Tag: call of cthulhu

Chaosium reveals ELDER, The Call of Cthulhu AI Chatbot.

Elder is trained exclusively on Call of Cthulhu, huh? …Gee, I can’t think how that could possibly go tentacle-shaped.

I kid, I kid! This is a smart concept. It’s perfectly ethical, too: the developers are officially working with Chaosium to create something that can be used to deal with rules questions and whatnot. They’re only using Chaosium’s own stuff, too, so there’s no worries there (they also explicitly promise that they’re not using AI-generated art in any way). Frankly, I wouldn’t mind something like this for GURPS.

The Miskatonic Playhouse’s ‘The Dragon of Wantley’ drops tomorrow.

This looks interesting!

This is “an actual play video and podcast with regular guests and community scenarios” being put up by The Miskatonic Playhouse, which sounds… kind of neat, really. I don’t watch this sort of thing normally, but something about this tickles my fancy. Maybe it’s the promise of production values. Or I’m just curious to see what gaming looks like as a spectator sport, these days.

Continue reading The Miskatonic Playhouse’s ‘The Dragon of Wantley’ drops tomorrow.

@HPLHS’s “I can’t personally justify it but it’s worth every penny” CALL OF CTHULHU CLASSIC GAMER PROP SET.

Short version: Chaosium did a Kickstarter last year to reprint some classic Call of Cthulhu RPG supplements from the 1980s. The HPL Historical Society has gone out and done props for all of them: “These props go with the supplements reprinted as part of the Call of Cthulhu Classic set, which includes the original Call of Cthulhu Rulebook, The Cthulhu Companion, Fragments of Fear, The Asylum & Other Tales, Trail of Tsathoggua, and Shadows of Yog-Sothoth.”

The CoC Classic Gamer Prop Set will set you back a cool hundred bucks, and I don’t have the space for the props in question – but the HPLHS is the gold standard when it comes to game props. They just get it. If you’re a CoC gamer, you’ll get your money’s worth out of this deal.

The Call of Cthulhu Classic Kickstarter.

Specifically, the forty year anniversary reprinting of the original boxed edition of the Call Of Cthulhu RPG. This is old-school stuff, friends: Chaosium scanned near-mint versions of the originals, cleaned them up, added little extras, and now here it is. I should also note that I checked, and Chaosium is planning to print this in Europe: i.e., not via slave labor. We all remember the wretched Sassoon Files affair, I’m sure…

In the Mail: BEYOND THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS.

BEYOND THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS has arrived! I’ve wanted this supplement for a while, now. Just… not enough to spend hundreds of dollars on it, mind you.

BEYOND THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS reprint available at Chaosium.

Link here (I’ve already ordered mine). AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS is a reprint, not an update: the module uses the Call of Cthulhu 5.5 rules, but they offer conversion advice for 7.0 campaigns. Hardest hit: the folks trying to sell old copies for three hundred bucks.

Heh. Reminds me of why Steve Jackson Games reprinted GURPS Imperial Rome. IIRC, somebody on the forums came on and started bragging about how he managed to score a copy of the first edition for a ‘mere’ hundred bucks or so. Steve Jackson took careful note about how many people were enviously congratulating him, then went ahead and did another print run…

The ‘Journal d’Indochine’ Kickstarter

This Vietnam Call of Cthulhu supplement was done by the same people who did The Sassoon Files a while back. If you don’t remember, that was the Kickstarter where the entire print run got confiscated and destroyed by the People’s Republic of China because the description of the Chinese Communists in that Call of Cthulhu supplement wasn’t sufficiently worshipful. As one of the writers of the Journal d’Indochine Kickstarter has assured me, they have learned from that particular display of barbaric insecurity*.

Continue reading The ‘Journal d’Indochine’ Kickstarter

I am both charmed and enraged by the *existence* of Refractions of Glasston.

Via Facebook comes this free, officially ‘Neat-o’ Call of Cthulhu supplement called Refractions of Glasston. It is both free and Neat-o for the same reason; it is the result of a creative writing class at Taylor University in Indiana. The students all signed up to create a roleplaying game supplement over the course of a semester, which is an infuriatingly brilliant idea for a class. You kids don’t know how easy you have it! In my day they’d look at us funny for even suggesting that game writing was real writing! Now it counts towards your final GPA!

So get off my lawn! — But first, click that link and download it. The students are justifiably proud of what they did.