hp), AC unarmoured, poisonous fingernails (1 damage, but save or take 3d6 damage when the poison kicks in 1d10 rounds later), morale 5. Regenerates 1 HP per hour unless dead. Between 0 HP and -5 HP he will look dead, but will actually continue to regenerate until fully restored – only at -6 or below does he actually die.

Proto-Humans (3 in room 7, 1 in room 12): 2 HD (8 hp), AC unarmoured, bite (1d6), morale 6. If two proto-humans hit the same target in the same round then their victim has been swarmed and grabbed. They may make a Strength check to break free – if this fails they will be yanked off-balance and dragged off helplessly into the darkness.

Redmud Bill (room 9): 3 HD (13 hp), AC leather, rusty hatchet (1d6), morale 8. Has three Beads of River Rousing, which, if dropped into a freshwater river or lake, rouse it into furious, churning waterspouts for 1d8 rounds for 1 mile in every direction.

Winged Guardian (room 15): 5 HD (21 hp), AC chain, wing buffet (1d6), morale 8. Whomever the guardian is currently attacking must save each round or be seared by the rain of sticky, burning venom that pours constantly from its mouth, taking 1d8 damage – this damage is halved (rounding down) if they have a shield to shelter under.

2 Shame Children (room 16): 3 HD (11 hp), AC leather, chain garotte (1d8 – if max damage is rolled the victim passes out for 1d10 minutes), morale 5. Experts at hiding and sneaking – if you lose sight of them, you’ll never find them. Attack only from ambush.

2 Horned Champions (room 17): 4 HD (17 hp), AC chain, greatsword (2d6), morale 10.

Horned Queen (room 17): 5 HD (23 hp), AC chain, teeth and claws (1d6), morale 10. Once per round can call down a random curse on a PC, who must save or suffer (roll 1d4: 1= blindness, 2 = fear, 3 = madness, 4 = paralysis) for the next 1d6 rounds. Anyone wounded by the Queen starts bleeding secrets, and will uncontrollably start confessing whatever they most want to keep secret for as long as the blood continues to flow from their wounds.

The White Tower: an edition-agnostic adventure for D&D

I took an overdose of fin de siècle Gothic fiction and wrote this, more as a finger exercise than anything else. Put it in a hex somewhere near the sea.

Advance warning: some of the themes addressed here are pretty heavy, even if they are approached rather obliquely, just as they are in the fiction that inspired it. Please use with appropriate care.

The Tower: It stands on a hilltop, shining white in the distance, visible for miles around. The land around is thickly forested. No-one goes there now, though the forest is dotted with the overgrown ruins of farms and villages, showing that the hills were once densely inhabited. The woods have an evil reputation with the locals, who avoid the place, especially after dark.

The Rumours: In the villages that cling to the riverside, the people are happy to talk about the tower on the hill, though never without first making signs to avert the attention of evil spirits. They say a sad old lord used to live alone there, until the day he rode along the sea cliffs the morning after a storm and found a beautiful girl cast up by the waves on the beach, more dead than alive and surrounded by broken timbers. He took her home, and she became his ward, and then his wife. She seemed to give him new joy in life, and one by one he called his old friends to live with them: a priest, a doctor, and an artist. Then one midsummer the whole household was found dead and dangling from the rafters - all save the lady, who had vanished without trace. After that nothing went right in the villages around the white tower. Soon the farms were all abandoned, and the forest came.

The Woods: By day the woods are harmless enough, and in the spring and summer they are thick with wild roses. Often a woman can be heard singing in the distance, though no amount of searching will ever find her. By night travellers will repeatedly glimpse swaying, broken-necked figures hanging from the branches out of the corners of their eyes, though these disappear when looked at directly. When the wind blows through the woods by night, it carries the sounds of crashing waves, screaming men, and shattering timbers, as though a shipwreck was happening just over the hill.

For each hour spent in the woods by night, there is a 1-in-3 chance of an encounter with a random ghost. Roll 1d6:

1. Bianca, the maid, weeping uncontrollably as she dabs her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief, her broken neck jerking disturbingly with each heaving sob.
2. Giuliano, the gardener, and Alberico, the doctor, locked in a feverish embrace, trying to kiss each other with heads that dangle from broken necks.
3. Ortensia, the cook, dressed up in her best gown, roaming the woods and calling out: 'Lucia! Lucia!' Stiff coloured ribbons tied around her throat imperfectly conceal her broken neck.
4. Jacopo, the chaplain, striding through the forests in his black soutane, his shattered neck almost, but not quite, held upright by his high and rigidly starched white collar. He holds a sealed letter out stiffly before him, the word Lucia just visible on the envelope. 
5. Giustino, the artist, craning his broken neck and sketching feverishly with paper and charcoal at something only he can see. 
6. Lord Orazio, brandishing a bleeding dagger, rushing through the night wild-eyed and howling: 'She is MINE! Mine only! Mine always! I found her! She belongs to ME!'

If any attempt is made to interact with the ghosts, it will instantly become obvious that what seemed like human forms were nothing more than a trick of the moonlight, their voices merely the moaning of the wind.

Approaching the Tower: One stumbles upon it suddenly, right in the middle of the wood. Its white stone walls are still strong and clean, untouched by overgrowth, in marked contrast to the condition of all the other ruins in the woods. Its wooden doors have rotted almost to nothing. The stables, servant's quarters, and other outbuildings are now mere heaps of mossy stone.

• An immense serpent lazes on a rock nearby, huge and almost unkillable, covered in gorgeous, multicoloured scales. It will attack only in self-defence, but if any group of people try to enter the tower it will rear up and spit a stream of venom straight into the eyes of whichever of them has the lowest Charisma score. Unless dodged, this venom will cause permanent blindness unless treated with healing magic or washed away promptly with salt water and/or milk. (Any healers in the party will know this.) The snake can be distracted by giving it live prey to eat: the larger the animal, the longer it will spend eating it. A rabbit might buy you a minute, whereas eating and digesting a horse will occupy it for an entire day. 

A Note on Ghosts: Unlike the ghosts in the forest, the ghosts in the tower are completely physical. (They are not zombies: the actual corpses of all these people are still mouldering in their graves.) Their pale bodies can be cut down with mundane weapons, although they do not bleed and are weirdly resistant to harm. If 'killed', they reform the following midnight unless the tower's enchantment has been undone. Unless otherwise noted, none of them can leave their respective rooms.

A Note on Dreams: Anyone who attempts to sleep within the White Tower will be tormented by horrible nightmares of shipwrecks, serpents, stabbing daggers, strangling roses, hanging bodies, and staring eyes, and will wake up feeling more exhausted than they were when they first went to sleep. Sleeping under these conditions will not allow the recovery of lost hit points or spells.

Ground Floor: The main doors lead into a great semi-circular room hung with faded scarlet tapestries depicting hunts, tournaments, and battles, with a grand flight of white stone stairs leading up. A doorway at the back leads to a warren of kitchens, one of which contains a trapdoor covering a rusted iron ladder leading down into darkness. The sound of a woman weeping echoes down from upstairs.

First Floor: A single room dominated by a huge table and an immense fireplace. Seven frayed ropes hang from the rafters, swinging lazily back and forth even when there is no breeze. White stone stairs lead up to the second floor.

• The ghost of Bianca, the maidservant, haunts this room, weeping endlessly as she tries to wash the bloodstained floorboards with her tears. Her labour is useless: scrub how she might, the stained timber remains as scarlet as ever. Her skin is pale and her neck is obviously broken. She clutches an elaborately embroidered handkerchief in her calloused hands.
• If questioned, Bianca responds only with incoherent torrents of self-reproach: 'They made me! I'm sorry! I'm so sorry! I loved her so much! But they all forced me to! Oh, if only I had been stronger! Oh, this is all, all, all my fault!' 
• Bianca has a knife hidden up her sleeve, and will fight to the death to avoid parting with her handkerchief, the one token she has left of Lucia's love. If she can be persuaded that giving the handkerchief to the PCs will help Lucia find peace, however, then she will hand it over, although not without kissing it several hundred times first.

Second Floor: Three bedrooms branch off a central landing. A narrow flight of stone stairs continues upwards.

Master Bedroom: This room belonged to Orazio and Lucia, and is still haunted by the ghost of Lord Orazio. Its walls are lined with bookcases, weighed down with ponderous legal and scholarly tomes, some of them of great value. From the open window, it is possible to smell (although not see) the sea. Behind a wooden screen, painted with images of sea birds, stands a huge white marble bath.

• Orazio's ghost paces around the room on an endless patrol, his grey old head swinging alarmingly from side to side on its broken neck. In his hand he clutches his grandfather's dagger, still stained with Lucia's blood. From time to time he mutters: 'Lucia! Lucia!' and 'Faithless! Faithless!' under his breath. 
• If he sees the PCs, Orazio will demand to know what they are doing in his house, and will ring the bell for the servants (who, obviously, do not come). He becomes agitated if anyone points out his unnatural condition, or that of the tower. If Lucia is mentioned, even obliquely, he accuses them of being her lovers and attacks in a frenzied rage. Any wounds he inflicts with his dagger, even the slightest scratch, will just keep bleeding and bleeding until proper medical attention is given or the victim dies.
• Orazio's power is this: if he gives a direct order to a single PC, they must save or obey it to the best of their ability. Orazio can only give orders that conform to his understanding of gentlemanly behaviour: 'leave my house' or 'restrain this trespasser' are fine, but 'murder your friends' or 'slit your own throat' are right out. Anyone whom he has wounded with his dagger receives no save against this ability.
• If the bath is filled with salt water (e.g. from the lake or the pit), then anyone bathing in it will regain half their lost hit points. Full immersion will also heal blindness caused by the serpent's venom or bleeding caused by Orazio's dagger. Its magic will function only once for each PC.

Second Bedroom: This room was occupied by Alberico, the doctor, and was the site of his illicit liaisons with the gardener, Giuliano, whose ghost still haunts the room. Its cluttered shelves and wardrobes are almost invisible beneath the masses of flowering rosebushes which grow across the walls, floor, and ceiling, filling the room with an overpowering floral scent, regardless of the time of day or year.

• Giuliano's ghost lurks unseen amidst the rose bushes, which grow through and out of his beautiful, pale body. He cannot speak for the roses that grow from his mouth. He hungers for warmth, and nourishment, and life.
• For every minute that PCs remain in the room, they must save or sink into a drowsy stupor, lulled by the scent of the roses. As they lie in this state, rose vines will stealthily curl around them and impale them with a hundred thorns, drawing off blood to feel Giuliano. The more blood he drinks, the more he will stir amidst the vines, making it easier for the PCs to spot him, and to see that he is clearly still too weak to break free from the roses that pin him to the walls. If attacked, he defends himself with clouds of soporific pollen, and with walls and waves of lashing thorns.
• If Giuliano drinks more than two gallons of blood in a single day, he becomes strong enough to break free. (This much blood loss would kill two ordinary people, but spread between six it would just leave them feeling woozy and weak. Alternatively the PCs could feed him an animal from the forest, or the hairy thing from the pit under the house.) He can also be freed by cutting through the roses that bind him using either Orazio's dagger or Ortensia's cleaver. (If severed with normal blades, they regrow as fast as they are cut.) 
• If freed, Giuliano will stagger upstairs to the Study, and seize Alberico in an urgent embrace. More rose-vines will erupt from both men's bodies, binding them tightly together, and soon there is nothing but a mass of roses to mark the place where they once stood. Cutting through them will reveal no trace of either man, and they will not reform the following midnight. With Giuliano gone, the roses in this room become normal flowers, and will promptly wither if out of season. 
• A trunk under the bed contains Alberico's medical supplies, including plenty of bandages (which will be useful if anyone has been cut with Orazio's dagger), and bottles of saline solution (which are handy for washing the eyes of anyone hit by the venom of the serpent).

Third Bedroom: This room was shared by the chaplain, Jacopo, and the artist, Giustino. It is easy to guess who slept where: one half of the room is hung with sombre colours, with a tiny shrine to a miserable-looking saint in one corner, while the other half is scattered with paints and half-finished clay models, with expensive clothes in extravagant fabrics flung heedlessly across the bed and over the backs of chairs. Giustino's clothes and Jacopo's holy icons could both be very valuable to the right buyer. Their ghosts are not here, haunting the chambers above.

• Hidden under the pillow of Jacopo's bed is a silk bag containing a stash of passionate love letters addressed to Lucia by Jacopo, interspersed by terrible (but obviously heartfelt) attempts at erotic poetry. Each page has been torn neatly in half.

Third Floor: This floor has the same layout as the one below, but instead of three bedrooms the central landing opens onto a library, a study, and a chapel. A set of spiral stairs, wound claustrophobically tight, twists upwards to the fourth floor.

Library: This room is full of bookshelves and cabinets of curiosities, packed with trinkets from far-off lands, some of them of considerable value. A writing desk sits by the window.

• One wall is dominated by a large painting of Lucia, signed by Giustino. It depicts her seated by an ornamental lake, surrounded by roses, with the White Tower itself clearly visible in the background. She holds an embroidered handkerchief - recognisably the same one used by Bianca - and looks very, very beautiful, if somewhat vacant. Anyone with an above-average Wisdom score will be able to tell at a glance that the painter was obviously in love with his subject.
• On the desk is an open book, a bestiary of strange creatures from many lands. It has been opened to a page describing 'syrens, wicked spirits of the ocean, beauteous of body but void of soul, whose songs draw men to madness and destruction.'
• In the locked drawer of the desk are legal papers drawn up by Orazio, petitioning a local (and now long-dead) magistrate for divorce from Lucia on the grounds of her 'infidelity and promiscuity', 'unnatural practises', and 'neglect of her marital duties'. The papers are complete, but have not been signed or sealed. 

Study: This room smells strongly of poppies. It is haunted by the ghost of Alberico, the doctor, who fusses endlessly with his books and potions as he tries, uselessly, to come up with an adequate diagnosis of Lucia's nature and his own bizarre condition. As he works he takes regular gulps from the bottle of laudanum that rests on the table, using his free hand to physically hold his head up by the hair as he does so to allow himself to swallow despite his broken neck.

• Alberico is extremely resistant to the idea that he is dead, and will come up with quite insanely convoluted 'rational medical explanations' to account for his situation. He will insist that he could leave this room if he wanted to, but that his work is much too urgent to wait. If confronted with irrefutable evidence that he is dead he will suffer a massive nervous breakdown, chug down the whole bottle of laudanum, and collapse in a narcotised stupor for 1d8 hours. When he wakes up he will carry on with his work as though nothing had happened.
• More rational than the other ghosts, Alberico will freely admit to having plotted to murder Lucia. 'Quite a disruptive influence, she was. Threw the whole household out of order. A thoroughly abnormal type - something wrong with her nerves, no doubt. Everyone agreed by the end. Desperate cases require desperate solutions!' His memory of the event itself is blurry, but he remembers hearing Lucia singing 'a song that sounded like the sea', and seeing Lord Orazio plunge his grandfather's dagger into her chest in a desperate attempt to shut her up. 
• Alberico's desk is covered in masses of case notes, documenting his fruitless attempts to diagnose Lucia's nature. He will happily allow the PCs to consult these, although he will not allow them to be removed. Anyone looking through the notes will notice that Alberico has idly sketched Giuliano's face dozens of times in the margins. Anyone who has seen Giuliano in the second bedroom will recognise the face as his, but if questioned Alberico will insist that the face is of 'no-one in particular. Just idle doodling, I'm afraid...'
• Alberico will violently resist any attempts to meddle with or remove his case notes, and if the PCs persist he will grab a large bottle from a shelf and smash it open, releasing a buzzing cloud of furious insects whose stings induce rapid swelling and unbelievable, crippling pain. They are hard to fight with normal weapons, but smoke (e.g. from the second-floor fireplace) or any kind of strong air current (e.g. the wind on the roof) will soon disperse them. 
• Alberico's power is this: during combat, he will look at a random PC each round, mutter a brief diagnosis of them based on their current behaviour (e.g. 'shouting too loudly - probably hysterical', or 'face looks flushed - probable heart condition'), and make a swift note in his pocket book. This diagnosis will then become the truth, causing those who fight against him to swiftly dissolve into a mass of physical and mental infirmities. (Note that Alberico can't use this power aggressively, by e.g. diagnosing someone with a fatal heart attack: he genuinely thinks he's just observing what's already there.) If Alberico is defeated, or his pocket-book is destroyed, these induced conditions disappear. 
• If Alberico is reunited with Giuliano (see Second Bedroom, above), the PCs will be free to read and take his notes at their leisure.

Chapel: This cold, severe-looking room is hung with icons depicting bleeding saints and martyrs, posed in various expressive attitudes of agony. The ghost of Father Jacopo, the chaplain, kneels in silent meditation before the altar. His bowed head makes his broken neck horribly obvious, making him look rather martyr-like himself. 

• Jacopo's power is this: if anyone enters the chapel, Jacopo rises and turns his stern gaze upon them. The intruder will instantly become overcome with feelings of hysterical shame and self-loathing, and will subject themselves to increasingly extravagant forms of self-harm until they are physically pulled from the room, while Jacopo watches silently with an expression of mingled pity and contempt. 
• If Jacopo is confronted with either the love letters from the third bedroom, or the erotic drawings of him from the studio, his composure disintegrates and his gaze loses all its power. He begins kicking up a storm of poltergeist activity, throwing the heavy bronze candlesticks around the room while howling about how Lucia bewitched him into vice and sin. 
• If Jacopo is defeated, anyone examining the altar will discover the true object of his veneration: a golden reliquary containing a nude drawing of Lucia, stolen from Giustino's studio. The reliquary is beautifully engraved with patterns of flowers and vine leaves, and would be of great value to any church with a relic worth putting in it. 

Fourth Floor: This wide-open, barely-furnished room was converted into Giustino's studio, on account of the brilliant light that shines in through its huge windows. It is littered with half-finished statues and paintings, and the walls are covered with layer upon layer of charcoal sketches drawn with a hasty, urgent hand. The older ones beneath are mostly of beautiful young men, but the newer sketches pinned on top of them are all of Lucia. A hidden folder in a locked drawer contains a sheaf of erotic sketches of Father Jacopo, obviously drawn from life. A flimsy-looking ladder leads up to a trapdoor on the roof.

• The ghost of Giustino haunts this room, labouring endlessly at a clay sculpture of Lucia. He begins work each day at dawn, periodically breaking off his sculpting to consult his sketches, until at midnight he looks his sculpture over, realises his failure, and tears it down with a howl of anguish. He starts again the following morning.
• If his work is interrupted, Giustino will become furious and order his unfinished statues to animate and attack. They are sad, clumsy, lumpen things, but there are quite a lot of them and they carry on fighting until they are smashed to pieces. 
• Giustino's power is this: whenever he looks at a person, the way that he sees them will become the truth of them for as long as his gaze remains fixed upon them. Giustino's gaze is not false, exactly, but it tends to simplify people almost to the point of caricature: so a strong woman would remain strong while he looked at her, but would become almost incapable of anything other than feats of strength. In game terms, whomever he is currently looking at keeps their highest ability score and halves all the rest until he looks away.

Roof: The wind blows strongly here, a continuous torrent of air that smells of salt and sounds like the roaring of the sea. PCs who don't tie themselves onto something risk being blown clean off the roof and falling sixty feet to the ground below. From up here the lake is clearly visible, sparkling like a clear blue jewel among the remains of what were once the tower's gardens.

Basement: This crumbling subterranean warren of storerooms and wine cellars is the hunting ground of the ghost of Ortensia, the cook. Quite the maddest of the ghosts, she roams the cellars with her cleaver in her hand, snarling to herself. 

• Upon seeing the PCs, Ortensia will mistake whichever of them has the highest Charisma score for Lucia (regardless of gender) and launch herself forwards to attack, howling a volley of misogynistic abuse - 'Whore! Bitch! Temptress! Slut!' - as she does so. 
• As she 'dies', she will stare up pitifully at the PC she has mistaken for Lucia, and use her last breath to whimper brokenly: 'Why? Why choose her? Why couldn't it have been me?'
• If the PC whom she has mistaken for Lucia shows her any kind of affection, she will throw her cleaver away and collapse into floods of helpless tears, apologising over and over again for her part in Lord Orazio's murder plan. Soon afterwards she will attempt to kill herself if not prevented.
• One of the wine cellars contains a small fortune in rare wines, although without Ortensia's help it will take a thorough search to reveal it.

Sub-Basement: Lord Orazio's grandfather, Giovanni, oversaw the construction of the White Tower and was buried down here, among its foundations. PCs who come down here will hear him tap-tap-tapping on the inside of his tomb with his bony fingers. If they dig him up, he will rear up in his ragged winding-sheet and begin clack-clack-clacking with his ghastly yellow jawbones. (Unlike the other inhabitants of the White Tower, Giovanni is very much a corpse, not a ghost, and he stays dead if destroyed.) By signs and gestures he will attempt to indicate his frustration with the current state of the tower, and his desire for its inhabitants to be put to rest. If asked how, he picks up a rock and scratches twelve words onto the wall: FREE THE GIRL FROM THE WOOD. FREE THE WOOD FROM THE GIRL. 

Giovanni is nothing but a literal bag of bones, and would be no use in a fight either as an enemy or an ally. If the PCs free Lucia after digging him up, however, then as he collapses back into death he uses his last conscious moment to ensure that he falls pointing to a particular stone in the wall. PCs who remove this stone will find a stash of antique gold coins buried behind it, hidden by Giovanni to be used in his family's hour of need. 

Under the Foundations: Beside Giovanni's grave is a deep, damp pit, descending down into the wet earth. It is inhabited by some awful scrambling creature with thin, hairy limbs and yellow gnashing teeth, which will come scrabbling from its hidden holes to cut ropes, douse lamps, and murder intruders. At the very bottom of the pit are three feet of salt water, a mass of hair and bones of indeterminate origin, and a rock on which someone with beautiful handwriting has scratched the words Still so very far above the sea. Hidden behind this rock is Lucia's wedding ring, which would bring quite a price if it was cleaned up a bit.

The Lake: It is surrounded on all sides by masses of dense undergrowth, making it very difficult to find unless the PCs have either worked out its position relative to the tower using the painting in the library, or seen it directly from the roof. Here Lucia stumbled, singing and bleeding and dying, after Orazio's attempted murder. Sea nymph that she was, she merged herself with the water of the lake, and gradually with the water table of the whole forest. The lake is obviously freshwater, fed by hidden subterranean springs, and yet it tastes as salty as the sea. 

Anyone who spends more than a few minutes by the lake will hear a woman's voice murmuring, softly: 'Give me back to myself'. 

To undo Lucia's literal and metaphorical murder, any five of the following objects must be thrown into the lake:

• Bianca's handkerchief.
• The painting from the library.
• The divorce papers from the library.
• Lord Orazio's bloodstained dagger.
• Alberico's case notes.
• The drawing from Jacopo's reliquary.
• Giustino's unfinished clay statue of Lucia.

When one object is thrown in, the water in the lake begins to churn.

When two objects are thrown in, the water in the lake takes on the colour of blood.

When three objects are thrown in, the outline of a woman can be glimpsed below the surface, although anyone diving down finds only stones and weeds.

When four objects are thrown in, Lucia's bleeding corpse can be seen lying at the bottom of the lake, very cold and very pale and very dead.

When five objects are thrown in, Lucia's eyes snap open and she rises, dripping and shuddering, to the surface.

The Rivals: If Bianca, Ortensia, Jacopo, Giustino, and/or Orazio are still 'alive' when Lucia rises from the water, they will instantly be aware of her resurrection and come rushing from the tower, screaming that she is theirs and theirs alone. If the PCs stand in their way, the ghosts will attack them furiously to get to Lucia: otherwise they will fight among each other until only one remains. Lucia will smile indulgently at her final 'suitor', and kiss them on the forehead, causing them to drop dead on the spot with a rapturous expression on their face. Then the serpent slithers over and eats them.

Unbroken Wings: Once the suitors are dead, Lucia will call the serpent to her, and merge with it, becoming a vast, undulating sea snake with a woman's face. As she does so, her necklace and bracelets will snap and fall from her body. Her coral-red lips open, pouring forth a song that fills the forest with the sounds of the sea. Then she dives down into the lake and is never seen again.

The left bracelet bears a green jewel. Anyone who wears it can breath water as though it was air.

The right bracelet bears a blue jewel. Anyone who wears it can drink salt water as though it was fresh.

The necklace bears a white jewel. Anyone who wears it will never be harmed by any sea creature except in self defence.

Aftermath: With Lucia gone, the White Tower begins to crumble. Its unquiet ghosts dissipate. Decades catch up with it in a matter of months. Within a year it is nothing but a heap of tumbled stones.

Once word spreads that the forests are no longer haunted, a distant relative of Lord Orazio will ride in and assert her ownership of the whole area. She visits the site of the tower, and takes a strange liking to the lake beside the ruins. Soon afterwards, she adopts a rose and serpent as the symbol of her house.

For years afterwards, fisher-folk along the coast claim to sometimes hear a woman's voice singing over the waters, especially on the mornings after storms. But Lucia does not return. 

'An amphibious boy in a canvas suit': Charles Dickens's monsters

Hey, all. I'm not dead, and the blog's not either: I've just had a busy couple of months dealing with various real-life obligations. Normal posting should be resumed shortly.

Most of this post consists of lengthy quotations from a novel published in 1841. You have been warned.

Anyway. Last month I read The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens. It's not a great novel. In fact it's barely a novel at all: more like a heap of random scenes, loosely strung together by improbable coincidences that serve to move the characters from place to place. The individual scenes and characters are often great, but I felt that the book as a whole was weaker than the sum of its parts. I was not surprised to learn that it was written in weekly installments.

It is, however, a work in which Dickens indulged his relish for the grotesque. Most of his novels are ostensibly set in the real world, while actually depicting something closer to the world of Gothic melodrama: but in this book the veil is particularly thin, and some of the characters who populate it barely even pretend to be human. Here, for example, is the novel's villain, Quilp:

The creature appeared quite horrible with his monstrous head and little body, as he rubbed his hands slowly round, and round, and round again—with something fantastic even in his manner of performing this slight action—and, dropping his shaggy brows and cocking his chin in the air, glanced upward with a stealthy look of exultation that an imp might have copied and appropriated to himself.

Mr Quilp now walked up to front of a looking-glass, and was standing there putting on his neckerchief, when Mrs Jiniwin happening to be behind him, could not resist the inclination she felt to shake her fist at her tyrant son-in-law. It was the gesture of an instant, but as she did so and accompanied the action with a menacing look, she met his eye in the glass, catching her in the very act. The same glance at the mirror conveyed to her the reflection of a horribly grotesque and distorted face with the tongue lolling out; and the next instant the dwarf, turning about with a perfectly bland and placid look, inquired in a tone of great affection.

‘How are you now, my dear old darling?’

Slight and ridiculous as the incident was, it made him appear such a little fiend, and withal such a keen and knowing one, that the old woman felt too much afraid of him to utter a single word, and suffered herself to be led with extraordinary politeness to the breakfast-table. Here he by no means diminished the impression he had just produced, for he ate hard eggs, shell and all, devoured gigantic prawns with the heads and tails on, chewed tobacco and water-cresses at the same time and with extraordinary greediness, drank boiling tea without winking, bit his fork and spoon till they bent again, and in short performed so many horrifying and uncommon acts that the women were nearly frightened out of their wits, and began to doubt if he were really a human creature. 

Yeah. An evil dwarf. He drinks boiling water. He never sleeps. His face seems to be able to act independently of its own reflection. He eats tobacco and water-cress for breakfast. He bends metal with his teeth. He presides over a horrible old wharf, where he is served by 'an amphibious boy in a canvas suit'. In the original illustrations he looked like this:

Quilp is the figure on the far right. Attacking a giant wooden admiral. Like you do.

Despite being notionally human, Quilp manages to be more goblin-like than most subsequent actual goblins. And this sort of thing keeps happening. Take, for example, this account of how people devolve into ghouls:

There were many such whispers as these in circulation; but the truth appears to be that, after the lapse of some five years (during which there is no direct evidence of her having been seen at all), two wretched people were more than once observed to crawl at dusk from the inmost recesses of St Giles’s, and to take their way along the streets, with shuffling steps and cowering shivering forms, looking into the roads and kennels as they went in search of refuse food or disregarded offal. These forms were never beheld but in those nights of cold and gloom, when the terrible spectres, who lie at all other times in the obscene hiding-places of London, in archways, dark vaults and cellars, venture to creep into the streets; the embodied spirits of Disease, and Vice, and Famine. It was whispered by those who should have known, that these were Sampson and his sister Sally; and to this day, it is said, they sometimes pass, on bad nights, in the same loathsome guise, close at the elbow of the shrinking passenger.

Again, notionally this is a 'realist' account of how Sampson and Sally decline into poverty; but in practise the language makes it clear that they've collapsed below the level of the human, becoming 'spirits', 'spectres', vile crawling things that live in vaults and cellars, creeping out on 'nights of cold and gloom' to slurp discarded offal out of gutters. A comparable process of dehumanisation, through which social conditions gradually transform people into something nonhuman, can be seen in the passage in which Nell encounters a laborer whose job it is to tend a factory furnace.

In a large and lofty building, supported by pillars of iron, with great black apertures in the upper walls, open to the external air; echoing to the roof with the beating of hammers and roar of furnaces, mingled with the hissing of red-hot metal plunged in water, and a hundred strange unearthly noises never heard elsewhere; in this gloomy place, moving like demons among the flame and smoke, dimly and fitfully seen, flushed and tormented by the burning fires, and wielding great weapons, a faulty blow from any one of which must have crushed some workman’s skull, a number of men laboured like giants. Others, reposing upon heaps of coals or ashes, with their faces turned to the black vault above, slept or rested from their toil. Others again, opening the white-hot furnace-doors, cast fuel on the flames, which came rushing and roaring forth to meet it, and licked it up like oil. Others drew forth, with clashing noise, upon the ground, great sheets of glowing steel, emitting an insupportable heat, and a dull deep light like that which reddens in the eyes of savage beasts.

‘I feared you were ill,’ she said. ‘The other men are all in motion, and you are so very quiet.'
‘They leave me to myself,’ he replied. ‘They know my humour. They laugh at me, but don’t harm me in it. See yonder there—that’s my friend.’
‘The fire?’ said the child.
‘It has been alive as long as I have,’ the man made answer. ‘We talk and think together all night long.’
The child glanced quickly at him in her surprise, but he had turned his eyes in their former direction, and was musing as before.
‘It’s like a book to me,’ he said—‘the only book I ever learned to read; and many an old story it tells me. It’s music, for I should know its voice among a thousand, and there are other voices in its roar. It has its pictures too. You don’t know how many strange faces and different scenes I trace in the red-hot coals. It’s my memory, that fire, and shows me all my life.’
The child, bending down to listen to his words, could not help remarking with what brightened eyes he continued to speak and muse.
‘Yes,’ he said, with a faint smile, ‘it was the same when I was quite a baby, and crawled about it, till I fell asleep. My father watched it then.’
‘Had you no mother?’ asked the child.
‘No, she was dead. Women work hard in these parts. She worked herself to death they told me, and, as they said so then, the fire has gone on saying the same thing ever since. I suppose it was true. I have always believed it.’
‘Were you brought up here, then?’ said the child.
‘Summer and winter,’ he replied. ‘Secretly at first, but when they found it out, they let him keep me here. So the fire nursed me—the same fire. It has never gone out.’
‘You are fond of it?’ said the child.
‘Of course I am. He died before it. I saw him fall down—just there, where those ashes are burning now—and wondered, I remember, why it didn’t help him.’
‘Have you been here ever since?’ asked the child.
‘Ever since I came to watch it; but there was a while between, and a very cold dreary while it was. It burned all the time though, and roared and leaped when I came back, as it used to do in our play days. You may guess, from looking at me, what kind of child I was, but for all the difference between us I was a child, and when I saw you in the street to-night, you put me in mind of myself, as I was after he died, and made me wish to bring you to the fire. I thought of those old times again, when I saw you sleeping by it. You should be sleeping now. Lie down again, poor child, lie down again!’

Tellingly, this man isn't given a name. His life, family, and identity have all been sacrificed to a piece of industrial machinery, which he has come to regard as something more alive and sentient than he is. He himself is well on his way to becoming a mere spirit of the fire, his humanity entirely subsumed into the machinery around him. The only thing that would prevent this whole passage from appearing in a Warhammer 40,000 novel is that GW's writers could never sustain this level of prose. 

Nell leaves the factory, and wanders on into a nightmare cityscape:

Advancing more and more into the shadow of this mournful place, its dark depressing influence stole upon their spirits, and filled them with a dismal gloom. On every side, and far as the eye could see into the heavy distance, tall chimneys, crowding on each other, and presenting that endless repetition of the same dull, ugly form, which is the horror of oppressive dreams, poured out their plague of smoke, obscured the light, and made foul the melancholy air. On mounds of ashes by the wayside, sheltered only by a few rough boards, or rotten pent-house roofs, strange engines spun and writhed like tortured creatures; clanking their iron chains, shrieking in their rapid whirl from time to time as though in torment unendurable, and making the ground tremble with their agonies. Dismantled houses here and there appeared, tottering to the earth, propped up by fragments of others that had fallen down, unroofed, windowless, blackened, desolate, but yet inhabited. Men, women, children, wan in their looks and ragged in attire, tended the engines, fed their tributary fire, begged upon the road, or scowled half-naked from the doorless houses. Then came more of the wrathful monsters, whose like they almost seemed to be in their wildness and their untamed air, screeching and turning round and round again; and still, before, behind, and to the right and left, was the same interminable perspective of brick towers, never ceasing in their black vomit, blasting all things living or inanimate, shutting out the face of day, and closing in on all these horrors with a dense dark cloud.

But night-time in this dreadful spot!—night, when the smoke was changed to fire; when every chimney spirited up its flame; and places, that had been dark vaults all day, now shone red-hot, with figures moving to and fro within their blazing jaws, and calling to one another with hoarse cries—night, when the noise of every strange machine was aggravated by the darkness; when the people near them looked wilder and more savage; when bands of unemployed labourers paraded the roads, or clustered by torch-light round their leaders, who told them, in stern language, of their wrongs, and urged them on to frightful cries and threats; when maddened men, armed with sword and firebrand, spurning the tears and prayers of women who would restrain them, rushed forth on errands of terror and destruction, to work no ruin half so surely as their own—night, when carts came rumbling by, filled with rude coffins (for contagious disease and death had been busy with the living crops); when orphans cried, and distracted women shrieked and followed in their wake—night, when some called for bread, and some for drink to drown their cares, and some with tears, and some with staggering feet, and some with bloodshot eyes, went brooding home—night, which, unlike the night that Heaven sends on earth, brought with it no peace, nor quiet, nor signs of blessed sleep—who shall tell the terrors of the night to the young wandering child!

You know that city, right? You've read about it in a hundred dystopian novels and OSR campaign settings. Some of you will have read about it on this very blog. (I called it the Wicked City.) But all that any of us have done is taken Dickens's metaphors a bit more literally than he does here. 

Dickens had a gift for making 'normal' things seem weird and horrible. I've read a lot of horror fiction over the years, and few literary horror monsters manage to be as creepy as, say, the old man who buys David's coat in David Copperfield:

Into this shop, which was low and small, and which was darkened rather than lighted by a little window, overhung with clothes, and was descended into by some steps, I went with a palpitating heart; which was not relieved when an ugly old man, with the lower part of his face all covered with a stubbly grey beard, rushed out of a dirty den behind it, and seized me by the hair of my head. He was a dreadful old man to look at, in a filthy flannel waistcoat, and smelling terribly of rum. His bedstead, covered with a tumbled and ragged piece of patchwork, was in the den he had come from, where another little window showed a prospect of more stinging-nettles, and a lame donkey.

‘Oh, what do you want?’ grinned this old man, in a fierce, monotonous whine. ‘Oh, my eyes and limbs, what do you want? Oh, my lungs and liver, what do you want? Oh, goroo, goroo!’

I was so much dismayed by these words, and particularly by the repetition of the last unknown one, which was a kind of rattle in his throat, that I could make no answer; hereupon the old man, still holding me by the hair, repeated:

‘Oh, what do you want? Oh, my eyes and limbs, what do you want? Oh, my lungs and liver, what do you want? Oh, goroo!’—which he screwed out of himself, with an energy that made his eyes start in his head.

‘I wanted to know,’ I said, trembling, ‘if you would buy a jacket.’

‘Oh, let’s see the jacket!’ cried the old man. ‘Oh, my heart on fire, show the jacket to us! Oh, my eyes and limbs, bring the jacket out!’

I mean, fuck. I suspect that this guy was one of the inspirations for Tolkien's Gollum, but Gollum on his worst day was never as scary as Dickens manages to make the drunken old owner of a second-hand clothes shop. 

1872 illustration of the Goroo Man, by Fred Barnard.

What reading The Old Curiosity Shop brought home to me was just how little a sense of supernaturalism depends on the actual supernatural. I've written before about how easily the fantastical can cease to feel fantastic, especially in a game like D&D, but the converse is that even 'normal' things can swiftly take on a fantastical dimension if they're evoked in the right way. Dickens, who was always a massive ham at heart, even shows us some of the ways to do it. Give a character some sinister and distinctive appearance, mannerisms, speech patterns, and behaviour, and they can swiftly come to seem more genuinely monstrous than any out-of-the-book goblin, orc, or gnoll. An orc who jumps out a cave, tries to whack you with a sword, and dies after taking 1 HD worth of damage isn't really much of a monster: he's just an environmental hazard. But a creature that comes crawling from its cellar on lightless nights to suck the offal from the city gutters can still genuinely appall, even if it still has 'human' written on its character sheet. 

With a bit of work, it might even be possible to make the village shopkeeper much creepier than the average D&D demon.

Oh, my heart on fire.

Oh, my eyes and liver.

Goroo...

Illustration of Old Smallweed, by Mervyn Peake.