THE ENCHANTING GHOST (1970)

I am continuing to celebrate the release of Strange Tales of Songling with reviews of movies that helped in inspire the game. Today I want to talk about The Enchanting Ghost. I wrote about this movie briefly in my Five-Boning Chilling Monsters and Villains for October at Shaw Brother's Universe. But here I am going to give a full review (spoilers and dark subjects ahead). 

The Enchanting Ghost (1970) was directed by Chou Hsu-Chiang, and stars Chang Mei-Yao as Ruyu, and Yang Li-Hua as Yuzhu. It also features Lui Ming as Master Shi, Li Hong as Master Shi's wife, and Julie Lee Chi-Fun as Chun Tao. 

The movie is about a scholar, Yuzhu, who loses his property to a scheming uncle and a man named Master Shi. Without a place to reside, Yuzhu moves into an abandoned estate with a reputation for being haunted. There he meets a woman, Ruyu, who initially seems to be a ghost, but is really just a normal human, taking refuge with her dying mother after an attack by robbers. Yuzhu and Ruyu form a life together at the estate and eventually marry. There life is blissful but the joy is interrupted when Yuzhu's Uncle and Master Shi hear rumors that Yuzhu has married a pretty ghost and go to investigate. When Master Shi sees Ruyu, he lures Yuzhu away to abduct and imprison her. At Master Shi's estate, Ruyu is raped by Master Shi, then poisoned by his wife before being released. The poison causes Ruyu's skin to peel and her hair to fall out. Ashamed and unable to return to Yuzhu, she commits suicide but comes back as a ghost, haunting her killers to death.  

I am not going to lie, The Enchanting Ghost is slow paced but in my opinion, this is what makes it work. It is also not the kind of movie most modern viewers are accustomed to. While The Enchanting Ghost is a horror movie, the supernatural is mostly hinted at until the very end, and by today's standards the terror is not overwhelming. I don't state these things to criticize the movie or discourage people from viewing it. Rather, I want the reader to clearly understand what kind of horror movie this is, so they don't go in with misguided expectations. 

Ruyu and Yuzhu

The reason The Enchanting Ghost is effective is it builds the relationship between Ruyu and Yuzhu, and gives you a character to truly care about when she is in peril. You want her to escape. You want her to return to Yuzhu so they can be together. So it is all the more horrifying to witness the brutal end that she endures. You sympathize with the ghost, and want her to get revenge. This is a film where the humans are the ones to fear and the ghost is to be pitied. And I don't think the movie could achieve this with a rapid pace or if it did anything other than dwell on Yuzhu and Ruyu's life together at the estate for the most of the film. 

There is a sense of doom hanging over the couple from the very beginning. The Enchanting Ghost foreshadows Ruyu's fate from the moment we meet her. Throughout the movie, the possibility of Ruyu being a ghost is toyed with. When Yuzhu encounters Ruyu for the first time, she is mistaken for a ghost. Later in the movie she dresses as a ghost to frighten away Yuzhu's uncle. Then there are rumors in the village that Ruyu is a ghost and has enchanted Yuzhu. By the time she actually becomes a real ghost, your mind has been prepared. 

Ruyu returns as a ghost 

In terms of special effects, the movie is simple but effective. I do think it works, but I also don't think it is going to frighten modern viewers very much. The movie does a good job of establishing and maintaining atmosphere, and it is easy to see the influence it had on later horror movies. I think the most effective seen in terms of horror, is when Ruyu is first introduced and we are led briefly to believe she is a ghost. There is another scene where Ruyu dresses as a ghost to frighten Yuzhu's uncle away, and this is similarly effective (especially when Yuzhu sees her in ghost paint and thinks she is supernatural). The early part of the movie does a good job making you question Ruyu's nature and wonder if she is in fact something more than a normal woman. But I as I said before, this is really a movie where you are meant to sympathize with the ghost, and fear her killers. 

The characters in the film are stark and clear. The villains are all knowingly wicked. That includes not just Master Shi and Yuzhu's uncle, but Master Shi's wife and his concubine, Chun Tao. It is the wife's idea to poison Ruyu for example, because she and Chun Tao are jealous of her beauty. The protagonists are both pure and innocent. Yuzhu is a scholar who desires only to read as many great books as he can, and seems to have no desire for riches. Ruyu is clever and virtuous, being the one to sense the peril posed by Yuzhu's uncle. I should note that Yuzhu is played by a woman (Yang Li-Hua). That isn't too uncommon in films made when this one was. 

The scene where Ruyu is raped and killed is unsettling and heartbreaking. Though Ruyu is presented as clever and is aware that Master Shi is evil, she is tricked when a servant comes to the house to tell her that Yuzhu took ill at a shop in town. The servant leads her to Master Shi's estate where she is imprisoned in a bedroom, then assaulted by Master Shi. These scenes are perhaps mild when compared to movies today, but you've spent so much time getting to know Yuzhu that your fully aligned with her as a character and this makes the horror palpable. In the morning, Master Shi's wife, and his concubine Chun Tao ask her to eat something before sending her home. They laced the food with poison and as she makes her way back to the estate, she collapses and wakens in the night to her hair and skin falling off. All the while Yuzhu is pining for Ruyu, wandering and calling her name. She hears him calling to her, and whispers a response "I am here Yuzhu", before plunging into pond to kill herself. 

Master Shi 

When Ruyu rises as a ghost, the movie becomes less about scares and more about revenge. Primarily she kills by confusing and tricking Master Shi, his wife and her concubine. Eventually the wife and concubine rise as ghosts as well and put an end to Master Shi. It is a satisfying revenge but the film ends on an ambiguous and sad note when Ruyu returns with her mother to the estate and greets Yuzhu (in what seems a daydream). The whole time, Yuzhu does not speak, only the mother speaks. It isn't clear what lays ahead for Yuzhu; but the viewer is left to wonder if Ruyu has come to protect or haunt her husband. 

Like I said earlier this is more of an atmospheric horror movie, than one designed to send you screaming. It does have its moments, they are just fairly restrained and most of the movie is devoted to establishing the characters, so that you care about them in the finale. But it is truly foreboding throughout. in fact, I think that is the chief tone of horror that is maintains. You know things will not end well, and The Enchanting Ghost teases you with hints. Ruyu is the more aware of the danger than Yuzhu, and in a crucial moment in the movie just as Master Shi is concocting his evil plans, tells him they must leave the house. A moment of delay on Yuzhu's part seems to seal their fate. 

The Enchanting Ghost was quite influential when I was working on Strange Tales, which is why I wanted to do a review of it. In terms of gaming, while this doesn't immediately seem like something that would lend itself to ideas, it certainly is worth viewing. My take form it was the possibility of creating a ghost the players care about. One way to achieve this is to introduce an NPC the party who is only turned into a ghost later in the campaign. But I think it could also be achieved inside a single adventure. The way the ghost is presented is also helpful for a GM trying to find an interesting way to introduce ghosts. 

I do recommend the Enchanting Ghost mainly to people who have an interest in seeing earlier examples of horror (especially if you are interested in Chinese Cinema). Also if you like classic movies, I think this will likely appeal to you. Personally I think it is one of the more interesting horror movies out there, and find my mind going back to it frequently.

LEGEND OF THE DEMON CAT

I had intended to celebrate the release of Strange Tales of Songling by devoting a month to reviews of relevant movies. However, I was caught up getting the print edition ready and didn't have time in February. The good news is Strange Tales is now available in print. So I am resuming my reviews with a film called Legend of the Demon Cat. 

I almost didn't want to watch this movie. Not because I don't like the genre or subject matter but because I've seen so many films with posters and marketing like this one in the last year that were hugely disappointing. I am very glad I gave Legend of the Demon Cat a chance. 

Legend of the Demon Cat was directed by Chen Kaige and released in 2017. It stars Huang Xuan, Shota Sometani, and Sandrine Pinna. Set in the Tang Dynasty it is about a mystery surrounding a cat demon whose origin is bound up in the death of Lady Yang. Because it is a mystery I won't give too many more plot details beyond that, and simply say it uses history, and historical figures, to paint a tale of illusion and magic. 

This is a beautiful film. It is colorful and transports you into a whole other world. While it actually doesn't rely as heavily on CG as other movies (my understanding is that the sets were extensive and real), whether or not it succeeds still hinges on the viewers reaction to the CG that is used. The CG is important for establishing the supernatural. I found myself enchanted by it, though there were brief moments when the CG faltered and the illusion broke. However, on the whole thought the special effects and cinematography created something memorable and appealing. 

The sets and costumes were also astounding. These are what really pull you into the movie in my opinion. For the film they constructed a city (which will eventually be turned into a theme park). It is rich and believable world, filled with beauty and illusion. One thing Legend of the Demon Cat does well, perhaps better than any other film I've seen in a long time, is make you feel like you are there walking in the time and place the character's inhabit. It is highly immersive, and you get a real sense of the layout of buildings and other structures. It takes you Tang Dynasty Chang'an and lets you move through historical architecture in a way I haven't experienced before. This helped make for a solid foundation, which I think helped when they began taking more visual liberties to enhance the atmosphere. 

At its heart this is a mystery and I enjoyed following the two main protagonists, a Japanese monk named Kukai, and the poet Bai Leitian. It takes place decades after Lady Yang's death and as they uncover more clues, we are told the backstory through a series of cleverly done flashbacks. 

I enjoyed the flashbacks to events surrounding Lady Yang's death. Beginning with a gorgeous banquet, then the An Lushan Rebellion, which instigates much of the drama. I like too, how Bei Leitian and Kukai are able to imagine these sequences as they find diaries, interview witnesses and investigate the places involved. It brings everything together nicely. 

The film is at times creepy, but also moving. As I said earlier, much of the film hinges on the audience's reaction to the CG and one place this is particularly the case, is with the Demon Cat itself. I don't want to give too much away, so I'll just make the observation that the movie portrays the cat sympathetically. I thought the CG with the cat was effective in this respect. 

I found the Cat Demon's backstory intriguing, and I think it made for a much more compelling villain than I expected. The nature of the creature is also unusual enough that you don't really understand what it is or how it came to be until the end. 

Sometimes a sympathetic villain can detract from the horror of a movie. Legend of the Demon Cat does a good job of using the villain's sympathy to make it more menacing. This isn't a pure horror movie, much of it is intrigue, drama, and fantasy. But I enjoyed its dips into horror territory and felt these were helped by the other aspects of the movie.  

In terms of gaming I think there is a lot in this movie that would work at the table. It definitely gave me a few adventure ideas and certain elements I'll be using for horror purposes. 

Above all I believe, the most useful thing gamers will find is probably a sense of the interiors of structures and the layout of the architecture. This is something movies often give disjointed glimpses of, and you can't always fit the pieces together. Here you have a much better idea of the flow of rooms and their function. 

I loved Legend of the Demon Cat. I went in expecting to be mildly disappointed but was surprised by experience and reminded of Chen Kaige's enormous talent. It does take its time. It occasionally lingers and meanders, but I didn't mind because I wanted to experience more of the world it was creating. I like this movie the way I like Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula or a Baz Lurhmann film, because it feels like a place you can touch and taste. But that is also to say, this movie might not be for everyone. I realize am especially drawn to movies that have this effect. I would still strongly recommend it to people. Just for the sets alone it is worth viewing. And it is a thrilling mystery that blurs the lines between magic, beauty and illusion in a captivating way. 

DUMPLINGS REVEW: TWO HELPINGS OF HORROR

With the release of Strange Tales of Songling, I want to spend the next month discussing some of the movies that were sources of inspiration for it. I already wrote about Heaven and Hell, and today I am going to talk about Fruit Chan's Dumplings, starring Bai Ling, Miriam Yeung, and Tony Leung Ka-fai. It was released in 2004 both as a short film and full length feature (more on this below). The following contains minor spoilers of plot details that appear very early on, but does not discuss any of the surprises or developments that occur deeper into the film. 

Miriam Yeung plays Mrs. Li, an aging actress who is desperate to restore her lost youth and regain the affection of her husband (Tony Leung Ka-fai). She finds a remedy in dumplings prepared by Aunt Mei (Bai Ling). But her rejuvenation comes with a price.  

Dumplings is very upfront about its premise. Rather than tease the audience or play games like "what's in the dumpling" it lets the viewer know Aunt Mei's recipe right away: human fetuses. The point of the horror isn't any kind of suspense about what Aunt Mei is up to. It is also very frank in its approach. From the start, we see Aunt Mei mincing fetus meat. And it is prepared in a mundane way like any other ingredient. This adds to the believability and unease when Mrs. Li takes her first bite, so the audience can feel the crunch of every bite. Overall the movie is very effective at getting you to feel what the characters feel. 

Aunt Mei (Bai Ling) makes dumplings

The movie is almost more of a character drama at times than horror, which works in its favor (this is particularly true of the full length version). It is still a horror movie. But like Kuei Chih-Hung's Killer Snakes (which I hope to discuss in another post this month), it spends a lot of effort on its characters. Which helps, because much of the horror is a blend of body horror and gore (though the gore is more subdued than you might imagine). 

There are two versions of Dumplings: the extended theatrical release, and the short 40 minute film that was released as part of Three...Extremes. However both use mostly the same footage, with the former adding scenes and having a different ending. 

In some ways, the short film is superior in my opinion. It is tighter, not wasting an ounce of fat, so it never drags or meanders. It also feels more firmly a horror movie. The extended version takes a lot more time and clarifies key details. I think in most cases, the details are implied enough or not essential enough to the story that the shorter version works fine without them. But the changes do make for very different movies. 

In other ways, the extended version is better. It has more time to explore its characters and themes. A big part of what makes Dumplings work is Aunt Mei. And in the theatrical release we get to see a lot more of her. She spends screen time with Mr. Li, for example, and there is a whole subplot around that. It illuminates her personality and her past a lot more, and shows sides of her we don't see in the short film. This produces a character that is the same but different in many ways. There is perhaps less mystery to Aunt Mei in the longer version, but the loss of mystery is replaced with depth. But in both cases Bai Ling's performance is exceptional. 

Mrs. Li (Miriam Yeung) 

Some aspects of the longer version, make it feel less like a horror movie and more like a character study. This is just as enjoyable to watch though in my view. It is just a matter of the film feeling less tight overall, so I think the longer version has a greater chance of losing some viewers than the shorter one. But it might also have wider appeal because it extends the premise further beyond the genre. The longer version has some scenes that don't feel quite as necessary, but it also does submerge you more in the world of the characters. And many of the changes, for instance a key plot point involving a medical procedure, result in surprises in one version, but foreboding in the other. 

Even though some of the length takes away from the horror, parts of the longer theatrical version add to it. For instance both movies do a great job lingering on details to impose discomfort on the viewer (in a way that movies like this should). But the full length film adds a lot to this. Whether it is watching Aunt Mei prepare human flesh or perform a painful and dangerous medical procedure, the camera makes you watch. When you want the camera to move or flinch, it does not. 

The biggest difference of course is the ending. Personally I think the ending in the short film is better. It is a more frightening and poetic conclusion. There is also a stronger hint, even if it is subtle, of the supernatural in the short version's last scene. Both endings are shocking in their own ways. 

A scene with Mr. Li (Tony Leung Ka-fai)
 in the theatrical version

That there are two versions is one of my aspects of Dumplings. It is interesting to see what a difference running time and editing can make. I think one of the conversations that follows watching them is about the editing process and what it either adds or takes away from a story. People are bound to favor one or the other, so I do recommend watching both of them if you can. 

If you like horror, if you like gore, but you also enjoy great character performance, and perhaps some grind house elements, you should see Dumplings. The horror is more subtle than overwhelming, even as the gruesome details are dangled in the forefront. And there is a lot more going on than just horror. This won't be everyone's cup of tea of course. It will make some viewers uneasy, perhaps even angry (there is at least one very upset review about this movie, though I personally think it completely misses the point). But movies the evoke a strong response are worth watching. It is also a gorgeous film. The cinematography is wonderful, which is one of the key things that makes it so effective. Definitely check it out if you have never seen it. 

HEAVEN AND ESCAPE FROM HELL

There is a wonderful film by Chang Cheh called Heaven and Hell. It isn't good in the standard sense of the word, and a it isn't a good-bad movie either. It is just a very unique film and a strange blend of styles and tones. I love this movie. When I first saw it, I wasn't quite sure what to think, but with each viewing my fondness for Heaven and Hell grew. I have given my opinions on it HERE and HERE. I also wrote a halloween review for it some years ago for Shaw Brothers Universe (but if my memory is correct it was swapped for another topic I wrote about and slipped through the cracks). 

I like escape from hell scenarios in RPGs. And I think Heaven and Hell is probably the best example of how to run one successfully. I talk about this a bit in Strange Tales of Songling, and I mention the movie Heaven and Hell in one of the adventures in the book. 

Escape from Hell adventures are a great way to turn something like a character death into something much more interesting. Better yet, they are a great way to follow-up an instant party kill. I like lethal games, but I also have no problem with players earning their way back to life if they are up for a whole campaign devoted to it. 

I think there are some basic rules worth considering. I generally follow there rules. First, it shouldn't be easy to make it back. Second there should be ground rules to making it back. Third, failure should have significant downsides. 

If a single player character dies, the escape from hell scenario is easiest to do with them storming hell and helping the other player escape. Exactly how that plays out will be somewhat dependent on the kind of afterlife you are dealing with. If there is a total party kill, then it is very easy to center a whole campaign around escape. This can be as surreal or literal as you want. You can even start a new campaign, with a whole different system if you like, and slowly reveal this is an afterlife and the characters are the spirits of the player characters from the previous campaign. This is one way I began using Strange Tales of Songling, as an afterlife for my Ogre Gate campaigns.

There are lots of movies, legends and stories to draw on for escape from hell. But Something about Chang Cheh's Heaven and Hell seems to line up most with how it would work in practice in a typical RPG. Here is my original Halloween Review of Heaven and Hell (which I think gives an overview of what to expect from it): 

TRAPPED IN HEAVEN AND HELL

Heaven and Hell provokes different reactions in viewers. I avoided watching Chang Cheh’s divisive delve into the afterlife for many years because I had heard many negative remarks about it. When I did finally watch, I wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about the movie. Only a few films have had this effect on me. Soon after, I began to think about Heaven and Hell a lot. I began obsessively reviewing the scenes in my mind. I wasn’t sure why, but it clearly had a large impact on me. So I watched it again, and again, and again. I came to love its surreal and experimental approach. It is somewhere between My Young Auntie and Ashes of Time with a dash of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory thrown in. It takes you on a dream-like tour of a genre-splattered cosmology with weird musical interludes, kung fu and dancing. This movie quite literally has everything, but it won’t please everyone. And I think that is why it is so good. 

Heaven and Hell is divided into three parts. It begins in Heaven, in the court of the celestial bureaucracy. We are soon plunged to earth, where the celestial guard, Xin Ling (Li Yi-Min), is banished for helping a heavenly couple escape. There he’s a cigarette smoking taxi driver who dies and goes to Diyu (Hell) after trying to once again save a pair of star-crossed lovers. 

Watching Heaven and Hell, for me, is like going to a concert or a magic show. It is an experience. It is a movie you feel. The plot is fairly crazy, made more strange by some of the aesthetic choices along the way. For example, the earth sequence, which features Alexander Fu Sheng and Jenny Cheng as the star-crossed lovers in question, utilizes intensely minimalist stage design at times and incorporates more than one musical number as well as dance fighting in the manner of West Side Story. This is one of the aspects of the movie that I couldn’t stop thinking about. A lot of people don’t like the minimalist sets and are equally put off by the dancing. It is true the sets can be bare-bones but they create a sense of theater that works and actually immerses me in the experience more deeply by focusing my attention on the essential elements of music and image. I also find it intoxicating. The dancing and the total commitment to a certain feel heightens my experience of the movie. Visually it is impressive and also adds to the atmosphere. Watching it is like being slightly drunk, which is how Ashes of Time always makes me feel.

Most of the film is taken up by the third portion: Hell. We get a tour of Diyu’s gruesome punishments as people are formally judged and assigned an appropriate sentence. This is where the movie feels a little like Willy Wonka to me, with the elaborate props and creative punishments in a psychedelic hellscape. But the exploration of Diyu works and Cheh succeeds in creating an entire world with memorable characters and places. 

In Diyu, Xin Ling meets a woman named Red Dress (Lin Chen-Chi). After a trippy flashback sequence we learn she died on a misadventure involving alcohol, pills and a hypnotic shuffle off of a window sill. They travel the underworld together before being separated and then re-united at Plow Hell. 

Red Dress and Xin Ling are able to appeal their case to the Buddha of Mercy, who tasks Xin Ling with finding men wronged like himself to form a team that will break out of hell. The assembling of the team of heroes affords an opportunity for a series of smaller stories as we learn about each of their tragic backgrounds. They all have been betrayed or done a significant injustice. And what a team. It includes Sun Chien as a Taekwondo expert killed by robbers, Lo Meng as a brash youth with terrific kung fu who got shot in the back, Philip Kwok as a wuxia hero betrayed by his sworn brother, and Bruce Tong as a vengeful son done-in by corrupt magistrates. 

By this point in the movie, there have been so many genres touched upon, and here is where the it feels a bit like My Young Auntie to me. Not only are the heroes all from slightly different genres, they are in many instances from different periods in history. The world created, flattens everything and allows for all these things to exist side-by-side. It is the kind of movie, where you feel like you’ve seen every movie by the end. 

Heaven and Hell has a star-studded cast. Because it is broken up into three parts and each sequence has a largely different cast and title card, it is easy to overlook how many notable actors appear in Heaven and Hell. Everyone from David Chiang to Philip Kwok and Alexander Fu Sheng are present. My understanding is part of the reason for the wide-ranging cast is due to stop-and-start production issues, but I think it just gives the film a larger scope. 

This is, in my opinion, a very compelling movie to watch for Halloween. It is not as scary as some of the other Halloween offerings out there, but it is so strange, dark and surreal that it is worthy of the season. It is inherently divisive. Not everyone feels the same about it. I can’t promise that you’ll love it. I can’t promise you will like it. I can promise it will be a unique experience. I find it impossible to predict how people will receive Heaven and Hell, and that is one the things that makes it so exciting. Watching this film is a roll of the dice, but if you like to gamble, there may be a place for you in hell.  

BURN!!!

Been working on something a bit different lately, that arose out of a conversation I had on the podcast with Joel Clark, where we tried to design a game on the air. 

We came up with a concept called Schlock, a one-shot emulation of straight to video movies (and films of that caliber). The system is extremely simple, character creation literally takes a couple of seconds, so its easy to get characters in after player character death (we figured a lot of Schlock is high body count, so that is going to be important). The rules themselves are just a page and will appear at the start of each adventure. There are core rules that cannot be altered, but each adventure can add rules to create better genre emulation. For example, if we make a Kung Fu module, that would feature additional mechanics for martial arts (but they would still be simple in nature in order to preserve the feel of play). 

A key part of the game is a figure named Ricky Vibrato. He berates the GM in the sidebars with insulting, but good advice, and is the fictional publisher of the Schlock line. He is intended to come across a bit like the Larry Bishop character in Kill Bill Volume 2. 

The first adventure is called Burn, and it is inspired by the Deep Purple song of that name. It leans full tilt into my interest in hard rock and heavy metal. I have wanted to do something musically inspired for a very, very long time. I always throw in lots of easter eggs in games that are musical references, and occasionally it serves as inspiration for content (a lot of Ogre Gate was inspired by Dio lyrics for example), but this is the first time I've found a way to make it the foundation of the adventure. The whole adventure really is built from music. I've played guitar since I was 11 or 12 and this was a chance for me to bring some of that into the game. 

Burn is one of my favorite Deep Purple Songs. I recommend checking it out if you have never heard it (and especially paying attention to the guitar solo and organ solo in the middle), but the lyrics suggest an apocalypse where a female figure descends and lights people on fire. That seemed pretty gameable to me, it fit the Schlock concept well, so I turned it into an adventure. 

We play tested about a week ago and it went well. We are planning another playtest soon. After that I will complete my revisions and then run it myself (so far I've been functioning as a player in the playtests so I can see how other GMs handle the content first). 

The plan is to have Joel write the other adventure and we might do it as a double feature. We haven't quite decided how this is going to be released. Those details are still being worked out.

WHY STRANGE TALES?

Art by Jackie Musto 

Since Strange Tales of Songling was released in PDF yesterday, I'd like to talk about why I made this game in the first place. I only put out about one game a year or two (Bill and I made the decision to shift to a slower production schedule in order to improve quality and allow games a more natural time to develop). 

Horror is the genre that I connected to most as a gamer, and particularly as a GM. The first campaign I tried to run on my own was a Ravenloft Campaign. Knight of the Black Rose came out, piqued my interest in the setting (I had grown up on universal horror movies and hammer films), so I picked up the black boxed set and Feast of Goblyns. That was the setting that always resonated with me. And if I wasn't running Ravenloft, I was playing in a horror setting like Orrorsh.

My interest in Strange Tales started when I was working on Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate. I had a number of sources of inspiration for that and one of them was Pu Songling's Tales from A Chinese Studio. This is a collection of anomaly accounts (reports of strange events) and many of its key stories are well known and been made into movies (A Chinese Ghost Story and Painted Skin being two big examples). I liked Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio because the entries were relatively brief, but provided great fodder for adventure ideas. You could sit down in the morning before a game if you didn't have anything planned, and reading a handful of the entries would quickly inspire gameable content. The stories themselves are quite compelling and span a range of styles. But many of them feature ghosts, scholars and fox spirits. 

I was so fond of Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio I decided to a blog entry for every entry in the Penguin translation of the book. I chose penguin's version because I like the prose of the translation, but also because it is a condensed translation. Other versions are multiple volumes and it would have taken me a very long time had I used those. I do recommend the multi-volume translations, as you get a lot more content, but for my purposes, the Penguin edition was fine. 

Map by Francesca Baerald

I decided to have each blog entry turn one or two of the Strange Tales into material for Ogre Gate. It worked so well that I began writing a new game (which became Strange Tales of Songling). This was going to be a much simpler system with four character paths, because I felt for horror that would work better. I even timed all the character creation to make sure it wasn't taking too long because I wanted players to be able to get back into the game fast after their character died (and in horror I am a believer in character death being on the table). 

I also wanted Strange Tales to take more of a monster-of-the-week approach because I think that works well for horror games. My regular games are often sandboxes, but I tend to run horror in a different way. 

The book structure was something I wanted to approach differently as well. I decided to include four adventures in it, rather than one, and have the adventures serve as a guide for what the game is all about. Because the mechanics are simple this made it easy to devote a large section of the book to adventures (and to include a robust monster chapter). 

Working on Strange Tales was great. I had a terrific time developing the game, researching the genre and history. It was also a good excuse to watch a bunch of horror movies over and over again. I became a bit obsessed with picking up every multivolume translation of Strange Tales from the Chinese Studio I could. Because of the language barrier, I wanted to get as many different translations and explanatory footnotes as I could. 

In the end Strange Tales emulates Pu Songling, Yuan Mei and a number of movies in the genre or near to it. I kept the genre boundaries porous enough that I could also incorporate movies like Heaven and Hell or Killer Snakes as sources of inspiration. 

The book is out now. It has wonderful art and maps (Jackie Musto did the cover and interior art, and Francesca Baerald did the maps). If you like horror, if you like movies like A Chinese Ghost Story, definitely check it out: HERE. 

STRANGE TALES AVAILABLE IN PDF

Strange Tales is finally available in PDF (and will be available in print in the next month or two). You can find it HERE. 

A Horror RPG Inspired by Chinese Ghost Stories: 

Adventure in worlds haunted by fox spirits, hopping vampires and ghosts. Strange Tales is a Chinese horror RPG inspired by the supernatural accounts of Pu Songling and Yuan Mei. Players confront the supernatural as demon hunters, scholars, wandering swords and dangerous ritual masters. 

Strange Tales provides a streamlined and easy system for quick play and comes with four complete adventures. It also includes a selection of monsters based on Chinese anomaly accounts, folklore, and horror movies. The GM section provides a number of approaches with a focus on monster-of-the week style play.