Monthly Archives: December 2018

Mockman’s “Dreamland” game

10 Monday Dec 2018

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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Mockman, maker of the graphic novel of Lovecraft’s Kadath and the fine Dreamlands map, now has a note on the map page to say that the map has sold out, but a reprint is planned in…

2018 connected to my Kickstarter for my Dreamlands-specific Lovecraftian roleplaying game, “Dreamland”

The game appears to have been in development since Christmas 2015, was scenario tested at NecronomiCon 2017, and was again convention play-tested at Big Bad in October 2018. The blurb for the latter event now suggests it’s gone beyond being ‘pure Lovecraft’ and is…

inspired by the fantasy worlds of Lord Dunsany, H.P. Lovecraft and Italo Calvino.

Though potentially still being restricted to Jason’s Lovecraft Dreamlands map in terms of the terrain and places, I’d guess.

I like Jason’s idea of preventing modern ‘yo-speak’ and encouraging acting by making the game run so that…

each character receives bonuses for their in-game use of language to deepen the fairytale mood.

A comment on the event page by Jason has more details…

Rules-wise, the game uses dice, but the biggest element of the game is Words. Dreamland style stories (Lord Dunsany etc) are all about evocative language. In game terms, this is represented by 240 Word Tokens (see attached) with words which ’embody’ Dreamland — divided into 5 categories, Wonder, Loathing, Mystery, Exoticism and Poetry. These elements are the Five Pillars of Dreamland.

During the game, the DM gradually distributes the Words into a common pool, and players gather and combine Words to fuel their powers by making flowery speeches. Different Roles (like character classes) and Memories are associated with different types of Words, so different characters (and their players) are encouraged to speak in different ways. There’s some simple dice, too, but Words are the main mechanic. But use too many Words and you risk breaking one of the Pillars of Dreamland, causing terrible and bizarre effects…

I’d also suggest the possible need for a demerits system, removing points for cringe-inducing hokey cod-medieval use of words such as “dost”, “thee” and “thou” and “verily” etc. And extra points for confabulating mellifluous new words from two words that one has already been dealt, then giving them an instant definition that pleases the gamemaster.

For instance, Eldritch and Ulthar = ‘Ulthitch, the thick tangled thatch on the peasant houses of the Dreamlands, in which Ul-worms sometimes make their nests’. Other player, in response: “Dost thou tell me, lord, that I sleep under a roof of [uses a dealt word] horrors, and am likely be-wormed with these Ul-worms? How may I rid myself of such vermin?”. One point deducted for the cod-medieval “dost”, two added for a good player response and use of a dealt word. The gamemaster would have the option to dismiss the new definition: “You have drunk [heavily of the strangely perfumed wines of Hatheg], and babble nonsense…” etc.

[Warning: Plot-spoilers ahead]

Jason’s NecronomiCon 2017 events showed off what sound like the game’s early scenario ideas…

DREAMLAND: THE PARADISE OF THE UNCHANGING (Thursday, 6-10 PM)
Olathoe, the beautiful city which knows no age nor death, is besieged by a monstrous terror. Can a small group of Olathoeans (you) save the only home you have ever known? Summoned by the king, the task of saving the timeless city falls to a small group of farmers, merchants and craftsfolk… united only by your dreamlike memories of another life in another world…

DREAMLAND: ON THE WINGS OF DREAM (Friday, 8 PM-Midnight)
After a hazy night in the Enchanted Wood, you awaken with strange marks on your bodies and the chattering of birdsong in your ears. What happened to you in those forgotten hours? What sinister bond connects you to the fangs of snakes, the jaws of dragons and the claws of crows? Slipping back and forth between waking-world London and the world of Dreamland, you and your fellow dreamers must solve the mystery before the terror which comes with the rooster’s crow of dawn…

DREAMLAND: TO THE END OF THE WORLD (Saturday, 2-6 PM)
You have traveled far, seeking the legendary edge of the world which no living dreamer has beheld. On your side: the greatest science and magic of the Six Kingdoms. Standing before you: deserts and jungles, monsters beyond belief, and cities of nightmare. Succeed in your quest, and gain fame and knowledge beyond your wildest dream. Fail, and infinities away, your waking-world body will pay the price…

Looks good.

“… the volume I stumbled upon was one of the unexpurgated German copies, with heavy black leather covers and rusty iron hasps”.

09 Sunday Dec 2018

Posted by in Historical context, REH, Scholarly works

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Bobby Derie has a new and comprehensive survey of “Robert E. Howard in the Biographies of H. P. Lovecraft”. The first half usefully steps us through how Howard gradually crept into the Lovecraft biographies, as decades of scholarship put the peices together. In the second half Derie surveys what uses various recent writers on Howard and Lovecraft appear to have made of the best biographies, and Derie finds most recent efforts wanting in some way. He usefully includes the two recent biographical Lovecraft graphic novels in this assessment, though gives the nod to one and finds only some slight dramatic licence in the other.

I’ve taken the liberty of using his final paragraphs as a source for a handy guide list:

* Don’t take De Camp at face value. Though pioneering, and with direct access to those who (hazily) remembered the 1930s, he didn’t have all the facts. Remember also that he was embedded in a particular cultural and publishing milieu, and that you need to know enough about that to spot where and how it’s influencing the text.

* Find out what the best recent Howard biographies are, read them and use them.

* Make sure you’re using the accurate Howard texts for the fiction.

* Read the volumes of Howard letters and Howard-Lovecraft letters.

* Don’t go in for heavy over-reliance on I Am Providence. A very great source, yes. But not if: i) you’re just rehashing it so as to crank out another tick-box article for your academic C.V.; and ii) you are assuming it’s exhaustive and that it’s ‘all that it is possible to say’; and iii) you’re assuming that certain key events (such as the rejection of “Cool Air”) haven’t been recoloured by new facts found since publication.

Manuskript 0.8

09 Sunday Dec 2018

Posted by in Odd scratchings

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Writers may be interested to know that the free open source Scrivener-clone Manuskript has today popped out a Manuskript 0.8 version for Windows. Until Scrivener 3 for Windows finally appears ($45, 2019?), Manuskript is the best option for Windows desktops for fiction writers.

Though not for serious non-fiction. I’ve looked all over its UI and the wiki / changelog / website and it seems to completely lack a footnotes system or any plan for one. Scribus is useless at footnotes, and while Affinity Publisher is free it is still stuck in a footnote-less and buggy beta. So if you need open source software it seems your only currently-developed option for non-fiction is LibreOffice Writer.

The first thing you’ll want to do in Manuskript, when trying it, is change the tiny squished font in the main writer. Font settings are not easy to find initially, but are down in: Edit | Settings | Views | Text Editor | Font. You can also change padding, line-spacing, background colour and more. The full-screen view has its own font and background controls, also found by digging into the same Settings panel. Don’t accept the clunky defaults, and figure on spending about 30 minutes setting up the UI and fonts.

With Pandoc installed it can import more file formats than it supports ‘out of the box’.

The Phantagraph in the 1930s

08 Saturday Dec 2018

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New on Archive.org this week, a clean scan of The Phantagraph for July 1936 (Vol. 4 No. 4), with the Lovecraft Fungi poem “Nostalgia” (c. 1930?) on the cover. Also a short but useful signposting article on ‘weird music’, as it stood in the mid 1930s.

After the first substantial issue, July-August 1935 (“Volume 4, No. 1” because it was deemed a continuation of the Bulletin of the Terrestrial Fantascience Guild) the Hevelin collection also has some complete online scans of Donald Wollheim’s Phantagraph from the 1930s. Though with the archive’s ‘plastic hold-down’ scanner-strip visible across the scans…

* November-December 1935. (Letter from Lovecraft praising an article by C. W. Lonsdell on writing good science fiction; Lovecraft poem “The Dweller”; tongue-in-cheek article-squib “How I Get My Inspiration”, on how to ‘write Lovecraftian’ for Weird Tales).

* [July 1936 at Archive.org]

* June 1937. (Lovecraft poem “Halloween in a Suburb”)

* July 1937. (Lovecraft poem “The Well”, and Lovecraft’s c. 1920-21 prose poem “Ex Oblivione”)

* August 1937.

* September 1937.

Archive.org has one 1940s issue, and the Hevelin collection has a number of 1940s issues.

The FictionMags Index has a complete index and tables of contents. The above links are to the only online full scans that I can find from the 1930s.

In 1967 a slim hardcover collected the very best of the publication as Operation: Phantasy. The Best from The Phantagraph (Table-of-Contents).

I’ll add links to this page as and when I find future complete scans of the 1930s issues.

New book: Born to Be Posthumous

07 Friday Dec 2018

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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“Edward Gorey: master of the macabre” The Spectator Australia reviews the new book Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey. The reviewer echoes the complaint of one of the Amazon reviewers when he says that “There’s a great deal of repetition in this book”, but finds it assiduously thorough.

Perhaps that opens an opportunity for someone to make a heavily abridged graphic novel, or a heavily illustrated abridged version, at some point?

Friday ‘picture postals’ from Lovecraft: Cross Plains

07 Friday Dec 2018

Posted by in New discoveries, Picture postals

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Did Lovecraft ever receive ‘picture postals’ from R. E. Howard, dropping through the mailbox in Providence? Perhaps. Although Cross Plains, Texas, does not seem to have been the sort of place one would make a postcard of — unless perhaps one could do something artistic with sagebrush and cattle and a sunset. But if they did once make such things as postcards, then it seems that a view of the town bank and main row of stores might have been the standard ‘town view’…

Rogers photo, 1920s, newly repaired and colourised.

I had a dig around on Archive.org and found the town’s water-tower, as seen behind the stores in the above picture, in full-length and in detail. One can see figures standing on the top railing and sitting on the bottom struts, for scale…

Added to Open Lovecraft

05 Wednesday Dec 2018

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* T. W. Melvaer, “Imagining the Unimaginable: Lovecraft in Popular Culture”, Masters dissertation for the Norway Technical and Natural Sciences University, 2018. (Surveys the use of Lovecraft and Cthulhu in recent popular culture: Rick and Morty; South Park; Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham; and the videogame Darkest Dungeon).

* J. R. C. Pacheco, “Apropiaciones Lovecraftianas de temas teosoficos”, Melancolia, Vol. 3, 2018. (In Spanish. A student of the Center for the Study of Western Esotericism discusses theosophical references in Lovecraft, especially… “Blavatskian anthropogenesis and the myth of the Book of Dzyan”).

Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques

04 Tuesday Dec 2018

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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The new book Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques: Monstrosity and Religion in Europe and the United States is one of those elite $115 essay collections seemingly aimed at collecting dust in University and (in this case) ecclesiastical libraries.

I’ve only just noticed it, and see that it appeared in the summer of 2018. It’s only of interest here for the one chapter: “Lovecraft’s Things: Sinister Souvenirs from Other Worlds” by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. Curiously an essay of the same title, and by the same author, also appeared in the similar (though now rather less costly) book collection The Age of Lovecraft (2016), so the 2018 essay seems to be a reprint — though I suppose it could also be revised and/or expanded version.

For those wondering what’s in that essay, since the new book has no previews as yet… after introductory and theoretical ‘thing theory’ sections, the final third of Weinstock’s Age of Lovecraft essay surveyed Lovecraft’s re-use of the stock Gothic props of the Castle (“Rats”), the Portrait (“Pickman”), and the Forbidden Book (guess), especially in terms of their uncanny quasi-personification in Lovecraft’s texts. It is suggested that such a form of personification might raise in Lovecraft’s readers a dimly resonant recall of a superstitious world, a world in which liminal objects and object-places (such as castles) had once been psychologically ‘enchanted’ with both dread and wonder. Such personification of earthly ‘things’ might also be understood as foreshadowing Lovecraft’s later deployment of monstrous cosmic forces in his fiction, outer entities that indifferently understand humans only as ‘things’. (The essay somewhat feeds into academic theory’s current notions of trans-species psychology, a future eco-animism, and a post-human planet).