A comment from Robert, here at this blog, which I think deserves to be worked up as little guest post…

Robert of Innsmouth Mania in France, writes:—

Here is a Web link to details of a very strange event which occurred in France over a decade ago, in 2001. The article is at http://clefargent.free.fr/wb_7rev.php. It is in French, but I will summarize it for you. It’s about an email which circulated on the Web for a few weeks, accompanied by a picture (which you can see on the website). This email said:

“Mail to all Lovecraft fans. It has been discovered recently in a Parisian bookseller, a copy of an unknown novel of Lovecraft, translated in French! This is the cover. Translation was made by Gabriel Lautrec, correspondent of R.H. Barlow, who has translated it at the end of the 1930’s. You will find the entirety of the text soon, on our website, which is under construction at the moment. The address will be given to you in another email soon.”

And then there was silence…

The title was the Club of 7 Dreamers, a book that Lovecraft thought of writing at some point (S.T. Joshi and others have noted it), but which he never did it. Gabriel Lautrec really existed and was indeed a known translator. The deep analysis of the cover showed that it was not a cut-and-paste made in Photoshop — it seems that the guy really printed the cover. But there was no trace of any such book in the catalog of the editor, nor in the archives of the French National Library, which is the equivalent of your British Library or Library of Congress.

It’s a fake, but a really good one, since in those days it would have taken months for people to search and get all the information, and then eventually conclude it was a prank. But during this time France had produced an unknown book by HPL! Like the title, we dreamed…

Proposal for a fairly simple non-RPG gamer’s fun Lovecraft board-game…

The board-game to be based on Lovecraft’s many long night-walks in New York, walks made frequently when he lived in the city for several years in the mid 1920s. Devise a simplified Monopoly-like version of New York City circa 1926, based on appropriate places found on maps and guides to the city at that time, and in the Lovecraft letters etc. The board-game would then have Lovecraft and his New York friends (maybe also a few cats from Ulthar, Detective Malone from “Red Hook”, and the old man from “He”) encountering mysterious atmospheres in NYC locations as they circle the squares at the edge of the board. The “hall of mirrors in Coney Island at night” would be an example of the sort of location to use (Lovecraft visited Coney Island several times), as well as the more obvious graveyards and museums etc. By landing on and answering knowledge questions about these places the players collect cards. When they have a certain combination of cards, this lets them into the tunnels or crypts or abandoned subway stations on the board. All tunnels emerge in the raised centre of the board — where players have a dream-encounter / psychic battle with Cthulhu. Perhaps they have to escape from the dream that Cthulhu is ‘sending’ to them. Perhaps Cthulhu is hanging off the Empire State Building, to which he is gripping King Kong-like. Players can only escape him via answering strange riddles, which would fit with Lovecraft’s concern with unspeakability and madness. The goal of the game would be to complete a tour of the Lovecraftian places in New York at night without going insane from too many Cthulhu dream encounters.

Feel free to take this idea and run with on Kickstarter. Just send me 10% of the take 🙂