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In episode 49, the whole MUP crew steps back into the old sandbox again with our special guest, podcaster and comics encyclopedia Aron Head from Ideology of Madness. We chat about Mythos influence in the realm of comics, as well as Aron’s interesting approach to building game worlds with players.

Campus Crier

We’ve got a slew of Kickstarter news:

• Golden Goblin Press passed its goal for Tales of the Crescent City within 24 hours after launch. Now they’re smashing through stretch goals like a Jambalaya Juggernaut.
• Check out an interview with Oscar Rios, the president of Golden Goblin Press, on Diehard GameFAN.
• **You can also hear Murph interview Oscar for a quick update in our feed here.
• There’s also a pretty sharp Cthulhu gamer jersey up on Kickstarter. Great for game day. Yeah, if your game is REAL ULTIMATE COSMIC HORROR. Nobody wins.
• Old school wargaming company RAFM launched a KS for the “official 7th Edition” Call of Cthulhu minis line. [Note: your old minis will still work.]
• Speaking of minis, Chad mentions a Lovecraftian skirmish game called Strange Aeons that Geek and Sundry’s Teri Litorco reviewed and played on her wargaming vlog.
• And if you needed more things to spend you money on, lookee — there’s a new Call of Cthulhu video game based on the Chaosium RPG!

  GenCon planning is already underway — buy your passes and hope you can find somewhere to sleep! Check out Murph’s review of the fiction anthology Eldritch Chrome on our site.   Oh, and a huge thank you goes out to BoscoBoy and William for their sponsorship! We appreciate the help in keeping the show running. Srsly.

Tangent: Video Games

Aron asks for recommendations of Lovecraftian video games, and it sends us down a digital rabbit hole of game-name dropping. Don’t Starve Alan Wake Phantasmagoria

Feedback

Doctor Bob sends in a voice mail, mentioning depictions of The King in Yellow available to check out in Chaosium’s The Hastur Cycle. He also mentions Ripples from Carcosa, a Chaosium monograph with scads of Hastur scenarios, and the horror game called Dread that uses a Jenga tower as a resolution mechanic. While we’re at it, might as well mention a couple of forum posts on the topic. Bret Kramer and Eibon suggest checking out a wiki devoted to The King in Yellow. Bret provides a list of fictional version of the play:

James Blish includes portions of it in his story “More Light” (Revised by Lin Carter in “Tatters of the King” in The Hastur Cycle Thomas Ryng produced one John Tynes wrote a short one, recently made available as a gift to Unspeakable Oath subscribers and another one by Thomas Tafero called “The Tattered King”

And Eibon corrects the record on some background from last episode:

Bierce invented the names, Carcosa (“An Inhabitant of Carcosa”), Hastur (“Hiati The Shepherd”), Hali (as a person) and a couple of others. Chambers took these names and formed them into a more consistant background for his book. Lovecraft mentions Hastur and the Lake of Hali in “The Whisperer In Darkness”. Derleth then took the idea that Hastur was part of the Mythos, making him Cthulhu’s “half-brother” and strongly implying that Hastur sides with the Elder Gods against the Cthulhu and Co and has him imprisoned on Aldebaran (from Chambers) and served by the Byakhee (“The Return of Hastur” through to The Trail of Cthulhu). Derleth’s version then dominated until the RPG arrived, then Tynes makes his own version and the Chambers influence becomes much stronger.

Special Collections

This week takes us into the unknown back room of the vaults where the secret comics archive are moldering.  

DC Mythos stuff:

• Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham
• Aquaman v Cthulhu?  Yup, that’s kind of a thing. Another review here.

Marvel Mythos stuff:

• Abd-el-Hazred
• Marvel’s Cancerverse arc starts in the issue titled: The Stars Are Wrong
• The Thanos Imperative
• Marvel Unlimited is like Netflix for Marvel comics. You pay an annual fee for access to all of their back catalog from the beginning up to a few months old.

Other Publishers:

• Locke & Key, the fabulous graphic novel by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez. Put it in your eye holes.
• Jon mentions a pic of Joe Hill holding a giant fan-made key.
• Hellboy
• Boom Studios The Calling (plus all of their Cthulhu comics in trades).
• X-Isle
• I.N.J. Culbard adaptations, (which you can buy here).
• DeadBeats – by Chris Lackey, Chad Fifer and I.N.J. Culbard (with a review here).

All Alan Moore:

• Me and Alan Moore’s Beard
•  Alan Moore’s graphic and hyper violent NEONOMICON can be found at InStockTrades
• League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Black Dossier
• Nemo – Heart of Ice
• Yuggoth Cultures and Other Growths
• The Haunter of the Dark: And Other Grotesque Visions

 

Cryptocurium Spotlight

*** This week, Dan highlights the Nyarlathotep Idol.

Main Topic

The crew chats about Aron’s method of player-driven sandboxing, as heard on the Knights of Reignsborough actual play. Aron GMs an annual zombie survival game at Fear the Con each year, called …And a Little Child Shall Eat Them Star Trek: Aegean is their Trek game that will get started sometime later this year. Realms of Cthulhu is the Savage Worlds Cthulhu game.  PDF (DriveThru RPG) and Print (Amazon) Murf mentions Eldritch Skies, another Savage Worlds game that has recently come to market. Discuss this episode on the Campus Forums here.]]>