Here's How My Traumatized Occult Detective's Case is Going So Far

TRIGGER WARNING: Dark setting, murder, scary supernatural stuff

Achille Kickx was the product of a happy marriage between two fairly prosperous shopkeepers. They sent him to university with a snappy wardrobe perfect for a Serious Young Man who was dead set on being a journalist.

He landed a junior reporter role at one of the more reputable papers in town. With his diligence, probity and discriminating mind, he seemed poised to be one of the major narrators of the city's life.

Except here's the hitch: This place resembles Victorian London, but it's not. This is an unnerving parallel-dimension version called Mónatstone, which—along with all the standard muck and misery of a rapidly industrializing 19th Century city—absorbs the sinister narrative goo of Ghostlight, an eldritch emanation from this world's moon that bathes the city at night, fomenting otherworldly madness and grotesque murders.

While investigating some perplexing events on the crime beat, he became convinced there was something slippery, nameless, well-organized and deeply evil behind the murders. That's when he was burned while tracing down a lead. Imagine a melted candle with slit eyes and a vague downturned parenthesis of a mouth. That's Achille as we find him at the adventure's outset.

He knew it wasn't physical flame that had done this to him; his attempts to explore in print the nature of his near-immolation after recovering in the hospital earned him only a dismissal from the paper—complete with a cover-up story developed at the behest of the paper's senior editors.

Now he works for a small-circulation sensationalist rag under a pseudonym, where he submits stories via post or by leaving his editors clues that help them find his drafts: His extreme self-consciousness about his appearance and ruined reputation means he spends most of his time skulking about in face bandages, and that it's easier for him to do most of his work at night—where Ghostlight exacerbates the physical and emotional fallout of his injury. He has to take prodigious notes, as he often falls into fugue states during an investigation and will wind up in another part of town with no idea how he came to be there. Luckily, he still retains his knack for detailed notekeeping. He is not so much brave as he is obsessive and is prone to fits of rage in addition to memory loss.

As the story opens, he sees police gathering behind a popular theater, rousting street urchins and inspecting one of their slain fellow-travelers—Elijah, who was a part-time pamphleteer and crier for the theater, and a sex worker. Achille is riveted by the scene, suspecting deeply that this may be related to the events he investigated when he still had a daylight face. The matter is further complicated by the fact that the local coppers don't like having him around. He'll have to focus the tatters of his psyche to unearth the true cause of this gruesome act—all under Ghostlight and with no help from anybody.

You can listen to Achilles' first few case journal entries here, along with some thoughts I had on this genre of TTRPG and the roleplaying game industry.

ON THE TUBES: It gladdened my heart to see Aussie boardgame streamers Nerds of the West take a deep dive into the vermouth-tinged waters of 60 Second Cocktail, a fast-moving bluffing/push your luck game developed by my excellent pal in Perth, Noisy Andrew. Looks like they also expanded the theme into some cocktail demos if you're looking for some new recipes to try. Belly up to the bar, kids.

ON THE BLOG: I got several pages into the setup of Thunderbolt Apache Leader—a highly detailed solo wargame—before being flummoxed by the step where you spend your limited pool of points to arm the squadron. I riff on the grim comedy of my vat-cloned pilots and what I like about my experience so far on the Breakup Gaming Society blog. Head on over, we'll drop a few payloads, have a few laughs...

IN THE GLASS: In case you were wondering how my three-day liquor experiment turned out, in which I let a cinnamon stick and an arbol chile sit in 6 oz. of Tin Cup Whiskey: It was revelatory. Hot as hell. Alive with unmediated flavor. It felt like the endpoint of a pilgrimage that started years ago with Fireball and ended in apotheosis.

I'm never buying cinnamon-flavored whiskey off the shelf again. Neither should you. This was not hard at all. (And thanks to TikTok's @kendra.forrest)

Until next time, may you fight long and well.

N