Category Archives: Odd scratchings

Proposal for a Lovecraft board-game

28 Tuesday May 2013

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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 🙂

Lovecraft Was Right, Part 756

26 Sunday May 2013

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Painting through the power of thought enabled by scientists…

electropainting

In “From Beyond” (1920)… “Tillinghast creates an electrical device that emits a resonance wave, which stimulates an affected person’s pineal gland, thereby allowing them to perceive planes of existence outside the scope of accepted reality” (Wikipedia).

On using the device… “from some point in space there seemed to be pouring a seething column of unrecognizable shapes or clouds” — “From Beyond” (1920).

Tapping into Kickstarter’s abundance

24 Friday May 2013

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A board-game/card-game based on Neil Gaiman’s Lovecraft/Holmes crossover story “A Study in Emerald” has been abundantly funded on Kickstarter, and should ship in October 2013…

game

Perhaps that’s a special case because the stars have aligned: Lovecraft / Gaiman / Holmes / steampunk-era, all wrapped up in an accessible game format. But I’m wondering how Lovecraftian scholars might tap into such generosity for things Lovecraftian? Some off-the-cuff ideas…

* A search-engine for the full collection of the Lovecraft letters would surely get handsome funding. It could be done in the same proven-secure manner that Google Books uses for presentation of its search results, only letting you see small snippets. The source would be the full Schultz/Joshi digital archive of the letters. The engineers at Google might even help out with that, as they helped with deciphering the recent Lovecraft postcard-letter.

* If a long-time Lovecraftian researcher wanted to be compensated for making all their texts “open access” in digital perpetuity on archive.org, as they headed into retirement, I’d imagine a Kickstarter campaign might do it.

* A full searchable online library (built on a combination of Google Custom Search Engine and Omeka) reproducing Lovecraft’s own library in searchable digital form, plus all the books he’s known to have read. It would have to be limited to public domain materials, but if you look at Joshi’s book Lovecraft’s Library you’ll see that a lot of it is now in the public domain.

* Maybe some kind of simple-but-full digital gazetteer of all Lovecraft’s places, built on Omeka and with each record having embedded links to Google Maps and Google Streetview for the location. Could be done as a wiki, but in my experience small open collective wikis fail even faster than a socialist economy. Might be best done by a small team of long-time Lovecraftian geographers.

* A simple introductory “Beginner’s Guide to Research in Lovecraft and his Mythos”, along the lines of the “For Dummies”… books? I suspect there’s a whole lot of intelligent people out there would might like to write and blog about Lovecraft and the later Mythos authors in a more grounded manner, but who lack any real guide to start them off. The other problem of course, is the sheer expense of acquiring the print-only Lovecraft books that are needed if one is to triangulate and fact-check the many discoveries still to be made via the free online resources. Such a “Beginner’s Guide” could also usefully be translated into other key languages.

* There’s my Lovecraft timelines idea, but the software doesn’t yet exist to do that in an elegant or easy manner.

Strange fearful & true newes

10 Friday May 2013

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What exactly was the providence that gave Lovecraft’s Providence its name? There’s a book on that, Providence in Early Modern England — which has a chapter on mysterious signs and portents associated with providence… “‘Tongues of Heaven’: Prodigies, Portents, and Prophets”.

Update: it was a free chapter when I linked it, but now seems to be paywalled! Sorry about that. But it’s mostly available free on Google Books: search “Prodigies, Portents, and Prophets”.

graphic020
The first fanzine for weird tales? Strange fearful & true newes, London 1606.

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They loved their weird giant tentacle monsters, even way back. The discription of a rare or rather most monstrous fishe, London 1566.

Timeline in the works

03 Friday May 2013

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Further to my recent Lovecraft timeline idea which I posted here, it seems a group in London is on the case…

HTML5 (history) timeline creation web app. Fixed-Price – Est. Budget: $5,500.00. Posted April 8 2013, delivery 31st May 2013. “We’re a London based group of designers, historians and consultants who want a prototype (history) timeline creation web app…”

So I shall hold off my own timeline in the hope that they have something in beta by late summer.

Lovecraft’s library, searchable

03 Friday May 2013

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It occurs to me that Lovecraftian researchers could now have a keyword search-engine for Lovecraft’s own library, plus books he is known to have read. If we want it. Since most of these books are now in the public domain and have been scanned by Google, and are consequently now free on Archive.org, Gutenberg, or Hathi. Rather than just a list of Web links, the best option would be to:

   i. go through the second edition of the book Lovecraft’s Library, Google-ing the titles and getting the Web URLs for the full plain text if it exists online.

   ii. plug this URL-list into a free Google Custom Search personalised search-engine.

Alternatively, someone could create a commercial product on a DVD which serves the same function. This might have the benefit of including PDF digital facsimiles, as well as referencing the stripped plain text of the books. Such a product could also acquire and scan any public domain volumes unavailable online. Feel free to take this idea and run with it, with the suggestion that you can probably save yourself a lot of work by commissioning someone via elance.com or similar. I imagine that $200 or so would entice some student to spend a few days doing the grunt-work of looking up the Lovecraft’s Library titles and getting the URLs.

A Lovecraft timeline

02 Thursday May 2013

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I was thinking of doing a basic “core-facts” Lovecraft timeline. As a big desktop-based side-scroller timeline for the Web. With three strands running parallel to each other: his life events / dates for writing and publication of the works / relevant general-history dates. Sadly timeline creation software is still as crap as it was in 2007, the last time I went looking for it in a serious way. The software is either geared toward: genealogists (ugly, fiddly, expensive); arcane computer-coding nerds (ugly, fiddly to install, always in beta); or business owners or schoolkids who just want a dozen items on a dinky little timeline (can sometimes be pretty, but can’t handle hundreds of items / side-scrolling / slick zooming in-and-out). Anyone have experience of a good timeline software, for the sort of finished Web history timeline that I’m envisioning? I’m thinking I may have to code it in javascript and HTML, as I did in 2007 🙁