Appendix February 2026
Evil: a study of lost techniques (Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh)
I stumbled across this title while trying to look up another book's citation (Artaud and the Gnostic Drama by [not-that-Jane-Goodall] Jane Goodall) for a friend. I almost didn't pick it up, but I could feel the heat in my head when I paused over it. That is almost always a sign that the book contains something for me. Sometimes that is just a couple of pages of writing, but this whole little book flashes.
More than anything else, this is a book about the remainder, the pieces that are left behind when the sweeping narratives of revolution and redemption have exhausted themselves. Thematically and ethically, this book invites me to revisit my creative foundations.
The fifty figures of evil contain characters and places and languages and more that are provocative. Reading through these collections, the degree to which they arrest my attention forms a heat map of possible creative and critical encounters I want to struggle with and through. If I am bold, perhaps these are themselves the playbooks of many little games.
This book is also surprisingly game-able. Fifty figures, eight elements each, makes for a very roll-able collection of sparks (d100 + d8). Mohaghegh's libraries of evil are well drawn, containing occupants and tomes ready for exploration. Whether through preparation or improvisation, this section is full of prompts for play.
Reading this has also driven home that I can't do the creative work that I need to do without centering my eccentric spiritual practice. It is simply too central to my life. Sitting with this book and opening work with a grimoire spirit solidified the shape of the project I am working and catalyzed my writing toward an autobiographically inflected point crawl filled with meaning-full fantastical elements linked by exploration- and experimentation-forward play.
It is a peculiar place to grow from, not one that I envision sitting well in the small indie RPG industry-that-sometimes-masquerades-as-community. To be honest, though, after watching so many folks cape in distasteful ways for Jay Dragon after the Rascal article regarding her treatment of her freelancers for Yazeba's Bed and Breakfast and reading about the state of the current OSR scene, it seems to me like maybe I want some distance from that industry anyway.