Call of Cthulhu prep

Well I haven't felt like blogging much of late. I'm mostly stressing about my health. I went to the rheumatologist and his bedside manner was not the greatest. Starting off by asking me why I'm there set the tone. But on a positive note he told me that not exercising was dumb and he wants to see what my blood work looks like after a few weeks of exercise. So I guess that's the silver lining.

Right! We're here about the Cthulhu!

I believe I mentioned that I was setting up a distance campaign for Call of Cthulhu 6th ed. I know 7th is around the corner but I don't seem to have access to it.

We're going to use Roll20 as the interface and I'm going to try to record it and perhaps put up the live play on my youtube account for this blog. Which reminds me, I also have meant to do some videos on my basing technique etc.

So for our first adventure we are doing "The Haunting". It comes in the free quickstart rules and in the main rule book. The quickstart version has a lot of tie ins with other printed adventures, while the main rule version has an added mythos tome. I'm trying to combine the two.

There are a ton of resources on Yog-Sothoth.com but I have added and changed a few things. I'm going to use the awesome map of Boston c. 1888 found here and supplement it with information from the Rand McNally map of 1891 found here.

I also found some interesting fonts here, the free ones are great, but $20 for all the others doesn't sound too bad. Another font from the rule book is Leonardo Hand, which can be downloaded from Dafont here.

Once I run the adventure I'll share with you the stuff that I made or found special for my running of it. I won't post it yet just in case the players wander over here.

As for music, I haven't decided if I want to go with the embedded juke box in Roll20 or if I can just play a youtube playlist in the background. I found a cool one called Musica Cthulhiana.


Any how. No painting for me yet this week. I need to get off the stick. I was supposed to be doing Chico's weekly challenge but something tells me I'm not going to make it. I also need to get on Curt's figures and my own stinking giveaway.

Time to chain myself to the painting desk.

Book Review: Halcyon Classics The Definitive H.P. Lovecraft: 67 Tales of Horror

Well I finally finished reading the Kindle Edition of this H.P. Lovecraft Anthology.

While the price was very good I will say that my interest in Lovecraft really ebbed and flowed. Some of the stories just didn't capture my interest as much and I found myself getting tired with some of Lovecraft's literary devices. But that is somewhat par for the course when reading collected works. I found Howard to get to me at times as well when I read the Conan anthologies.

What I was not prepared for was Lovecraft's racism. It doesn't come up in every story, and a lot of it is garden variety Anglophile world view of "lesser" races. His racism against blacks, or African - Americans if you prefer, is repugnant.

Sorry, but I gotta calls it as I sees it. I personally was totally unprepared for it. At first I was inclined to think that it was just a sort of period bias against barbaric non white, non Christians and it was that. But it was actually worse than that. I still enjoy the true horror stories and the Dreamlands stuff is pretty good but I probably would have come away with a better taste in my mouth if I had stopped at Call of Cthulhu and Dunwich Horror etc.

Gorgonmilk in the comments here pointed me to an interesting essay here.

I still enjoy the Cthulhu mythos and spinoff games, but I have to say I was disappointed to read this tripe from Lovecraft.

So I can't fault the book itself. Good value, you get a ton of stories. But if you only want to read the main stories and be subjected to to the other stuff less, maybe try a different book.