Last year, starting on Friday June 8th and continuing on over the weekend, I was a Guest of Honour at the innaugural Chaosium Con Australia; a celebration of the games published by Chaosium Inc, a company whose work I've long admired and was once a regular contributor to, especially their game of Lovecraftian cosmic horror, Call of Cthulhu, which I first encountered in 1984; I also contributed significantly to Chaosium's Stormbringer and Elric! game lines, roleplaying games based on the work of enormously influential English fantasy and science fiction writer Michael Moorcock, whose work I first encountered at the Moe Library when I was about 13-14 years old.
The covers of Elric! and Melniboné: Dragon Isle and Dreaming City (Chaosium, 1993)
H.P. Lovecraft (aka HPL), an American writer of weird fiction whose influence has resonated far beyond his time and continues to inspire writers, filmmakers and artists to this day, was another influential writer whose work I stumbled upon around the same age - more of which in another post, possibly.
My last blog post was about my contribution to a Cthulhu Invictus book (a variant of the game set in the days of the Roman Empire) called Britannia and Beyond, published by my old friend Oscar Rios by his New York City-based company, Golden Goblin Press; here, I'd like to talk about my work for the more traditional setting of the game, the so-called 'Classic Era' of the 1920s, which has been the default setting for Call of Cthulhu ever since the first edition of the game was published back in 1981 - inspired by the period when HPL was living and writing.
In June last year, I volunteered to help edit Belfast-based author Colin Dunlop's manuscript for Cthulhu Ireland, a 'new' guide and sourcebook for running Call of Cthulhu in the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland, as Ireland and the North of Ireland were known then. (I say 'new' because Cthulhu Ireland was a massively expanded rewrite of Colin's older Chaosium monograph, Mysteries of Ireland, published in 2012). I ran out of time to edit the entire manuscript, as I desired to get back to my own projects for the Miskatonic Repository, Chaosium's community content program, which allows Call of Cthulhu devotees to write and publish their own scenarios and sourcebooks, which are sold via the popular website DriveThruRPG.
In June last year, I volunteered to help edit Belfast-based author Colin Dunlop's manuscript for Cthulhu Ireland, a 'new' guide and sourcebook for running Call of Cthulhu in the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland, as Ireland and the North of Ireland were known then. (I say 'new' because Cthulhu Ireland was a massively expanded rewrite of Colin's older Chaosium monograph, Mysteries of Ireland, published in 2012). I ran out of time to edit the entire manuscript, as I desired to get back to my own projects for the Miskatonic Repository, Chaosium's community content program, which allows Call of Cthulhu devotees to write and publish their own scenarios and sourcebooks, which are sold via the popular website DriveThruRPG.
While I was only able to proof-read, fact-check and edit the book's source material section, and not the collection of scenarios which make up the second half of the book, I am enormously proud of Colin's work on the book: I genuinely think it's one of the best books available to purchase and download (or print on demand) on the Miskatonic Repository.
And don't just take my word for it: here's RPG editor and prolific critic Matthew Pook (aka Pookie) writing about the book on his blog, Reviews from R'lyeh:
And don't just take my word for it: here's RPG editor and prolific critic Matthew Pook (aka Pookie) writing about the book on his blog, Reviews from R'lyeh:
‘Cthulhu Ireland: 1920s Horror Roleplaying on the Isle of the Fey is the definitive guide to Ireland in the 1920s for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition… It is informative and it is interesting and it deals with the difficult history during the early part of this period with care and sensitivity… Overall, Cthulhu Ireland: 1920s Horror Roleplaying on the Isle of the Fey is an impressive addition to the Miskatonic Repository and a great addition to Call of Cthulhu.’
If you play Call of Cthulhu, and you read this blog, go buy Cthulhu Ireland post haste - you can thank me later.
I finished up my editing work on Cthulhu Ireland in September-October last year, with every intention of returning to my own project for the Miskatonic Repository, Queering Cthulhu, a guide to LGBTQIA+ life in Lovecraft's New England designed for Call of Cthulhu players and Keepers (as the game's Game Masters are officially known) - and indeed, I picked up the project after several months and began editing and expanding on the 38,000 I'd written to date - and then I got distracted again.
I finished up my editing work on Cthulhu Ireland in September-October last year, with every intention of returning to my own project for the Miskatonic Repository, Queering Cthulhu, a guide to LGBTQIA+ life in Lovecraft's New England designed for Call of Cthulhu players and Keepers (as the game's Game Masters are officially known) - and indeed, I picked up the project after several months and began editing and expanding on the 38,000 I'd written to date - and then I got distracted again.
Nightmares from the Depths is a new, forthcoming campaign for the Miskatonic Repository by British writers Alan Kissane and Robert Francis, set in Boston in 1925. If you're familiar with HPL's seminal short story 'The Call of Cthulhu' (written in 1926 and published in the quintessential pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928) then your spider senses are probably already tingling...
Alan hopes to publish the campaign soon, within the coming months - and I can't wait to see it released on the unsuspecting world.
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For my next blog post, I'll hopefully focus on my own in-development Miskatonic Repository projects - with luck it won't take me a year and a half to write that one...
