Season 19, Episode 6

Episode 6: Illegal Aliens

As they said goodbye to 1928 San Francisco, Penelope’s two travelling companions thought it would be fun to catch a glimpse of the same city, exactly 100 years later. But in the post-truth, fake news-obsessed brave new world of 2028, the US have become a populist dystopia on the brink of civil war, with Alcatraz hosting the HQs of AEGIS, America’s answer to UNIT…

This episode provided the perfect coda to our Californian half-season (see the previous posts), with a very different atmosphere and a somewhat "2005 RTD" vibe of political satire. 

Set at the very start of Donald Trump's third term (you know he WILL try it, don't you?), it featured, among other things, an ICE-like American counterpart of UNIT (which the US had, of course, decided to disengage from): AEGIS, aka American Extranormal Guard & Intelligence Service, the brainchild of the POTUS' new favorite tech-bro: none other than Henry van Statten, now in full comeback mode after his 2012 eclipse.

It also had all-American, secretly-produced, beta stage Cybermen and an unlucky froglike alien in a Hawaian shirt named Barney (please don't call him Kermit).

It was fun to play with some present-day, real-world stuff (Donald Trump, the so-called post-truth era, the rise of AI deep fakes etc.), with Penelope sincerely wondering whether this dystopian drift was a sign of temporal tampering by some hidden power or just the normal course of 21st century history. In the end, she went for the latter interpretation... and put some wrongs to right, effectively ending Van Statten's second career and pulling the plug on the crazy All-American Cybermen project.

The TARDIS is now back on Avalon and season 19 will return for its second half in a few months!   

Season 19, Episodes 4-5

Episode 4: Blue Devils

1893. Penelope is back in San Francisco, with two new travelling companions – including Alan Macleod, a 20^th century writer, very eager to meet the great Ambrose Bierce in person! But the Time Lady soon discovers that mysterious forces are at work in the Paris of the West, fourteen years after her last visit. Her investigations lead to an unexpected reunion…

 

Episode 5: The Magic of Cities

Delving further into the mystery of magus Thibaut de Castries’ transition from history to fiction, Penelope uncovers the weirdest of timey-wimey conundrums. The trail leads her from the 1978 Sci-Fi World Conn to a lonely cabin in the woods in 1928 and finally to a hotel room with a view on the Abyss. Featuring Fritz Leiber, C.A. Smith and the unforgettable Donaldo!

This diptych continued and concluded my riff on Fritz Leiber's "Our Lady of Darkness" (started in episode 2), which proved to be a really fun ride, with Penelope going to and fro through different eras of San Francisco history (1893 then 1978 then 1928...) to solve the "timey-wilmey conundrum" mentioned above - the mystery of Thibaut de Castries' disappearance from History along with his elusive book on megapolisomancy - except from one single copy, which seemed to be miraculously protected from the ravages of time and the enigmatic aforementioned "erasing force"... 

I realized afterwards that the whole thing had a somewhat Umberto Eco-esque vibe (well, if you replaced medieval Europe with XIX-XXth century San Francisco, Aristotle's lost tome on comedy with De Castrie's grimoire, the old, mad, blind librarian by an old, mad, almost undead De Castries and medieval monks by real-life fantasy writers - Ambrose Bierce (see the start of the season), Clark Ashton Smith and Fritz Leiber... well, okay, I guess that, in the end, all these unconscious "Name of the Rose" echoes probably seem a bit far-fetched but you know...).  

Episode 5 included two very memorable meetings with historical personages: the aforementioned "unforgettable Donaldo" (more on him below) and a 1928 Clark Ashton Smith as a lonely, hermitic Dreamer in his famous cabin in the woods. 

So who is Donaldo, you ask?  His real name is Donald Sidney-Fryer - a larger-than-life (but completely authentic) individual - modern-day troubadour, scholar of poetry and fantasy fiction (the greatest authority on Clark Ashton Smith). He was the model for the character of "Donaldus" in Fritz Leiber's novel. I found out about Mr. Sidney-Fryer while researching historical details of Clark Ashton Smith's life and I was instantly fascinated. And so was Penelope, who met him in 1978.

These two episodes also provided some very funny interactions between Penelope and one of her new travelling companions, Alan Macleod, an obscure (and, for one, entirely fictional) writer of ghost stories in his early sixties named - their meeting with Fritz Leiber at the 36th World Science Fiction convention (in 1978 Phoenix) quickly turned into a neatly-packed, destined-to-be-remembered comedy scene, in which I (once again) marveled at Sylvie's gift for improvised witty dialogue. 

At the end of episode 5, having defeated the De Castries menace, (once again) foiled the rebirth of Carcosa and ticked all the timey-wimey boxes, Lady Penelope decided to stay for a while in 1928 San Francisco... which will, of course, be the setting for our next episode!

Season 19, Episode 3

Episode 3: Palace of Whispers

Northern China, 1942. Her battle against the city-entity of Carcosa takes Penelope to another point of historical uncertainty in the life of a future, would-be or never-was emperor – the puppet state of Manchukuo. In a palace full of secrets, shadows and spies, she meets the tragic figure of Puyi, last emperor of China and current holder of the Sutra of Pale Leaves…

As the above blurb may imply, this episode enabled me to cannibalize some wonderful ideas from Chaosium's excellent Call of Cthulhu campaign The Sutra of Pale Leaves against a historical backdrop almost entirely drawn from The Last Emperor, Bernardo Bertolucci's masterpiece about Puyi, which also provided much of our session's musical soundtrack (one of the great Ryuichi Sakamoto's best works, as iconic and haunting as the movie itself).

Aside from emperor Puyi himself and an opium-addled empress Wanrong, this episode allowed Lady Penelope to encounter two very interesting (and utterly different) historical women: the imperial concubine Tan Yuling and the spy-traitor-adventuress Yoshiko Kawashima. Both played major parts in the story - including a memorable "dinner-for-two" scene with Kawashima, which ended with Penelope using her Venusian aikido nerve-pinch on her host... 

As for Tan Yuling, I followed the now historically contested (but so much more interesting, dramatically speaking) version of her death  - poisoning by a Japanese doctor acting on behalf of Puyi's Nippon puppeteers to prevent her from stirring him against Japan. In the end, Penelope chose to save her from her historically-programmed death, reviving her with a healthy dose of Avalon elixir and whisking her away in the TARDIS - a bit like she did a looong time ago with the Elizabethan playwright-cum-spy Christopher Marlowe (ah, those were the days). Sylvie made Penelope's decision even more dramatic by revealing / foretelling the circumstances of her impending doom to Yuling before giving her the choice: either accept her predestined death or disappear from history and start a new life as a space-time traveller.

On the Carcosan front, this episode allowed Penelope to realize that she was not finished with the City of Nightmares (even though she did cause the final end of its Porphyr population, a few seasons ago: now devoid of its erstwhile inhabitants, Carcosa has revealed itself as a living, semi-sentient entity, a Viral City now hungrily looking for a new reality and a whole new population to symbiose with... a cosmic catastrophe which, without Penelope's timely intervention, could have engulfed 9th century Byzantium, 1879 San Francisco or 1942 Manchuria... As for the Sutra of Pale Leaves, its Manchukuo iteration now rests safely enclosed (and cut out from all space and time!) in a specifically TARDIS-crafted box...     

Season 19, Episodes 1-2

Episode 1: Time and Byzantium

Constantinople, 826 AD. Lady Penelope is playing the temporal tourist and loving every minute of it, until she discovers a potentially continuum-wrecking dissonance hovering over Theophilos, the boy who would one day become Emperor – or will he? Something or someone is manipulating the tides of History and Destiny. A new quest awaits the Time Lady!

Episode 2: Golden Gate

Lady Penelope’s hunt for echoes of destiny dissonance takes her to 1879 San Francisco, where strange glitches interfere with the flow of time. Joining forces with journalist Ambrose Bierce and megalopolimancer (uh?) Thibault the Castries, she soon finds herself chasing a ghostly barouche through Chinatown… before meeting America’s one and only true Emperor.

Hello everyone!  Yes, our beloved Time Lady (now in her 8th incarnation!) is back for a whole new season of adventures in Time and Space!

After experimenting (quite successfully, if I may say so myself) with the mini-series format, I've decided to return to the traditional season approach (12 or 15 episodes in length - I've not decided yet), starting with a quartet of linked episodes (or a single multi-episode story, if you will) focusing on... the return of Carcosa, with a new paradigm and a new reality (since Penelope pretty much destroyed the accursed meta-temporal city, back in season 17).

And now, on to our first two opening episodes!

Time and Byzantium resulted from Sylvie's longtime wish to visit Constantinople AGAIN, after her unfortunate, short-lived sojourn there way back in season 7 (and some 12 years ago in real time). In the meantime, I've done some background reading on Byzantine history, allowing me to render this extraordinary setting in a more detailed and evocative manner. I specifically chose 9th century as the time period because it marked the apogee and eventual abandonment of the whole Iconoclast phase of the empire - a fascinating historical and cultural backdrop. The episode featured quite a few real-life characters, includning the future emperor Theophilos and his teacher-mentor John (Ianos) the Grammarian and kickstarted a new crosstime quest (or hunt?) for Penelope.

As many of you have probably guessed, Golden Gate owed a massive creative debt to Fritz Leiber's novel Our Lady of Darkness (for the De Castries / megalopolimancy stuff) and, even more importantly, to Three Septembers and a January, one of my favorite Neil Gaiman's The Sandman episodes. And like the latter, our own story featured both Emperor Norton and the (revenant) King of Pain as prominent characters. I also added Ambrose Bierce to the mix (I really couldn't leave the man who coined the name "Carcosa" out of this!), adding a healthy dose of pessimistic sarcasm to the dialogue, as well as some interesting reflections on the great author's past and future, from the 1879 perspective. The actual play was a delight, with some great interactions between Penelope and the main NPCs, including a remarkably moving speech when Norton had to resist the treacherous enticements of the King of Pain, reinvented as the Reborn Carcosa's puppet and messenger.

See you soon for the next episode!  

The Ashworth Chronicles: Bonus Episode!

 Bonus Episode: Within

Just when she thought she was out, they pull her back in… As soon as Lady Penelope wakes up, she knows something was wrong. Why is she lying in a four-poster bed, in an unknown yet familiar rococo room?  Why is she wearing the face of one of her previous incarnations?  Who is this mysterious gothic Governess standing at her bedside? And where is the Shadow Box?  

Yes, I know, the miniseries was supposed to be over - yet I did have a lingering feeling of uncompleteness and, above all, I did see the opportunity to run a "dream / mindgames" episode à la Amy's Choice - something which I'd wanted to do for quite some time now but I just couldn't find the right formula (moment + situation + stakes, etc.). 

Anyway, this short episode really brought a sense of closure to the whole miniseries, while allowing Sylvie and I to revisit some of Penelope's memories - more than 18 seasons, more than 30 travelling companions and 8 incarnations so far!

See you in a few months for our next miniseries / season / whatever!  

The Ashworth Chronicles, final episodes

Episode 5: Ghosts of War

Just when Penelope and Titus thought they were done with the Vishklars’ attempts to derail the Ashworth family history, the Time Lady’s TARDIS catches a new but unpleasantly familiar alert signal coming from the north of Aragon in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War – a time and place where no Ashworth has ever set foot before!  ¿Qué diablos está pasando?

Episode 6: Gorgo, Mormo

Before taking Titus to Avalon to meet his father Lord Ulysses, Penelope decides to take a holiday in 1^st century Rome – visiting old friends, showing Titus the sights and basking into the ceaseless wonders of the Eternal City… unless, of course, she was actually driven there by some mysterious, timey-wimey premonition for a decidedly dark, decisive miniseries finale…

And so concludes our miniseries, The Ashworth Chronicles - but of course, this writeup wouldn't be complete without our traditional post-play notes!

In Episode 5, a shocked and flabbergasted Titus discovered that his young wife-to-be, Victoria Sinclair, a supposedly blasé dilettante, had actually fought along the Republicans and the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War!  Since he could not run the risk of interfering with her timeline before their very first encounter, Penelope had to keep her future adoptive grandmother from the psychic clutches of the nightmare-twisting Vishklar and keep the family history on the right track. This episode also features one Eric Blair, a very British member of the POUM… who would later become famous as George Orwell.

At the end of Episode 5, with everything seeming hunky-dory on the temporal front, Penelope decided that she would conclude this first bout of adventures with Titus by taking him to ancient Rome, one of her favorite destinations. As the GM, I fiendishly decided that this choice, which was really made on a whim, was actually an unconscious premonition which would lead our favorite Time Lady to the time and place where the Vishklars' Three Mothers were hatching a sinister plot to bring about their own rebirth and Rome’s transition into the next Carcosa. 

Fortunately for everybody in Rome, Penelope was able to save the day (and history as we know it after 86 AD) with her usual flair. This adventure involved quite a lot of historical lore about the cult of Cybele, the Magna Mater (actually a red herring); in case you were wondering, its title comes from a famous litany spoken in one of HP Lovecraft’s early horror tales (but is actually an authentic quote from an ancient author, as I learned during my research phase).

And now… we’re taking a break, with Lady Penelope finally returning to Avalon with her new protégé. We’ll return in a few months, with a new miniseries of adventures in time and space!

The Ashworth Chronicles, episode 4

 Episode 4: The Invisible City

Yemen, 1884. Lord Ulysses Ashworth leads an expedition through the Rub-al Khali desert, in search of the fabled City of Irem, the Atlantis of the Sands – unaware that he is walking into a trap designed to seal the fate of the Ashworth bloodline. A tale of illusions and whispers, of lost cities and broken dreams, featuring Arthur Rimbaud, cursed poet and historical enigma.

This episode mixed typical Haggardian (Haggardesque?) elements with an almost poetic take on the lore regarding the fabled lost city of Iram / Irem  of the Pillars; one of its most important elements was the elusive character of Arthur Rimbaud - a former poet prodigy turned into a strangely soulless merchant adventurer, completely unaware of his future literary glory. From a GMing perspective, he was a very tricky character to portray - the taciturn, world-weary shadow of the enfant terrible he once had been - a bit like a WoD Changeling overcome by Banality.

With Penelope's neutralization of this fourth Vishklar machination, her mortal family's timeline seems safe from further historical disruptions... or are the nefarious nightmare entities about to up their game?  Stay tuned for the final two episodes of our miniseries!