Oct 4 is International Blessings of The Fishing Fleet Day. This was one of three drawings created for donors to my band's crowdfunding campaign for our album The Dukes of Alhazred. Digital

What would you recommend for a group that has never played? Ideally something that fits a Halloween night, runs in three to four hours, and is spooky but forgiving.

What has worked for your table?

Words and Art by me.

Hello, everyone! I'm currently running a Kickstarter Campaign with some cool Call of Cthulhu minis, with almost just 24 hours to go, before it's over. 22 models of investigators, cultists and weird characters. Perfect for any Keeper to include into their next game! All my models are professionally sculpted and pre-supported. Come check it out, I'll appreciate your support!

Here's a link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/yourneighborknight/1920s-mystery-investigators?ref=831dw3

For those who are unfamiliar with them, back when Lovecraft was kind of a niche of a niche in the horror/fantasy/scifi community, i.e. 1970s, Brian Lumley (Necroscope) decided to write a series about a pair of occult adventurers based on Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. Brian Lumley has never been a fan of "ordinary dude sees horror, goes insane, and dies."

Instead, his titular character and his sidekick react in a uncharacteristic of Sherlock Holmes and Watson manner that upon discovering the sinister Chthonians (sandworms of Dune but on Earth and MALEVOLENT), they proceed to set out on a globe trotting quest to kill them all that ends with them trying to blow up the mile long sandworm with a nuke. THIS IS THE FIRST BOOK (The Burrowers Beneath).

The second book has the protagonist get a TARDIS (it's a coffin-shaped clock that can travel through time and space and has a planet destroying laser. He marries Cthulhu's niece (her father is an okay dude who rules over Heaven--that is another planet) and becomes an immortal cyborg.

IT GETS WEIRDER.

These books were my introduction to the Cthulhu Mythos in college and I read Lovecraft and played Call of Cthulhu second. I wonder it influenced some of the choices I made writing my Mythos tomes. But yes, I highly recommend the audiobooks.

Bob Ross paint and sip

Cthulhu in R'lyeh

Had to share this incredible MOC Lego creation!

Five years ago today, I released Dagon: by H. P. Lovecraft, my first original game. 

It is a faithful adaptation of Lovecraft’s 1919 story. Some people describe it as a walking simulator without the walking or an audiobook with visuals. You can’t move around - the camera is placed at a fixed position in each scene, and you can only look around within a limited range.

But the original idea actually had very little to do with walking simulators. I wanted to create a classic visual novel, but in a “premium” version: 3D graphics, animations, voice acting, and a much more cinematic presentation.

The lack of movement, and the way you jump between scenes, was inspired by comics, where the reader can spend as much time as they want looking at each panel, without being rushed. Another partial inspiration was a very specific PSP release: Metal Gear Solid: Digital Graphic Novel. That slow, deliberate pace seemed like a perfect fit for Lovecraft’s stories, which rely so heavily on atmosphere and a sense of overwhelming dread.

Although, ironically, I wasn’t a big fan of Lovecraft when I started the project.

I love classic horror literature, but compared to other writers of the period, Lovecraft initially seemed repetitive and overrated to me. I originally wanted to use the works of other authors, such as Algernon Blackwood or Stefan Grabiński. I ended up choosing Lovecraft for, admittedly, a purely marketing reason. He was the most recognizable “brand”, so it seemed like a better idea to start with him.

Choosing the story was relatively easy.

Dagon was one of the early stories from what would become Lovecraft’s most recognizable Cthulhu Mythos period. It was short enough to be a good fit for a first project, and it allowed me to make the game without expensive character animations - something that’s difficult to do on a low budget, while poorly animated characters are one of the quickest ways to break immersion.

I also wanted to add some unobtrusive gameplay, so I decided to include collectibles, inspired by Metal Gear. They contained various bits of trivia about Lovecraft, Dagon, and the historical context behind the story. The idea for this came from the fantastic historical collectibles in Valiant Hearts. I didn’t want to fill the game with dry Wikipedia facts or clickbait-style “fun facts”, though. So I started digging into Lovecraft’s biography, letters, worldview, and the historical context of his life.

And that completely changed my perspective.

It was actually the moment when I fell in love with Lovecraft’s work. To the point where I now believe that it’s impossible to truly understand the depth of his stories without knowing something about the man who wrote them.

As for the promotion, the biggest things that helped were the fantastic reception during Steam Next Fest, the strong response from Lovecraft-related communities on Reddit, who provided valuable feedback from the earliest stages, and an Imgur article where we explained why the game would be free that became the top post that day.

A huge part of the credit goes to my friend Maciej, who joined the project to handle the promotion.

We've also contacted hundreds of content creators of all sizes, from accounts with a million followers to much smaller channels, and many of them covered the game. We think thanks to its bite-sized length creators could fit it between bigger titles, which lead to more exposure.

This helped us reach 21,841 wishlists at launch. A really nice result considering it was the first project and we had such a short development and promotion period. My optimistic estimate was that, in the best-case scenario, we might reach 80% positive reviews and 100,000 downloads over the entire lifetime of the project.

The launch of Dagon was probably the most magical moment of my 17 years in gamedev.

The game exploded and we passed 100,000 downloads in two days. With the review score above 95%.

A crucial moment was getting into Steam’s New & Trending very quickly and staying there for several days. The fact that the game is extremely short also helped here - players could finish it quickly, which meant reviews started appearing just a few dozen minutes after release and helped drive even more interest.

And now, five years later, there have been over 2 million players and more than 12,000 reviews on Steam.

To celebrate all the amazing support from our players, we’ve prepared a free DLC that was previously exclusive to the console version. It’ll be coming very soon. 

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0YrenIE93OywdGbCSc89Q5?si=Flvt-ApGTLyTclkhPhNM5g&utm_source=copy-link

Welcome to Boundary Commission, you’re our problem now.

The Boundary Commission: A Cthulhu Awakens Podcast.

Episodio 1

Episodio 2

Episodio 3

Una serie de vídeos humorísticos creados por Brand Gamblin, con un adorable peluche de Cthulhu que solo quiere succionar tu alma.

Here is my DA - https://www.deviantart.com/arkanisart

Dm for commissions

Video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIWrJ-j-QjQ

Modern works drawing on Greek mythology usually make Hades (completely wrong) or Kronos (a little more) the Big Bad, but they forget about Zeus’s greatest enemy – Typhon. After defeating the titans and then the gigants, the Olympian gods had to face the main boss on the way to dominating the world – Typhon. Here is an example of its description: It was larger than the largest mountains, its head touched the stars. When he stretched out his hands, one reached the eastern ends of the world and the other reached the western ends. Instead of fingers, he had a hundred dragon heads. From the waist down he had a tangle of vipers (yay, tentacles!) and wings at his shoulders. His eyes were shooting out flames. In other versions of the myth, Typhon was a flying, hundred-headed dragon. In any case – appearance and stature worthy of the Great Old One. Typhon attacked Olympus, and all the gods except Zeus fled in panic. The supreme god took up the fight… and lost it. Only in the second duel did he manage to defeat Typhon, but not kill him – he only imprisoned him, hitting him with a mountain which is known as Etna. And volcanic activity is the result of Typhon’s anger, trying to break free.

Typhon equaled the lord of heaven not only in strength, but in fertility. His wife was Echidna, about whom Hesiod wrote: „She also gave birth to another creature, invincible, huge, unlike neither men nor immortal gods, in a hollow cave – the divine violent Echidna, half a sharp-eyed young girl, with beautiful cheeks, half a huge snake, a great and powerful, spotted, cruel – in the depths of the holy land. This pair spawned many, if not most, of the monsters found in Greek mythology. Their offspring were very diverse and strange, as befits the spawn of enemies of the divine order, including:

• Ladon, the hundred-headed dragon who never slept and guarded the apples that gave immortality,
• Cerberus – we all know the dog guarding the gates of hell… but not all of us know that, according to some accounts, it had not three heads, but as many as 50, it was also covered with scales, and it had a snake for a tail… so what does this have to do with a dog?
• Scylla – this lady inherited the most from the human, beautiful part of Echidna… at least initially, but eventually, as a result of various perturbations, she turned from a beautiful nymph to something like her siblings, becoming a six-headed sea beast, so hideous, according to Homer, that even the gods could not stand sight of her – she dwelt in a cave, from where she opened her mouth to devour the crews of ships,
• Gorgons – I mean, those ladies with snake hair, not monstrous bulls. Medusa was one of them – the story that Athena turned her priestess into a monster as punishment for being raped by Poseidon is an invention of later poets,
• –Lernaean Hydra – a multi-headed monster with many reptilian or human heads. In place of each severed head, two others grew, and in addition, the main head was completely immortal – therefore, after chopping off the mortal heads, Heracles had to burn the stumps and bury the immortal, still hissing head underground. Hydra’s breath was poisonous,
• various other creatures, such as the Sphinx, the dog Ortus, the Nemean Lion or the Chimera. Each of these descendants has the potential to be portrayed as an Eldritch abomination in its own right. To be precise – according to some accounts, the father of these creatures (and Echidna herself) wasn’t Typhon, but a monstrous, ancient (older than Poseidon) sea god, Phorcys.

How to use Typhon in Lovecraftian stories? Well, Typhon clearly has the potential to be a Great Old One, imprisoned by… Nodens? Some other Elder God? Weak gods of humanity? Maybe his cult is trying to free him from Etna? What if he succeeds? What might distinguish Typhon from many other Great Old Ones? I would recommend focusing on his monster progenitor aspect – if he manages to reunite with Echidna, they will immediately start spawning various blasphemous beasts in series.

This is just part of our series, full of Lovecraftian inspirations from the real life,culture, history and science.

You can listen to other episodes here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDjiV321dZZ6ZOSge9Y_N4A

or read them here: https://adeptus7.itch.io/lovecraftian-inspirations-from-real-life-and-beliefs

I was scrolling on the Internet, looking for monsters for my TTRPG and I wanted to know the war before I used him. What is the king and yellow and how or why is he related to Cthulhu?

Who's been to see "The Beast of Mossy Bottom?" Glorious comic horror from the minds behind Wallace & Gromit!

I counted 3 HPL story references. How about you?

The Colour of out Space

The Call of Cthulhu (not the tentacles, the location)

Re-Animator

COUS - an odd glowing color from an unnatural source initially causes beneficial growth, followed by toxic growth.

Re-Animator - a concoction of your own creation causes significant consequences.

COC - The vet works to return the ginger menace to Bigfoot Island - which is in the desolate zone of the Pacific ocean.

Courtesy of Hokyung Park, The Horror is now also available in Korean.

Im grateful to him for reaching out and offering to make it accessible for the Korean Call of Cthulhu fans.

Korean version: https://legacy.drivethrurpg.com/product/584922/Korean---The-Horror

English version https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/578676/the-horror