2026/11/10

OSR: Sky Islands and The Curse of Count Zeppelin

Biplanes cross the skies. Spies, journalists, and detectives haunt the smoke-shrouded streets of floating cites. Expeditions to distant lands, fistfights in implausible locations, cigarettes, newspapers, and schemes. Yes, it's time for some dieselpunk.  

This post is stream-of-consciousness worldbuilding. The next post in the series will (hopefully) contain more gameable content. I've tagged this post "OSR" for now, because I'm considering building a Sky Pirates GLOG hack (or something similar). 

Juhyung Kang

The Curse of Count Zeppelin

There's a time-honoured rule that if your film features a jet ski chase, it will not be good. Perhaps there's a similar rule: pulp-inspired media with sky pirates is almost guaranteed to be bad. A zeppelin is usually, but not always, a a harbinger of critical doom. 

The Ghibli films Porco Rosso (1992) and Castle in the Sky (1986) are exceptions. Miyazaki's deep love of aircraft helps. It's unclear if the same rule applies to RPGs and board games, or if any sufficiently niche setting is doomed. Crimson Skies did well, but CGL's Leviathan is a notorious white elephant.

If the curse is real, then, if you're going to run a sky pirates RPG, it makes sense to minimize effort. The internet is littered with the wreckage of dieselpunk / sky pirate worlds, built with lavish care and forgotten by almost everyone. 

Plausible Fictional History 

The more you learn, the more difficult running a historical RPG becomes. The paralysis of detail, the desire for verisimilitude, the reasons X won't work, the doubt over whether or not aluminum foil came before or after music over the radio,* can combine to paralyze a thoughtful GM.

*Aluminum foil first, by about a decade. 

It's far easier to use a fictional setting. You can make sweeping medieval generalizations, run pirates without trying to remember who was in power in Spain, or compress an industrial revolution into a gameable form, all while cheerfully ignoring signals from certain parts of your brain.

Aircraft-based pulp settings are usually alternative histories. Crimson Skies has a disunited USA, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow has... a '30s cold war (?). This lets authors have Chicago, jazz, and kewpie dolls, but also aircraft-carrier-sized zeppelins and biplane-piloting mercenaries. Kenneth Hite is, possibly, the leading RPG authority in this genre.

Hite's Law: All Change Points, from Xerxes to the last presidential election, create worlds with clean, efficient Zeppelin traffic. Changing history may produce Zeppelins as an inevitable by-product, much as bombarding uranium produces gamma rays. Often, the quickest way to tell if you are in an Alternate History is to look up, rather than at a newspaper or encyclopedia. From this premise, it is not outside the realm of Plausibility that our history between 1900 and 1936 was, in fact, an Alternate History. It would, at least, explain a lot.

-Kenneth Hite, "An Alternate-Historical Alphabet," January 14, 2000

Other games take a different approach. Bloodborne, Disco Elysium, the Age of Steel RPG, use real-world visual and linguistic cues (cathedrals, the police, etc.) in an entirely new (or largely implied) setting. You can use real-world knowledge to figure out what the Regnum Cocainum of King Phillipe III was like, without any additional information. 

Erik van Helvoirt

Sky Pirates, Hold the Sky Piracy?

I don't think a game about sky pirates should be built around air combat rules. Those rules are good to have, just like sailing ship rules are good for a pirate game, but making them the core of the game requires a combat-as-a-sport design mindset. It's better suited to a wargame or a video game (or a specialized game, like Lancer). RPGs are about schemes. Combat-as-a-sport is about optimization.

A scheme is using a pig bladder, a ladder, and three pounds of marbles to turn a hopeless fight into a total victory. Optimization is about using your +1 fire sword with an amulet that doubles your dealt fire damage, a vest that turns fire damage into acid damage, and a class feature that lets you apply acid damage to all enemies in a 30' radius... Schemes rely on the shared imagined reality of the game. Optimization relies on the rules. A shared imaginary reality is the draw of RPGs. You can get rules anywhere.

Incidentally, Flying Circus would probably work out-of-the-box for my purposes if I wanted to run a game with more intra-group conflict. Apocalypse World is perfect for that sort of thing. I might still use the air combat system.

Pulp Covers

Deep Time & Sky Islands

Some aircraft-heavy settings take a "transplanted era" approach. Take our world, at a time with an industrial (or near-industrial) technology level and mindset, and transplant it to a world with floating islands. The Warbirds RPG does this, but it has all has all the drawbacks of alternative history. Starting from scratch requires a complete world history (or, at least, enough of it for RPG purposes). 

For now, picture a standard sky islands setting. Water below (way below), varying layers of floating islands above. Assume that humans evolved on a now-sunken island. Alternatively, this is an artificial world in space or virtual reality or something. Whatever conceit helps you sleep at night. It probably won't come up in the game, so why worry? And a source of atlantean/precursor tech might be useful.

Any fictional science-based prehistory has to account for millions of years where humans (or hominids) had fire, stone tools, and not much else. Perhaps a continent-sized island was stable for millions of years, then began to break up. Slowly at first, giving time for primitive maritime / aeronautical technology to develop, and then quickly. Without technology more advanced than a really good rock, flight (and therefore expansion and long-term survival) is not possible. 

In the real world, dyed flax and thread turns up around 36,000 BC. So let's set 50,000 BC as the absolute lower limit for kite-building, which also corresponds with canoe-building and oceanic navigation.

The pressure to expand is constant. The family farm / pasture / cove / hunting ground can support a certain number of people. You're surplus. Or the local prospects offer no chance of the good life.  The traditional response is to go to a nearby farm / pasture / etc. and either join their group or hit them until you've got their stuff. Sometimes both.

But on a sky island? If you want to move, you'll need more than a hollow log. 

Juhyung Kang
What's the minimum technology to construct:

A hot air balloon? 
Thin cloth is required, which needs a loom, and looms are time-intensive processes. It's difficult to fuse and seal skins and bladders, but it could be possible. Paper could work, but strong and thin paper needs a surprising amount of chemistry. Building a balloon could be a family or community effort, but it feels plausible once linen-type plant cloth is available. A balloon allows for tethered flights to a nearby island. 

For untethered flights, steering is a problem. To steer, you either need to go faster than the wind (a powered aircraft) or slower (a sailing ship, a balloon with an anchor, a tethered kite). Without an external force, anything caught in the wind is going wherever the wind is going, and that might not be survivable. Control surfaces on a kite or glider let you turn gravity (via altitude loss) into that external force. 

Kites and gliders?
Building a kite just requires skins and reeds. Tethering it requires strong, light, and thin string. Bowstring technology could be adapted to kite strings. I'm not sure if you could get away with sinew. The heavier the kite, the more wind you need to lift it, and therefore the stronger your cord needs to be, so thin material (such as silk and paper) will be more effective than leather or raw plant material.

Gliders are hard to test without risk of injury. You can spend years trying to smelt copper, weave baskets, or make fireproof clay pots without putting your life at risk. You can paddle in the shallows before testing your canoe on the open ocean. But there aren't many safe intermediate stages for a man-lifting kite or a glider. 

In the real world, there was no incentive to develop gliders other than ambition and entertainment. There was always a way to get from "up here" to "over there" that was far safer. But in a sky islands setting, there's a strong and consistent incentive. If population pressure is the main driver of expansion, then there's also a source of test pilots willing to risk death.

Multi-person copper-age gliders seem feasible. Dangerous, but feasible. Moving from non-functional bird-imitating feathered frames to actual gliders just requires experience, not any modern scientific principles. Those help, but they're not strictly required. Think about how many millions of brain-hours were spent developing sailing technology, against the attempts of a few idle speculators in aeronautics. Textile technology is still critical. A hang glider isn't dugout canoe tech, but if you can build a crab claw sail, you can build a glider. 

Prehistoric pilots also have the advantage of height. Assuming the maximum altitude for settlement is 15,000' (rounding down a bit), that gives a pilot a lot of room to regain control and search for updrafts. 

What about trained birds?
Birds can, with great effort, lift things. A bald eagle can carry a salmon, but not elegantly, and not for any great distance. They don't have have a lot of excess capacity. A large extinct condor could lift (perhaps) 40lbs, with a lot of flapping and fuss. A bird capable of lifting a human and flying for 1,000m would be implausibly large... and hungry enough to see humans as a snack. It's difficult to train something that can casually snip off your head. 

Could you train birds to fly in tandem? Maybe, but it seems implausible. Efforts to train them to carry coconuts have been unsuccessful. I think if you caught 50 geese and tied them together with rope and leather harnesses, all you'd have at the end of the day is a tangle of irate waterfowl. 

Side Note: I suspect bird domestication would be heavily incentivized. Cormorant fishing could allow floating islands access to the bounty of the sea.

Scale and Terminal Velocity
Concerns over glider development and inter-island flights can be solved making humans very small (or making them Redwall-style mice.) Squirrels can (allegedly) survive a fall from any height (though you shouldn't test this at home), so squirrel-sized humans would have an easier time discovering flight. But shrinking the scale introduces some odd leaping / throwing effects that I don't want to deal with; a squirrel-sized human could leap ~60' straight up. Still, there'd probably be evolutionary pressure towards smaller people with strong cartilage. 

Archaic Tech

Why does this matter? If the setting has biplanes, why put any thought into sky-galleys and gliders? Is it just for the montage at the start of the film? Well, not everyone has biplanes. The logical development of a technology, stage by stage, can give a GM a set of useful tools.

Julien Gauthier, Chromantic Studio

Lifting The Sky Islands 

Oolith is a bluish-grey element that is affected by a gravitational field in the opposite manner to conventional matter. It floats; everything else sinks. The effect increases with concentration (analogous to radioactive decay).

Side Note: I considered going full Greg Egan and making atomic weight correlate to an element's susceptibility to gravity. Group 6 elements would be neutral; Group 7 would be repelled. But I'm no Greg Egan, and it seemed like too much effort to work out all the ramifications. Special relativity (probably) works in this universe; general relativity is right out the window. 

Oolith makes flying islands possible. It is usually found in one strata. Rocks below the strata are more easily weathered (since they're hanging), which slowly exposes the oolith. As the exposed oolith is eroded (reducing its concentration), the island sinks. The fragmented oolith falls to the core, where it is trapped and concentrated by geochemistry. If enough is concentrated in one place, it can break a chunk of semi-molten stone free, forming a new island. Geosophists believe the ancient continent [name] was broken up by an island rising below it.

The largest current islands are ~100,000km^2; the size of New Zealand's North Island, Iceland, Newfoundland, Cuba, or Ireland plus Wales. Small islands can be very small indeed. Any natural island under 50' square has a tendency to tumble and break apart, sending fragments sinking into the depths.

Experienced prospectors can identify oolith-bearing sands by watching them fall, or oolith-bearing minerals just by dropping a stone. Oolith is present in several minerals (with varying and confusing cultural names.) Crystaline oolith can form under certain conditions, but is rare and difficult to mine. Once a crystal is freed from its matrix, it tends to rise rapidly. 

Oolith cannot be smelted. Ancient techniques relied on plants (see Luftbrush, below), crystals, or unusually pure deposits. Modern techniques use acid leaching to concentrate oolith.  

Putting A Spin On Things

Gravity, in this setting, is analagous to electromagnetism. The world produces a strong, diffuse, and uneven gravitational field. Oolith has to move through the field to be repelled. This is not difficult; islands float and the field-producing core rotates below them.

But if you take concentrated oolith and spin it, the repulsion effect increases. A stone that barely hovers can, if swung around a person's head, gradually provide lift. A primitive glider would be much more effective with one person steering and one person using a lift-generating whirligig with a crystal oolith core. This lift also acts as a stabilizing force (beyond merely gyroscopic effects). It takes more effort to move a spinning oolith than a stationary one. 

Side Note: If the oolith is lifted (rather than generating some sort of antigravity field), then holding it is not a good idea. Think of it as a skyhook; the user would be lifting themselves, and any attached glider, just with their arms. Attaching the stone to a frame and using a bow drill makes a lot more sense. If a non-rotating stone provides a few pounds of lift, and only transforms energy when rotated, then a rotating stone's lift is equivalent to the lift a person could provide by gripping a skyhook or immobile rod. It's an efficient no-air-required propeller. This could turn an inefficient glider into an efficient one, or stop a terminal fall, but a purely human-powered aircraft would require the same engineering as in the real world. 

Ancient sky-galleys used teams of rowers, with individual air-paddles or with banks connected into sinusoidal waves. Lift was provided by millstone-sized discs.  

Longships were the first to use vastly more efficient propellers. Rowers were placed inside an aerodynamic wooden hull, facing each other, and gripping (later pedalling) one or more crankshafts. The shafts were coated or embedded with oolith and connected to a propeller. The same effort both lifted the craft (via oolith effects and external wings) and propelled it forward. Longships could cross vast distances efficiently, especially if aided by hot air balloons and sails when moving with the wind.

Gearing and springs allowed for larger and more complex aircraft, sometimes using different oolith arrangements to manoeuvre. Steam power enabled very large vessels, but demanded correspondingly vast expenditures of oolith. But any aircraft relying on oolith was ponderous, and oolith's rarity encouraged the development of "unlofted" aircraft. 

The properties of liquid or gaseous solutions of oolith are not well understood. This is good mad pulp science tech. If this setting has a space program, implosion of an oolith crystal will probably be involved.

Jourdan Tuffan

Luftbrush

If a thing exists, life will try to use it to its advantage. On the other hand, I'm not aware of any species (other than humans) that deliberately separates radioactive isotopes or navigates using radio waves.  

Bioaccumulation of oolith is possible. Plants sometimes leach toxic metals as a defense. The seeds of the Luftbrush plant contain a tiny grain of oolith, and evolved to spin as they fly, generating extra lift and allowing for greater dispersal. Luftbrush seeds were gathered and carefully burned, and the ashes sifted and concentrated (in inverted clay pots, as the oolith tended to rise). The concentrated oolith could be trapped in clay or glass.

Ooltih is mildly toxic, but some cultures ritually ingest it, in the hopes of preventing fatal falls. There's no evidence to suggest that it accumulates in human tissues.

It's difficult to justify sky whales in this setting. I don't want to go fully magical. On the other hand, giant flying flock-of-bird-devouring dive-bombing whales full of valuable flotation oil seem like fun.

Orion's Arm

Floating Geography

Because I can't leave well enough alone, this world is a torus. Gravity is not provided by centripedal force (like a ringworld), mass (like a hypothetical toroidal planet). It's provided by the rotation of specific elements; a large amount in the sun, a smaller amount on a planet's core. The world is therefore thinner than one might expect; a hoop instead of a donut, but not a ring. 

The world wobbles relative to the sun, so it has seasons. If its axis of rotation is slightly offset from its orbit, it would have an equator along the outer rim, two temperate zones above and below the equator, two ice caps on the upper and lower surface of the ring, and a colder but non-frozen zone around the hole. Here's an article that covers all this and more. 

Wind is a problem. Topologists claim you can comb a hairy donut, but you can't comb hairy balls. They'd know, I suppose. On a sphere, wind has a built-in source of chaos. The muddle at the poles introduces instability, which wobbles down the whole system, creating little vorticies and patterns. On a torus, winds could build and build without disturbance. Thermal cells, a hot core, and planetary oscillations could help. There might be a diagonal / corkscrew element too, from the torus' rotation. The absence of large land masses (other than the ice caps on the upper and lower surface of the torus) would make the winds relatively uniform, so ocean surface temperatures would be crucial. The seas would make the southern ocean look like a swimming pool. 

Inhabitants on the outer surface, between the two ice caps, might not know their world is a torus. Sure, at sea, one horizon is closer than the other, but the chances of this being noticed seem low. Determining a torus world's latitudinal size (thickness) should be possible by ancient methods. Longitude (wideness) would be trickier. If a small island was known to circle the world on a predictable cycle, then estimates of its overland speed (over a large island) could lead people to conclude that the world is much wider than it is tall. 

This creates an isolated "new world" on the inner surface of the hole, across the polar ice caps, which is ideal for RPG purposes. Mad polar explorers, struggling for months against arctic winds and blinding ice towards the north pole, only to discover that there's more world - a lot more world - on the other side. 

Planetary Structure 

  • Mantle. Around 10,000' below sea level, with occasional deeper pockets. A braided tangle of rock, with a molten core.
  • World-Sea. Occasional oil seeps, volcanic gas pockets, and other hazards. Large underwater islands, separated from the core but unable to rise above the water.
  • Surface Islands. Islands able to rise to the surface of the water, but either unable to rise further (or slowly rising). Fishing, oceanic travel, and warmer temperatures makes these islands more appealing than sky islands.
  • Sky Islands. Floating chunks of rock. Sometimes they become gravitationally coupled, floating in groups or chains. Newly risen islands often have a thick layer of nutrient-rich silt. Lichen, fungi, and windborne seeds arrive shortly. Birds transport plants and small animals. Trees appear within a decade.  

Purely for visual appeal, I'm increasing atmospheric pressure to ~2atm at sea level. This means water boils at 120oC, which is annoying but not the end of the world. Nitrogen narcosis might set in during rapid altitude changes, but human biology can cope. Maximum habitable islands are at ~22,000'. This might help even out global temperature variations, but I this isn't the kind of setting where climate modelling is required. We're in the weeds already. 

Jose Ramirez, Chromantic Studio

How Many Mustard Seeds To Move One Mountain?

I know I said this was a low-effort setting, but sometimes, a bit of math is required. Take a sky island 1km long by 1km wide by 0.2km deep. Density of 2,500 kg/m^3. Mass of 5x10^11kg.

Assume the island is stationary and (for convenience) at 1 atmosphere of pressure. A horizontal wind of 100km/hour (27.7m/s) striking one face of the island for 24 hours. How fast is the island moving after 24 hours? How far has it moved?

Let's start off with a back-of-the-envelope high school physics dragless system.
Area of face (A): 2x10^5 m^2
Dynamic pressure (ρd): 470 pascals.
Wind Force (Fw) = pdA = 9.8x10^7 N
Mass (m) = 
5x10^11kg
Acceleration (a) = Fw / m = 0.000196 m/s^2
t = 1 hour = 86,400 seconds

Displacement = 1/2at^2 = 7.3x10^5 meters = 731 km.
Final velocity = at = 16.9 m/s = 60 km/h.

This is wrong for many reasons. For example, the force isn't constant; as the island accelerates, the relative wind speed drops. But it is a useful sanity check. Sky islands move at a noticeable but not alarming rate (if aerodynamic drag and magical oolith drag are included). You could do better calculations to get a more accurate number, but that's not the point. The point is that, in a worst-case scenario, a farm-sized island won't end up circling the globe or flying into space. You could just as easily say that small sky islands move at the average local wind speed, matching changes in wind speed more slowly as their mass increases. A Newfoundland-sized 2km tall sky island has a mass on the order of 5x10^20 kg, while its wind-facing area is around 5x10^8 m^2. By the same fuzzy math, 24 hours of 100kph wind would move that island a little over 1m. Not worth worrying about. 

Vertical travel is more difficult to calculate, since it's based on a fictional material. An island rising from the core would, upon reaching the surface, briefly accelerate its rise as the ground/sea water drains from its rocks. The rise would slow as plants colonize the island, absorbing atmospheric CO2. This could, possibly, lead an island to sink again after a few decades in the air. This cycling might be how hydrocarbons form; a heavily vegetated island that suddenly loses its ooltih layer and falls could be compressed, then uplifted later. 

Just putting a sail on a sky island wouldn't allow it to be steered. It'd still move with the wind. But, since oolith is an external force, using aerofoils and sails to spin the island (increasing the lifting force of oolith) could increase its height. That lifting force could be transformed into horizontal motion, but it'd be a fairly intense engineering project. Windmills connected to propellers could also work, but not quickly. 

Timekeeping On A Hoop

The calendar is a mess. On a large and stable island, fixed stars and seasonal variations are predictable. On a small island, which can wander hundreds of kilometers per year, seasons are probably a matter of guesswork and hope. If an island sticks to a latitude band, then its seasons are predictable (though offset from a stationary island). Celestial navigation should let people determine their latitude, but determining longitude, without fixed reference points, would be even more difficult. 

Does any of this matter for RPG purposes? Maybe, but probably not. Still, thinking about this sort of thing can lead to gameable scenarios. Large islands have a monopoly on (and possibly an obsession with) mathematical calendars. Radio beacons would revolutionize long-distance navigation. 

Life Aloft

In a setting where continental drift happens over the weekend, large terrestrial animals might be at a disadvantage. There are probably some semi-aquatic creatures, able to climb onto land temporarily: Crocodiles, Ambulocetus, that sort of thing. Anything that can climb quickly and eat moss might survive. Deer, goats, guinea pigs, capybara. Humans could transport them from island to island. A domesticated animal that fits under one arm would be worth hauling in a glider. Flying animals have an enormous advantage. Draft animals are probably rare; the incentives to develop gearing and mechanisms for oolith rotation make wind and water power available fairly early.

Water is probably a major limiting factor. Large islands at sea level could support groundwater and lakes, the sea water pressure would prevent the water from escaping. Flying islands could trap some water, but I'd expect most of it would dribble out. Collecting and storing rainwater could influence the architecture. Boltholes and safety ropes would be useful, and probably culturally coded, on small islands. 

Island Speciation

In this setting, humanity spread onto sky islands during the neolithic era (give or take). This isn't enough time for truly wild mutations to take root. The pressures of flight would probably lead to smaller people with quick-healing ankles, but gills, patagiums, etc. are unlikely. On the other hand, if there's an inner ring crossover (see Floating Geography, above), an entirely separate hominid lineage could split off earlier. And it's an RPG setting; if you're going full fantasy, you can add orcs and goblins and what-not with some justification. 

Pulp Covers
 

Useful Media

But we have seen and heard of many people overcome with so much foolishness, made crazy by so much stupidity, that they believe and say that there is a certain region, which is called Magonia, from which ships come in the clouds. In these ships the crops that fell because of hail and were lost in storms are carried back into that region; evidently these aerial sailors make a payment to the storm-makers, and take the grain and other crops. Among those so blinded with profound stupidity that they believe these things could happen we have seen many people in a kind of meeting, exhibiting four captives, three men and one woman, as if they had fallen from these very ships. As I have said, they exhibited these four, who had been chained up for some days, with such a meeting finally assembling in our presence, as if these captives ought to be stoned. But when truth had prevailed, however, after much argument, the people who had exhibited the captives, in accordance with the prophecy (Jeremiah 2:26) "were confounded … as the thief is confounded when he is taken."

-Agobard of Lyons, On Hail and Thunder, 9th century.

I've already listed a few of the obvious examples in this post. Here are some more obscure ones.   

The Pirates of 1920 (1911)

In the far future of 1920, airships will be used to stage daring robberies. May have canonized the standard sky pirate uniform (coat with two rows of buttons, leather cap, goggles, belt and holster.) Also predicted the techniques used in (arguably) the first case of actual air piracy. 

The Phantom (1996)

A fairly awful film with an excellent villain. Just a truly crazy Hurst / Hughes type, drawing from the same well as Cave Johnson. A pulp lunatic surrounded by people from a different genre. It's only on this list because of some minor air piracy (done by actual central casting pirates) and general pulp tropes. 

The Three Musketeers (2011)

A star-studded cast, expensive costumes, shoots on location, a familiar plot with an alt/pseudo-history twist. And yet, it's (rightly) forgotten. Why? I think it's the lack of heart. There's a sense that every scene is recycled, every line of dialogue written by a committee. You've seen every part of this film before, but better. 

Skyland (2005-2007)

A Canadian children's TV show from the early motion capture CGI era. Is it good? No.The Curse of Count Zeppelin fell upon them, and the result is profoundly mediocre. It's got sky islands, but it is fundamentally a sci-fi show. Specifically, it's a Star Wars show with the serial numbers filed off... and not that well filed off either. Still, if you needed inspiration for a Star Wars game, it... exists.

Last Exile (2003, 2011)

At last, something good. For some people, this is probably foundational dieselpunk media, but it might be new to you. The promotional materials have an odd focus on teenagers in sundresses, but next to none of this appears in the series (thankfully). It's just a solid bit of worldbuilding, political drama, and interesting visuals. 

Just Imagine (1930)

No sky pirates, but a good retro-future yarn. 1930 envisions 1980, watched in 2030 (rounding up).  Perhaps this confirms that the Curse of Count Zeppelin doesn't rely on tropes from the pulp era failing to resonate with modern audiences. The problem is deeper. Just Imagine predicts video calls, hair dryers, and future shock. It has some of the best city sets outside of Metropolis, and some of the most blatant hollywood rhubarbs outside of radio comedy (18:24). 

Attila Varga

Final Notes

Normally, I'd consider running a pulp game in a pulp-inspired (or at least pulp-compatible) system. But the more I think about a Sky Pirates game, the more I'm inclined to punk over pulp. Punk needs risk and stakes, not cinematic competence. 

Spending time and effort on the details of a setting is not required, but it can hep a GM build a mental toolkit. Now that I've done the research (if you can call it that), I can visualize how far sky islands are from the sea, how a fictional technology might develop, and some of the problems a sky islands civilization might encounter.

If you have any thoughts on this post, feel free to leave a comment. 

2026/10/29

Dread and Halloween Games

Dread is useful as a highly improvised one-shot party or pickup game. I prefer Fiasco if people are clear-headed and RPG-minded, but for Halloween and the less-than-sober, Dread is the perfect RPG. All you need is a Jenga tower and scenario.

The scenario is the tricky part. Dread provides some prewritten scenarios, but they’re trying too hard to be useful. They’re thorough, thoughtful, and well designed, but that’s not what Dread needs. Dread tends to be almost entirely improvised. It's a game that's on the borderline of being a freeform acting exercise. It is excellent for sharpening a GM's skills, but there is no safety net. No rules, no notes, no higher authority.

Someone could run Dread as their first RPG. The book is full of good advice. If the GM had a theatre or improv background, or watched a lot of RPG content, or were lucky and talented, it could work reasonably well. But for an experienced GM, someone who understands pace of play and spotlight time, who’s willing to invent rules on the fly, who can draw out reticent players, who can paint a scene in a few words... Dread is still difficult. It’s an improvised solo in front of a critical audience. It strips away all the comforting safety nets a GM usually has and says “OK, hot shot, let’s see you do it on the high wire."

Running Dread at a party is a bit like breaking out a guitar. Plinking out “Smoke on the Water” won’t cut it. But it's a lot more fun than a Jackbox game or some fiddly board game with a pristine cardboard chits.

Vincenzo Lamolinara

The Dread rulebook is 96 pages long. It is well worth the price, but the core rules of Dread could fit on an index card with room to spare. It’s a victim of its own simple brilliance.

Since the rules and quickstart are free, here’s a summary.

-One GM (skilled), 3-6 players (no skill or previous RPG knowledge required). Fewer than 3 players and the resolution mechanic doesn’t work; more than 6 and it gets unwieldy to reach across a table.

-The GM sets a scenario, theme, and goes over any safety tools they’re using.

-Players create character concepts.

-GM calls on a player to pull from a Jenga tower whenever a player attempts something perilous, or whenever they feel like increasing the tension. Basically, any time the GM thinks that a horror movie death could occur, a player should pull. The harder the task, the more pulls may be required, potentially with each pull representing a different stage or aspect of the task.

-Successful pull = danger avoided. Knock over tower = character dies (or is otherwise out of the game). Abandon pull = failure with consequences but not character death. Deliberately knock over tower = character succeeds at a fatal cost.

-If the tower is knocked over, rebuild it with 3 blocks already pulled for each time it has fallen this game.

That’s the game (or most of it). But don't mistake "simple" for "easy." 

Optional Houserules

Use a few or none at all. Sourced from reddit, Smosh plays Dread, and testing.

-Heroic Intervention. If a player is pulling from the tower, another player who has a character in the scene may knock the tower over, sacrificing their character to save the character of the pulling player. This is in addition to The Sacrifice rule, where the pulling player may deliberately knock over the tower to succeed at a fatal cost.

-Betrayal. If a player would pull from the tower, once per game, their character may betray another player’s character who is in the scene. That player must pull instead.

-Time Limits. Instead of just adjusting the number of pulls, require 2 pulls in 30 seconds, 4 pulls in 1 minute, etc. Works well with a thematic timer (hourglass, ominous buzzer, flickering digital clock).

-Physical Damage. If a player abandons a pull and, as a result of the subsequent failure, suffers an injury, that injury affects their ability on future pulls. The player must use their non-dominant hand, cover one eye, etc.

-Telegraphed Jumpscare. Dread says not to use jumpscares, and it is correct, but one consequence of an abandoned pull could be a warning that, during some future pull by that player, there may be a jumpscare. If the GM can secretly set it up so that another player (possibly of a dead character) or a bystander can deliver the scare on cue, the results tend to be tremendous. 

-Coloured or Marked Blocks. If the tower has multiple colours or other distinct markings, the GM can call for a pull of a specific colour (or randomize which colour must be pulled).

Rules Not To Use

Elective pulls (pg. 14)
I don’t think these are required. Dread is a heavily GM-mediated game. Players can ask if their characters can do something, but they can’t ask to do something mechanical. The sense of dread only works if their ultimate fate feels out of their hands. No elective pulls, no making the situation easier mechanically, no direct interaction with the rules. Just draw when told to draw. 

Pre-pulls for <5 player groups (pg.7)
I think these are unnecessary. The pristine tower at the start of the game, and its eventual appalling state, is part of the charm of Dread. The GM should just call for multiple pulls early. Use a fast-paced deadly opening/prologue followed by a more normal period of tension-building. It’s probably fine if you’re using Dread’s resolution mechanism in a more standard type of RPG session.

Dead and Bored

Dread's main drawback, like many high-lethality systems, is that a character can die early, giving the player nothing to do for some time. This is ameliorated by a party atmosphere; there's usually something else going on. It also allows initially hesitant or skeptical viewers to jump in.

Some GMs suggest a "fated to die" approach, where the character of a player that causes the tower to topple is doomed in the final scene, but will survive until then. This, I feel, misses the point of Dread. It is not a merciful system designed to tell many types of stories.

The GM does need to learn to eyeball the tower's current state, and manage the pace of play accordingly. Dread works best at ~2-2.5 hours. The pace of play has to be blistering. 

Schemes and Survival

RPGs rely on schemes. A setting that does not encourage schemes is a sterile and joyless affair. But in Dread, there is no escape. The characters are doomed by default. Success is not making it to the end of the scenario by block-pulling dexterity, rules manipulation, and smart planning. Success is if the resulting story is good (and frightening). There has to be a willingness to go "oh darn" when a character's carefully planned escape goes awry in an arbitrary way, a desire to survive mixed with a knowledge of the nature of the genre.

In a conventional RPG, a player building a backpack-mounted weed-killer sprayer to push back the Kuzdu from Mars is doing a good job. That sort of scheme should be encouraged, and it should work. But in Dread, if they do that, pull, and topple the tower... then the GM can reveal that Mayor Pondrick was too cheap to buy actual weed killer, and told the groundskeeper to use apple cider vinegar instead. "But I did everything riiiiiight," the character cries, as the Kuzdu devours them. 

Ben J

Character Creation

Dread has a very thorough questionnaire system. No doubt, when used properly, it would help players generate very interesting interlinked characters. But Dread is rarely run as a proper game. It is a throw-it-together-and-run game, a game you can run with only a Jenga tower. No paper, no pencils, no dice, no frontal lobes. And this means the players, who may be new to RPGs, intoxicated, leaving in half an hour, etc. will not fill out a detailed questionnaire.

The GM should, instead, start with an elevator pitch, before setup, while wrangling players away from the snacks and towards the table. They should provide basic setting and tone info, with lots of tropes, giving players obvious hooks for character creation.

Example. “It’s early October, 1957. The Russians have just put an artificial moon called Sputnik in orbit. You and some other youths from the small town of Sunbeam, Illinois have gathered on Makeout Ridge to watch it.”

GM may, depending on the scenario, wish to prepare a list of character concepts. These should be extremely basic. Just a name (because names are hard) and a few words, like a High Concept from Fate. These are backup options for players who are stuck on a concept, confused, joining the game late, etc. 

Examples: Kurt Mallory. Greaser, rough but heart of gold. Deborah Shankie, part-time waitress, wants out of town. Maria Shankie, younger sister who snuck out. Peter McCormick, varsity-jacketed quarterback. Al Fontaine, hobo veteran, just passing through. Janet Vansavian, wannabe reporter. Billy Haskap, kid with paper route and slingshot. Frank Biswas, new student in town. Deputy Dan, wide open mind. Rusty, the dog. 

If backstories are required, they can be invented during play. Put some faith in your players.  

Pencils and paper are not required, but names are hard. It's sometimes handy to write the character’s name on both sides of a piece of bent cardstock, to make a place card. A standard Jenga box is wide enough to slip a stack of notecards down the side.

SMBC

Minimum Viable Scenarios

All a GM needs to craft a game... at maximum effort. Don't spend your time writing down notes and plans. Spend your time assembling mental lists of tropes, characters, scenarios, hazards, etc. The game lives in your brain, not on paper. Be prepared to pivot immediately. 

You can use Dread to test ideas that might not be worth a full module or screenplay. If a concept or twist doesn't work, the stakes are low. 

Criteria:

-Ensemble cast. Story has to handle multiple characters. No main character. No peril that can only be faced alone.
-Easy and comprehensible elevator pitch.
-Easy to think of moments of deadly peril
-Easy for low-investment players to generate character concepts.

Standard Sci-Fi / Horror

Alien Invasion
Flying saucers, ray guns, skeptical sheriffs, disembowelled cattle, etc. One of the easiest scenarios to twist; one of the hardest to make truly frightening. 

The Backrooms
There’s a weird inexplicable environment that kills you. Reality is breaking down. Difficult to do well, but very satisfying, especially if there are moments of normality in between episodes of profound theatre-of-the-mind weirdness.

The Blob
An unstoppable non-sapient alien threat, possibly with a weakness. Works best with specific geography in mind.

Bloody Mary
The characters performed a ritual and now something (an urban legend, a ghost, the devil) is coming for them. An isolated setting is not required; most people simply won't believe it. The ritual could be a science experiment.

Event Horizon
There’s an abandoned ship and it’s haunted or infested. Characters are your standard crew tropes. Works on the water. Could be an abandoned hospital, but we’re starting to get into Old Dark House territory.

Final Destination
A group of people survive a deadly event via a premonition, and death wants to kill them via implausible events. Can be a thin scenario without a complication (e.g. on vacation, theme park, in space, etc.). Doesn’t work particularly well as a Dread scenario; arbitrary and nigh-inevitable death is a core part of Dread anyway. I’ve included it because if I didn’t, I’m sure the comments would suggest it.

Jurassic Park
An island full of deadly creatures. An old guy in a panama suit tells you he’s spared no expense on his quest to clone giant trilobites or the Beatles. Or the island is just like that naturally. 

The Old Dark House
There’s an inn or a manor and the bridge is washed out. There’s something in the walls, someone in the attic, a sound on the moors. All the lights go out and someone has to start the generator.

Slasher
There’s a guy with a knife and he’s after you. Replace [guy], [knife], etc. Could be an alien on a spaceship, a robot from the future, a Dracula, a Werewolf, etc.  Isolated settings are best, unless you can come up with a good reason for it to work in a crowd (e.g. it’s halloween, it can teleport, etc.)

Strangers in Town
The car broke down or you’re on vacation. There are cultists, cannibals, witches, billionaires, Soviet infiltrators, psychic children, etc. Folk horror.     

Tiny
You’re mice or rabbits or shrunken people. The world is red in tooth and claw.

The Violent Unknown Event
A polite public-service-announcement apocalypse. Paranoia-style absurdity. Remain indoors, obey all posted signs, disobey all false signs.

Your Worst Job
A highly specific personal horror story. Any bad job you’ve worked, but suddenly worse. Stephen King used this a lot.

Zombies
Too many variants to cover. Everyone has gone insane and wants to kill you. Could be the Purge, with guns, or alien doppelgangers, or chemical weapons. 

Flavio Greco Paglia

Non-Horror Examples

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
The [Stuff] Factory (or even The Stuff Factory) is always good. Players generate children+vice (parent optional). 

The Titanic
There’s a big ship and it is sinking. Could also be called The Poseidon Adventure. Really, a “get from here to there in a dangerous artificial environment.” Could be space, underwater, etc.

Disaster
There’s an earthquake, volcano, hurricane, tornado, hailstorm, thunderstorm, tsunami, blackout, whiteout, or asteroid. The great thing about RPGs is that the special effects budget is unlimited.

The Seven Samurai
We need a specific number of misfits to defend a village against bandits and their leader.

Example Notecard

I may have lied a little bit about not prepping for Dread. I tend to write down scenario ideas on a card, then leave it in my pocket during game.  These notes approach "man door hand hook car door" levels of terseness. 

October 4 1957 Sputnik launch Oct 7 game. Watching it western sky. Orbits once 90 mins. Beeps 1.5x per sec. Sunbeam, IL. Evening. Teenagers. Radio rebroadcast of beeps. "WKRU Radio, and we're OK. Are you?" Clouds with gaps. Nearly midnight. Stars are out. Moving star. Then, as the clouds close, another. And another. A triangle of them, like a flock of geese. Radio picking up another signal, 210 megacycles, rebroadcast. Beeps rising. Car lights flicker. Turn off, first pull. Car broken, carpool into town. Streetlights off. Things in the sky. Job 38. Mad minister. Noises above clouds. Stop. Plane, parked in field by roadside, engine still turning, baking hot. Fishing boat. Called down by radio station, on the road to Pikeville. Angels in sputnik's image. Sky rolled up like a scroll. Moving through wires.  

 The more prep you do, the more props and soundboards you use, the more you'll wish you had all the tools a more detailed system offers. Dread is perfect as an exercise in minimalism.

Aleksandr Nikonov

 Final Notes

Dread delivers experiences that Betrayal at House on the Hill etc. promise. Board games require no particular skills beyond reading comprehension and a bit of tactical thinking. They promise a high-effort experience without cost, and usually fail, because imitation effort substitute never tastes as good as the real thing. Dread has a high skill requirement for the GM, but when it works, it really works.

 

2026/10/23

Film Notes: Halloween with Dr. Seuss

According to a friend, their child (2ish) enjoys The Monster Overhaul. They toddle over to the bookshelf, get it down, and flip through it looking at the pictures. Most of the time, they skip straight to the Strange Water chapter and look at the deep-sea fish. "Oh, scary scary!" they say. Then they flip the page. "Oh, scary scary!"

The kid will do this even if no one is around.

This is the best review my book has ever received.

Children's author and illustrator Dr. Seuss also understood that children sometimes like to be frightened. People point out that The Cat in the Hat is an unsettling home invasion, that Horton Hatches the Egg is full of anxiety and obligation, and so-on. 

Dr. Seuss' unsettling landscapes aren't noted as frequently. "Seussian" often refers to a certain kind of whimsical organic design, but there's an argument to be made that it's drawing from the same well as "Gigeresque".

The Terwilliker Institute, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T.

The Once-ler's home, The Lorax

Ga-Zair, Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are? 

Oh The Places You'll Go
I think these are early examples of what is now called "liminal horror." The paintings of Alex Colville might be another. Seuss uses unsettling, half-real spaces, featureless horizons, buildings that are not quite buildings, and menacing formless creatures to create tension. This insight into nightmare logic is most obvious in two of his more obscure films. 


Halloween is Grinch Night (1977)

It's unclear if this film takes place before How The Grinch Stole Christmas or after it. Probably before, but it's intriguing to consider the alternative. The Grinch seems less openly hateful and malicious. He's a slightly different character, a sort of worldly-wise trickster devil. Gruff, but not misanthropic. Does the Grinch see himself as Whoville's sinister judge, deliberately unsettling the social mores of a twee surveillance state? 

On Grinch Night, the Grinch is (apparently) capable of magic, a sorcerer-king from the mountaintop, come to test the Whos and sort the wheat from the chaff... and have a good time doing it. The root cause of the trouble isn't the Grinch's temperament. It's the weather. Just a natural, inevitable, uncontrollable event. It's something Whoville can mitigate, but it doesn't have a moral dimension. Sure, the Grinch could choose not to be irritated, but the story frames him as something like a hurricane or (given the era) an incoming nuclear warhead.   

The Grinch transports his phantasmagorical terrors in his "paraphernalia wagon". "Paraphernalia" is generally used to mean "junk" or "regalia", but its technical definition is "property a woman brings into a marriage over and above her dowry." This sort of trivia will win you many friends during your long digressions about the obscure works of Dr. Seuss. Therefore, one could argue there is (or was) a Mrs. Grinch. We see her photo on a dresser in 1982's The Grinch Grinches the Cat in the Hat (unless that's his mother; it probably is, given the whole warped Freudian psychology angle of that film). Is the Grinch literally carting his emotional baggage into town? According to internet lore, Tony the Tiger (the mascot of the American breakfast cereal Frosted Flakes) may have been involved. 

One justification for Halloween is Grinch Night taking place post-Christmas is that Max the Dog runs away at the end. It's possible that the Grinch's heart grew three sizes on Christmas... but three sizes might not be sustainable. If it's a prequel to Christmas, then Max's return to the abusive and tyrannical Grinch is tragic; if it's a sequel, then at least Max gets away. Max is also a much more human character in Grinch Night; in Christmas, he's just a dog. Must a dog always return to its vomit? 

Some of the imagery recurs in 1990's Oh The Places You'll Go, which could indicate that Halloween is Grinch Night had a deep roots in Seuss' imagination. 


The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953)

The film opens with a small child pursued by grey-clad figures wielding coloured nets or wind socks. This nightmarish swooping motif is present in several of Seuss' films, including his WWII propaganda work. An amorphous blobs diving at a person's head is easy to draw, but it's surprising how well it works as choreography. Someone had a clear vision and executed it.

The film also features a hypnotist duel, beard-linked roller-skaters, the terrifying Dungeon Elevator Song, and other very odd choices.

A film like this could only be made under the studio system, where choreographers, dancers, costumes, set designers, etc. could be pulled off the shelf and used without starting the entire process from scratch. It's a '50s full-colour musical, just a bit weirder than normal. And "normal" was still fairly weird. 

The shadow of WWII lies over this film. There's a level of casual militarism. The plumber, August Zabladowski, wears his outfits like a uniform. Bart's dead father presumably died in The War. 

Still, it's a bold film for the McCarthy era. In an era of enforced conformity, it has an anti-authority, anti-conformity message, and therefore (among other reasons) failed to resonate with audiences. Is it good? No, not really, and I'm not convinced the studio's meddling and cuts made it worse. But it is unique and joyful. There's a level of silliness that meshes well with Arneson's The First Fantasy Campaign. The Dungeon Elevator Song would fit in any old-school funhouse. 

2026/07/08

Film Notes: A Selection of Recent(ish) Obscure(ish) Horror Films

Horror has a (well-earned) reputation as a wastebin genre. Here are a few horror-adjacent films, largely without jumpscares, musical stings, and cheap tricks. They're on the fringe of the genre, where it starts to become something else.


The Vast of Night (2019)

This is probably the finest film I've seen this decade. Not necessarily the best, or the worthiest, but a film I'd like to show to other filmmakers as an example of how to do it properly. I regret not seeing it in a theatre.

It's... OK to do a period film with modern dialogue. Shakespeare did it; you can too. But there's something impressive about a film that manages, on a relatively low budget, to seamlessly recreate a time and a place. There's never a sense you're looking at a set, that lighting guys and boom mikes are just out of view. You're there. These aren't costumes, they're clothes. These aren't actors. They're people. The dialogue is what it should be.

The long shots. The soundtrack. The framing, the lighting, the haircuts. The sound shoes make. Someone loved every part of this film. 

The Vast of Night is the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind wishes it could be. It's, in my view, the greatest UFO film of all time. Better than Contact, better than Fire in the Sky, better, even, than Incident at Raven's Gate. It's Andrew Patterson's directorial debut, and it is very impressive. I'll follow their career with interest. Do online gambling sites let speculate in director futures? 

A Whale (2024)

This film deserves a wider audience I'm not sure if it'll ever get an English release, or even a wide theatrical release, but it really should.

It's unsettling without being frightening. It is well paced, well shot, and, as far as I can tell, well planned. It is a streamlined film. It respects the viewer's time and intelligence, which feels rare these days. It integrates CGI without spectacle and without bravado. I've seen the wretched Underwater (2020) recommended as a cosmic horror film; there's simply no comparison. Perhaps one day, budgets will be distributed according to talent.  

Ashkal, the Tunisian Investigation (2022)

This is only superficially an investigative horror film. It's deeper, and has a lot more to say, but if you only take the superficial aspects, it's a superb contribution to the genre.

I'm a little leery of using of real-world tragic events as supernatural framing devices. Is it necessary to create a secret history where the hand of the devil (or local equivalent) is visible, when human causes and human desires are all that is required? Adding a secret purpose to a death camp implies the real purpose is insufficiently horrifying.

But, viewed from a sufficient distance, this is possibly the perfect Delta Green movie. Up there with the first season of True Detective.


Yellow Veil Pictures

Not one film, but a film distribution company with a well curated selection.  

 Side Note: Oh God, Not Another Casting Call

A surprising number of intriguing sci-fi / horror films turn out to be Inside Holllywood pictures. You know the type; films made by people trapped inside the reality-warping California ecosystem, written by people unable to see beyond the walls of their cage. Examples include but are not limited to Somnium (2025), Touch Me (2025), The Endless (2017), Something in the Dirt (2024).

Something in the Dirt was particularly disappointing, as it had some real potential before devolving into self-congratulatory / self-deprecating Hollywood inside baseball slop. These films aren't cosmic horror films. They're films about trying to make it in Hollywood, or life in California, with a vague framing device to sell tickets. They're inherently shallow. 

Maybe David Lawson Jr. et. al. need to take a sabbatical and work somewhere. Get out in the real world. Put a boom mic on their shoulder and walk east, until someone says "that's a weird looking golf club". 

 But outside of the Hollywood bubble, the films Yellow Veil Pictures picks up are generally pretty good. Without Name (2016) has elements of Algernon Blackwood's The Trees. The Spine of Night (2021) is an OSR darling. I can't imagine being nostalgic for TV commercials, but Buffet Infinity (2025) is a film consisting largely of small-town TV commercials. I think shorter films, like the Local 58 series, have already thoroughly explored the analog horror genre, but it was still enjoyable. 

Backrooms (2026) & I Saw The TV Glow (2024).

Both films are good; Backrooms surprisingly so, given the perils of adapting a vague vibe into a film. They could be entries in a new, loosely defined subgenre: the horror of repetition and of a wasted life. This isn't the main theme of either film, but it is present. 

We all have our loops. Our habits. Behaviors that keep us walking in circles. Reaching for the same solutions over and over again. Thinking each time will take you somewhere new, but they don't. And still, it's the neural pathway of least resistance. A path you made. - Backrooms, 2026.

Time wasn't right. It was moving too fast. And then I was 19. And then I was 20. I felt like one of those dolls asleep in the supermarket. Stuffed. And then I was 21. Like chapters skipped over on a DVD. I told myself, "This isn't normal. This isn't normal. This isn't how life is supposed to feel. - I Saw the TV Glow (2024).


This isn't the active invariant time loop horror of Timecrimes (2007), Triangle (2009), or Primer (2004), or even the disjointed self-examination of The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973).

This is a passive, unconscious looping. Patterns repeating themselves. Proustian, perhaps. Not the horror of change, but the horror of a lack of change, at the lack of one's ability to change. The sense of time slipping forward while repeating itself. Something closer to Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, or possibly Asako Yuzuki's Hooked. It's not a new fear or a new idea, but it seems to be resonating with today's audiences (whatever that means).

There are probably other films that fit this category. A friend suggested M. Night Shyamalan's [The Beach That Makes You] Old (2021). That friend was sentenced to watch Death Bed: the Bed that Eats (1977) sober.

There's a pop psychology link between an era's horror movie fears and its real-world preoccupations (well, at least for mainstream America). Zombies and the local other, alien abductions and the cold war, etc. Is the perception of time and the futility of human endeavour the new frontier of horror?