Lavonardo

I quite enjoyed Ken Hite’s thorough work on the entire H.P. Lovecraft output about a year ago. Sadly, that work was carried out in livejournal, which doesn’t exactly shine in providing easy access to the set via categories.

I thought about creating a list of links to the individual entries, but never mustered the energy.

Fortunately, the text has now been resurrected and newly published by the Atomic Overmind Press. I’m still undecided whether to pick the pdf up immediately or to wait for the arrival of the book.

This is the first time that war on photographers is waged on a location I’ve visited.

Even though photography at the Swan Point Cemetery in Providence, Rhode Island, is forbidden, the abuse heaped on the visitor who took a photo of H.P. Lovecraft’s tombstone is an astounding example of good customer service.

I visited the location in 2006, and took no pictures. Mainly out of inconvenience as my backpack was buried in the backseat of the car.

[ via boingboing. ]

The week seems to be packed with science fictional freebies (information again courtesy of boingboing).

This time the loot is in audio form - as Neil Gaiman reads his genre-hopping short story A Study in Emerald. It is available in mysterious eAudio and fortunately MP3 format as well.

To a cthulhu-savvy person, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo’s statement is very frightening indeed:

…the stars were favourably aligned for Nokia in Q4…

What next?

Should we nickname the next communicator “Hastur”?

Got the long-awaited Delta Green: Eyes Only book the other day.

The book had a print run of 1000 copies, and the store seems to have run out very recently.

Eyes Only collects the three Delta Green chapbooks published late last millennium, and expands the content with two new scenarios. Which bodes well for the more conspiracy-ridden sessions of the Wednesday Emperors.

There’s been no indication whether this book ends up on the web as a free pdf (like the recent ransom-method publications by the main culprit, Dennis Detwiller) or starts turning up on eBay priced sky high like the original trio of booklets.

I am Nyarlathotep.

The 999 forms of Nyarlathotep are a point of meditation for the true initiate. It is through these manifold faces that the secrets of the universe are made known. Called “The Crawling Chaos”, Nyarlathotep is the disembodied ego of Azathoth and thus the universal “I” of known reality. Some of the many documented forms are; Father of Knives, Nephren-Ka, the Black Man, the Beast of the Lashing Tongue to name a few.

Which Great Old One are you?

Arkham Horror by Ryan Junell (CC)

Fantasy Flight Games has announced the arrival of fourth Arkham Horror expansion.

Kingsport Horror, out early next year adds yet another board to the game. The increasing need of horizontal real estate ensures that fewer and fewer of gamers can actually play Arkham Horror on a table, as the multiple boards and increasingly many decks of cards consume all available space.

It’s been a while since the last game - and the previous expansion hasn’t even been tried out. Definitely a good time soon to see whether the great old ones still hold humanity in thrall (current score is 4-2 for the home team).

A random collection of links that rose above the norm recently.

• Soundtrackinfo, because neither wikipedia nor imdb offers a complete guide to.
• The future of electronic paper.
• Cthulhu Fhtagn Cheezburger.
• Haven’t played around much with buzzfeed, seems interesting and occasionally pointful - the selection of links on discovery of new species is interesting to say the least.
• For old-skool sim city enthusiasts: build your own Chicago.
• Eternity II, the two million dollar puzzle. 256 pieces is deceptively small, but the number of permutations is astronomically high: the dominant number is 196! which is the number of alternate ways to lay out the centerpieces.
• Balloon dog anatomy.
• The annual Wired Test review compendium is now available for free.

Call of Cowthulhu, the first add-on to Steve Jackson Games’ Munchkin Cthulhu is out.

The mix of farmyard and unspeakable horrors is… odd.

And apparently popular, since the second expansion, Unspeakable Vault has just been announced. The game dispenses with John Kovalic as the artist, and opts for a new direction with the french Goomi.

Very much in the interactive fiction vein, with a healthy dose of classic and ultra-violent videogames thrown in for good measure.

• Telltale Games, who have singlehandedly birthed the episodical adventure game with Bone and Sam & Max recently received a nicely round six million dollars in venture capital.
• Yet another variant of the Z-Machine, Ziggy uses forums for input and output, and the effect is quite an odd multi-player experience.
• Rockstar continues its defiant progress: Manhunt 2. The release of the game has now been suspended following bans in both United Kingdom and United States.
• The H.P. Lovecraft 70-year anniversary games are out. My own effort got sidelined almost in square one.
• Mr. Grownup Gamer is blogging his way through the entire Zelda-series.
• Top 10 massively multiplayer games/worlds holds quite a few surprises: WoW at #1 is not one of them, but the 15:1 advantage enjoyed by Habbo Hotel over Second Life definitely is.
• A games writer for Guardian bravely tries to organize the writing of a multi-author text adventure on a blog.
• There’s a wiki for everything, and multiples thereof on hype-y subjects. Interactive fiction certainly doesn’t carry hype, but the jointly authored site on the subject provides lots of information.
• IGN’s games of the summer feature has very optimistic (but also vague) release date for Bioware’s inbound science fiction extravaganza Mass Effect.

Munchkin Cthulhu must have been an immediate hit, since Steve Jackson Games has already come up with a sequel: Call of Cowthulhu.

Which, based on the first images and words, attempts to combine the Lovecraftian mythos with an unhealthy dose of rusticity.

Played two games of Arkham Horror (supplemented with the first expansion Curse of the Dark Pharaoh) today. And the combined score of the two games was 1-1, a draw.

Originally planned on playing just a single game, but got so readily trounced by Cthulhu in the first game (lost on account of having seven open gates on board without us having sealed a single one), just had to try our hand on a second game.

Indeed sucked big time on the first one - didn’t do anything wrong, but fought against a stacked deck, and ended up losing big time (no investigators lost, just very slow progress on the Arkham streets). The final battle commenced much sooner than expected, and we hardly made a dent in the skin of the R’Lyeh Sleeper.

Used the same characters in the second game, against Yig, and while a handsome victory (six gates sealed), it was far from a clear-cut game. The expansion’s Mythos-cards broke the progress several times, and recomposing forces was twice much more a matter of luck than skill (clever anticipation cannot be claimed to be the cause, since there was hardly any strategy for long stretches).

Next time: a two board game, with Dunwich Horror added for extra rugosity and squamousness.

Delta Green is back after a long long hiatus.

Back as a properly published game. Dennis Detwiller has worked wonders with the ransom model during the last year, and now the game is back with a one-two punch.

The original book is finally reprinted, though sadly the content has not been updated since the original printing (apart from adding d20-based mechanics), the conspiracy-riddled world contains no details of a post-911 scheme. (This is based on a very brief and cursory look in Compleat Strategist in New York, so the new and improved data might be there, just carefully camouflaged).

The main event of this spring, however, is the long-awaited release of the three Eyes Only books in a much-expanded edition. The trio of books was originally available directly from Pagan Publishing only - and in the days of pretty much nonexistent web stores, really hard to obtain outside the united states. Got the last two books from a friend who visited Gencon back in the day, and have been looking for the first on eBay. Though, with prices regularly crossing the $100 mark, haven’t been sorely tempted. Now, with a reworked edition, with doubled page count from the originals. There’s simply no excuse not to buy this book. Even with the horrible shipping costs. The initial printing is limited to 1000 copies, half of which have now been sold in ten days.

Rather strong a show for conspiracy/cthulhu mix-up, which was judged to be dead in the water years ago.

Three interesting articles on interactive fiction popped up this week:

Peter Nepstad kicked off a contest on creating a game based on H.P. Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book, a collection of story fragments. The story fragments are short - might be an opportune time to dust off the compiler and give this a shot. Not for the contest part, but to have a first decent programming project in a long long while. And woo, on the double, looks like Manifesto Games is picking up the distribution on 1893.

Textfyre is a phenomenally bad name for the latest company trying to make it in the less-than-obvious niche of commercial interactive fiction (last known successes: Infocom and Magnetic Scrolls). But they’ve signed up the author of Anchorhead, Michael Gentry for the first games. Which means that I’ll certainly give the first product a shot.

Gamasutra ran an interview with Emily Short the co-author of Inform 7 and a bunch of good games.

Purely game-related links, avoid like plague if you think gaming is not a dignified pursuit past the tender age of tweleve.

• The second part of the history of computerized role-playing games is out. And this one covers much more familiar ground than the previous segment.
• Chaosium’s Beyond the Mountains of Madness is one of the most imposing books on my gaming shelf. Imposing enough that I haven’t really considered subjecting any players to it yet. A recent collection of game aids for it might just mean that a summer campaign is born. Too bad that it’s a monograph, and not for sale except through direct order (wouldn’t matter much, but Chaosium’s mailing chargers are a killer).
• The issue of Dragon Magazine focusing on the works of China Miéville is out. Forty pages of low-crunch goodness.
• Put together a set of pages for our nicely starting Enemy Within-campaign.
• Casual games: does uncle Bob dare to go BEYOND MINESWEEPER?
• Haven’t participated in the annual novel-writing effort, 50′000 words in a month is a scary concept. However, a target of writing a 32-page adventure is far less frightening - and that’s exactly what Worldwide Adventure Writing Month attempts to accomplish this june.

First collection of links in a long while.

• H.P. Lovecraft’s Case of Randolph Carter as hypertext. The interface is iffy, but the concept interesting (seek out Anchorhead for an even better experience).
• An overview of parallel computing. 50+ pages, probably not that light reading.
• Gonegaming’s awards for 2006.
• An absolute treasure trove of unusual articles in wikipedia. In some cases mere “unusual” is definitely an understatement.
• In the beginning (like, seven years ago), there was korsoraattori, now there’s a a new dialect of SQL for the folks from northeastern Vantaa.

Lost a game of Arkham Horror. And by “lost” I mean that the game beat us, and no-one won.

Score is now 3-1 for the human element, and we came quite close to beating the Challenger from Carcosa in the final battle.

Indeed, this was the first game that ended in the Great Old One awakening, previously we’d been efficient enough to take care of the gates and minions in short order.

That did not happen in this game - we all drew gunslingers, which is nice for normal combat encounters, but sucks painfully as a balanced party. Managed to stave off disaster for many, many turns (game lasting well over four hours) after the sealing of gates in a few key locations. But that was just a temporary advantage, as an unresolvable rumor soon doubled the planar activity, and the three of us were unable to cope with the avalanche.

Next time, a date with a late pharaoh, and after that, a detour to Dunwich.

Dunwich Horror, the second expansion to Arkham Horror, is out and available in shops.

Seems that my living room table is too small to accommodate the two towns, as the expansion adds a two-panel board to the already big need for space.

Thus far the Wednesday Emperors have beaten the Great Old Ones 3-0, but the expansions supposedly turn up the difficulty of the game.

[ via Hiljaisten seiväshyppäjien kerho. ]

As a movie, the recent maximally retro Call of Cthulhu is not very good. The minimal budget of the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society shows, but in the end: the low allowance does not matter, and the movie just moves along at its own pace, entertaining for the whole 45 minute length.

I never expected an HPL movie to be full of deeply built characters played by the marquee names of the day - no, the anonymous actors employed suit the genre perfectly.

I never expected spectacular effects, the rather blatantly stop-motion animated Cthulhu suits the purpose well, as do the ship models. Which are not CGI, but real scale models.

I kind of expected the movie to be tied together a bit more - the short story consists of thinly connected separate threads, and the state of affairs remains the same.

As a movie this is indeed decent brief entertainment, and as such a good introduction to the works of the Cthulhu Mythos. For the HPL-connoisseurs the movie is a revelation - the works can be brought to celluloid without resorting to modernization and extra gore (no matter how functional and entertaining they may occasionally turn out to be).

The production values on the dvd do not leave anything to be desired. Well worth the money, and hopefully the proceedings bring forth more such fruits of labour.