The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.334: Omens of Ice

Omens of Ice is an expansion for Fantasy Flight Games’ Elder Sign dice and card game, which is pretty much one of my go-to solitaire games at the moment. Whilst the base game is set in Arkham, Omens of Ice relocates the action to Alaska - bringing with it a new set of mechanics for surviving in the extreme environment of the region. An added bonus is that the expansion also introduced Rhan Tegoth (one of my favourite Lovecaftian creations) to the game. Nice.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.333: Guardians of the Abyss

Fantasy Flight Games’ Arkham Horror: The Card Game has just completed its third campaign cycle of scenarios and, since I have started collecting the game, I’ve only ever managed to play one scenario out of the 30+ which are currently available - in part for the very reason that most of the scenarios do form part of a longer campaign which, due to current work pressures, I’d find difficulty committing to (I know that if I don’t play regularly, the likelihood is that I’ll lose traction and abandon the campaign). 

Today, however, I received Guardians of the Abyss, which consists of two linked scenarios, looks like it has something of a Masks of Nyarlathotep theme (which is a bonus), and might just be the thing to rouse my enthusiasm for playing the game. Unfortunately, this is also being added to the Christmas pile, so it’ll be another few weeks before I have the chance to get this to the gaming table...

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.332: NecronomiCon Disk Journal

As we begin to map the route to NecronomiCon 2019, what better way to start planning for the grand event than with this DIY NecronomiCon 2019 disk journal, whose cover image I borrowed from the convention website? I’m not sure who the artist is, so can’t give credit here at the moment - but will rectify that shortcoming as soon as that information is available - and fear not: this is a one-off made for my own personal use.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.331: In Anticipation of NecronomiCon 2019 - The Providence Biltmore

NecronomiCon 2019 tickets are still not yet available; even so, I am firmly committed to going, having already reserved my room at the wonderful Providence Biltmore hotel (a place which is, perhaps the very embodiment of the concept of faded grandeur). My current plan is to be in Providence for 7 days: arriving a couple of days before the con, I will be leaving for the UK via Boston a day after NecronomiCon 2019 wraps. Hope to see you there!

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.330: Ccru Writings 1997-2003

The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit constitutes a somewhat notorious moment in the recent history of British academia; a liminal, quasi-official entity based out of the University of Warwick’s philosophy department, the Ccru produced a techno-occultural melange of philosophical high-weirdness in which the work of Lovecraft played a not insignificant role.

The Ccru was not, however, without its casualties - both psychological and cultural: like Lovecaft, Nick Land - one of the key early figures in the Ccru - has gone on to become a cultural icon of the alt-right.

If you want to know what all the fuss is about, check out Ccru Writings 1997-2003. As an indication of what one typically encounters when delving into the archives of the Ccru, the blurb from the publisher’s website is instructive:

‘The texts collected here document the Ccru’s perilous efforts to catalogue the traces of Lemurian occulture, bringing together the scattered accounts of those who had stumbled upon lagooned relics of nonhuman intelligence—a project that led ultimately to the recovery of the Numogram and the reconstruction of the principles of Lemurian time-sorcery—before disintegrating into collective schizophrenia and two decades of absolute obscurity. 

Meshing together fiction, number theory, voodoo, philosophy, anthropology, plate tectonics, information science, semiotics, geotraumatics, occultism, and other nameless knowledges, in these pages the incomplete evidence gathered by explorers including Burroughs, Blavatsky, Lovecraft, Jung, Barker, J.G. Ballard, William Gibson, and Octavia Butler, but also the testimony of more obscure luminaries such as Echidna Stillwell, Oskar Sarkon, and Madame Centauri, are clarified and subjected to systematic investigation, comparison, and assessment so as to gauge the real stakes of the Time-War still raging behind the collapsing façade of reality. 

One of the most compelling and unnerving collective research enterprises to have surfaced in the twentieth century, the real pertinence of the Ccru’s work is only now beginning to reveal itself to an unbelieving world. To plunge into the tangled mesh of these conspiracies, weird tales, numerical plagues, and suggestive coincidences is to test your sense of reality beyond the limits of reasonable tolerance—to enter the sphere of unbelief, where demonic currents prowl, where fictions make themselves real. Hyperstition.’

Nice.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No. 329: ‘The Darker The Horror, The Brighter The Flame’

Yet more psychedelic cosmicism as we finally get to see Mandy at the cinema - on this occasion the venerable Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square - where it looks like you can win a replica of ‘The Beast’.

‘Psychotics drown where mystics swim. You’re drowning. I’m swimming.’

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.328: Badass Monster Killer!

Get you weekly hit of 70s-styled funkadelic kung-fu superspy blaxploitation Lovecraftian horror with Badass Monster Killer! - currently streaming on Vimeo.

High weirdness. My work here is done.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.327: Cult of Golgotha

Tantric physics filtered through the quantum voudon lens of Reginald Crosley and Michael Bertiaux, with references to William Burroughs, Keelian esoteric ufology, and the Grantian-Qlipphotic Cult of Lam, reveals - according to the epilogue to Craig Williams’ Cult of Golgotha - ‘The embrace of emptiness within the Desert Cell. Alien horrors welcomed through the thin, damaged wall of consensus reality - the Ambient Dead arise.’

Nice.

The Lovecaftian Thing a Day (2018) No.326: Bayt al Azif

You wait half an hour for a bus then two turn up at the same time...alongside yesterday’s Hypergraphia, another digital fanzine dedicated to Lovecraftian-themed gaming has recently appeared: Bayt al Azif (which apparently translates as the house of the Necronomcon). This first issue contains a rather eclectic mix of material, including an interview with Chris Spivey, something of a nostalgic spin by way of a number of pieces focusing on vintage gaming material, and a number of Call of Cthulhu (all of which are, interestingly, set in atypical CoC periods); added to which, the ‘zine sports a rather lovely piece of cover art. Overall, I rather like Bayt al Azif.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.325: Hypergraphia

Just a quick one today: issue 1 of Hypergraphia - a new Cthulhu-themed digital rpg magazine - is now available from all good purveyors of online gaming materials. Issue 0, incidentally, was released (in hardcopy, I think) at NecronomiCon 2017.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.324: Black Books - Tomes of the Outer Dark

Black Books: Tomes of the Outer Dark takes the basic frameworkmof the Call f Cthulhu rpg subjects it to an Old School Renaissance reimplementation using classic D&D rules.

Whilst I actually rather like Black Books, there is something oddly hauntological about the game: the OSR has been largely concerned with producing nostalgia-driven retroclone iterations of original D&D - a process driven by the assumption that the older and the simpler the better (at least as far as rpg rules are concerned).

Given that the original Call of Cthulhu rpg rules are only a few years older than D&D, and are pretty much the definition of simple, elegent design, an artefact like Black Books feels like something of a strange, retrofuturistic imagining of what Call of Cthulhu might have been if produced by TSR: the future past of gaming as it never happened.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No. 323: The Green Box Podcast

Just a quick one for today as I’m massively busy at this precise moment: I’ve just discovered a new Delta Green-focused podcast entitled The Green Box. I’m only one episode in, but it’s looking good.

Educate your lugholes with a burst of conspiratorial cosmic horror here.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.322: Terror Australis

Hot on the heels of Masks of Nyarlathotep, Chaosium have released an updated 7th edition version of Terror Australis - an Australian sourcebook for the Call of Cthulhu rpg - in pdf format (with a hardcopy to be released next year).

As I recall, Terror Australis originally appeared for either 2nd or 3rd edition CoC back in 1986, and hasn’t been reprinted or updated until now; it also has a notable link with Masks of Nyarlathotep, insofar as the first efition of Terror Australis included an Australia-based chapter of MoN which, due to publishing constraints, could not be included in the original MoN box set. Later editions of MoN have subsequently incorporated the Australian chapter in the campaign - including the recent 7th ed. reprint - such that Terror Australis has become an important resource for Keepers running MoN (which is presumably the reason for its recent updated re-release).

Bonzer.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.321: ‘ The Beast, It Cometh, Cometh Down’

Today I received my slipcase hardcopy of Masks of Nyarlathotep, revised and updated for the 7th edition of the Call of Cthulhu rpg - not only the greatest campaign for CoC, but quite possibly the greatest rpg campaign ever.

And there is no doubt that Chaosium have done the new edition of Masks of Nyarlathotep justice - this is an absolute beast of an item, whose production values are through the roof: the slipcase set not only contains the campaign spread across two hardback volumes (and spanning exactly 666 pages of content), but it also has a dedicated Keeper’s screen for the campaign, and a shedload of glossy, full-colour handouts.

Unfortunately, this is going on the pile of presents for Christmas, so it’ll be a few weeks before I have the chance to take a proper look at Masks of Nyarlathotep; even so, I’m seriously thinking about getting a gaming group together in the New Year in order to play this.

Needless to say, the slipcase edition of Masks of Nyarlathotep rates a doubleplus-extraspecial Nice.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.320: The Hashish Eater and Other Poems

Fedogan & Bremer are currently doing a fine job of producing audio-readings of weird poetry: starting with an deluxe reissue of John Arthur’s classic reading of Lovecraft’s The Fungi from Yuggoth a couple of years back, this has been joined by a collection of Robert E. Howard’s poetry, and today’s offering: The Hashish Eater and Other Poems by Clark Ashton Smith, and read by the magnificent Donald Sidney-Fryer.

In total, a marvellous way to encounter the poetical works of the Weird Tales triumvirate.

The Lovecaftian Thing a Day (2018) No.319: Quatermass 2

As yet, I’m unaware that Nigel Kneale ever admitted to having read Lovecraft; it is entirely possible that Kneale’s characteristically English, folk-inflected speculative horror arose independently of Lovecraft’s influence; even so, the work of both Kneale and Lovecraft share common tropes, with Quatermass or Quatermass and the Pit being showcased as exemplars of this; for my part, I have long felt that Quatermass 2 deserves equal recognition as being a firmly Lovecraftesque piece. As Mark Jones notes in New Critical Essays on H.P. Lovecaft,

‘With a plot-initiating event...similar to that of ‘The Colour out of Space,’ enslaved and conspiratorial human accomplices, impending planetary destruction, and enormous gelatinous monsters, Quatermass 2 is saturated with cosmic pessimism and terrestrial paranoia typical of Lovecraft.’

Nice.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.318: Mandy Soundtrack

Having already watched it three times, I remain convinced by my initial assessment that, whilst not exactly Lovecraftian, Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy is a stunning, psychedelic delve into the cosmic sublime: to this end, the film’s soundtrack has, alongside strange, mist-shrouded starscapes, occasional hallucinatory transitions into weirdly-alien realms, hints of a deeper mythology - as well as the Chemist’s comment that Red ‘exudes a cosmic darkness’ whilst black worms writhe about the protaganist’s feet - in no small part contributed to the evocation of a lush, Clark Ashton Smith-like cosmicism tinged with nihilism.

Needless to say, I spent scant time picking up a cd of the sountrack, whose cover sports Mandy’s name in classic ‘metal’ iconography. Nice.

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.316: Hour of the Huntress

I have finally managed to secure a copy of Hour of the Huntress - the first in a series of new short novels which tie-in to Fantasy Flight Games’ Arkham Horror universe. These books are in rather short supply, and Hour of the Huntress seems to be going for silly money. Fortunately, I found this for rrp - which is just as well, as thusfar the writing and mood of the books has been far from stellar...

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.315: Adventures Into Darkness

With the sad news of the passing of the legend who was Stan Lee, it seems apposite to post something which speaks to the intersections between the worlds of Lovecraft and those of comic book superheroes. Indeed, the fact that so much of Lovecaft’s work appeared in the pulps perhaps places him in the same cultural tradition of superhero comics; like superhero comics, it has only been in the last decade or so that there has been mainstream recognition of the wider cultural influence of Lovecraft’s work. Literary agent Julius Schwartz, who represented Lovecraft, also became an editor at DC Comics, overseeing he revival of Batman in the 1960s. (And, of course, we cannot forgo mention here of the infamous Arkham Asylum, which has become a central facet of Batman mythology).

In any case, one interesting point of intersection between Lovecraftian, superhero, and gaming fan cultures is Kenneth Hite’s Adventures into Darkness: a supplement for the Mutants and Masterminds rpg, which starts from the conceit that Lovecaft survived beyond 1937, eventually securing a career as a comic book writer for Adventures into Darkness (an actual title which was published during the early 1950s), incorporating his Cthulhu mythos into the pulp realm of two-fisted suprherodom. I actually refereed a short-lived Mutants and Masterminds campaign using Adventures into Darkness  sometime around 2009. I titled this ‘Arkham Knights’, setting the campaign in a noirish 1940s Arkham, which had grown to the size of a vast metropolis encompassing Dunwich and Innsmouth (a similar idea informed Pelgrane Press’ recent Cthulhu City - great minds and all that); therein, the player characters had gained extraordinary powers through their contact with the forces of the Cthulhu mythos, which they subsequently battled under the tutelage of ‘Nightgaunt’ (the ‘Arkham Knights’ analogue of Batman). But I digress...

I’m also reminded that the opening scene of Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2 - my favourite entry into the Marvel cinematic universe to date - involves a giant, betentacled interdimensional entity.

Safe journeying, Stan Lee, throughout those wild worlds of cosmic wonder to which you introduced so many of us. Excelsior!

The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.314: Strange Aeons Templates

We continue to scrape the bottom of the Lovecraftian barrel during the final few exhausting weeks of the Lovecraftian Thing a Day, with today’s offering complementing yesterday’s post: more pointless gaming tat by way of the template set for the Strange Aeons Lovecraftian miniatures game. Aesthetically-speaking, these templates are, I think, more appealing than those available for Von Unaussprechlichen Kulten - but please don’t ask me about who is supposed to be spraying what at who as far as the Strange Aeons spray template is concerned...