Beyond the Mountains of... Aieeeeeeee!
This morning, it happened. An ominous silence fell upon the land, and a mysterious van drove up in front of our door. A silent, brooding man stepped out and rang the doorbell. Still unaware of the signs and portents, I opened the door and was handed a heavy package. Being not quite awake yet, I signed the small slip of paper (which I really should have read before signing), and took custody of the package. Only then I realized that…
I now actually own a copy of Beyond the Mountains of Madness, the almost-impossible-to-get and out-of-print-for-aeons megacampaign for CoC. It’s referred to as one of the greats, and I’ve been trying to get my grubby little hands on it for a long, long time. Some weeks back, I got email from Chaosium saying that they’ve found a hardcover printing company that they are happy with, and that a new hardcover version is now available in limited quantities. They also set up a separate ”Antarctic Dementia” section on their website, with some other related goodies.
So now I have the book, the game aid kit, a Starkweather-Moore Antarctic Expedition 1933 t-shirt (yes, really), a sticker, and a collection of short stories including the original “At the Mountains of Madness”. Joy.
Rpg.net recently had a “horror week”, and one guy compiled a list of the Top 10 horror adventures, based on ratings given by rpg.net users. I could quibble with that list a bit (“To Go” isn’t really horror, it’s more in the “occult weirdness” category), but generally… yeah. It’s fun to note that I have almost all of those books in my game collection, and I intend to remove that “almost” word soonish.
About BtMoM… it’s a huge campaign, the book itself is 440 pages… it’s bigger than most game core books. It’s an exhaustively detailed and period-authentic story of a 1933 Antarctic expedition, and apparently a brilliant game if you can find a group that likes that sort of thing – it’s long, sometimes slow-paced, and needs commitment and actual interest in the workings of an expedition like that. In any case, it’s a book I’ve long been wanting to read, if just to see if it’s something I might like to run one day. Anything that’s generally compared to “The Enemy Within” on the quality scale must have a lot going for it.
Mon, 22 Oct 2007 10:25 Posted in Games
Tags antarctic, beyond the mountains of madness, chaosium, cthulhu
1 comment »
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By www.ahmametal.com 19 days later:
Bah, BtMoM hasn’t been unavailable for THAT long.
Compare the situation to, say, Horror on the Orient Express which also is a huge CoC campaign…
I wish I had bought one when we still had copies in the store :/
-Lönkka