A very quick glance at the titles for the usual annual tidal-wave of Lovecraftian videogames, these being those set for the first half of 2020…

* The Innsmouth Case. Hard boiled detectives in Innsmouth, interactive story-based and apparently with “comedy” elements. Cue the “Hmmm, something smells fishy here” jokes.

* World of Horror is a retro text Lovecraft adventure game with b&w manga-style pictures.

* Moons of Madness, Lovecraft in outer spaaacce! A big game delayed from 2019, but promised for 2020.

* Dead Static Drive. A Lovecraftian car-racing game.

* Transient, apparently Lovecraftian cyberpunk. Get ready to strap on your “cosmic radio” headsets.

* It seems the acclaimed The Sinking City is also getting some return-luv as new PC players get past the hate-reviews to find it, and as previous players revisit it with the new gaming PC / graphics-card they got in the January sales. There are also new items for the game such as the long-awaited October 2019 PC patch, free DLC character outfits, and the November 2019 noir reshade mod.

I probably missed a few, but in the absence of a blog-a-list of such things from a hardcore gamer who knows the territory, this’ll have to do.

Also noted in the quick search were tabletop games, such as Fate of Cthulhu, and it seems that the boardgame The Gate of R’lyeh (2019) is gaining ever-more positive reviews.

Bobby Derie surveys “Farnsworth Wright’s Favorite Weird Tales”. Lovecraft’s own list is included is the essay, for comparison. The master had trawled his personal file of Weird Tales back-issues, most likely over Christmas 1929/30, and sent the ‘top six’ to Wright in Jan? 1930…

“Beyond the Door” — Paul Suter.
“The Floor Above” — M. Humphreys.
“The Night Wire” — H. F. Arnold.
“The Canal” — Everil Worrell.
“Bells of Oceana” — Arthur J. Burks.

He also remarks “I’d include [Frank Belknap Long’s] “Black Druid” if it were published.”

Spotted on Archive.org…

They made ploughs in Batavia, New York.

And after a basic fix with Photoshop and some tickling with the desktop version of Vector Magic…

This is at 3k. Feel free to further fix and add to it. It probably can’t be used commercially as it’s a ’20s or ’30s logo on a 1942 catalogue cover. But you could still use it on a local event poster etc. A “weird poetry” performance night, perhaps?

PseudoPod 685: “The Loved Dead”, with a full reading of this notorious ‘banned in Indiana’ Lovecraft/Eddy collaboration. Which is rather good and, as S.T. Joshi has remarked several times, reads as if Lovecraft wrote it from start to finish.

New on Archive.org, “A Penny A Word”, being the detailed and lively memoir of an anonymous pulp writer who entered the field circa 1924-26 and spent a decade in it. The memoir appeared in The American Mercury, March 1936.

Who knew Submarine Stories was ever a real title? It appeared early 1929, but six months later ran into the teeth of the Great Depression and is said to have folded after 13 shaky issues. As such, it can’t have appealed to H.P. Lovecraft as a market, even though he had tried his hand at submarine tales in “The Temple”.

The 2020 theme of the Milan Machinima Festival is to be “The Weird, the Eerie, and the Unreal”. This is the third Italian festival on machinima, celebrating animations and films made with real-time rendering engines (videogame engines, mostly) and bringing the best of such work to the big screen in Milan as part of its Digital Week. The dates are 9th-13th March 2020 in Milan, Italy.

Propnomicon creates the Tillinghast Device from Lovecraft’s “From Beyond”.

Lovecraft’s devices are perhaps an under-considered part of his work. Off the top of my head I can think of…

* The time travel device and camera-like ray weapons in “Shadow out of Time”.

* The devices of Curwen (“Never before or since had he seen such instruments or suggestions of instruments as here loomed up on every hand through the burying dust and cobwebs of a century and a half”).

* The ‘mechanical’ and ‘canister’ aspects of the ending of “The Whisperer in Darkness”.

* The machines in “Cool Air”.

* The ray-projector in “The Evil Clergyman”.

* The cosmic telepathy device in “Beyond the Wall of Sleep”.

And probably there are others I forget now, and still more that are less central to the plots or to be inferred from the Commonplace Book or even the letters. I don’t recall ever seeing a pure Lovecraft RPG book (as opposed to a ‘Derlethian/wider-Mythos Lovecraft’ RPG book) collecting such things in one volume and giving them gamer stats etc.

New on The HPLHS Store, and thus able to combine nicely with other orders, the English version of The Illustrated Call of Cthulhu…

Every now and then we find a product that’s so fantastically great we must have it for our store. For some time we’ve been following online the progress of this illustrated version of The Call of Cthulhu by the French illustrator Francois Baranger. His illustrated book is finally done and is, quite simply, spectacular. We are delighted to share with you this new English edition by Fria Ligan and Design Studio Press.

It’s an oversized illustrated version with painted illustrations.

The same artist also has an “At the Mountains of Madness” book, done in the same format… but when last noticed here it was in French only. There’s also an interview with him in the recent book, Lovecraft: Au coeur du cauchemar, which could possibly be translated into English by someone at some point.