Metegorgos Gives Us Her Milk

 Evey Lockhart's Ruinous Palace of the Metegorgos is a small Troika!/BX scenario of abject beauty that the author probably needed to write to cleanse the adorable positivity of her very own Very Pretty Paleozoic Pals setting away. It weighs on your soul, far out of proportion for a slim book of 29 pages. It should start with about two pages of trigger warnings, but really, if you're in doubt, just read the product description at Melsonian Arts Council and you'll know whether this is for you. DON'T play it with anyone without proper warning.

ALL OF THE ABOVE IS ALSO TO BE UNDERSTOOD AS TRIGGER WARNING FOR THIS REVIEW: BIRTH AND ASSOCIATED TRAUMAS. ABJECTIFICATION OF WOMEN.

NAMEDROPS: JULIA KRISTEVA, JACQUES LACAN

Metegorgos is a very small dungeon crawl where the characters enter the decaying palace of a queen who has been cursed ages ago by several gods envious of her power. Mete was not only known for her fertility, but also for her wise politics, and so the gods had to destroy her. Now she's the very image of abject feminity, she and her offspring having been turned into a carricature of pretty much every misogynistic taboo surrounding fertility and menstruation.Her children are sad zombies shuffling through the woods in search of love, or giant flying cholera bacteria living in a shithole and feeding on her yellowish milk. It's really quite disgusting and permeated by a deep sadness about what Mete has been turned into by those fucking patriarchic asshole gods. The whole book engages in that way with politics that really only fantasy occassionally manages to do, peeling the mythology back by taking it for real, laying bare its political heart. How does it look like if women are literally turned into something monstrous to deny them power? How sick is that? And even if the characters want and manage to lift the curse, be sure that Lockhart has another twist of the knife in store with the druidic aftermath.

As this is a Troika! scenario (though with added BX stats), the text is evocative, sometimes mystifying and will yield several layers of meaning on close reading. Its short length is deceptice. Make sure to read "The Truth" (pp23) and then re-read the scenario if you're interested in them. If you just want to run a weird and disturbing 5 room dungeon, you don't need it, though.