The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.90: The Eye of Azathoth

Last night the Silver Key opened a portal within my dreams to the vast, empty reaches of infinite space - and through those star-strawn gulfs of endless night I found myself carried on the back of a great scaly beast: a thing with colossal bat-like wings and a hideous equine head.

As the monstrous beast flew through those unknown gulfs of night, ever onwards towards a strangely pulsing beacon millions of light-years distant, I became aware of the frightful sound of discordant piping - a sound with no discernable origin, but which filled me with an unnameable dread regarding the source of that far-distant luminescence.

As the bat-winged thing drew nearer to the sinister radiance of that ill-omened star, the atonal piping became louder and yet more wild; in that moment I intuited something of the nameless horror which lurked behind that deafening, tumultous symphony from unformed spheres: these were the cacaphonic strains and disharmonious chords of entropic dissolution - the disorderly resonance, echoing through time since the moment of the universe’ inception, of a terminal, uncreated and formless chaos which gnaws blindly, hungrily and eternally at the nucleus of reality.

Understanding then the destination toward which I was being carried, I prefered instead to jump from from off the back of the great flapping thing which had borne me so far, to fall endlessly through the limitless chasms of space, where I was tossed and buffetted by the star winds and tachyon currents which flow through those infinite expanses, until blackness finally took me...

This morning I found hanging around my neck this strange and unsettling amulet, comprised of some bronze-like extratelluric alloy. The tinnitus in my right ear (which I have suffered from periodically for the better part of a decade) has also returned; somewhere beneath that internal hiss of white noise, I am certain I can hear the remnant refrain of a mad piping - a sound which, one might imagine, could only be produced by some monstrous flautist which writhes mindlessly and shapelessly within unlighted and undimensioned abysses at the centre of all creation.

The Lovecaftian Thing a Day (2018) No.89: Shadows Over Normandie Storage Solution

More gaming accessories today, by way of this rather attractive (and compact) storage box, which holds all of the dice, counters and game elements for Shadows Over Normandie - a gorgeously produced WWII wargame in which the allies employ occult technologies to combat the apocalyptic plans of Cthulhu mythos-worshipping Nazi cultists. You can view further archive footage of the historic events depicted in the game here. Nice.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.88: Keeping Providence Weird

Another brief slice of NecronomiCon nonsense today, courtesy of Lovecraft Arts and Sciences - who have been keeping Providence Weird since 2013!

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.87: The Call of Cthulhu 10th Anniversary Programme

The HPLHS’ propensity for slightly tongue-in-cherk verisimilitude is certainly not absent from this in-universe brochure celebrating the 10th anniversary of the ‘1927’ release of The Call of Cthulhu motion picture. There is also something strangely hauntological (not to say melancholic) about it which, I suspect, beckons to the imagination of many a Lovecaft fan: for all his failings, we like to speculate about what might have been in that imagined past-future in which Lovecraft not only found fame and fortune, but did so on the back of a cinematic adaptation of what is today probably his best known work

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.86: Illustro Obscurum Collection II by Michael Bukowski

Illustro Obscurum Collection II is, as I understand it, part of Michael Bukowski’s attempt to illustrate Lovecraft’s monsters in their entirety. Bukowski has not only brought to shrieking, horrific life such classic Lovecaftian teratomas as Shoggoths, Elder Things and the Dunwich Horror, but has also revealed the liveliest awfulness of the (quite literally) indescribable beings to which Lovecraft alluded in the vaguest of terms (the ‘white polypous thing’ from The Call of Cthulhu, or the ‘Black winged thing’ mentioned in an entry in Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book). Unfortunately both this and volume I of the collected Illustro Obscurum are currently out of print (being published in very limited, handcrafted editions), but you can find many examples of Michael Bukowski’s wonderful art at his Yog-Blogsoth site here.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.85: ‘Alhazred Said It...’

A sentiment which, I think, all right-minded people must surely agree on.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.84: More Postcards from Providence

Memories of times past: a random selection of postcards and flyers acquired at the last NecronomiCon. I have quite a bit of this kind of ephemera, and may consider putting it all in some kind of scrapbook in the future...

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.83: Lovecraftian/NecronomiCon Bookmarks

More of my haul from NecronomiCon 2017: bookmarks kindly provided by Scott R Jones of Martian Migraine Press, and Scott Dorward, Paul Fricker and Matthew Sanderson of The Good Friends of Jackson Elias podcast. I can’t recall as to whether any of Scott’s books or the Good Friends have featured previously on The Lovecraftian Thing a Day - but if that is nit the case it will be remedied in the coming weeks. Currently The Good Friends bookmark rests in my copy of Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country, and Scott’s ‘Keeping It R’lyeh’ bookmark is being used - appropriately - as a placeholder for Thomas Vincente’s Lovecraftian occult tome The Faceless God.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.82: Elder Sign Protective Ward

There are some words best left unspoken - and some books best left unread.

To those ends, a cabal of sorcerers (located somewhere in Eastern Europe) forged for me this bronze Elder Sign protective ward. By its power are prying eyes averted from the monstrous secrets contained between the covers of my notebook - secrets bequethed to me through dealings with those Nameless Powers and Potentates which gnaw mindlessly upon the barrier between worlds, or otherwise wrested from the depths of those nighted, dimensionless abysses which lurk beyond the realm of the visible...

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.81: Electric Wizard, ‘Witchcult Today’

A few years back (2013,to be precise), I had the good fortune to be present at a conference organised by James Machin entitlef The Weird: Fugitive Fictions/Hybrid Genres. Whilst there I listened to a fascinating paper on drone metal, weird fiction, and religion, which in turn introduced me to the very wonderful back catalogue of Dunsanian drone metal band, Bong.

More recently I discovered Electric Wizard; whilst apparently categorised as ‘doom metal’ rather than drone, Electric Wizard seem to fall into stylisticly similar category to that of Bong (at least to my untrained ears), trading in a comparable aural commodity by way of grinding, heavy, repetitive riffs and broadly related (though not overlapping) themes; with regard to the latter, whilst Bong tend to focus on spacey Dunsanian weird cosmicism, Electric Wizard is more your 1970s psychedelic folk horror by way of The Devil Rides Out.

In any case, Electric Wizard’s Witchcult Today is the focus of today’s Lovecraftian Thing. Whilst they certainly don’t qualify as an explicitly ‘Lovecraftian’ band, there is definitely a Lovecraft vibe to Electric Wizard’s musical stylings, which to me feel like a lost soundtrack to Roger Corman’s 1970s adaptation of The Dunwich Horror - with regard to which, Witchcult Today does contain a very fine track entitled ‘Dunwich’.

Nice.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.80: Cthulhu Tales

Cthulhu Tales is a recently-released storytelling game by Cubicle 9 which I backed on Kickstarter some time ago. Whilst the box cover isn’t especially appealing from the standpoint of its visual aesthetics, the internal components are rather nice, including a large number of attractive, full-colour storytelling cards depicting themes and scenes of Lovecraftian horror. Whilst the game rules as they stand aren’t immediately solitaire friendly, I could envisage Cthulhu Tales being adapted and repurposed as a means of constructing randomised solitaire scenarios for something like the Call of Cthulhu rpg - so for now this one is going into my conceptual toolbox, with a view to developing it further for use with my speculative Lovecraftian solitaire rpg.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.79: Horrid Little Idol

Less than an inch in height, this tiny idol - depicting in carven wood some nameless horror from the Elder Time - was discovered on my doorstep earlier in the day, wrapped in a thin sheet of pale yellow tissue paper inscribed with curious symbols. Recognising the monstrous provenance of those glyphs, I quickly ensconced the horrid little idol in a dusty corner of my cabinet of curiousities - where, I hope, its baleful influence will remain bound (at least for the forseeable future) by multifarious sigils of warding and apotropaic devices of diverse kinds.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.78: Bronze Squid

I discovered a bunch of tiny bronze squid charms on ebay going for a couple of quid last week, which turned up at the weeked; not Lovecraftian in and of themselves - but I’m using one of them (attached to a bit of bronze chain) as a bookmark as I try to ‘Lovecraftify’ my olive Midori traveler’s notebook by way of adding various weird accoutrements to it.

Nice.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.77: Dagon (in memoriam of Carl T. Ford)

Dagon made a previous appearance in 2016s Lovecraftian Thing a Day, but with the sad passing of Carl T. Ford - Dagon’s creator, publisher and editor - towards the end of 2017, it seems appropriate once more to recognise the significance of this Lovecaftian ‘zine one more time (with different issues on display to those used in the 2016 post).

I bought what I now believe to be the very first issue of Dagon (which, sadly, I no longer possess) during a visit to the original Games Workshop in Dalling Road, Hammersmith, sometime between  1983-84; at that point it was principally dedicated to the Call of Cthulhu rpg. However, by the mid-1980s, Dagon had expanded its remit to focus increasingly on Lovecraftian fiction whilst also significantly upping the ante when it came to production values, with glossy card frontcovers showcasing some of the best in then-current Lovecraftian art; the interiors were also increasingly lavised with (usually) high-end art, and Dagon attracted contributions by notable genre writers such as Brian Lumley, Ramsey Campbell, T.E.D Klein, and Thomas Ligotti. I became a regular purchaser of Dagon around this time when, during my first year at University in 1987, I discovered the T.E.D. Klein 18-19 double issue at Games Workshop in Leeds (the connection between the weird fiction renaissance and role-playing games is, indeed, a significant one which I hope to comment on at a later date). Dagon ceased publication three years later with issue 27.

I can’t overemphasise how significant Dagon was to me in terms of my personal journey of discovery of the UK Lovecraftian/Weird Fiction scene during this period - a time when things Lovecaft-related were very sparse on the ground indeed (especially where mainstream bookshops and publshing were concerned); were it not for Dagon (and later, Stephen Jones’ annual Best New Horror anthology), I would not have become aware of writers like Wagner, Ligotti or Klein - or homegrown talent such as D.F. Lewis and Mark Samuels - until much later.

Equally important was the fact that specialist bookshops and mail-order sellers such as The House on the Borderland, The Fantasy Centre, and Kadath Press were also advertised their wares in the zine’s pages, opening up multiple opportunities for purchasing otherwise-unavailable small press publications (although I have to apolgise to Facebook friends Mick Lyons of Kadath Press and Dave Brzeski of The House on the Borderland retrospectively, for not making more use of their services - The Fantasy Centre tended to be my principle port of call during regular family visits to London back in the day). Now that we seem to be reaching peak Cthulhu in terms of the vast number of books and anthologies currently available - many of which are immediately downloadable - I suspect that new fans of Lovecaftian fiction will have difficulty undersanding what it was like in those glorious pre-internet days!

In any case, thank you Carl T. Ford for all your efforts in the early days of the UK resurgence of all things Lovecraftian. Wherever you are now, I hope you rest easy.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.76: ‘Sticks’ by Dave Carson

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, this is a signed print by Dave Carson, illustrating Karl Edward Wagner’s British Fantasy Award-winning short story of Lovecraftian horror, ‘Sticks’ (the story itself was inspired by the strange, stick-like motifs which appear in some of the work of Weird Tales illustrator Lee Brown Coye, who also provided the covers for some of Arkham House’s early Lovecraft collections).

I seem to recall picking this up in the late 1990s from Arkham - a shop in Brighton, UK, which used to specialise in weird and Lovecaftian art and ephemera - when Dave Carson had a small exhibition on there, but I’m not entirely certain of this.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.75: Karl Edward Wagner’s ‘Why Not You Or I?’

Karl Edward Wagner remains one of the unappreciated greats of moden weird fiction - he was certainly doing the bleakly nihilistic noirish horror thing decades before Laird Barron came on the scene. I first encountered Wagner in this edition of Dagon, with an amazing portrait of Wagner by Jeffrey Salmon gracing its cover:

Ahead of the curve, in the UK Dagon was the pre-internet entrypoint into what was then at the cutting edge of the literary weird (in its pages I first encountered Ligotti, Mark Samuels, D.F. Lewis, and a host of others). Sadly, last year Carl T. Ford, editor and publisher of Dagon, passed away.

As a result of Dagon, I sought out Wagner’s work, and managed to pick up a signed copy of Why Not You and I? during a visit ot Peterborough’s specialist bookshop ‘The House on the Borderlands’ at some point in the early 1990s:

Whilst none of Wagner’s tales collected therein are explicitly Lovecraftian, the shadow of the Lovecraft circle via Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber hangs heavy over them; indeed, both Howard and Leiber inspired what perhaps became Wagner’s best known creation, Kane the Mystic Swordsman (who makes a brief appearance in ‘Lacunae’ - probably one of the best contributions to Why Not You and I?); Howardian melancholia also informs ‘The Last Wolf’ - my personal favourite from this volume (a similar melacholia inhabits my best-loved piece of Wagner’s writing, ‘At First Just Ghostly’ - a fragment of a larger, unfinished work, which was publshed posthumously).

Other of Wagner’s best work was informed by the pre-Lovecraft weird tradition, with ‘The River of Night’s Dreaming’ being an early addition to the now burdgeoning post-Chambers ‘King in Yellow’ literary mythology; the shade of Machen hangs over ‘.220 Swift’; sadly none of these appear in Why Not You and I?; neither does ‘Sticks’, Wagner’s British Fantasy Award-winning contribution to the Cthulhu mythos (and which supposedly inspired elements of both The Blair Witch Project and the first season of True Detective). All the more reason, then, to search out Wagner’s writing and appreciate a somewhat-forgotten master of the modern genre.

The Lovecaftian Thing a Day (2018) No.74: Lovecraft Country

I’ve finally started reading Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country (a paperback edition of which I picked up at Lovecaft Arts and Sciences in Providence last year). I have to say so far it is excellent. The book details a series of interlinked narratives surrounding African-American army veteran Atticus Turner’s quest to find his missing father: a phantasmagoric road-trip through 50s America on the cusp of the civil rights movement, in which the Lovecaftian horrors lurking at the edges of the text are quickly overshadowed by the very real horror of the casually-violent racism which is both a constant and the norm in the everyday lives of the protaganists.

Salient to the present moment in turning Lovecraftian tropes against themselves to disturb and unsettle in a manner both different and more challenging than usually encountered in the genre.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.73: ‘That Which Dwells Below’

Last night, weighted down by the Silver Key, I found myself sinking into the black, oneiric depths of a vast and restless ocean.

Soon after a webbed and scaly hand took mine, dragging me further downwards into that watery blackness, until at last it was was illumined by a sickly green light: a spectral glow extruded by colossal structures resting on the ocean floor - great edifices comprised of some geenish phosphorescent mineral, and shaped according to an alien design of unclean angles and abnormal geometries. Amidst these gargantuan assemblages, and built into the side of a mountainous block of ancient volcanic rock, there stood a vast, slab-like portal - the sight of which filled with a feeling of inexplicable dread as to what might lie within...

Soon after, my companion - whose dark and unnatural shape I could barely discern as it led me away from that subaqueous zone of lurking horror towards the ocean’s surface - placed around my neck a curious amulet of roughly-hewn jade; it remains around my neck still - drawn by some unknowable means by my dreaming consciousness back into the waking world.

Yet before I awakened from that phantasmagoric realm of oceanic dreams, I enquired of my unseen amphibious companion what the strangely tentacular device carved upon the curious talisman might represent. The nameless thing responded in a gutteral, croaking voice with four words only: ‘That Which Dwells Below’.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.72: Ire of the Void

Today’s offering is Ire of the Void: an unusual novella/gaming combo for Fantasy Flight Games’ Arkham Horror: The Card Game. The core conceit here is to offer a Cthulhu mythos novella set in the Arkham Horror universe, whilst providing a set of cards which allow players to adopt the persona of the book’s central character when playing the game. In theory ths is a great idea, offering a more immersive experience within the world of Arkham Horror by way of a return to its literary roots.

Despite excellent production values (hardcover, with some lovely colour plates providing additional, in-universe backstory), the novella is workmanlike and lacklustre, failing to evoke anything remotely akin to cosmic dread; indeed, Ire of the Void is, perhaps, the least Lovecraftian thing I have ever read - despite its intriguing Lovecraftian premise (a disgraced Miskatonic University astronomer investigates the hyperdimensional properties of Arkham’s architecture in the company of Einstein’s protege).

The novella’s main character is, however, in possession of a magnificent beard (ably illustrated on the front cover and player cards), so I suppose there is that.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.71: English Heretic Visitors Guides: Passport to the Qliphoth

English Heretic’s Visitors Guides:Your Passport to the Qliphopth appeared in my postbox this morning - a reissue of a CD which I believe was first released in the mid-2000s. Whilst initially not explicitly Lovecraftian, the snaking tentacles on the cover - along with what I think is an image taken from one of only two explicitly Lovecraft-themed artworks produced by Austin Osman Spare - infer Lovecraft’s influence on this piece of experimental-occultural electronica; in addition to which, the following online sleeve notes locate the album's five tracks within those increasingly familiar intersections between Aleister Crowley, LAM, Kenneth Grant, and the UFO phenomenon - intersections to which Lovecraft’s work is (oc)culturally salient:

'In 1919, Aleister Crowley achieves rapport with an entity of extra-terrestrial intelligence, LAM, via an opium  laced vision, The Amalantrah Working. Close to death, he passes on a portrait of LAM to his acolyte Kenneth Grant. London 1949, Gerald Gardner and Grant attempt to bring down the power from alien sources on the site later occupied by Centre Point. In 1980, Rendlesham, Suffolk, becomes a Centre Of Pestilence prophesised by mediums in Grant's occult lodge of the late 1950s. Is the epidemic of alien visitations following the dropping of the Atomic bomb in August 1945 due to a cataclysmic upheaval in our cosmic consciousness... are these entities really energy spectres, dakinis and distant cousins of Lovecraft's Outer Ones? In a mind expanding voyage through England's Qliphoth, we are proud to present a series of Visitor's Guides: audio recordings and aural assays, the radioactive samples of researches at the cold war citadel of Orford Ness, the site of the suspected UFO crash landing at Rendlesham, the ruins of Dunwich, a witch lair at Brundish, the carnal tunnels of Soho.’

I have to say that, after listening to it, I was rather unsettled to discover that four of the tracks from Your Passport to the Qliphoth were recorded at sites which I had myself visited in the mid-to-late 2000s - as part of my own speculative investigations into the strange entanglements between the eerie Suffolk landscape (and some of the weird Lovecraftesque folklore which clusters around Orford Ness), contemporary ufology, and Lovecraftian esotericism...

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.70: Elder Sign Dice Cup (Redux)

A question which I imagine is at the forefront of many people’s minds these days is ‘why have just one Elder Sign dice cup when you can have two?’. Indeed, such a question becomes apposite in face of the fact that Q Workshop have now released a gorgeous new Elder Sign dice cup to complement the glow-in-the-dark one they produced a few years back. As you can see below, in the new design, the Elder Sign itself is chased in gold, and surrounded by a fetching green tentacular motif:

Nice.

Having received the item yesterday, I decided to take the dice cup out for a test run during this evening’s session of Fantasy Flight Games’ Mansions of Madness - which I was within a whisper of winning having disrupted the cultbritual, only to have a Priest of Dagon blast me with a bolt of eldritch energy, thus deducting my final hit point and leaving me a smoking a withered husk on the rooftop of the Vanderbilt Mansion. That said, I had just stolen the mortal remains of his wife, so I suppose I deserved it...

In any case, I can now confirm that the new Q Workshop Elder Sign dice cup is, indeed, both functional and demonstrably effective in relation to its principle task - namely that of a receptacle to be used in the randomising (via vigourous shaking) and rolling of dice results.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.69: Guest Thing No.1 - ‘Make Lovecraft Not Warcraft’ T-Shirt

Stylishly modelled by Phil Hine - and jointly provided by Maria Strutz and Phil - this ‘Make Lovecaft Not Warcaft’ t-shirt is not only this year’s first Guest Thing, but provides us with a sentiment which, in these difficult times, I think we can all agree upon.

I’m on the lookout for other Guest Things, so leave a comment here or pm me on Facebook if you have an item you would like to see showcased on the wildly popular (?) Lovecraftian Thing a Day!

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.68: More NecronomiCon Ephemera

Today’s offering is a free local paper advertising NecronomiCon 2017 - memorable for the fact that I picked it up whilst visiting the Big Nazo workshop in Providence over the convention weekend. The Big Nazo Band have been, for me, a personal highlight of the previous two NecronomiCons: think sexed-up Lovecraft meets raucous bluesy pub-rock in Cthulhoid costumes. See above for a sample. Good times.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.67: NecronomiCon 2017 Programme Guide

Today we present a copy of the NecronomiCon 2017 freebie porgamme guide (there was also a separate commemorative convention book, which I’ll probably post at a later date). The programme guide lists the events that were scheduled for the convention, as well as hosting short biographies of the various smart, successful, talented - and let’s not forget strikingly-handsome - guests who graced the convention with their presence.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.66: Medieval Lovecraftian Tarot Cards

Apologies in advance for the poor photography. Above is a set of faux-medieval Lovecraftian tarot cards (actually a set of tarot-sized decorative cards, as the deck is only comprised of the major arcana, along with some additional cards which form triptych tableaus - such as the one above, depicting knights fighting a shoggoth) which I received as part of a Kickstarter campaign for the Cthulhu Crusades card game.

The cards are beautiful, so it is a shame that they weren’t produced as a complete tarot deck; my disappointment in this regard was compounded by the fact that the cards come in a wooden box with the famous Khem Caigan Necronomicon sigil on the cover. It seems that publishers and filmmakers are making regular use of this sigil - no doubt in the mistaken belief or cynical assumption that it signals something sinisterly Lovecaftian to their intended audience. What it actual signals (at least as far as I am concerned) is how limited, tiresome and unimaginative your understanding of what constitutes ‘the Cthulhu mythos’ is. Rant over.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.65: Elder Sign Paper Bag

Today I present a paper bag stamped with the Elder Sign.

What secrets might this simple receptacle have once concealed - secrets so monstrous in their intimation of forbidden, Outside things that their containment necessitated the employment of such a cryptic and terrible ward? We shall probably never know - and perhaps that is for the best...

So it is that within the provenance of things Lovecraftian, even the most everyday of objects may assume a sinister and disturbing aspect.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.64: Elder Sign Wax Seal Stamp

I picked up this Elder Sign wax seal stamp from Noadi, one of the many traders present at NecronomiCon 2017 (the stamps are also available to purchase here). The creativity and inventiveness shaping the visual and material cultures of the contemporary Lovecraftian milieu - and hence the manifold and monstrously beautiful forms through which Lovecraft’s worlds and influence continue to manifest - never fails to amaze me.

‘Whatever universal masterpiece of tomorrow may be wrought from phantasm or terror will owe its acceptance rather to a supreme workmanship than to a sympathetic theme...Radiant with beauty, the Cup of the Ptolemies was carven of onyx.’ H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature.

The Lovecaftian Thing a Day (2018) No.63: Eldritch Horror - Masks of Nyarlathotep Expansion

I’ve been on a bit of a gaming jag lately, so today’s entry is yet another post concerning the world of Lovecraftian boardgaming.

The recentlybreleased Masks of Nyarlathotep expansion for Fantasy Flight Games’ Eldritch Horror takes the classic world-spanning Call of Cthulhu rpg campaign and adapts it to the medium of hobby boardgaming; I haven’t had the chance to play it yet, so can’t yet comment on how successful Masks of Nyarlathotep is in this regard. Instead, I will offer some thoughts on the history of the Arkham Horror/Eldritch Horror intellectual properties, and their relationship to Lovecraft’s literary worlds and to the Call of Cthulhu rpg.

Produced by Chaosium in 1987, the first version of Arkham Horror incorporated key elements of their successful Call of Cthulhu rpg into a boardgame format. The second edition of Arkham Horror, which was and continues to be published by FFG, initially appeared as a licesnsed product - certainly intital printings of the game and its expansions contained a variant Call of Cthulhu logo on their covers. Whilst Arkham Horror remains in print to this day, no new products have appeared for the game since around 2011 - it having been largely supplanted by its successor, Eldritch Horror (which borrows much from the earlier game, whilst streamlining its mechanics and shifting the focus from the town of Arkham to a global stage).

Whilst Eldritch Horror also ports over various thematic elements and charcters from Arkham Horror - many of which, as previously noted, have their origin in the Call of Cthulhu rpg, Eldritch Horror no longer displays the Call of Cthulhu brand. With the addition of various other gaming systems (Elder Sign and Mansions of Madness) to their stable of Lovecraftian/Cthulhu mythos board and card games, FFG have rebranded the line as the Arkham Horror Files, again dropping any mention of explicit links to the Call of Cthulhu rpg. FFG have also been fairly open about the fact that the games which form part of the Arkham Horror Files take place in a more heroic, pulp-oriented alternative Cthulhu mythos timeline/world to that of Lovecraft’s original stories. In part, FFG have (quite rightly) made the decision to do this in order to create a game world which is more inclusive than Lovecraft’s highly racialised vision of the mythos.

Despite this apparent brand-separation, the recent Eldritch Horror expansion is of note for the very reason that it returns the boardgaming system to its rpg roots; in addition to which, the expansion box contains advertising material for the revamped 7th edition version of the Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign book (due out soon from Chaosium). Things, it seems, have come full circle. I have no idea what, if anything, might be the significance of the above (presumably it has something to do with licensing issues), but nonetheless it strikes me as a curious and interesting sideline in the history of Lovecraftian gaming.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.62: Happy Birthday Arthur Machen!

Today we celebrate Arthur Machen’s 155th birthday with Tartarus Press’ recent reissues of Machen’s autobiographical works: Far Off Things, Things Near and Far (both in one volume), and The London Adventure. I have these in earlier editions from (I think) the late 1920s/early 1930s, as well as the limited, numbered editions produced by Three Imposters - but given their championing of Machen’s work over the past two decades, I felt obliged to purchase the Tartarus Press volumes (which are, in addition, things of real beauty). These volumes are also available as ebooks.

As an extra treat, I also present the Autumn 2017 issues of Faunus and Machenalia, produced by the wonderful Friends of Arthur Machen, and which appeared in my post box earlier in the year. If you are a Machen enthusiast, please do consider becoming a member of the Friends.