Top Ten Books for High Weirdness in Your Campaign

by Kenneth Hite

"I couldn't live a week without a private library."

-- H.P. Lovecraft

When adding High Weirdness to your campaign, it certainly helps to have decades
of experience reading the stuff and three enormous bookcases full of obscura and
eliptony at your back, as I do. My players know that nothing they do and nowhere
they run is safe from some obscure reference I pulled out of a French occultist's
manual written under the influence of absinthe and poverty in 1895. But what, I hear
you cry, is the GM without such vast stores of creepy and disturbing knowledge to
do? Allow the players respite? Run a (brrr) conventional game? It just doesn't bear
thinking about.

That's why I've tried to boil all of that down into ten books, which will give you, the
harried GM, a basic grounding in Weird Stuff To Spring On People Who Thought This
Was Just GURPS Time Travel. All these books are available: not only have I
personally read, bought and used them (no nighted legendary tomes of lore that
unfortunately all disappeared in 1906 here), but they're all still in print (according to
amazon.com). You can print out this column, march down to your local Borders, and
with publisher and ISBN (and a few bucks) you can make this Library Of Ancient
Wisdom your own. Follow the bibliographies in the books you use to other sources.
Speaking of bibliographies, you may notice that some of these books appear in the
bibliographies of GURPS Illuminati, GURPS Warehouse 23, and/or GURPS Places of
Mystery. (Not to mention, ahem, the brilliant and helpful bibliographies of Secret
Societies and Major Arcana, for Chaosium's Nephilim: Occult Roleplaying.) This only
goes to show that the authors of those tomes knew a thing or two about their jobs:
to present the wonderland of the odd and eldritch in RPG terms. To help you with
that same job, here's ten starters.

"There are few things more dull than a criticism which maintains that a thesis is
untrue, and cannot understand that it is decorative."
-- A.E. Waite, The Pictorial Key To The Tarot

The Books of Charles Fort, by Charles Fort (Dover, ISBN 0486230945) Charles Fort
collected what he called "damned facts"; facts that science refused to acknowledge;
rains of frogs, eclipses that shouldn't happen, sheep-mutilating werewolves and
disappearing Ambroses. He had several mutually contradictory theories to explain
them ("I think we're fished for" is perhaps my favorite) and wrote in a jaunty, wry,
telegraphic style that could define "inimitable." Indispensible for the well-read
UFOlogist or lover of the bizarre, this omnibus volume is indexed by place, date, and
type of incident ("Periwinkles, fall of"). The rain of carp should be your players' first
clue that Something Is Not Going The Way It Ought. Fort is vast, he contains
multitudes.

Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco (Ballantine, ISBN 0345368754) Even if you

can't handle the novel's dense prose style (I love it, but then by Eco's definition, I'm
a lunatic), the imaginary conspiracy woven by the three protagonists is a GM's
model of how to take anything (including a laundry list) and turn it into Clues
Pointing To Something Vastly Greater. Allusions, connections, two explanations for
everything, and the Templars, too. This is How To Do It.

The Magician's Companion, by Bill Whitcomb (Llewellyn, ISBN 0875428681) This is a

handy guide to a dozen-plus mystical traditions organized numerically from dualities
(Yin and Yang) to, er, 91-ities (the Enochian calls of John Dee and the Golden
Dawn). There's also simple, neutral, easy-to-pick-up stuff on alchemy, talismans,
magic squares, herbalism, magickal mineralogy, and lots of other handy things. This
is great for tying magickal systems into numerical models -- like, say, a 3d6 bell
curve. It's also great as a primer for all those traditions (like Sufi latifah or the
Alexandrian decans) that haven't made it to the new age shelves just yet.

The Black Arts, by Richard Cavendish (Perigee, ISBN 0399500359) This text gives a
great, easy-to-understand introduction to the history and practice of your basic
sorcerous arts from the theories of correspondences to numerology to kabbalah to
alchemy to ritual magic. Plenty of anecdotes to sprinkle into your campaign as
"secret history," plenty of cool dress-up and local color for the black magician bad
guys (or the grey or white magician good guys, come to that). Probably the best
"Western magic for dummies" available without getting into grimy specifics.

Holy Blood, Holy Grail, by Michael Baigent, Henry Lincoln, and Richard Leigh (Dell,
ISBN 0440136482) This book is an instructive example of how combining secret
history, obscure connections, and wild-ass guesswork presented with a straight
face can build millennia of excellent game background. Baigent and Co. tie the
Templars, the Masons, Joan of Arc, Jesus, the Holy Grail, and the Rosicrucians
together wonderfully: none of their links are original but the thesis becomes a
mosaic greater than the sum of its parts. With just a little practice, you can do the
same thing with any theme in your own campaign, or tie it into this one.

Unexplained!, by Jerome Clark (Visible Ink, ISBN 0810394367) Need a quick

rundown on crop circles? Area 51? Reptile Men? Just pull this baby off the shelf:
you'll get a recap of the basic legend, the best known anecdotes (which can easily
be filed clean of serial numbers and used in your own campaign: "You've got to help
me, sirs... For the last week I've been stalked by a hideous man with wings like a
moth!"), a bibliography of keen references, and at least two theories to explain
whatever it is. Clark is best on cryptozoology (you know, Loch Ness and yeti and
all), UFOs, and Forteana (named for our boy Fort, five paragraphs up), but it's a
model of the quick, reliable, truly helpful reference for the sort of thing Britannica
unjustly ignores.

Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries, by Colin Wilson with Damon Wilson

(NTC/Contemporary, ISBN 0809245248) Like Clark, but a trifle more idiosyncratic:
Wilson's book covers stuff like perpetual motion and the Man in the Iron Mask that
Clark misses. More good ideas, especially for the time-travelling or historical
campaign. Wilson's masterwork The Occult is out of print, apparently, although it's
very easy to find used; it's more of a historical-thematic survey of all kinds of
things, tied into Wilson's peculiar theories about human development and
psychology and whatnot. Great stuff for GURPS Atomic Horror style madmen to
spout, anyway.

Lost Cities of North & Central America, by David Hatcher Childress (Adventures
Unlimited Press, ISBN 0932813097) This is only one in Childress' Lost Cities series:
the others are Africa & Arabia; Atlantis, Ancient Europe & the Mediterranean; South
America; Ancient Lemuria & the Pacific; and China, Central Asia & India. This is raw
gaming material: Childress writes about all the GURPS Places of Mystery type stuff
plus scads more things Phil and Alison just couldn't fit in. Travel narratives give local
color and travel detail for the careful GM, cool photos and sketchy maps make primo
handouts, and Childress is ready with a zillion crazy theories for every single stone
standing on end or on another stone every bloody where in the world. You simply
can't beat it.

The Sirius Mystery, by Robert K.G. Temple (Inner Traditions International, ISBN
0892811633) If you gotta have ancient astronauts, these are the ancient astronauts
to have. Temple's thesis goes into Sumerian-Egyptian puns, Robert Graves' Greek
Myths (Robert Graves, always your sign of quality strangeness fun) and Central
African anthropology to give us a story of the fish-men from Sirius and their plans
for humanity. This will give you ammo for years of pyramid fun, and a really whacked
tie-in to GURPS Voodoo campaigns courtesy of Larry Niven and Steven Barnes.

Passport to Magonia, by Jacques Vallee (NTC/Contemporary, ISBN 0809237962)

UFOs? They're fairies. Or vice versa. That's Vallee's thesis, and a fun one it is. This
book serves as a great repository of both UFO and fairy lore, and lets you play
deeply disturbing "changeup" games of GURPS Black Ops or GURPS Celtic Myth. If
you prefer your UFOlogy straight up from Zeta Reticuli, you deserve to take a gander
at Vallee's trilogy Dimensions, Revelations, and Confrontations, which looks at the
UFO stories with a critical, though not too skeptical, eye. >From Vallee, it's just a
hop and a jump to John Keel, who's as nutty as a California trail mix, and rather
more fun.

"I do not think that there is a pathology of the occult dedications, but about their
extravagances no one can question, and it is not less difficult than thankless to act
as a moderator regarding them."
-- A.E. Waite, The Pictorial Key To The Tarot

Which is a fancy way of saying that restricting this list to ten titles only leaves a
whole lot of great, though less universally accessible, stuff off. With that in mind,
here's a dozen more honorable mentions. These have more restrictive categories to
them, look into them if you plan on using that specific stuff yourself. Fair warning:
not all of these are necessarily in print, so I've just given titles and authors. Nor are
they all for the faint of heart and weak of mind. (Even the debunkers on this list give
plenty of gameable details on the kinds of things only silly people want gameable
details about, for example.) But all will repay close study with grimaces and slow
head shakings by your players.

Best Book on the Hollow Earth: Walter Kafton-Minkel, Subterranean Worlds

Best Unified Field Theory Of It All: William Bramley, The Gods Of Eden

Best Beginner's Book Not Actually For Beginners: Aleister Crowley, Magick In Theory
And Practice
Best Frothing Paranoid Hitler-And-The-Occult Tome: Peter Levenda, Unholy
Alliance

Best Interdisciplinary Book On The Poles (And Best Subtitle): Joscelyn Godwin,
Arktos: The Polar Myth In Science, Symbolism, And Nazi Survival

Best Interdisciplinary Book On Other Things That Stick Up: Peter Tompkins, The
Magic of Obelisks

Best Interdisciplinary Book On Lines Between Such Things: John Michell, The View
From Atlantis

Best Book On This Stuff By A Real Historian: Frances Yates, The Rosicrucian
Enlightenment

Best Atlas Of This Stuff: Francis Hitching, The Mysterious World: The Atlas of the
Unexplained

Best Patient Debunking Of UFOs: Curtis Peebles, Watch The Skies!

Best Patient Debunking Of Lost Continents: L. Sprague De Camp, Lost Continents

Best Collection Of Freaky-Cool, But Totally Unconfirmable, Anecdotes Louis

Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians

"I know also that after long dealing with doubtful doctrine or with difficult research it
is always refreshing, in the domain of this [occult] art, to meet with what is
obviously of fraud or at least of complete unreason."
-- A.E. Waite, The Pictorial Key To The Tarot

Go thou and refresh thyself and thy campaign likewise.

Past Columns

Article publication date: June 12, 1998

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