The Lovecaftian Thing a Day (2018) No.61: Grimrock Isle

Grimrock Isle was publshed by Triad Entertainments in 1992, and to my knowledge is the largest solitaire adventure for the Call of Cthulhu rpg, consisting of five adventure booklets which together form something of a mini-campaign; it also seems to be one of the most highly regarded solo scenarios produced for the game - despite the fact that it draws the player in using one of the more cliched tropes typically found in early CoC scenarios (the ‘you are hired to investigate a strange old house in an isolated community’ opening gambit).

Also included is the ‘Big Book of Forbidden Knowledge’which reveals the secrets of Grimrock Isle, allowing the GM to run the scenario in standard rpg mode for a group of players.

In any case, as per yesterday’s post, Grimrock Isle is the current focus of my regular solitaire gaming night. During last night’s session, I also discovered some used character sheets shuffled in with the handouts which come with the scenario. These proved to be the PCs used by members of my family during the one and only time they felt a need to play a game of Call of Cthulhu - late one Christmas afternoon about 15 years ago. I still cannot account for how this came about, and must assume that a) copious amounts of alcohol had been consumed and b) my family decided to humour me in my strange gaming ways. Needless to say, this session has now become somewhat legendary in the annals of the family history. To this day, my father insists that he ‘won’ the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game (in fairness it looks like he came out of the session with most of his sanity intact and 5 hit points remaining - which I suppose is a kind of winning as far as the Call of Cthulhu rpg is concerned). Good times.

Unfortunately if you want to play Grimrock Isle, you can’t - it is now long out of print. And you can keep your grubby paws off my copy.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.60: Tentacular All Rolled Up

I fell in love with this stylised tentacular All Rolled Up gaming accessory the moment I saw it (a couple of years ago, at the All Rolled Up stand at Dragonmeet). It is shown here with a Q Workshop dice bag inscribed with the (Derlethian) elder sign, a bunch of Q Workshop Call of Cthulhu polyhedral dice, and a purple All Rolled Up foldable dice tray. Currently this is being used for my playthrough of the classic solitaire Call of Cthulhu mini-campaign, Grimrock Isle, by Triad Enterprises.

Nice.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.59: Caitlin R. Kiernan’s ‘Agents of Dreamland’

As Women in Horror Month draws to a close, today we turn our attention to the work of Caitlin R. Kiernan. Whilst Kiernan has been at pains to point out that she doesn’t consider herself a horror writer per se, she has provided regular contributions to the field of Lovecraftian weird fiction - one of the most recent being her novella Agents of Dreamland (and one of my favourite reads from 2017).

Like much of Kiernan’s work, Agents of Dreamland is oblique in terms of its resolution: its plot flows across multiple narratives with jumping - sometimes non-linear - timelines, not all of which necessarily intertwine and conclude neatly. But this being a work informed by the Cthulhu mythos, Kiernan’s discomposition of an anthropocentric narrative structure is incredibly effective in heigtening the unsettling and inhuman weirdness of the tale - whose elements involve the Signalman (represenative of a shadowy government agency investigating ostensibly alien phenomena), an interplanetary probe which disappears near Pluto, a contactee UFO cult, and intimations of humanity’s final passing. In all an excellent and beautifully-crafted work which exemplifies some of the new and challenging trajectories which Lovecraftian literature is following in the 21st century. Black Helicopters, a companion piece to Agents of Dreamland, is released in the UK this May.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.58: Ann K. Schwader’s ‘Dark Equinox and Other Tales of Lovecraftian Horror’

A penultimate celebration of Women in Horror Month, today we honour Ann K. Schwader. Perhaps best known for her Lovecraftian poetry (she was NecronomiCon’s poet laureate in 2015), Schwader has been publishing Lovecraftian verse and short stories since the 1980s. Dark Equinox, published in 2015 by Hippocampus Press, is Schwader’s most recent collection of tales of Lovecraftian horror, and yet another strong recommend (check out ‘Death Verses of Yian-Ho’ as an especially fine piece).

The Lovecaftian Thing a Day (2018) No.57: Kij Johnson’s ‘The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe’.

In further celebration of Women in Horror Month, today we present Kij Johson’s wonderful and evocative The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, in which the eponymous mathematics professor from Ulthar has to go in search of one of her students - the granddaughter of a sleeping god - in order to save the Dreamlands from possible destruction. There is much here which fans of Lovecaft’s The Dream-Quest  of Unknown Kadath will recognise and delight in - especially those scenes of chthonic horror involving gugs, ghouls and ghasts; but, as with yesterday’s offering, Johnson also undermines the staidness of traditional Lovecraftian horror not only by placing women front and centre within the narrative, but also via an unexpected plot twist which sees the return of a character familiar to fans of the Lovecaft canon, and whose presence comes to problematize the bigotry informing so much of Lovecraft’s earlier writing. The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe is a strong recommend for those interested in the New Lovecraftian Weird.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.56: Ruthanna Emrys’ Winter Tide

In celebration of Women in Horror Month, today we present Ruthanna Emrys’ Winter Tide: the novel-length follow up to her highly-regarded The Litany of Earth (available to read here). I’m currently about a quarter of the way through Winter Tide, so can’t offer a comprehensive overview of the novel, other than to say that it continues the tale of Aphra Marsh: a Deep One hybrid and survivor of both the US government’s raid on Innsmouth and her subsequent imprisonment in the same camps used for the internment of Japanese-American citizens. In this respect, Emrys’ work constitutes part of the rising tide (pun intended) of the New Lovecraftian Weird which seeks to subvert (and offer a politically-informed contemporary counternarrative to) the conservatism, racism and misogyny intrinsic to so much of the Cthulhu mythos as envisaged by Lovecraft himself.

To this end, Emrys manages to evoke a sense of the cosmic sublime at the same time as offering a sympathetic view of the Cthulhu mythos from ‘within’; in doing so, Winter Tide unsettles the problematic assumption that the mythos is somehow ‘external’ and antagonistic to humanity, inferring instead that the human condition is as much a part of it as Deep Ones, shoggoths, and all the rest. In any case, Winter Tide is an excellent inroad into a new and politically-engaged reframing and reconceptualising the Cthulhu mythos.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.55: ‘It was just a colour out of space - a frightful messenger from unformed realms of inifinity’

Sent to me by Prof. McKittrick of Miskatonic Unversity’s Department of Folklore, this curious wall plaque - the product of an unknown local artist - purports to depict the conclusion to various monstrous events and horrible transmutations which afflicted a small hamlet somewhere to the west the of Arkham, where the hills rise wild. These strange occurances were precipitated by the fall of a meteorite in the region at some point during the late 1920s - an incident which was subsequently investigated by a team of researchers from Miskatonic University. To this day, the university refuses to make public the findings of that investigation.

The above artwork was apparently produced from clay found within the well depicted on the piece, which stood close to where the meteorite fell. It is an artefact suffused with a dark iridescence, and ashimmer with unnameable, alien colours and indescribable hues hitherto unknown to the human visual spectrum. Contemplating the thing for any period of time results in my sleep being haunted by nightmares involving freakish transformations, abnormal mutations, and other horrendous metamorphoses which ultimately render the human form into something wholly other...

The Lovecraftan Thing a Day (2018) No.54: The Investigators of Arkham Horror

Something of a follow-up to yesterday’s post: being a huge fan of Fantasy Flight Games’ stable of Lovecraftian boardgames (Arkham Horror, Eldritch Horror, Elder Sign, and Mansions of Madness), I had to pick up The Investigators of Arkham Horror when it was released last year.

A 264 page full-colour, glossy hardback coffee table book, Invextigators provides background to FFG’s Arkham Horror Files universe - by way of vignettes concerning over 50 of the (playable) characters which inhabit their boardgames, and supported by huge amounts of luscious Lovecraftian art. Whilst not necessarily one for the literary Lovecraft collector, if you are a bit more of a Lovecaft generalist, or interested in some of the ways that Lovecraft and the Cthulhu mythos have been translated into modern hobby boardgaming, this is definitely worth a look.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.53: Elder Sign Dice Tower

I keep the light in my apartment somewhat dim, so unfortunately the first of the above photos - depicting my purple acrylic Elder Sign Dice tower (available here) -  is not as clear as I should like. In any case, it saw use earlier this evening in a solitaire game of Elder Sign, the aftermath of which can be seen in the second photo, shortly after Harvey Walters managed to close the gate to Yog Sothoth - thus averting the end of the world - subsequent to retrieving one of the eponymous Elder Signs from some dusty corner of the Miskatonic Museum. Private eye Joe Diamond, on the other hand, was sent irrevocably insane by something he encountered in the museum’s basement...Good times.

To round off my first solitaire game-night of the year, I played a quick game of Arkham Noir (the topic of yesterday’s post), which strikes me as being fiendishly difficult - and perhaps a tad too abstract for my liking.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.52: Arkham Noir - The Witch Cult Murders

Arkham Noir: The Witch Cult Murders is the first in a new series of solitaire Lovecraftian card games produced by Yves Tourigny. Oddly enough, I was able to procur the second and third in the games series directly from Yves during NecronmiCon 2017, but at that time the first game had not been published; regardless, the art on the cards is both gorgeous and thematic, and I mean to play this tomorrow evening (intended as the first of my weekly Lovecraftian solitaire gaming nights).

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.51: Silver Key Lapel Pin

As a follow-up to yesterday’s item, today we present the NecronomiCon 2017 Silver Key lapel pin, which current sits within the Ghooric Zone’s mysterious Cabinet of Lovecraftian Curiosities and Imponderabilia, alongside our 2015 and 2013 Silver Key lapel pins. Nice.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.50: Lodge of the Silver Key NecronomiCon T-Shirt

When I go to NecronomiCon I usually go as a Silver Key ticket holder - this provides certain perks, such as automatic entry into the popular Cthulhu Prayer Breakfast (a highlight of the convention), a special silver key pin badge, and the above Lodge of the Silver Key t-shirt (from 2017). But mostly I go as a Silver Key ticket holder because, well, its the Silver Key - and that’s pretty Lovecraftian.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.49: Cards from the Smoke

Cards from the Smoke is the final supplement produced by Cubicle 7 for their Cthulhu Britannica: London line of rpg material (using the Call of Cthulhu 7th edition rules set). Consisting of 160 tarot-sized cards, Cards from the Smoke is essentially a freeform storytelling aid for (amongst other things) creating (and resolving) CoC scenarios - which is precisely the reason why I picked these up. Being the friendless curmudgeon I am, I have noted previously that one of my goals for 2018 is to construct a toolkit for facilitating something akin to a solitaire Call of Cthulhu rpg experience - to which end Cards from the Smoke seems to offer some very intriguing mechanisms to aid solo play.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.48: An Amulet from Yuggoth

Last night the Silver Key unlocked a hidden doorway through which my dreaming consciousness was inexorably drawn, finding itself drifting through those empty depths of space which separate the planetary bodies of our own solar system. The star-winds bore me upon the particulate ethereality of their tachyon currents, carrying me past Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, onwards beyond the trans-telluric outliers of Uranus and Neptune, and thence to that boreal dwarf-planet which drifts mindlessly at the ultimate rim of known space - spoken of in certain, unfathomably archaic and prehuman texts as Yuggoth.

The miles-deep continental ice-sheets covering that mysterious orb proved no barrier to my formless consciousness, and soon I perceived evidence of strange life lurking within the nighted caverns beneath the ice: squat, alien cities of basalt; canals of pitch which flowed sluggishly through steep gorges of jagged black rock; and black windowless towers - whose exterior walls had been inscribed with strange hieroglyphs hinting at inscrutable cosmic secrets - from whence I heard buzzing voices articulating a horrid litany of monstrous revelations in half-formed human syllables...a litany mindlessly repeated by other participants in those grotesque rites - repeated by a chorus of all-too human speech, but with a droning, mechanical timbre...Investigating further, I pressed my consciousness into the interior of one of these black towers...Reeling at what I saw within, I fled back through the black abysses of space to the comforting confines of Earth. 

Awakening upon my bed, I found clutched in my hand a token from that monstrous sphere to which my dreams had drawn me: a token vouchsafed to me by an inhabitant of that black tower, within whose dismal interior I witnessed horrors of which I will not speak - a token revealing in crude outline something of the alien monstrosity of the very thing which had knowingly delivered that same amulet into my hands during my otherworldly sojourn within that cold and desolate orb.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.47: Green Cthulhu Breakfast Club Traveller’s Journal

Not content with having one of the Cthulhu Breakfast Club special edition traveller’s journal, I also picked up what is currently the standard edition, available from yog-ysothoth.com (but only to patrons of the site). This version comes in a rich dark green, but like the special edition also has the classic silhouette of Lovecaft gracing its cover.

And lest we forget, an African-Amercan artist going by the name of Perry was responsible for one of the most enduring and iconic images of Lovecraft.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.46: Ramsey Campbell in Conversation with Stephen Jones

As part of their Spring Term curriculum, the London branch of The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies tonight presented a special masterclass involving two key figures in the UK horror scene: Ramsey Campbell - one of the greatest living British horror writers - in conversation with editor, writer and anthologist Stephen Jones. Also two of the nicest blokes in British horror.

Things Lovecraftian loomed large in the discussion, with lots of reminiscences surrounding the publication of Campbell’s first book The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants, alongside many fascinating and amusing anecdotes about a life in horror. I also had the opportunity to get my copy of Born to the Dark (the second in a trilogy of novels of Lovecraftian horror) signed by the author. It was also great to catch up with Steve Dempsey and Paul Mclean of yog-sothoth.com, who were also in attendance. An excellent evening all-round.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.45: The Dunwich Horror Picture Show

The Dunwich Horror Picture Show has been a fixture of the last couple of NecronomiCons. Playing on the final evening of the convention, this special performance of Roger Corman’s The Dunwich Horror typically includes a live band playing the soundtrack to this cult classic, random cultists roaming the auditorium and terrorizing the audience, as well as a few special surprises in the form of Lovecraftian beasties conjured forth by Big Nazo. All this and the psychedelic grooviness of Dean Stockwell playing Wilbur Whateley by way of Timothy Leary and Charles Manson. The above flyer is from the 2017 performance of the show. Good times.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.44: Miskatonic University Antarctic Expedition hoodie

I uncovered this Miskatonic University Antarctic Expedition hoodie - which I think I acquired from the HPLHS over a decade ago - whilst going through an old suitcase.

I made good use of it during what was, ostensibly, a polar bear sightseeing tour to Churchill, Canada. In fact, at the time I was in the employ of a highly secretive government agency who tasked me with investigating rumours that one of the monstous Gnoph-Keh of elder lore was stalking the territory - possibly the result of cult activity surrounding a nameless Outer entity which the indigenous peoples of that region refer to fearfully as ‘The Thing Which Walks Upon the Winds’.

Needless to say, the fact that the world yet exists speaks to the efficacy of my efforts at putting down  at least one of the primordial horrors which lurks within that realm of icy death

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.43: Elder Sign Playmat

My photo hasn’t really done it justice, but this is the gorgeous playmat produced by Fantasy Flight Games for their Elder Sign co-operative card game. The playmat depicts a plan of the Miskatonic Museum (the setting of the Elder Sign base game, which players are required to explore in order to prevent the return of one of the Great Old Ones) overlayed with the image of shadowy tentacles. There is also a nice Art Nouveau border surrounding the map, and depicting characters from the game along with Nyarlathotep and Ghatanothoa at each corner.

In any case, one of my New Year resolutions was to have a weekly solitaire game night as of January; this hasn’t quite come to pass due to my workload at the start of the year. However, my intention now is to make this a regular activity (and a semi-regular feature of this blog) as of next week - starting with a game of Elder Sign (and no doubt accompanied by some additional accessories which will also make their way onto the blog over the coming days).

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.42: Mountains of Madness

Mountains of Madness was playing earlier this evening as part of the final night of the London Lovecraft Festival, and I have to say this was a terrific staging of Lovecraft’s epic tale of Antarctic horror.

In 50 minutes or so, the cast of three (two of whom also appeared in the festival’s other highlight, The Thing on the Doorstep: Asenath’s Tale), with minimal props, managed to evoke an uneasy sense of boreal otherworldiness on a stage the size of a very small living room. Needless to say, the cast avoided the pitfall of trying to realise giant albino penguins, Elder Things, and shoggoths in visible form - indeed, this was more akin to the kind of dramatised storytelling which I mentioned yesterday as best suiting Lovecraftian theatre. To this end, the script incorporated portions of the text of At the Mountains of Madness which, for me highlighs an important issue: Lovecraft’s writng is often about the production of a distinct mood and atmosphere, as well as the distillation of a particular philosophical viewpoint through a very specific use of language - such that focusing on narrative and plot alone when translating it into a visual medium often fails to effectively represent the fundamental thematic essence of his work.

In any case, Mountains of Madness was very good, and worth catching if you have the opportunity.