Annotated by Ken Hite, mind you.
It’s weird, though: I don’t actually remember ordering this. It’s not available on the Arc Dream site yet, because I was over there a couple of days ago to see if I could preorder it. No biggie. It’s probably from some Kickstarter or something.
Having backed the KING IN YELLOW RPG Kickstarter I can tell you that the stuff that they’re offering in the Bundle of Holding‘s worth it. Particularly Robin Laws’ THE MISSING AND THE LOST: it’s just a good book in its own right. He should be selling it more widely — in fact, why am I not telling him that?
This is the other half of the creativity fueled by spite. I REGRET NOTHING
Continue reading 01/30/2020 Snippet, AS THE GOLDEN EMPEROR LIES DYING.As the Golden Emperor Lies Dying
A Hastur Mythos Alternate History Campaign
For the next Patreon offering. This would be explicitly Cthulhu Mythos, with a HEAVY reliance on The King in Yellow. Thoughts?
Idea: Emperor Norton I did die on January 8, 1880 — and his body was taken over by the King in Yellow, which then used Norton’s miraculous ‘recovery’ to insidiously spread through California. Now it’s 1911, and San Francisco mayor Winthrop is about to run for President, on the strength of his leadership during the horrible statewide earthquake of 1906. And Norton’s husk is finally about to die.
OK, Robert W Chambers was… hrm, how to put it? OK. Imagine that Danielle Steel had started out her career writing horror fiction that was dramatically different* than what she’s known for now, and that’s pretty much Chambers in a nutshell. Dude wrote a bunch of short stories that we still read and draw from: he was also a trained painter before he took up writing. And he apparently painted the picture below:
There is an Amazon link! But it’s not currently listed as being in stock. Just go over to Arc Dream’s site and order either the deluxe hardback or the PDF of The King In Yellow annotated edition there. I acquired the PDF, and the artwork is gorgeous. And so are Ken Hite’s annotations. Check it out.
That’s the King In Yellow (reality-decaying horror) setting where a Carcosa-infected dictatorship has been overthrown, and the PCs are all playing former revolutionaries in that world. Anyway: is anybody interested in doing an online playtest? If I can get three or four people to sign up, I’ll email Pelgrane and try to get in on it. It’ll be like the Fall of Delta Green playtest we did: we’ll do it all as a Google Hangout and whatnot.
Lemme know in comments if you’re interested.
The Mysterious Package Company crafts… well, it’s right there on the label. Multimedia High Weirdness By Mail, to quote the Church of the Sub-Genius; eldritch and hand-crafted and apparently just a little sumptuous. I’d be getting The King in Yellow one right now if I had somebody to send it to. Or if I could afford it; this is not a ‘casual weirdness’ link. This is a ‘what you get that impossible to buy-for person for his/her birthday/Christmas’ link.
As in, a redoing of the novel where the mysterious ‘yellow book’ was in fact The King In Yellow. I mean, sure, you’re swallowing your own tail there (Robert Chambers was probably himself referencing The Picture of Dorian Gray, at least in part), but still. You’d think that somebody would have written this up for Call of Cthulhu.
Man, I may have to. Although it’s been a while since I read the book, admittedly. Hmm…
