IBC131 Gaming the Mythos

Our old pal John Houlihan joins us in The Squid Inn as we take a new look at gaming the Mythos. We go back to the early days of Lovecraftian computer games, talk about some new releases, then go on to favourite card and board games. We round off with RPGs, plus tips on game design and building atmosphere at the table (rubber tentacles, anyone?) Finally, it's a dip into Dagon's Sack for the latest missives!
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ILF26            John Houlihan           Tips for Horror RPGs       Mothership Campaign

Key of Dreams      We Want the Gold     

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:11

Welcome to Insmouth Scranger.

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Greetings, friends, and welcome to episode 131 of the Innsmouth Book Club. As you can see, we've taken refuge today from the scorching heat outside in the Squid Inn. To be precise, we're in the games room in the Squid Inn. I'm one of your hosts, Rob Poynton.

SPEAKER_01 0:35

And I'm the other one, Tim Mendys. I'll tear myself away from the nice pristine Necronomicon pinball table that they have in the corner, which it's always nice to see one of those. And yeah, we're going to be talking all things game-related with the Mythos today. So we're going to be looking at video games, tabletop RPGs, and card games and stuff like that. And to do this, we are going to be joined by a returning esteemed guest, Mr. John Hoolehan. Hi, John.

SPEAKER_02 1:01

Hello, hello, hello, how are you? I'm just tore myself away from great old one invaders. Always fun, gentlemen.

SPEAKER_00 1:12

Yeah, just a word of warning. Don't lean over the pool table because the pool table in Insmouth is a little more interactive than you're used to. So let's start with uh some news items, of course. I just want to give a quick mention for Innsmouth Literary Festival 26, of course, which is about a month away now. Still a few tickets left, but don't hang about. And I just wanted to let you know that if you wanted to pre-order the ILF 26 t-shirt, which has a lovely bus design on it this year, then you've just got about another week to do so. Check the Innsmouth Gold site. John, I hear you've got some news. You've got a new book due out very soon, I believe.

SPEAKER_02 1:51

I I have indeed, yes, the um fourth instalment of my Mondu Cthulhu series, Napoleonic uh Adventures in the Peninsula, which is sort of very kindly being described as um Sharp meets HP Lovecraft in the fires of the peninsula war. Um that gets uh its fourth instalment, Keeper of the Hidden Hidden Flame, uh, in which uh our dashing but dim Hussar hero gas underwater gets deeper embroiled into the uh sinister events surrounding the peninsula war. And also I'll be launching it actually at the ILF. Yes, yes, indeed. Uh reading and signings and uh all that kind of good stuff, so do come along and say hello.

SPEAKER_00 2:35

Brilliant, because the last one ended on a bit of a cliffhanger, from what I remember.

SPEAKER_02 2:39

It did. I've I've been taking I've been taking my cues from the old episodic serials, and uh, you know, you've gotta you've gotta have something for people to go, gosh, I need to know what happens next. Nice. Well mon dieu, I should say.

SPEAKER_03 2:53

Indeed. Yeah, gosh, doesn't really work, does it?

SPEAKER_00 2:57

Yeah, if it was sharp, you've got to say bastard. Bastard. And uh you've been out gigging, Tim. You've got some more gigs coming up as well. Is that right?

SPEAKER_01 3:07

Indeed, yeah, yeah. We just played Blackpool and Manchester at the weekend. So I'd just like to thank everybody who came to those, and uh it seemed to have a really good time. There was a lot of drinking and a lot of uh rowdiness. It was it was always good to see when a crowd gets a bit rowdy, you know. There's nothing worse than an audience sitting on their hands. Oh, yeah. So this was the opposite, it was grey fun, grey fun. And yes, we will be playing in Brighton on the 4th of September at Brighton Electric with the awesome lesbian bed death. So that's gonna be an absolutely cracking evening. So come along and join us for that.

SPEAKER_00 3:43

Nice, nice. We'll put the links down below, of course. And uh I can announce that my book, Queen of the Fens, is finally off at the printers. We're just waiting for the first proof copy to come back. This is uh sequel to Robert E. Howard's Worms of the Earth, set in Roman Britain. And it's the first in a trilogy in what is known as the Empire of the Worm series. So that should be certainly ready for ILF, if not before, slithering toward you even as we speak. So, yeah, as Tim mentioned at the top there, we're gonna be looking at three main aspects of mythos gaming, and we're we're gonna try and stick to the mythos in particular, because of course, if we mentioned horror, then it widens out even more. And I think, especially if we're looking at video games, it's wide enough, isn't it?

SPEAKER_03 4:33

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:34

Oh yeah. So we're gonna try and keep to mythos specific and we're gonna start with video games, PC games. I think we're all old enough to remember some of those classics that came on the floppy disk or CD. And John, I know you were very involved in the PC game world in the early days.

SPEAKER_02 4:52

Yes, yes, I was uh before I turned my hand to fiction, I was uh video games journalist for about 25 years, uh working for pretty much every publication, but especially uh PC Gamer, PC Zone, and Computervideogames.com, where I was uh editor and uh coverings all video game news and and reviews and all kinds of good stuff like that. So yes, I still haven't uh got over the addiction, but I can play for fun rather than uh uh career nowadays, which is actually quite a nice change of pace, I must say. But yeah, some uh some true classics, which I'm sure we'll get into very shortly um in the sort of Cthulhu Mythos uh genre.

SPEAKER_01 5:33

Yeah, there's a surprising number. There's the ones that everybody knows, and then there's another hundred that nobody's ever heard of. Because I'm actually writing a book on Lovecrafty video gaming, and I have been for the last two or two and a half years, because there's so much stuff that I've got to research in inverted commas. It's it's a great idea just to sit and sit and play video games all day, right? It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it. I'm working honest, honest.

SPEAKER_00 6:01

How have you managed in terms of retro stuff? I I guess can you pick stuff up on Steam now and that kind of thing, the older games?

SPEAKER_01 6:08

Emulation. Emulation for for stuff like your Spectrum, your Commodore 64, anything like that. Yeah, you emulators are everywhere. And I bought a little little doodat, a little box uh called like a super console X, and it's load pre-loaded with hundreds of emulators, and you just put the ROMs on a little SD card and uh play it on your TV like a console. Um yeah, that's been that's been invaluable because there was a surprising amount for them early uh systems, like um, because obviously people a lot of people know about the lurking horror and the text adventure, but around the same time there was the Terrar of Dunwich and various other little text adventures that slipped under the radar, but even back in like the ZX Spectrum and the Amstrad CPC in the very in the mid-80s, there was a very early point-and-click adventure called The Mystery of Arkham Manor, which takes its beats from the case of Charles Dexter Ward. And yeah, I was amazed by all these little gems, fistful of Necronomicons on the spectrum and things like that.

SPEAKER_02 7:16

Yeah, I think um that it's just uh programmers and game designers just love a bit of Lovecraft. I mean, if we talked about every single game that's had an influence, we you know, this episode would stretch to the next millennia. But um, you know, you find it its influence everywhere. I mean, there's even in you know, major titles like Red Redemption 2, you can find like uh uh uh just a little Easter egg of like a bunch of cultists who've all committed suicide on their way to going to old runs right deep in the backwoods and stuff like that, and you know, eldritch symbols all across the wall. Very interesting.

SPEAKER_00 7:54

And I think it was that, and then when we get into the RPGs, obviously, with Call of Cthulhu, this sort of spawned the 80s Lovecraft boom, didn't it? I think.

SPEAKER_01 8:04

Yeah, I think it I think we're definitely on the crest of another one because as John just mentioned, it's like in the Assassin's Creed Mirage, there was a whole side quest where you go around finding mythos tomes and it takes you to like the nameless city and things like that. Um yeah, it's cropping up in everything. I mean, like even major things like Elder Scrolls, each Elder Scrolls game has some form of Lovecraft mission in it. I mean, famously Oblivion had the Shadow over Hack Dirt, which was essentially the Shadow Over Insmouth, just done in the Elder Scrolls universe, you know.

SPEAKER_00 8:43

It's and wider from that, I think we've got the Necronomicon in the latest Minions film, isn't it? Or something like that. I didn't see that. I don't yeah, yeah, apparently there's some Lovecraft influence in minions even. Wow, amazing. So kick us off then, John. Let's go around and we'll choose uh one or two each to start and uh and see where we go.

SPEAKER_02 9:04

Well, I that's that I I it was a real struggle to sort of narrow it down. I eventually ended up picking top picking the top five because I just thought otherwise it would be you know, we'd be here forever. But I think the one that really stands out to me as the most authentic uh Lovecraft experience was um Call of Cthulhu, Dark Corners of the Earth, which is one of the true classics. It it you know, I went back and had a look at the gameplay and the graphics, and it doesn't obviously look great by today's standards, but just in terms of atmosphere, authenticity, subject matter, it's just it is the closest, I think, to original a classic Lovecraft story. There's you know, uh the premise is uh you know, a private detective who's in uh incarcerated in a mental hospital, and he's had a breakdown, and he's sort of slowly piecing together, you know, the the parts of his case. There's a visit to our our own fair Innsmouth here, um, and some classic characters from the um the uh uh you know the the mythos and and Lovecraft's writing. And I it's the classic setting as well, sort of 20s, 30s, um, uh, but it just drips with perfect atmosphere and authenticity. And the other one I'd pick, um not well, again, it's very atmospheric and authentic, is something called amnesia, the dark descent. Yes, one of my favourites. Yeah, ah, it's such a brilliant um interpretation of the mythos. It's got some very clever um sanity mechanics in it, so the more you spend time in the darkness or looking at monsters or experiencing unsettling things, the more your insanity kind of grows. But if you use if you light up torches and lanterns, that restores your sanity, but it means the things that are hunting you can see you. I mean you've got this kind of constant balance of trying to explore, but trying to avoid you know these things, and you can't fight them, they're deadly every time. So you've got you really have got you know your you know, you're kind of helpless in the face of uh these these abominations, which is obviously very on on point. And um, yeah, I just think it again, it's you know, you get the story, it sort of unfolds through notes and discovery, and and it's not very long, it's not you know, again, not brilliant looking by today's standards, but just for creepy atmosphere, it's almost unsurpassed, I'd say.

SPEAKER_01 11:52

Yeah, I I would totally agree with you on that. And I think that epistoly style in video games really lends as well, lends itself to Lovecrafty and gaming in general, where you piece it together through bits you find and through environmental storytelling. There's nothing worse than when they try and beat you over the head, like you have somebody who comes and gives you an info dump. That just kills the immersion, right? Yeah, yeah. And I think that's something the Aminicia games as a whole, they were all great, in my opinion, all of them, including uh Machine for Pigs, which was done by a different developer, but I still love that game. I thought that was really good. Um, they they nailed that slow realization of what's going on, and they're just loaded with these. What in the hell was that moment?

SPEAKER_02 12:36

Yes, and I think that you're right, they kind of trust the player to you know, it's not everything is just handed to you on a plate, you have to, you know, kind of but fill in the blanks yourself, and I think that that creates you know such a such a better experience, and again, like because you can't really look directly at the monsters without going for too long. I mean, it's full of great horror tricks and great kind of um you know devices that we've all seen uh loads of times, but they just it just blends them all together so well, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_01 13:13

It's it's amazing. I think that sanity mechanic in that game is second only to the sanity mechanic in another Lovecrafty and video game, which came out on the GameCube Eternal Darkness Sanity's Requiem. Oh, I don't know that one. That game is a game that fucks with you as a player directly. Not the character, it fucks with you as a player. As your character loses sanity, the game starts glitching. And at one at one point, like you've got to remember when this came out, I wasn't on the internet, I didn't know any spoilers or anything like this. Blue screen kicks up, your memory card has been erased.

SPEAKER_00 13:55

Oh, that's great.

SPEAKER_01 13:56

Well, and then all of a sudden it melts away, and you're back in the game, and you're like, what the fuck did you do? It does little things like that, like it'll suddenly the the screen will flip upside down. It's really it's a really good game. It's one I really hope that they somehow do a remaster of it um and bring it back because it's one of those games that not everybody remembers, but it was so good. I mean, because the story again is classic Lovecrafty and it's set over different time periods, and you you're a relative of all these different characters. So you've got like a character in Roman times and yada yada yada, and it's putting together basically piecing together what the hell is going on with this tome of eternal darkness. I'm sure you can guess who's involved with that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:46

Yeah, exactly. Probably it was. Well, I'm I'm going back to that investigative approach. My first choice is Shadow of the Comet. That was uh Infogrames in 1993, and it's basically a point and click, but they captured the atmosphere really well, and and the graphics were of their time, but I always remember that as being a very engrossing one. Bloody hard. Yeah, it was it was quite difficult because even now, when I googled it today, there's walkthroughs and that kind of stuff, you know. And of course, back then it wasn't so easy to find a walkthrough, you know. It was almost like finding an old tome, just getting hold of the walkthroughs. And it's uh photographer, John Parker, goes to the isolated town of Illsmouth because he's gonna photograph the passage of Halley's Comet. At the last time Halley's Comet came over in 1834, a certain Lord Bolskin visited the town and tested a theory we had about the comet and basically went insane and spent the rest of his life in an asylum. So Parker, when he arrives and learns about this, starts investigating what happened to Bolskin, finds his papers, uncovers a conspiracy, and then basically there's three days to work it out, and of course, try and survive working it out as well. Because when the comet arrives, well, you know, something else does as well, obviously. But yeah, I remember that as being a very immersive game.

SPEAKER_01 16:20

Did you ever play the sequel? The well, their their follow-up. Because obviously Infogrames did first did Alone in the Dark, and then Shadow of the Comet, which was gonna be a straight sequel, but they ended up doing them other sequels, which were crap. Um let's face it, they were terrible. They were nothing to do with the first story.

SPEAKER_03 16:40

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:41

So they did Shadow of the Comet and then they did the prisoner Prisoner of Ice.

SPEAKER_00 16:46

Prisoner of Ice, yes. I'm pretty sure I think I played that as well, but I don't remember it so much. So I I don't know if it was as good as.

SPEAKER_01 16:53

I I played it recently. I played it recently because I managed to find it. It was released for the uh PlayStation, the PlayStation 1, but only in Japan. But somebody has recently done an English translation of it. Ah so I played it recently and it it's it really holds up. Oh right, oh, it's it's the same kind of thing as Shadow of the Comet, obviously, but uh obviously in the Antarctic, but it gets to a point later where there's it it's all against the clock, it gets really tense. So it becomes survival horror book point and click. I think the only comparison I can really give in terms of what I'm trying to get at is the clock tower games.

SPEAKER_00 17:33

Oh right, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:35

Yeah, you know, that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_00 17:37

And you were mentioned Alone in the Dark there, that is still my old-time favourite. I mean, that was, as you say, the infograms, that was 1992. Uh one of the first games to use polygonal characters, pre-rendered backgrounds. Yes. And uh I think it's been described as the first ever 3D survival horror game. And that, of course, is Edward Carnby, the private investigator, uh, poking around in the Louisiana mansion Der Cato, which was abandoned after its owner, Jeremy Hartwood, committed suicide. I did play that again uh about a year or so ago. I I downloaded uh a latest the original version, but obviously for modern PC. Yeah, still held up. Excellent game. I mean I think the the graphics add something to the atmosphere of it, you know, the the fact that it does look like that. I find that, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:26

Did you play the remake? There was a reboot called uh The New Nightmare.

SPEAKER_00 18:30

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:31

Yeah, and then there was another game called Alone in the Dark, but it was actually Alone in the Dark Inferno, it was a sequel.

SPEAKER_00 18:38

Right.

SPEAKER_01 18:39

But then there was a straight remake two or three years ago, probably more like five years ago.

SPEAKER_00 18:43

There was a tw 2024 one, I think. That I think that was the latest one. Right. I don't think I have. I don't think I have, no. Very good. Oh, okay. I'll keep an eye.

SPEAKER_01 18:52

Very, very good. Uh it does stray slightly from the original game, but in a good way. It expands upon it, but it does retain a lot of the atmosphere and things like that.

SPEAKER_02 19:04

It's interesting, isn't it? We could no, you could I could I I'll throw you uh I'll throw you a theory that perhaps the entire survival horror genre is Lovecrafty and certainly inspired by.

SPEAKER_00 19:16

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 19:18

Oh I would I would say you might be right on that because one of the earliest games that because there's a lot of debate about what the first survival horror game is. Now, I think I personally, in terms of true survival horror, because a lot of people say sweet home, but no, and we'll get onto that in a second, um, because that was more of a JRPG, similar to La Place No Ma, which was a Lovecraftian JRPG, which came out slightly earlier. So there we go. And then there was Project Firestart, which I would say was probably the first true survival horror game for the Commodore 64. But if you go back even further, there was a survival horror the original version of Laplace no mar came out on the PC98 only in Japan, and it was a first-person dungeon crawl. Wow. So I would say that is a contender, but it is certainly one of the earliest horror games. So you know there you go.

SPEAKER_02 20:21

Yeah. Well, I think it just has as a genre, it it just blends perfectly, doesn't it? With that, you know, you you're desperate low on resources and supplies, overwhelming monstrosities are hunting you, and that tension of I've never got quite the tools to deal with them. I always have to, you know, I'm always having to be clever with the environment or find other ways to, you know, other ways to beat these things because I'm low on bullets, I'm low on Latin, I'm low on everything. Where's that shotgun?

SPEAKER_01 20:57

That's right, dialing back to amnesia the dark descent, why that was such a breath of fresh air at the time because that was the first game in a hell of a long time. Because you've got to remember the sort of PS3, Xbox 360 generation, it all went action. Resident Evil was terrible, Resident Evil 5 and 6 were awful. It was all guns and explosions, and the horror was just dialed right down. That was just the way the industry had gone in terms of horror gaming, it had all become action horror.

SPEAKER_03 21:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:25

So that was a breath of fresh air because you didn't have a single weapon. No. It was the first one, which you would basically call unhide and sneak. Yeah. I do remember thinking maybe the fire will get them. It did not. But it like but the um obviously you've got the gatherers in that, which are your sort of moment to moment stalker enemies, but you've got that the the omnipresent shadow, that with the weird growthy thing that's slowly creeping through the through the castle. Yeah, yeah. And I still gotta say, one of the most terrifying moments I've ever experienced in a video game is when you get down in the cellar and it's waterlogged and you've got those invisible enemies and you've got a you basically playing the floor is lava, because if you end up in the water I think I think that is so many people say that about amnesia, don't they?

SPEAKER_02 22:21

That that is actually you know one of the you know the true games that can shock and scare you, and it's very immersive as well, obviously, but you do genuinely have moments of oh god almighty. So very authentic, I'd say, to the Lovecraft. Yeah, did you play the most recent one, Bunker?

SPEAKER_01 22:43

I loved it. No, I is that the World War One, yeah. You're essentially you're trapped in a bunker and it's a sandbox. It's a sandbox thing, it's all open, but you've got a it sort of plays like a Metroidvania, you've got to find different objects and things like that to open up different areas. With essentially to get out, it's got the same kind of AI system as alien isolation. Oh yes. A lot of people will know, but only in this case, it's a ghoul. Yes, a big one, a bloody big, monstrous, overgrown ghoul that's chasing you through a bunker. It's some of them are like the most tense six or seven hours I think I've ever had. You're basically just playing cat and mouse with a ghoul, and if you cock up or you make too much noise, you're you're dead. That's it.

SPEAKER_02 23:35

Yeah, it's on my it's on my rather large to-do list of games, which never seems to get any smaller, no matter how many I play, sadly. But yeah, no, I I'm looking forward to that as well because I've I've heard great things about that. That yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:50

Did um either of you play the Call of Cthulhu game from a few years back? Was it um Cyanide? I think. Yeah, I enjoyed it.

SPEAKER_01 23:57

It was it was um a little bit flawed in terms of it presentation, but I thought I really enjoyed it. I I did enjoy it.

SPEAKER_00 24:04

It had its moments, I thought, yeah. Uh a bit on Rouse at some points, I felt.

SPEAKER_01 24:09

That was kind of the issue, and it also I think it suffered because it came out around the same time as the sinking city, yeah, which was the opposite, because that was full-on open world expert investigation with some great detective mechanics, because it was Frogwares who do the Sherlock Holmes games.

SPEAKER_00 24:27

Ah, right.

SPEAKER_01 24:28

So it had the same like the memory palace system, and you had to go to like police stations and look through records and all the side quests and all that. So I think that the Call of Cthulhu game suffered because it was very much a narrative experience. So I think it suffered against the full-on detective uh thing. Now, speaking of which, uh did neither of you play uh Sherlock Holmes The Awakening?

SPEAKER_00 24:56

That has been on my list for a long time, that one.

SPEAKER_02 24:59

I didn't play.

SPEAKER_01 25:00

The remake is uh absolutely sublime. The remake is, I think it's one of the few occasions where it tops the original. It's so good. Um that yeah, really good. It's just Sherlock Holmes doing Call of Cthulhu, essentially. Yeah, he ends up in the Louisiana swamps and New Orleans and all this, it's brilliant, absolutely yeah, cracking, cracking game.

SPEAKER_00 25:25

So, do do we think then that that's an integral part of uh what makes a good Lovecraftian video game an integral part is the investigation, uh as well as just being like an FPS kind of thing or something?

SPEAKER_02 25:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:39

Yeah, I would I would definitely say so, because that's because I mean I mean there has been good some good uh Lovecraftian first-person shooters, but absolutely it's a completely different beast, you know, because obviously Quake, you know.

SPEAKER_02 25:55

I was just about uh that was because it's very relevant, uh as you may know, you may not know. 30th anniversary edition has just come out uh with new levels, a whole new episode called Rise of the Machine, is it? Um Dimension of the Machine, that's right. And um, you know, one of uh the classic uh well, the classic shooters, of course. Um I mean I I I I played it back in the day and had a a bunch of fun with it. You know, some of the enemies are just so lovecrafting inspiration.

SPEAKER_01 26:32

Oh yeah. Well, you've even got the form of formless spawn of Sarthogua in there. Yes, which is a right little bastard.

SPEAKER_02 26:40

Is it the final boss? Yes, um Sh uh Shabirth and um the shamblers and the spawn are both very, very lovecraftian influence, and of course, uh designed by the great um Sandy Peterson as well, who obviously you know dragged in a lot of Lovecraftian influences from his uh personal preference and good thing too, I'd say. But I may fire that up again with the whole the promise of a whole new episode to uh to explore. And um it's been a long time since I played it, but I think that could be um real good fun.

SPEAKER_01 27:13

I played it again a couple of uh a while ago when they did, when they brought out the big remaster with all the with all the expansions, and there was two new episodes on that. And uh I actually covered it on the IBC. I did a mini episode on it. Oh, that's right, yeah, yeah. Yeah, because um, yeah, it's one of my favorite games of all time. It's it's just absolutely brilliant. Big fan of its software. If you're gonna play first-person shooters, they're the ones you want to play. Yeah, boom and quake, man. I mean, that's all you need. Saying that, there was a great one, but I can't remember the name of the developer. Um, that came out uh probably about 10 years now called Dusk. Did you ever play Dusk? Dusk, no, no. It was a retro style, so it was done in kind of the style of uh Blood and Quake. They were kind of the two inspirations. You end up in a weird place, there's weird stuff happening, there's cultists and mad yokels and and all this kind of stuff. And the final boss is old Nyali. Ah you end up in his dimension, the pyramid the the dark pyramid and all that. It's brilliant. Yeah, really good. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:27

You mentioned Sinking City as well there, Tim. Oh, is there a Sinking City 2 coming out? Did I read somewhere? There is, yeah, there is, and I'm terribly excited. I can see that.

SPEAKER_01 28:36

Oh, I loved it. I loved it. I love the first one. I thought it was great. But the reason I'm I'm happy about the second one coming out is because that gives me an excuse to go back and play that again. So what if I one of the things that I really might tip my hat to Frogwares for was the use of the lore and the mythos, because there was so much in there, it wasn't just Innsmouth, which you'd expect, and Call of Cthulhu, which you would expect. There was like Arthur Germain in there, and nods to the king in yellow, and on all this kind of business. But the thing I found the most surprising was that was the the main villain of the piece, it's not the squid face you would expect. It's not Lovecraft's Squid Face. It's another Squid Face. One created by Brian Lumbery.

SPEAKER_00 29:26

Ah right. Okay. There you go, you see. Well, it's it's nice. I I guess it's easy, perhaps in some ways, uh from a design perspective, to put some Lovecraftian window dressing on any sort of game, but that's not the same as as really uh making it Lovecraftian, is it?

SPEAKER_01 29:45

No, I think yeah, I think for my final pick, I'm gonna say, um, obviously I'll probably still waffle on about other things, but one something I want to definitely get to is the game, I think the Lovecraftian game that surprised me the most in recent memory was Dredge. Ah, yes. Lovecraftian fishing simulator. And I was I picked it up and I wasn't expecting much. I thought, oh, this might be mildly diverting because obviously you go around, you upgrade your boat, you do your fishing, and then night falls. And my god, it gets weird, and it gets and it gets tense, and it's just oh, it's just so good. It's like and it's got a lovely little mystery in it, which I won't ruin for anybody, and it's just one of the endings is awesome. The bad ending, obviously, is the best. Um it's love crafty and it has to be. None of the endings are particularly good, but the bad ending is definitely the best. And yeah, I would just urge anybody to go into that with an open mind because it's just so much fun to play, you know.

SPEAKER_02 30:50

My one of my my other select or my final selection possibly was um, although not really a full Lovecraftian game, but just something authentic to the sort of whole uh cosmic horror ideal was Bloodborne. Oh yes, yeah. Yeah. I mean that you know the director um of the game kind of absolutely held his hand up and said we were really super influenced by um uh you know, super influenced by Lovecraft. And well, you've even got the me go in there. Yeah, well there's actual me go in it. Yeah, no, very true. That's right. And some absolutely murderous Lovecraftian horror bosses. Oh my goodness. I mean, I'm I'm not a wholly sold on the you know, players punishment kind of thing. Um think it, but I did I did make an effort with that game, and ultimately it was very when you do finally nail some of those guys, yes, it is supremely rewarding, supremely rewarding.

SPEAKER_01 31:55

Yeah, I would I would totally agree with you on that. I'm not the biggest fan of the souls born genre, but I persevered with that. I might I actually finished it in the end, which uh that's a badge of honour, because it's one of the most difficult video games of all time.

SPEAKER_02 32:10

So yeah, yeah, that really is a true, true one to have on your achievements list, isn't it? It's uh so cool then. What was your favourite of the bosses? Oh, there's the guy in the I can't remember his name now, the guy in the churchyard.

SPEAKER_01 32:22

Oh, yes, the the hunter, uh the old the old hunter. Yes, yes, yes.

SPEAKER_02 32:27

Not necessarily my favourite, but I he was I just was just something I couldn't get about beating him for a while. And so when I did, it was just ultimately satisfying.

SPEAKER_01 32:38

You have to use that music box to distract him, don't you? That's the other one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that was that was supremely satisfying.

SPEAKER_00 32:45

I think that's it. Yeah. So it's uh it's a wide field. This one. Uh, and again, we've probably just touched on the surface there, but you know, some some great suggestions that I'm gonna be looking at as well. If we had to choose one overall, which do you think it would be? I think for me it's dark corners, if only because of the the scene in the hotel room mass masterpiece.

SPEAKER_01 33:12

A masterpiece, it's uh like a one-for-one recreation of the start of Shadow Over Insmith. It's it's perfect, yeah. You know, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:21

I think I'd I I definitely endorse that. I think it's the most authentic and atmospheric of all the uh the ones that bring Lovecraft's work to life, definitely.

SPEAKER_01 33:32

Yeah, yeah, because that takes obviously Shadow Over Innsmouth, but it also um takes is I can't remember the name of the campaign, it's one of the Call of Cthulhu campaigns. Is it Return to Innsmouth?

SPEAKER_00 33:44

There's a right raid on Innsmouth was a scenario, I think. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's what I mean.

SPEAKER_01 33:49

Yeah, it's I think it's I think it's yeah, it does fit that raid in, yeah, as well, don't it? I think, yeah, because that second half and now they end up under under the devil's reef and there's a flying plates and all that.

SPEAKER_00 34:00

Yeah. Super, we we have reached an agreement. How about that? Great minds think I like. So let's move on to board and card games. Now, I don't have so much experience with this, so I've only got one thing to mention, which is a card game that I picked up in the mid 80s and still have called Dark Colts. Oh, I don't know that. This is a two-player game designed by Kenneth Raman, and it was published by Dark House in 1983. And two players, one plays life, one plays death. You have a pack of 108 cards and few through various mechanics. You start by creating a character, and obviously, the role of the life player is to keep him alive, the role of the death player is to kill him off. So you work through putting down this series of you've got story cards, escape cards, danger cards, and various other things. The mechanics are very simple, but it really does build uh an excellent narrative. And in fact, at one time people were recommending it as a way to build your scenarios for Call of Cthulhu and that kind of thing. That's how strong the narrative is. I think they made uh a second edition, they added a couple of bits to that, which was uh I think there was a magazine a magazine called The Cultist came with it. Nice, and they also had a solo and four-player version. But the original one, as I said, I've still got it's a ziplock bag with a sort of photocopied rules and 108 cards, and that's it. I'm I'm a bit I don't know, maybe it's a nostalgia thing, but I quite like these old games uh as opposed to things that cost 150 quid and come in a box. Yeah, yeah. This is just my my old game of rent.

SPEAKER_01 35:44

Well, it's like there is a secret nerd tax these days. Whenever you go into Forbidden Planet, you just you need to sell a kidney on entry. It's like some of the pricing is insane nowadays. So I'm sure the lot of these shops just had a markup on it, you know.

SPEAKER_00 36:00

Having said that, I would imagine I'm not had a look, but if if you were to look around on e on eBay and all that, if you wanted to get an original copy of this, I imagine that goes for a pretty penny these days. I don't think it was a very widely spread or or widely known game, which is a shame, as it really was excellent. Uh I'm I might even dig it out for ILF if we do more of a gaming session sometimes. I'll I'll definitely dig it out for something like that. Dark cults, that's my pick.

SPEAKER_01 36:26

I'm gonna divide mine into see, I'm I'm quite into the board game and card game side of it. I've got a few suggestions for card games and board games as well. So I'm gonna I'm gonna narrow them down. Now, if you want to go with something you can just jump straight into, you can't really go wrong with pandemic Cthulhu. It's the pandemic system board game, but Cthulhu. So you're killing deep ones and things like that. That's that's a really good pick-up put-down kind of board game. But if you want something more meaty, I would say you cannot go wrong with Fantasy Flights, Matches of Madness. It's so in-depth basically you set up the there's so many different scenarios. I mean, I've got loads of different expansions. So I've got like Streets of Barkham, uh, there's a train expansion, a jungle expansion with Yig in it, and all that. And so you set it up you set up the house, and you it's you sort of standard tile-based uh exploration and lots of D20s and all that kind of business, and yeah. One of the best things about it is it comes with these little figurines of like uh uh star spawn of Cthulhu and little little deep ones and all this kind of stuff. And uh yeah, it's it's incredibly difficult not to go mad or die, which is again kind of nails the Lovecraftian. But um, yeah, I anybody who's who's into the you need quite a lot of time to play it, but I would say well worth it. I would go with that. Uh so card games. Um I've got a really little one, right? It's like two little decks in a tin called Lost in Relay. And it's really simple. It's really simple. It's one of the one sort of thing you can take in your bag to the pub. Um it's easy to pick up, really good fun. It's um quite quite, like I say, very simple, but really, really entertaining. In fact, I I'll bring it to it to the ILF. We're gonna have a little game in the pub. There we go. But again, if you've got I was gonna say hours of your life, what what I really mean is months, years of your life, then it it's gotta be Arkham Horror.

SPEAKER_00 38:48

Yes. We are gonna have, I think, a display game of Arkham Horror going on at the ILF.

SPEAKER_01 38:54

Oh, nice.

SPEAKER_00 38:55

They've asked for a big table. Oh, you need one, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 39:00

Well, like you, Rob, I'm not I'm not a huge um uh board and card game player, but um I do I have played a little bit of Arkham Horror, and the real horror for me was the amount of expansion packs uh um I would uh if it was coming to board games, I would probably just pick um well, I'd probably give honourable mention to uh Cthulhu Wars, which was Sandy Peterson again. Uh I'm sounding like a Sandy Peterson fanboy today, but so that's fair enough. And this is the the sort of pitch, I guess, is it's a kind of Cthulhu Wars risk, basically. So you each um you've got a world map and you have four factions, and they're based on different elder gods. So I think it's you've got Cthulhu, obviously, Yala Thotet, Shub Niggereth, and Hasta in the sort of base game, and you've kind of got to develop your cultists and monsters, take territories, and eventually you you know you summon your patron deity to the um to to earth to kind of do battle with the other factions and stuff, and each of course has its own kind of unique mechanics and and um uh you know advantages, disadvantages and stuff. But yeah, yeah, really good fun game. Again, lots of expansions if you want to really heavily invest in them, but um but great fun as a base game as well.

SPEAKER_00 40:27

Nice, nice again. I'm not played that one either. So we would I think the oh well I I will just mention this. We we got a game called Is it Arkham Investigations, I think. Arkham Investigators, which was a detective type game. Oh and we played through the first scenario, and it is very much in the line of those sort of Sherlock Holmes type games, and that you go around the board picking up clues, and it it was good, but it didn't really grab either of us. So actually, I might bring that down to I left and put it on my table for sale if anyone wants. I mean it's very nicely done, very nicely done, very nicely presented.

SPEAKER_01 41:08

Before we get off this topic, I just want to throw something in because it's the most random left field curveball. Sabutio? Well, it's it's a game called Unspeakable Words. Uh, it's essentially Lovecrafty and Scrabble. And you've got it, you've got to trip up your other players and the sanity mechanics, and and yeah, you've got to it it's just bonkers. It is really, really bonkers, it's really good fun. It's a something my partner bought me for my birthday a few years ago, and it was just it's a great party game when you've had a few, so because you're all trying to go across the board, right?

SPEAKER_00 41:47

That's just me when I've had a few anyway, do you? Even if I haven't sometimes okay, so let's move on to RPGs and tabletop. So we'll we'll lump those two things in together because uh well, there's a lot of similarities and cross crossover between the two. I think perhaps the first overtly Lovecraftian thing I can think of in RPGs would be D, the first deities and demigods, which had had the stats for the Cthulhu mythos, and the Elric stories as well, I think. Yes, and I think they were both taken out for copyright reasons, I think it was.

SPEAKER_02 42:23

Yes, exactly. The true the true horror of copyright infringement was there. Must be a great old one who's uh their patron, I'm sure. No, you get it. But yeah, I oh that was a such an amazing book. The artwork was just really simple, black and white, wasn't it? And they had yeah, they had, of course, all the mythos, but but Elric as well. And I I think there were one or two other copyright infringing things, but but superb, one of my favourite um times of all time, that I think.

SPEAKER_00 42:53

I think it was great because D D tended to be very sort of European medieval, didn't it? Initially, it sort of grew out of chainmail wargaming stuff, really. Um, but this expanded out to Japanese mythology and Chinese and all sorts of stuff, and it really widened the scope. So I can't think when we were playing, I guess it would have been A, D, and D at the time, that we we ever used anything specifically Lovecraftian in it. I think there was so much other stuff going on with um, you know, fighting the Drow and the Hill Giants and all those great old modules. There wasn't much of the Lovecraftian in those. But I suppose if that had have continued, then maybe that would have brought Lovecraft more into DD, uh, which in fact has happened now because I think is it fifth edition they're up to now or something? Yes. There is a Lovecraft supplement that's just come out. Oh, yeah, as to put the mythos in your DD.

SPEAKER_01 43:47

So, you know. Oh interesting, interesting.

SPEAKER_00 43:52

But I suppose the big one is 1981. We're back to Sandy Peterson again, of course. You know, we've got Call of Cthulhu, published by Chaossium, based on their basic role-playing system that they first developed for RuneQuest. And it's still going today. It was seventh, eighth edition or something. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I think it's probably one of the longest running role-playing games around. And this was slap bang, no doubt about it, 100%, Lovecraftium. And we just thought this is fucking great.

SPEAKER_02 44:29

Yeah. I think it was because it was such a big departure from you know all the high fantasy stuff that tended to be role-playing's dominant thing then. And it it was not so much, you know, how can I transform my, you know, my first level character into a 10th level, this, that, or the other. It was more about sheer survival in the face of unmitigated horror and you know sanity. You because you were very much just ordinary people, you know, ordinary people drawn in into these unnatural conspiracies or strange summonings and stuff. But I think that just that was that was just so different and so appealing to the your sort of run-of-the-mill standard fare. I do remember there was one, we used to, uh there's a great guy when I was at um college, and he used to run sessions, and he sort of you would use some some things, but they were all totally free form. We'd all be up in his his sort of attic um his attic room, and he had loads of Ganeshes that he'd taken from a local curry house, like the plastic Ganeshes, and he sort of lit them, dimmed the lights, and we just play free form kind of Cthulhu games. Hours on end. It was so atmospheric, it was incredible.

SPEAKER_00 45:55

I want to speak about that in a little bit actually, um, how you build atmosphere for horror games and that sort of thing. That's very timely. Yeah. And I suppose it comes back to that investigation thing as well, doesn't it? DD was good, but it did get a bit, what's the term, murder hobo, you know? Slice, slowly slice something to death and then take its treasure.

SPEAKER_01 46:17

Yeah, I mean, there's something John touched on there. I found Call of Cthulhu way more accessible because I came into DD, like the people I was playing with were older and had been playing it for longer than me. I I found myself a little bit out of my depth to begin with. It took me a while to get to grips with it because there was a lot of fluff that I had to remember. There's a lot of all this, you know, the rules. Whereas I found Kulacthulu's rules way more just uh freeform accessible for me. And I think a lot I can't be alone in that, you know, because I mean it's why I've been turned off by quite a lot of these um tabletop RPGs and things like that, is because uh well, you need to do this and you need to have this stat and this stat and I just I just check out a glaze over.

SPEAKER_00 47:09

Well, it becomes like a power play, then doesn't it? And I think you'll find, you know, and you're gonna hit your adventurer out with the best thing according to whatever, rather than just this is my character. What would he have? He's got this, he's got that, perhaps his sword is broken, you know. You you work with that. Uh, this is why at the moment I'm I'm running an online RPG campaign and I'm using Mothership, which is space horror. But of course, I'm injecting a certain amount of Lovecraft into it, and I think for most sessions, I never consult the rules. Oh nice, you know, there's there's about six dice rolls a session, and and everything else is what does your player want to do? Can he achieve that? If is he an expert pilot? Well, then he can fly the ship. What do we need to consult this table for? You know, so then it becomes much more about the narrative, I think.

SPEAKER_01 47:59

Yes, yeah, yeah, definitely.

SPEAKER_00 48:01

Which I think brings us back to the Love Craftian because uh the horror in Love Craftian is not in the nuts and bolts of the situation, but in the fact that you're looking at something from the tenth dimension, and you're definitely not equipped to deal with it, right?

SPEAKER_01 48:18

Well, that I think that's the good thing. I think that's kind of what I'm getting at is the fact that obviously DD, you can find yourself will way underpowered compared to other people who know what they're doing. Whereas things like it, like Call of Cthulhu, you're all equally screwed. It's a level playing field, right? You're equally knackered because because what are you gonna do against some formless horror from the dawn of time that's squiggling and squirming out of the lavatory bowl, you know?

SPEAKER_00 48:44

Absolutely. So, what about other Lovecraft and RPG systems? What else have we got around?

SPEAKER_02 48:50

Well, I suppose I've got to give uh a mention to Act and Cthulhu, which I was the overlord for for uh over a decade, in fact, which was uh a little bit more of a a little bit more of a it was World War II with um tentacles as we always used to say, um it was uh you know uh a sort of more pulpy version of the game where you know you you you did see evil and then attempt to punch it in the tentacles rather than run screaming and um yeah, great fun. Sadly, uh sadly on hold at the moment. It may come back, it may not, but um uh there's a great depth of books and scenarios and campaigns. If anyone wants to go check it out, and there's very quick starts and characters, so you can just you can do it for free, published by Modifius. Uh, it's all still up there on the uh on the Modifius website to download. Um yeah, that was really uh that was a really good, fun, and interesting sort of spin-off from um you know mainstream, I suppose, Lovecraftium stuff, and also one of my favourite subjects, World War Historical Subjects, World War II. So uh yeah, it was a nice to be able to sort of combine both in one um action-packed RPG, I suppose.

SPEAKER_03 50:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 50:09

I I can't believe we've been remiss and that we didn't bring up Actung Cthulhu when we're talking about video games.

SPEAKER_02 50:17

Of course. Of course, yes, yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 50:20

There was the the RTS Actung Cthulhu. Now, I did actually want to bring that up. I meant to bring that up because I wanted because I always saw it as a spiritual successor to Call of Cthulhu the Wasted Land. Right, yes. In terms of the mechanic and the way it played, which again was obviously came from XCOM Terror of the Deep.

SPEAKER_02 50:39

Yes, absolutely. And um, yes, well, because of course it was um I was uh uh lucky enough to be writer on um Act and Cthulhu uh and uh for that video game, and uh they were lovely guys to work with or oc digital, and uh that was their original game, the uh Wasteland one, and they they thought it would be a great sequel, and the guy who ran it was um uh a huge Lovecraft fan. So yeah, it was uh it was a sort of natural fit all around on on that. So um yeah, it was good fun. I I should dust that off. I I haven't played it since you know we sort of finished finished making it basically. So another one to add to the list to play again, probably.

SPEAKER_01 51:21

I bla I blasted through it again quite recently when I was doing my bit of in the book about it. And yeah, yeah, I really enjoyed it. It was really good fun. Oh, fantastic!

SPEAKER_00 51:30

Excellent. Isn't this the uh the adapt the adaptability of the mythos though? Is we we can cover all these different types of horror. We can go from the Ligotti-esque why was I even born? Yes, through to, as you say, you know, real pulp stuff because uh Lovecraft was writing in in the pulp tradition, which in themselves covered that whole range, you know. Yeah, and I think I can't remember the name of the rules. It um was it Ken Hyatt uh brought a set out um that was quite sort of pulpy, but they didn't give the monsters any stats. I thought was interesting because his idea was if you meet Yok Sothoth, what are you gonna do? What's the point in giving him dead? Yeah, yeah. You're dead or insane, that's how it goes. Yeah, I think even like ghouls and stuff like that, you know, you you're in a whole world of shit. So I I thought that was an interesting approach as well.

SPEAKER_02 52:24

Well, I think, you know, I think in in terms of game design, you know, you've got uh if you've got if you're gonna give your investigators or heroes any chance, you're not gonna be meeting the gods of the mythos every day, are you? You're gonna be starting with cultists and maybe a few of their summoned creatures to start off with. Um, and then maybe you would would would move slowly up the chain, but you know, your average deep one would just basically rip a human in half, wouldn't it? So you've got a kind of scale the that the scale thing was a real problem in terms of designing, I think. Or it could be a real problem in terms of designing. But I think you do what uh what probably Lovecraft himself did, and you get glimpses of these gods and deities and stuff, but you don't actually really ever perhaps Nyala Fotep is the the exception there because he adopts human guys and is quite you know happy to meddle in the affairs. Quite chatty. Yes, it's quite gossip.

SPEAKER_00 53:32

No, I I think it's true, and I think there was a a a point in time when we first started playing in that early wave where it got to be every other scenario was save the world. And what we did in the end, we scaled it back and we went to modern day and set something in London, and it was much more about dealing with the cults and the occult conspiracy and all that sort of stuff going on. That that made for a much better game, I think.

SPEAKER_03 53:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 53:56

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 53:58

And I think that in itself was maybe part of the develop development of RPGs in general, because that then led us into more narrative games like Vampire the Masquerade and that sort of thing. And and even to now where there are games that are just pure storytelling.

SPEAKER_01 54:12

Yes, yeah, yeah. I was always well into masquerade, which um you can probably guess because I'm a goth. So we'd all poncing around in frilly shirts, you know. It's great, you know, it's what you do. We made Giarium black clothes cigarettes and all this other stuff, right? We just love it, we all just lent to it. So yeah, I've always been more of a fan of that more narrative style and reading stats and rolling dice and all that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_02 54:43

It's uh yeah, I mean, I yeah, I definitely as a designer, I kind of definitely veer more towards the narrative side. I think you know, you can I think rules have got to be fast and accessible, like as you were saying, Rob, you don't need to be going right, I'm gonna make this roll now. There's these modifiers on it, negative modifiers, and there's four of them, and then there's but I've got five positive modifiers, and that's just sort of dragging it back to the centre. See, there you go and blazing over. Yeah, it really does drag, and it really, really annoys me that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_00 55:20

Yeah, I'm involved in a Role Master campaign at the moment as a as a player, and it's very good.

SPEAKER_03 55:26

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 55:26

But I don't know if you've ever seen Rollmaster. You want to talk about tables. I need a magnifying glass to read, it's like a size four font or something. The tables are so dense. Oh, really? And I think we had we had a basic fight, we were attacked by bandits or something as we camped one night. I think that combat took like six hours. Well, like I mean, real time, like in game time, it's like four minutes.

SPEAKER_02 55:51

Well, I'm gonna do a shameless plug here because one of my things after finishing with Acting Cthulhu, I thought, well, you know, you've got you've got time to do your own system now. And so just as you do, I thought I'd design myself my own gaming system. Nice, my own role-playing system. And one of the things I learned from doing Act and Cthulhu was we produced a set of basic rules, which were you know, you've got two big core books, the Games Master's Guide and the Player's Guide, and then it's great to go into all that depth and stuff, but I thought let's try and boil it down to the essentials. So we did a set of basic rules, and I'm doing the same thing with the Monju Cthulhu rules, and it's got to be done in 20 pages. So all your basic rules will be done in 20 pages. I've I've called it um the D10 plus system, and it's a roll under and roll over system, which uh does that sound intriguing? Um excellent. So, yeah, so as a design challenge, I think if you can get all your basic rules into those 20 pages, then hopefully people won't be bogged down with endless dice rolling and modifiers and this stat doing that stat. Because what you really want to do is give people both player players and GM a good time at the table and allow that sort of I've I as I say I sort of go on that narrative side and allow that sort of storytelling, you know, because I'd much, much rather people, you know, sort of describe how they swing a sword, you know, and you know, are they going for a weak point or something like that, you know, and so and and allow them to be sort of clever without being bogged down with oh, how does that translate mathematically? Do you know do you know what I mean?

unknown 57:42

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 57:43

I've had a similar thing because obviously this year I leased my we We Want the Gold Skirmish game. Yes, of course. An excellent and that's a fantasy setting. I'm gonna do I'm working on another version which is horror-specific. Oh, excellent. So that's gonna be divided into sort of um flintlock era, gothic, classic Victorian Gothic, and then modern. So you can have the scenario set in each of those, and it's gonna be mythos related, but we're also gonna drag in all the classic monsters as well, your Frankenstein monster and all that kind of thing. Oh, fantastic, yeah. And it is the same thing, um, you know, for combat, you roll to hit, you roll your damage, that's it, it's it's done and dusted. And the way I I got round the idea of doing other things was just a feat table. You can roll a total failure, you can roll a partial failure, a success, an amazing success, and then it's up to the player to describe what that is. Yeah, so it's not just a case of oh, you try to jump over that wall, you failed. It's well, you got a partial success. What happens? Well, I get halfway over the wall, but then my jacket gets caught on the railing and the zombies are coming. Yeah, you know. So straight away it it builds that tension in. I think also, as well, as far as the monsters go, in the original skirmish game, the players are mostly fighting each other. So the monsters are there as just annoyances, you know. So they're they're quite easy to get rid of, even a deep one is relatively easy to get rid of because your main threat is the other player, the other team or teams. Right. Although you can play monsters as player characters as well, which switches things around a little bit.

SPEAKER_02 59:19

Ooh, fascinating.

SPEAKER_00 59:22

So, yeah, in in design terms, I I think you've got to be very clear about what sort of game you want. Is it gonna be hopeless? You know, is it gonna be adventure? What sort of experience do you want the players to have? I think that's where you start from.

SPEAKER_02 59:38

Absolutely, absolutely. And I'm trying to I'm I'm trying to design something that well, there's one system in the game, but I've not quite I've I've sort of got, I think I've got it basically, because I because of it's set during Napoleonic times and it's very kind of flashing blade, swashbuckling. I want to try and have a kind of verbal dueling system in there, which doesn't rely on any roles or anything like that, but it's it's it's a bit like the old Monty Python throwing insults at each other. So it's a kind of oh nice. Well, Monkey Island.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:12

Oh, monkey, yeah, monkey island.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:14

Monkey Island had something similar. And um, yeah, so I think that that'll be an interesting challenge. And I'm I'm trying to do it without any dice rolls at all, so that uh it's literally just you'll come up with a uh you know a florid insult, and it will be the player, other players' reaction or the GM's reaction that will determine how successful that will be.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:36

Nice. That's cool. So I love that sort of thing. Then it just gets away from you need a 10-to-hit.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:43

You know, I I do find sometimes with um uh they probably won't listen to this side and say it, particularly one of the groups I play with, people approach it like it's a video game. What I want to do now is do this, roll the dice, you open the door. You can go this way or that way, or I'll go that way. Yeah, yeah, but but what does your character feel? What are they what do they smell? What can they see? It's much more interesting to me.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:07

Yeah, definitely, definitely.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:10

Just to finish on that, then I did put a couple of videos up on uh my Dragon Seed channel recently about uh GMing and also about building atmosphere, particularly in horror games. We've already had a couple of mentions of candles. I'll put the link up to the actual video below. I'll go into a lot more detail on that. But of course, the the the setting is the start. If you're running a game at a convention or something, you haven't got control over anything, you know. If you're at home, then yes, moody music, moody lighting, uh various props and other things. So uh have you got any ideas for that or interesting experiences?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:48

Oh, I have a core cap. Um, group of friends used to play Call of Kaghulu and we used to go around each other's places and do it. We'd host it, right? And one of my mates got his little brother to hide in a wardrobe with a rubber tentacle, and we had all the lights down, the candles, yeah, candles going, all that, all the rest of it. And one of my other mates, I was sat I was sitting opposite him, and I saw the I could see the wardrobe like slowly creaking up. I'm like, did I see that? Am I going mad? And then as Ben said, like, and suddenly a tentacle wrapped itself around it, this rubber tentacle came out, went right round his neck. He nearly hit the ceiling. Table nearly flipped over, there was bloody dice and all sorts of shit all over everywhere.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:43

It was absolutely cracking. That's brilliant, that's brilliant.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:46

Yeah, I mean, I think I think absolutely window dressing can be uh yeah, or the dressing of a uh a game's session, like uh you know, like in the theatre or anything can be great. Lighting is you know, keep it low, and music is all ob obviously very can be very atmospheric as well. And even spot sound effects if you really want to go to town and just you know Yeah. I mean there's a lot of great software that will help you do that nowadays. Um just you know, even like arrows thunking into the into a bit of wood or you know, a chill cry. But I think you know, being old-fashioned, it it it's you know that nothing will be a great GM who can really spin that scenario and describe that tack, you know, that scene to you and really bring out all the details that will either enlighten or terrify your terrifying. And I think great characters as well, you know. If you if you are able to kind of bring some of your NPCs to life in whatever way you choose, could be a silly voice, could be, you know, um props or anything like that. I think that can really enhance the session too.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:59

I think that's a that's a big thing with the NPCs, and the same with the characters to some extent. I I've got one guy in my mothership campaign who does a very good Scottish accent, so when his character speaks, he uses that voice.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:11

There's gonna be ones when it goes wrong, though, isn't there?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:15

Well, yeah, there's potential there for right, real horror, right? You know. Gosh, we're playing mothership, yeah. But um, I I think it's sometimes you don't think about the accent, but you think about how they speak. Do they pause a lot between words? Do they speak very quickly? If if you put a character into the voice kind of thing, then you know it it helps distinguish. I have played before where everything is read out like this. You go into a room and a man is standing and he says, Ho adventurers, what are you doing here? You know, and I understand that it's it's not always, I mean, you know, we're kind of used to being on stage and that sort of stuff, I guess, aren't we? There's there's that aspect to it. Yeah, yeah. But a a little bit of even if you study a a little bit of that kind of how to speak in public or how to perform a little bit, I think that adds to the experience.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:14

Oh definitely.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:16

Quick question on that, John. You mentioned music. Do you have any sort of picks for a good call a Cthulhu campaign soundtrack?

SPEAKER_02 1:05:24

Oh, well, I think you can, I mean, you can just like there's so much copyright-free music out there now. Yeah, you know, that you can use on videos and stuff. I mean, there are put there are, I'm just struggling to remember the names of them now because I haven't run any The Innsmouth Gold CDs are very good. Oh, so the Innsmouth Gold C D I hear they're excellent. Uh sound design. Um But yeah, you know, there were there's plenty of plenty of free stuff. Is it Sue Inscape or something? I think that's why that's quite popular.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:00

That's that's that's useful, but you know, anything anything eerie, yeah, those great old sound effects um albums, if you yeah, the BBC sound effects. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:11

Yeah, those albums are very useful too. I find the um if you go into the sort of uh industrial slash neo folk genre, you've got some bands that do a lot of stuff, which is all based on like Lovecraft and Poe. You've got people like Nox Arcana. I mean, Current 93 did three albums with Thomas Logotti. Oh so I I I always like the time we were playing it, they were the ones we listened to, like in a foreign place in a foreign land, the the album. And it Lugotti starts in a rating on it, and it's it's almost like that that does because obviously it's Logotti, right? So you instantly go, Oh, we're all doomed.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:52

That's a good that's a good call, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:54

Yeah, right. The other thing I found as well, because it's the first time I've run online games, is obviously some things suffer because of that. Not everyone wants to be on the screen, all that, but they're all listening on headphones. Yes. Ah, get the sound effects in there, yeah. Really? Yes, there's there's quite a wealth of sound, even things like they're on a space station, you just get a good morning, this morning, the traffic it, you know, just little things like that that really add to the atmosphere, and of course, yeah, the odd jump scare here and there works really well as well. So, yeah, I I think if you can get that sort of atmosphere in your RPG, then you know that really adds to the experience because that's what everyone's there for, right? It's in a funny way, we all enjoy being scared.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:42

Yeah. Again, like dialing all the way back to first video game, Lovecraftian, the lurking horror, that the box of that came with feelies, that's what they called it. So you got like a map of the the university and a and a sort of ID card and all this, but in the box there was like a giant mutated centipede. So your first jump scare comes before you even boot the damn thing up because you open a box and they go, I like that sort of thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:14

I do like yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:16

I think handouts can be really effective as well, you know, if you you're able to uh and again there's stuff that's you know, there's plenty of public domain stuff there that you just get the PDF and fill in the you know, fill in the the text or whatever, and you hand that to players and they sort of eagerly read it and pass it round, and that sort of just adds to the whole interactivity thing as well. And of course, if you can, you know, if you can, if you're really dedicated, I guess you could make actual skeleton keys and all kinds of stuff that your players can feel and touch and and stuff like that. I think that'd be really cool. There was um, I think I can't remember what it was. Was it a video game that um or was it an RPG? I can't remember.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:59

They get they had a whole palette smells that you could just peel back at particular points in go down into the sewers and then you share Fantasy Flight did one recently called Road to Innsmouth, and you it's like a hybrid um of a tabletop RPG and a video game. So you have a tablet with this thing loaded on it, and you're exploring the thing, but it comes again, it comes with like a key to the Gilman House Hotel and a bit of Insmouth gold, a coin, a little statuette of Cthulhu, and all this kind of stuff. That's all on my shelf at the minute because they make great little decorations, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:43

Yeah, I I saw our friend Niels in California. He did mention uh that video I put up. He said because I was talking about, you know, we're we're talking sight and sound and that sort of thing. He said you forgot taste and smell, so for an insmoth game, you need to serve jelly deals to your players. Oh yeah, yeah. Listen, I I draw the line. I I might be from the East End, but I draw the line at Jelly Deals. I'm sorry, that ain't happening.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:06

Scappy fries, scabby fries, maybe, or just call it the squirming horror and have done, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:12

Wow, wow. Um, I suppose one thing we haven't touched on, because I don't know that any of well, Tim, I think you've probably got a bit of experience in this is LARPing as well. I I've got absolutely zero experience in that, so I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:25

Yeah, I mean I've I've done LARPing but not of Cthulhu. Right. Um, of that kind of thing. I've done because uh I used to be in a pirate band and we used to play the pirate festivals, and obviously that was in the downtime, the pub sessions afterwards. So what are you gonna do in the day? You're gonna get yourself a LARPing sword and have at it. But uh again, it's great fun, and again, but that you can it depend again, it depends on who's running it, because I've been to ones that are great and it's very narrative and all the rest of it, but then you have the one where this little guy following you around with a little notebook going, uh, I think you'll find that you don't have the stat to do that. And they're the ones where I just go, you know what, I'm bored, I'll put my sword down and go get kissed.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:06

You know. Have you ever done any, John? You haven't been involved in Larkes?

SPEAKER_02 1:11:10

I I did like many, many moons ago. I was um a member of the Dark Ages Society, which was Vikings and um Saxons, but that was not um that was that was with actual steel weapons as well, which was slightly dangerous, but but nothing love crafted. There used to be something called Summerfest as well, which was uh one of our guys from the Dark Ages ended up being one of the generals on one of these things on that particular year, and this was like a mass fantasy battle, probably about two, three hundred a side. And that was that was quite a thing. That was I mean, it was all they were all foam weapons, yes, yeah. And uh he was a general on one side, and one yeah, the opposing general was a guy who had like a complete and brilliantly recreated Kurgan soup. So he had the arms, the sword, the holding fantastic, and that was quite an experience, not very Love Craftian, but it did give you the kind of idea of just how brutal a medieval battle could possibly be. Uh it's quite quite an experience, but but sadly no Lovecraftian.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:22

Uh no, sadly no Lovecraftian uh we went to a local event a couple of Sundays back, which was uh a a Roman day uh uh a local. Well, there used to be a Roman camp there just the other side of uh the A6, and they had a reenactment group there, and there was about 15 of them, I suppose, in in the for you know, the square shields and all the rest of it. Oh, yeah, and they were they were explaining and then they did some formations and that kind of thing. And at one point they lined up and charged at the crowd. They start banging the shields and then they charge, and you think, Oh, fucking hell. You know, I wouldn't want to be stood here, you know. It's uh that's like 15 of them, they're like 200.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:06

They're like a legion or whatever, yeah. Yeah, quite the thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:10

Uh I I suppose we should mention our friends at P of Dreams, of course. Of course, yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:14

Yes, I was just about to do that, yeah. Because it's not LARPing, it's an interactive experience. You go and you're investigators, there's a mystery in this big house, you're there for the weekend, there's clues, you sort of uh you have to uh talk to the staff because they're all actors, like the butler and people like that, and they'll give you clues and you've got to piece together this mystery, and it's all kind of Lovecraftian, and because of its setting, it's set in Macken country. So there's that Mackinesque uh element to it as well, I think. And it it's very difficult to describe, isn't it? What it is, but it is just yeah, an interactive experience. So you go and there's this this mystery taking place around you as you're eating your dinner and blah blah blah. It's like a murder mystery weekend in tentacles, is how I would kind of, yeah, yeah, it seems.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:06

Yeah, it it looks very um sophisticated, definitely definitely put a very immersive, and you know, all the reviews coming back are very, very good. I'll I'll put their link up in in the notes below. Well worth taking a a look at that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:19

Yeah, because we've had um Laura and Ivan on the show, haven't we, before now?

SPEAKER_00 1:14:23

So yes, yes, and I'm not sure they were at ILF last year, they might be there this year. We'll be just waiting for confirmation on that. So again, well worth having a chat with them. And again, if you just wanted to get some tips on setting and building atmosphere, I guess they're the people to speak to.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:37

Oh, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:39

Okay, so I think we've covered uh about everything we can think of. Um, no doubt there's a lot of other things we've missed as well. In which case, dear listener, please let us know. Uh any good Lovecraftian RPGs or video games or board games that we've missed that you would recommend. And yeah, I'll be interested in anyone who has done Lovecraftian LARP as well to see how the mechanics of that work. All right, now, Mr. John, you're a regular visitor. You know the score. You know what happens in Innsmouth. You know what happens in Innsmouth stays in Innsmouth. You've seen that big pulsating bag in the corner. You know that at some point you're gonna have to reach in to Dagon's sack.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:23

It's not something I ever look forward to, but I've bought gloves. There you go.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:29

Seasoned veteran of Innsmouth. I love it.

unknown 1:15:32

Dagles.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:38

And here we go. We've had a few missives in over the past few weeks. And funnily enough, as we've been speaking about video games, we'll start with Luke Claymation, who's going to be at ILF as well. Posting on the Innsmouth Forum, two video games, Dark Rites of Arkham and Dreams in the Witch House. Look amazing and faithful to the material, real labours of love. Necrophosis may be worth a look on consoles. Another indie cracker, great audio and visuals from the same developers who made Canarium, I think.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:14

Yeah, Canarium was great. Um, I loved that. Um Ice Pick Lodge, I believe, is the developer. Um, they also did the Lothnolder games, um, which were PC point and click adventures, and they were great. I haven't played that yet, um, Necphosis, but uh yeah, it does look interesting. Uh Dark Rice of Arkham and Dreams of the Witch House, there's a whole little subgenre of these, they're sort of first-person narrative adventures. Uh they're quite short. There's a whole bunch of them. There's the Nameless City as well, and there's Dagon. And I don't know whether they're the same developer or a different developer. They're basically like short. You're basically just walking through the story kind of thing. They're very good, like ways to kill a couple of hours. And uh he's right, they are just labours of love, they're just love letters to the original stories, essentially. Yeah. Something I found interesting because you you've got some new ones actually came out. Uh you've had Cthulhu the Cosmic Abyss, which is another first-person uh game. Uh it looks really good. That's out on consoles and Steam and all that kind of stuff. Uh fairly recently, a couple of years ago, you had Still Wakes the Deep, which was by the Chinese room who made the amnesia sequel Machine for Pigs. That was tremendous. Um, something I spotted the other day, and I've not had chance to play it yet, but I'm very intrigued by it. It's another first-person horror game, sort of hide and sneak setup called Chorus of Carcosa. That's a neat title. Yeah, so we got a King in Yellow video game now. I'm tremendously excited to play that one.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:56

Yeah. I know there is a King in Yellow RPG, isn't there? Or at least one. Maybe maybe I think it's Pendragon. But I I've not looked at that at all, don't know anything about it.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:06

Okay, so we're gonna move on now to uh our last episode where we were joined by Marco Visconti and talking about all things crowly and that kind of business. And this comes from Patreon from our old friend and contributor Ralph Grasso. Nice show, very enjoyable. I was wondering if the boys in Tweed ever discussed the relationship between the movie The Alligator People and the Dirleth mythos. Thanks, Ralph.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:37

I don't know it. Do you? Uh rings a bell, the alligator people. Does ring a bell. I'm I'm guessing it was about the same era as Creature from the Black Lagoon kind of thing. I think it was an old black and white. Do you do you know that one, John? Have you heard of that at all?

SPEAKER_01 1:18:52

I no, I don't I don't know that one. Sort of dim remembrances. I think I may have seen stills from it, if ever nothing else. I'm gonna have to that look that up, Ralph. Yeah, I'll have to have a watch at that.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:05

Yes, we shall investigate. And Fred Keisha writes in something else we were talking about quite a lot with Marco was social media. And Fred writes the ultimate horror of the algorithm. Yes. Impenetrable, none of us understand it, yet it seems to increasingly rule our lives, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_01 1:19:26

You need to put some reverb on that. Oh good.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:29

I'll put reverb on everything, loves me what I mean.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:34

Okay, going to episode 129, where we talk to Trevor Kennedy. This comment comes from YouTube from Rambam 3000. Robin Williams was also in an episode of the detective series Homicide Life on the Streets, told entirely from his point of view. We gave a superb performance as a man who sees his wife senselessly murdered in front of him. It's one of the best episodes. Also, there's a very good channel called Feral Historian, who discusses various various social themes, political topics, scientific ideas, often using books, movies, and video games, including the horror genre, to do so. I can really recommend it. One episode looking at the movie Cabin in the Woods is subtitled Industrial Blood Sacrifice. Oh, that's that would be an album title. Oh Industrial Blood Sacrifice. Another is Blind Sight dealing with the idea of non-conscious minds where intelligence is pu purely a matter of pattern recognition with no awareness at all. That sounds like me. That sounds really interesting. Yeah, yeah. Nice. I'm gonna have to I'm gonna have to check that out. I I loved Cabin in the Woods. I loved that movie. That was just the right end of absolutely batshit for me. You know.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:58

And over to the Innsmouth Forum now, where Tobias writes in response to Alta's post, which we read out previously, we were talking about um reptile DNA in a Lovecraft story, and we were kind of scratching around trying to remember which one that was. Tobias writes, While there may be a specific story using the reptile DNA genes that I'm overlooking, I do remember HPL using reptile genes in Herbert West. Specifically in chapter 5, the horror from the shadows, the one where he's a war medic trying to keep individual parts alive instead of whole bodies. So maybe that's it, maybe that's what we're thinking of. And also uh interesting take on Charles Dex or Ward that Kerwin possesses the body of Ward. I've always read it as Kerwin being resurrected to his own corporeal form from his essential sorts. Do they not, after all, both exist simultaneously for a while in the story? Yeah, I think that would be my reading of that. Kerwin was resurrected from the salt, wasn't he?

SPEAKER_01 1:22:04

Yeah, but you from because he was sort of possessing him to begin with because of all the stuff with the painting and all and why that's why he ends up doing all that in the first place.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:14

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:15

But yeah, the the uh the end game is the resurrection through the salts. That's the a little bit of both in, kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. Next one, we're going back to 128 to cool air, and we have a message from Patrick Dodson 5686. I remember hearing somewhere, perhaps in Lord of a Visible World, that the main thing stolen from his apartment was his suits. This is discussed about when Lovecraft was robbed. And being a person who seemed to care about his appearance, at least as a gentleman, that he went around for a while after on a search for new suits.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:50

Yeah, he was burgled in New York, wasn't he? Part of the the the bad time he had in New York. I wonder if his shopping for suits was the same as his shopping for fountain pens, and he tried on every single thing in the shop. I like to think so.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:04

Um that poor man in that pen shop, that's dreamer on the night side, right? You can imagine the same thing. He goes, he goes down like like the moss bross. Oh, can I just try that? The inside leg is a little bit snug, you know. Oh, suit you, sir. Oh suit you, oh, there's a sketch in that, isn't there? Lovecraft goes to them tailors from the fast show.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:31

Yes, yes. And finally, and funnily enough, to bring us back round to the gaming, we have a comment on episode 120, Inhabitant of the Lake, one of our favourite stories by uh good old Ramsay Campbell, of course. And this is from B. Skalis 97. I hope I pronounced that correctly. Call of Cthulhu RPG has an adventure called Servants of the Lake in the book Doors to Darkness, which I believe follows the tale of the previous inhabitants who fled in around 1870. They actually became undead devotees of Glacky and relocated to the Arkham, Kingsport area. At Squatters Lake, they opened a motel and began baiting travellers into their trap. Oh, that sounds good, doesn't it? No, it really does. That's interesting. Glucky's Motel, not Daint's motel.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:26

Well, it's more like the Benders, isn't it? You know, they're the historical bloody benders out in the States that owned a guest house and basically murdered people and all the rest of it.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:36

Yes, yes. Who was the guy with the hotel as well? The murder hotel, HH something? HH Holmes, yeah. Owned Chicago, the White City. Yeah. See, real life is always scarier than fiction. So there we go. Thanks for joining us today, folks. I hope you enjoyed that look at uh Gaming the Mythos. As we said, we do like to hear your feedback. Anything we've missed or any favorites you've got that you've played, or any interesting experiences at your gaming table. So, John, when's the new book going to be out? Well, uh, it's on pre-order now.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:10

Uh, by the time uh we've escaped Insmouth this time, it should be on pre-order. And if you fancy um reading the first book in the series for free, uh you can just visit my site, john-hoolahan.net, and download that. Uh, it's called the Crystal Void, and that will get you into the adventures of Gaston Dubois. Uh, but um, yeah, the pre-order will be uh up on at various places, including Amazon and on my site, and you'll be able to come along and get signed copies at the ILF, of course.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:43

Marvellous, marvelous. Have you got any uh date sort of yet for the RPG as well, or is that gonna be uh a little while?

SPEAKER_02 1:25:50

Well, I think the RPG, I've sort of more or less finished the quick start rules. Um, and I think that'll probably be out. Oh I'm not gonna say this year, I think it'll probably be early next year.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:02

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:03

Quick start for people to enjoy, and uh there'll be a Kickstarter and all that kind of thing if uh you want to get on board.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:10

Yeah, modern to you. So uh we're not gonna be back next time, are we, sir?

SPEAKER_01 1:26:15

No, not for a few weeks, because we are gonna be busy, busy, busy, aren't we, with the Innsworth Literary Festival. But um, rest assured we will be dropping in some readings and bits and pieces here and there. So we will be keeping you entertained while we're having our few weeks off to basically scream into the void before we enter Innsmouth.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:38

Yes, yes, as with anything, organizing anything is uh it's a lot of work. And we'd just like to say a huge thank you, by the way, to everyone who's booked a ticket so far. And I have to say, we've got a really excellent lineup of traders this year as well, some new traders. I'll be putting out a full list of traders over the weekend, and it will be in that edition of Innsmouth News that is going out, which by the way has a feature on the artist Bernie Wrightson and also looks at Kenneth Grant's use of the Cthulhu mythos in his ritual magic. So, a couple of things of interest there. Okay, John, always a pleasure, sir. You're always welcome in Innsmouth. Nice to see you again. Wonderful to be here and have a chat with you, gents.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:21

Always uh always a pleasure.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:23

And as always, folks, do write in and let us know. And of course, if you'd like to support the show, then check out our Patreon page. When you sign up, you get bonus content for the Innsmouth Book Club and Strange Shadows. You get that quarterly copy of Innsmouth News, and you get free entry to the Innsmouth Literary Festival. And plans are afoot for next year as well. But you know, let's get this year out of the way first before we say too much about that. Okay, on that note, it's uh goodbye from me, Rob Poynton. Yeah, and it's goodbye from me, Tim Mendies.