Tuesday 14 August 2018

EVENT: Necrinomicon Charity Stream, 25th-26th August 2017


EVENT: 24 hour livestream event of Call of Cthulhu gaming and associated activities

CAUSE: Raising money for blood cancer charity, Leukaemia Care
DATE: Saturday/Sunday 25th-26th August 2018 
LOCATION: twitch.tv/necronomicondiscord

DETAILS: In 1928, in his story Call of Cthulhu, author HP Lovecraft described Cthulhu, or rather a statue carved into its likeness, as "A monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind."

90 years on and, even if you've played the tabletop RPG based on Call of Cthulhu and other stories by HP Lovecraft, the winged octopus headed alien god 'Cthulhu' might not be the obvious face of a charity fund raising event. But here we are. The Necroconomicon community on the Discord website, dedicated to bringing Call of Cthulhu gamers together in a friendly environment, are looking for writers, artists, podcasters and You Tube hosts - essentially anyone who has contributed to the game - to get in touch if they think they might be able to help with the 24 hour event.

The aim of the charity stream is to raise money for Leukaemia Care, as well as awareness of the disease.

Further details can be found on the Blasphemous Tomes website.

Wednesday 1 August 2018

Undertow

I figured a blog post is long overdue.
 
For one thing it has been close to a year since my last post. I should probably update this more often - on perhaps a monthly or weekly basis. 


For another thing, my Facebook and Twitter banners have, for a long time, advertised that I have a story called Undertow, but it may not have been obvious where, why, or what it's about (it's actually a scenario for a game, but I'll address that shortly). 


Finally, a recent successful Kickstarter campaign has announced a scenario called Undertow for the game Delta Green which, I'd like to clarify now, is not the scenario I wrote. I wrote Undertow a year or so ago, for my friend Stephanie McAlea at Stygian Fox, and the book Fear's Sharp Little Needles, a collection of really short scenarios for the horror RPG Call of Cthulhu, that can be run at short notice with minimal preparation. The book was successfully Kickstarted a while back and should, fingers crossed, be seeing the light of day (or flickering candle) soon.

 
I won't say too much about the scenario here (spoilers!), but the hook is simple enough: a reclusive author publishes a novel after many years of absence from the scene, a book that displays knowledge of the Cthulhu Mythos, and the investigators track him down to his home somewhere along the American coast. In many ways the book is a meditation on loneliness, depression and suicide. It is my hope that anyone that recognises that sense of isolation also recognises that countless people feel the same thing and pull through, and that if they can't find a way to escape the embrace of the undertow under their own steam it really helps to find someone who they can either talk to or spend time with without feeling harassed and judged. The scenario is a work of fiction, and no-one reading or playing the game is responsible for anything so evil or dangerous as to consider themselves without hope.




I know very little about Delta Green: Undertow, save what appeared in an update for their own Kickstarter: "First a dog and its owner vanished at the Tachee State Park beach, followed by four people combing the woods during the search that followed. What local authorities don’t know is that Native Americans claim the park is home to the Shadow. They say it is a place where the spirits of killers and criminals live on after death. Delta Green must team with an unlikely partner to continue the search." 


The game Delta Green is a spin off of the game Call of Cthulhu, so naturally there is likely to be some overlap in the theme of dark alien (incomprehensible) forces pitted against the characters controlled by the players. The title Undertow also lends itself to the themes of water (and thus it's no surprise that both stories contain beaches), and arguably shadows fall into a similar category, a shadow behind the item light is being shone upon not miles away from the dark depths beneath the surface of the water. 


A weird point of coincidence is that, in my scenario, one man and his dog also have an important part to play. That's just the zeitgeist though - as limitless as the wellspring of creativity may be, the streams and rivers they produce tend to run the same grooves and collect the same ideas along the way - arguably there is only a finite number of things that inspire us, and we're all reaching into the same pool to pull our ideas out of.


I'll be honest - I'm kind of intrigued to see whether there are other similarities.


Anyhow, my Undertow should be out in the wild relatively shortly. Delta Green: Undertow will take a while longer to see the light of day. I suspect my scenario won't be quite as expertly realised as the Delta Green one (those guys have been writing excellent material for years!) but I hope it is well received. If you're reading this Blog post off the back of reading/playing my scenario, please let me know what you thought of it, good or bad.


Thanks!



Footnote: the metaphor of the undertow was in a lot of the songs I listened to whilst I wrote my scenario.  If you can find me on Spotify, you might just find the playlist. :-)



I am friend to the undertow

I take you in, I don't let go
And now I have you
~ Undertow, Suzanne Vega