Saving The Cthulhu Font

Anyone who has ever played the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game (or most of its translated versions) will have encountered the beauty that is the title font, Columbus, which was used for the covers of books through its first couple of decades of life.

You may not know that the Columbus font is actually a Victorian-era Amercian display font … which has been digitized in a very limited way, but which has never really had a proper revival. The free versions (and even the “for money” versions pale in comparison to the samples you can see in old 1890s typographers specimen books — I know, I went searching for some ).

One of the worthy folks over on the Yog-Sothoth forums — a wonderful guy and resident professional font guru Thomas Phinney — is currently running a Kickstarter project to go through the painstaking process of digitally restoring Columbus (or Cristoforo as he’s calling it) to full digital glory, ready to be used in generations of new Cthulhu books (if the publishers wanted to do that, hint hint). As of right now, the kickstarter has a bit over two weeks to run.

The covers of the early Call of Cthulhu books have huge nostalgic value for me (as well as being extraordinarily fine pieces of cover art in themselves). I didn’t realise until I pulled them all out again and looked how much the Columbus font sort of “defines” the feel of the covers.

As my own little homage to those covers, and to Columbus, and Thomas’ worthy aims to drag it, tentacles flailing, into the 21st century, I’ve put together a poster (click for a larger version). If it brings back as many memories to you as it did to me while creating it … you should seriously consider backing the Cristoforo Kickstarter — if only to encourage all those pesky game designers that they really *should* be making book titles which look as beautiful as these ones …

The title for the poster BTW is “The Wrong South Pacific Cruise”

Virtual Horror Made Real

Most readers of Cthulhu Reborn will be well aware of the many and varied PDF goodies that have been released on this site, including several full-colour glossy scenarios (usually overflowing with handouts). If you don’t know what I’m referring to, scoot over to the downloads page and you’ll quickly see what I’m on about.

For a little while I have been wondering what some of the virtual horrors I have created would look if they were ever translated across to physical (print) form. To satisfy this curiosity I recently had a very small number of “promo only” professionally printed copies made of the biggest, glossiest layout that I’ve released here — Geoff Gillan’s “The Past Is Doomed”

I’m really pleased with the way these turned out, so thought I’d share a few photos here on the blog.

A bundle of horror, fresh from the printers

Internal Page Layouts

The book, covered in handouts

The biggest and most ornate of the handouts: the infamous “Dust Jacket”

These digitally printed booklets were create using more-or-less the same layouts as are available here for free on Cthulhu Reborn … so if you really like what you see, it’s probably possible for you to create something similar yourself. Of course you *may* need to spend quite a bit of time printing up newspaper props on grungy paper, scrunching them up, then flattening them out … just to achieve that authentic prop newspaper look. But then, hey, join the club

Great Cthulhu is Coming to Town

While there is still some “making a list” happening, and I’m sure much “checking it twice,” … it is looking quite likely that Great Cthulhu will be coming to my city at some time during this year.

Let me just back up a bit and explain what the heck I’m talking about.

Over on the Yog-Sothoth.com forums, Paul Maclean (aka Paul of Cthulhu, founder of YSDC) is a man with a plan. His plan is quite simple: he wants to arrange for his plush toy Cthulhu to visit as many places around the globe and be photographed doing as many squamous and non-Euclidean things as possible. It’s all in the name of charity. But it also sounds like it will be a LOT of fun.

So, of course I volunteered to host a visit from the Great Old One, despite the fact that I live far from most other Call of Cthulhu fans … in sunny Australia. I’m sure the international postage will be ridiculous, but it’s going to be fantastic.

One of the rules of Paul’s “Cthulhu World Domination Tour 2012″ is that each person who receives Great Cthulhu is expected to put some small token or piece of ephemera into his cardboard vault (aka the packing container) before sending it on the the next victim host. So excited am I by this exercise that I have chosen to create a custom piece of ephemera for this purpose: a mock 1920s newspaper clipping recording a supposed previous visit by Cthulhu back in 1925. It looks like this (click image for a full-sized version with legible body text):

And before anybody asks what a “pie floater” is … check out this page on Wikipedia. Do you not agree that this local food speciality looks like it comes from the pits of R’lyeh?

BTW the look and feel of this newspaper prop closely mirror issues of the local newspaper, circa February 1925 … and indeed, everything apart from the main article is actually material lifted from scanned newspapers from this period. And, yes, the headline “Women Who Marry Aliens / What Is Their Nationality?” is copied word-for-word from a real article. This prop features something that is a bit of an experiment for me … the creation of a new font based on scanned images: The main headline font (e.g., “PIE-CART FOUND ABANDONED”) is rendered using a hastily-cobbled together font made from letters cut from scans of the actual 1925 newspaper. Considering how quickly it was done, I guess it looks ok … but the experience of attempting this gives me new-found respect for the folks who do this professionally — there are a lot of things you need to get right for a font to look “not-broken.”

CthulhuReborn Gets Its First Award

There are quite a number of blog awards floating around the blogosphere, but until now this site has never received any nominations.

AlwaysDisconcerted, a very good friend to this site (not to mention a very talented artist whose work I have been privileged to use in PDF projects), changed that by listing us as a “Very Inspiring Blog” and granting us an award. That’s pretty cool: I guess the reason I originally created CthulhuReborn was to give something back to the online community … whether that be something tangible like free PDF scenarios, or whether it’s just giving people ideas they can take away to use in their games … it’s all about giving people inspiration.

I would strongly encourage folks to check out AlwaysDisconcerted’s own blog (not only because she clearly has superb taste in blogs, but also because her artwork deserves to get more attention).

It’s traditional in these circumstances to “pay it forward” by nominating a bunch of other people who are inspirational. While I don’t read a lot of other blogs, two that I do check on a daily basis are:

• Propnomicon’s superb blog on Lovecraftian prop-making, a daily source of weird props and news about Propnomicon’s own excellent prop projects
• Badger McInnes’ sporadic but ever-interesting blog on the behind-the-scenes machinations of his design and layout studio, Squamous Studios

While not really a blog, another source of continual inspiration to my work is the incredible H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. They produce a bunch of nifty products in a range of catagories including prop-elements (fonts etc), paper and sculpture props, Lovecraftian apparel, as well as producing excellent film adaptations of Lovecraft’s stories. Their Angell Box (a massively detailed prop recreating the full set of research papers collected by the narrator of the “Call of Cthulhu” short story) is perhaps the coolest object that I own. Please consider buying their stuff — I want them to make more, much MUCH more.

Backsides By Gaslight

As I’ve mentioned before, here on Cthulhu Reborn and also over on the Yog-Sothoth.com forums, I was fortunate enough to have a (rather small) role in the production of the 3rd Edition of Chaosium’s 1890s horror setting, “Cthulhu By Gaslight” (shipping in the next few days in paper-form, already available from Chaosium in PDF)

It was a lot of fun helping out, both by contributing some designs (handouts and the new character sheet are mine) … and also by tracking down some obscure graphics and illustrations from old Victorian-era books (such as the rather splendid engravings of 1890s firearms which made it into the final version).

As with all these kinds of things, there’s a lot of additional *stuff* that was produced along the way that didn’t make the Chaosium book but are still kinda neat. I figure it might be kinda fun to share some of these on the blog … and if someone can do something useful with them, well more power to them! (or, in Gaslight-speak, “Top-ho!”)

Not the Title Page

One of the last items to be completed in Badger’s layout for the Gaslight book was the front-title page and the table of contents. The Great Old One in charge of the book (Kevin Ross) put forward the idea of creating some pages that had a Victorian typographic look to them. I liked that idea, and contributed a couple of ideas as to how the title page might look. One of my two ideas was taken up, but the other — much more bonkers — idea was something that I thought was kinda cool in its own way, though not really right for the book. The idea was basically to attempt a page layout in the form of a 19th Century playbill. Here’s what my attempt at such a beast looks like:

Images of London

While trawling through old books about 1890s London I found heaps of wonderful examples of sketches and engravings from the era that so perfectly capture the mood that I just had to snip them into Photoshop and tidy them up. Here’s a flickr gallery I made of some of these great pictures — if you want some illustrations for your own game in 1890s London, use these to your hearts content!

Here are a couple of examples, to give you and idea of the goodness included in this gallery of 130+ engravings:

Humanizing Handwriting

Cthulhu Reborn has been getting quite a bit of additional traffic over the past few days thanks to it being mentioned, initially over on the rpg.net forums, but then over on the dark-king-of-all-Lovecraftian-blogs, the excellent Propnomicon (how cool!). The source of this unexpected interest is … well, something quite simple really: the blank Essex County autopsy form I posted here back in December.

As mentioned previously, this form was something I created for a series of scenario handouts for a huge and prop-heavy Call of Cthulhu adventure I’m still only part-way through typesetting and designing on behalf of a (fairly well-known) CoC author. So … while it will probably be a while more before the final book/PDF is complete, I thought it might be kinda neat to share one example of what *I* have done with the Essex County Autopsy form:

Some Thoughts on Handwriting Fonts

Revisiting this design reminded me of all the work that goes into trying to emulate real-world handwriting. Why is that? Surely there must be some good handwriting fonts out there that will do the job out-of-the-box? Well … I guess it comes down to exactly how realistic a look you are going for. Now … I like handwriting fonts as much as the next person (although they give me lots of headaches). Some of them are even pretty good approximations of letter-shapes that mimic the way people really write. But, with the vast majority of text set with these fonts if you look closely at the regularity of the letter-shapes upon repetition, the crisp straight baselines from computer typesetting, and the regularity of character spacing … all these things make passages look not-quite-human.

To demonstrate what I mean, and some of the tricks I have learned to try to “humanize” text formatted using handwriting fonts (used in the above prop), here’s a simple example. The message below is formatted using the excellent HPL Historical Society font based on the cursive handwriting of H.P. Lovecraft.

Now, that’s a great font … and even straight out-of-the-box it looks pretty reasonable as a simulation of human handwriting. But … if you look closer, you’ll notice a few things. The capital I character repeated in both lines looks exactly the same in both renditions. The lower-case T is also conspicuously identical in angle and weight in each of the half-dozen places it appears. And the baseline is dead-straight, much moreso than a real person would create. Now, none of these are failings of the font itself (most fonts only include one version of the upper-case I glyph for example), and for short passages of faux-handwritten text they are probably fine. But when you’re putting together long passages using a font like this, the repetition and regularity of the font definitely dimishes the overall illusion of the text having been written by hand.

So, what can you do about it? Well, I’ve experimented with a range of things over the past year or so, searching for ways to “humanize” the typeset text by introducing effects which emulate the natural irregularities and variations human beings apply when writing.

A simple technique that gets you a long way is simply selecting small groups of letters (and/or spacing) at random and tweaking their character height, then independently making a second pass of picking out short sequences of letters and tweaking their character width. Some letters will get tweaked both ways, some along one axis, but not the other, and some parts not at all.

Below is the result of this method applied (in Adobe Illustrat0r) to the text above. Some groups of characters have had their height tweaked by various different factors from -25% to +50%; widths have been tweaked in the +/- 25% range for some passages.

So what has this achieved? Well, look at the two upper-case I’s — they now have a similar, but not identical shape, angle and weight. Similarly, compare the various renditions of the lower-case T: each has a slightly different angle and size. Compare, for example, the ‘t’ in “writing” with the one which follows in “this” … they look similar, but quite obviously not the same.

Another trick that I’ve used is to apply a similar approach to randomly tweaking character spacing (tracking, to be technical). The passage shown below is the result of taking the preceding text, selecting sections and modifying the tracking by various values in the -50 to +50 range.

If you look closely, you’ll see how this has made some words look more cramped-looking (e.g., “appreciable”), while others are more spaced-out (“be no more”). This is fairly subtle, but it definitely enhances the varied look of the text and (I think) more accurately simulates the inconsistent spacing that people apply when writing.

Using Envelope Distortion

For a long time, the two methods described above were the bulk of what I did to try to make handwritten text look “realistic”. More recently, though, I have added another tool to my arsenal: using Adobe Illustrator’s “Envelope Distort” function. Without going into any detail at all, basically what this lets you do is to distort an object according to the shape of a different object. How does this help? Well … if you draw a non-filled rectangular path around each line of text (but on top of it):

it’s then fairly easy to “roughen up” this rectangle by hand. The easiest way in Illustrator is just to select the rectangle, pick the Pencil tool and start drawing close to the edge of the rectangle. Drawing like this edits the path, so if you trace around the four sides of the rectangle using the mouse (or a tablet), you end up with something that is rectangle-like, but not perfectly straight:

From there, all you need to do is select the first line of text and the corresponding pseudo-rectangle, click on the Object menu, select “Envelope Distort” and then “Make with Top Object”. Repeat for line two, and you have:

Note how the various renditions of the same letter now have quite different shapes, weights and spacing. In particular, compare the two capital I’s. Also, the baseline is also not perfectly straight and looks a lot more like what a person would do if trying to write in a straight line. Obviously, experimenting with different amounts of envelope tweaking is a good idea, since extreme deviations from the original rectangle generate things that just look weird.

Now … doing all this for a largish passage of text is pretty time consuming, particularly because it’s best to use slightly different settings / envelopes for each line of text (which means mixing it up differently each time … or at least being selective when it comes to reusing things). That’s why props like the filled-in Autopsy Report above take quite a bit of time to create. Is it worth it? Well, ultimately it comes down to how realistic you want something to look and how well your eyes can pick fake computerized “handwriting”. Problem is … once you start looking closely, you start finding fault with more and more examples of apparently realistically rendered writing …

 

Conspiracy Reborn: Geoff Gillan’s “The Past Is Doomed”

Geoff Gillan should be familar to many fans of Call of Cthulhu. Although he didn’t write a huge volume of scenarios for the game, he *did* create (and partially write) one of the game’s all-time classic campaigns, Horror on the Orient Express. And the handful of scenario he did contribute to Chaosium books in the early 1990s (including scenarios in both Blood Brothers books, Fearful Passages and Tales of the Miskatonic Valley) were in equal parts intriguing and spell-binding … in a horrific kind of way. To be honest, I wish Geoff wrote more Cthulhu stuff.

[for a more detailed bibliography of Geoff Gillan's gaming and fiction writing, check out his page on the Cthulhu Wiki]

But here’s the thing … he *did* write more for Call of Cthulhu, including a scenario called “The Past Is Doomed” which eventually got published in the Chaosium Digest. My understanding is that this was intended as Geoff’s contribution to a modern day scenario compendium which Chaosium planned but ultimately pulled the plug on.

Back when Geoff first put this out for free on the email digest, I thought it was kinda insane … but in a good way. You know, in a similar way that anything that Grant Morrison touches has a special kind of weird that makes your brain hurt, but somehow seems like underneath it all there’s something profoundly intelligent. That’s the sort of insane I’m talking about.

It’s really hard to say much about “The Past Is Doomed” without giving away some of its many-layered (and somewhat elusive) secrets. I can say that it’s set in Arkham, in the 1990s and it begins as an investigation into the disappearance of a well-known, if somewhat eccentric author. At its roots, it is a scenario which blends equal parts occult conspiracy with a curious obsession with the history of America in the 20th Century. Indeed, in Geoff’s intro he describes it providing some kind of thematic link between traditional 1920s Cthulhu and whatever Lovecraft’s haunted town of Arkham must have become in the modern era.

As I have been working my way through the highlights of the Cthulhu material published in the Chaosium Digest, Geoff’s scenario stood out as something very worthy of being turned into a glossy PDF. It contains so many bizarre, yet compelling ideas that it would be a shame for it to languish in text-only form in an email archive somewhere. But, unlike the other scenarios that I have released here on Cthulhu Reborn, the digest text of “The Past Is Doomed” represents more of a sketch of how the scenario might be — mainly because Geoff never really developed it too far before Chaosium’s project evaporated. I guess that I could have just re-published it in that form … but I figured it would be fairly easy to put a little flesh on the places where the scenario’s (rotting) skeleton was still showing, and put out something that is more representative of how Geoff’s adventure might have looked if it had been developed further.

Normally I shy awy from monkeying around with other people’s text … it tends to annoy the original authors no end. But, in this case, via some well-connected folks I was able to make contact with Geoff and talk to him about his original vision for “The Past Is Doomed” and how it might be augmented in a sympathetic way (i.e., a way I could monkey with the text that wouldn’t end up with Mr Gillan coming after me with an axe).

So that’s what I did … anybody who goes to the trouble to compare this PDF with the original Chaosium Digest version, will see that there has been a lot of text added by way of concrete handouts to get Investigators from plot point A to plot point B more tangibly. There has also been a level of additional exposition of some of the most elusive ideas, in an effort to make them a little more accessible without entirely spoiling the weird and otherworldly feel of the original.

One thing I talked quite a lot about with Geoff was whether it was a good idea to update “The Past Is Doomed” from a scenario set in the “now” of the 1990s (i.e., when it was written) to the “now” of … well, now. Eventually, we decided that the themes of the scenario worked a lot better in the pre-Millennial angst of the 1990s, so we left it there. I guess that makes it a kind of retro piece.

The PDF

This is the largest project that I have released here on Cthulhu Reborn, both in terms of the number of pages of the PDF, the amount of handout material, and the complexity of the page layout. All up it spans to 48 pages — 32 pages of scenario text, a couple of covers and 14 pages of (mostly double-sided) handouts. There is a *lot* of artwork in this layout, both in terms of spot artwork and maps, but particularly in page textures. There are something like 14 different page textures that I designed, all of which you’ll probably only just notice as some faint subliminal in the background. All of this adds size … so if you want to grab this freebie, you will be up for downloading 40MB of PDF.

To give you an idea of what you’ll be getting if you download this PDF, here’s a montage of a few of the page-layouts:

Artwork

The story elements of “The Past Is Doomed” include some mind-bending warping of the boundaries between historical era. That seemed to lend itself to some intriguing opportunities for making some unusual artwork via the joys of Photoshop.

Then there was the chance to make some page textures that thematically evoked the idea of time being warped somehow:

Downloads

To download the PDF adaptation of Geoff Gillan’s The Past Is Doomed, click the link below:

  Download Geoff Gillan’s “The Past Is Doomed” (48 pages, 40MB)

As always with all content that I publish here on Cthulhu Reborn, this is provided as a copyrighted file but freely distributable under a Creative Commons license. That means basically, you can do whatever you want with this material … except make money out of it. In case it isn’t blindingly obvious, the copyright holder here is Geoff Gillan for the text and me for the layout.

On a personal note, I would really like to thank Geoff for being so open to my efforts to adapt his adventure via the addition of a considerable amount of text of my own writing. Thanks also to Andy Miller for his excellent work doing copy-editing for this book!

On The Trail of The Green Fairy

Trail of Cthulhu is a pretty cool game … it’s a kind of similar-but-different take on Lovecraftian roleplaying from good ol’ Call of Cthulhu, taking intriguing steps into narrative roleplaying.

Plus it has loads of really cool scenarios and campaigns, which take Cthulhu roleplaying into completely different (some would say almost heretical)  realms.

One thing Trail of Cthulhu does not yet have (IMHO) is an attractive character sheet — the standard offering that comes with the game is doubtless very functional (listing many character gen rules as footnotes on the sheet itself) but it’s not very aesthetically pleasing.

Recently I was contacted here on Cthulhu Reborn by Matthew Strachan who runs a pretty unusual game of Trail set in 1890s Paris. Matthew discovered the Art Nouveau CoC sheet hosted here on the blog (actually one of the most downloaded item); he wondered whether such a beast might be designed for Trail. I thought it sounded like an interesting challenge, so I thought I’d give it a bash.

Below are some snapshots of the design I came up with. One of the design goals was to do something that isn’t identical to the 1890′s Art Nouveau sheet (what would be the fun in that … plus that design is now part of Chaosium’s 3rd Edition Gaslight book). Another goal was to experiment with making something that looked a bit hand-drawn. In the end I made two variants of the sheet — one of which is very hand-drawn, the other which still features lots of straight lines.

Here’s what the two designs look like (click for larger versions):

Sheet Fronts

Sheet Backs

Details & Artwork

The Victorian-looking Trail of Cthulhu logo is something I designed specifically for this project, as is the multi-layered texture underneath the logo bar. Both of those can be seen in more detail below. The name “Absinthe-Hounds of Paris” is also an invention … but one that I hope Matthew’s group will embrace in some form or other (even if only to inspire in-game refreshments )

And, BTW, in case anyone is interested … yes, it definitely is much harder to make something on a computer that looks authentically hand-drawn.

PDF Version

You can grab a PDF version of either the straight-line or hand-drawn version of the 1890′s Trail of Cthulhu sheet by clicking on the links below:

  Hand-Drawn 1890′s Trail Sheet (2 sided, formatted for US Letter)

  Straight-Line 1890′s Trail Sheet (2 sided, formatted for US Letter)

  Hand-Drawn Sheet with extra skills from “Bookhounds of London”

As with everything I release here on Cthulhu Reborn these designs are copyrighted, but offered free under a Creative Commons License. That means you can do pretty much anything you want with this material, except make money from it. Now … given that the 1890s isn’t (yet) a published setting for the Trail of Cthulhu game (it’s pretty much focussed on the 1930s and 1950s so far), I’m not sure how someone would use this. But there’s lots of creative people out there, so I’m sure someone will figure out something. Or maybe one day there *will* be an “Absinthe-Hounds” book … heck, I’d buy a copy!

A Nightmare Reborn: Mark Morrison’s Deadwave

The name Mark Morrison is one of those iconic ones that should be familiar to anyone who has followed for any length of time Chaosium’s two flagship roleplaying lines, Call of Cthulhu and Elric/Stormbringer.

Those who were around in the early days of CoC history (say, the late 1980s and early 1990s) would certainly recognize Mark’s name from his numerous superb scenario contributions to books from that era — perhaps most famously his still-much-referenced scenario from Mansions of Madness (Crack’d and Crooked Manse) and the scenarios in Terror Australis. Many would also remember the long-running column that he wrote for The Unspeakable Oath, titled “The Case of Mark Edward Morrison” and his contributions to a couple of classic campaigns (Horror on the Orient Express and At Your Door).

Even new-comers to the game would likely have run across Mark’s work — his introductory scenario Dead Man Stomp has been printed in all editions of the Call of Cthulhu rulebook since 1992.

[for a more extensive bibliography of Mark's Cthulhu work, as well as a summary of his contribution to Elric, check out this page on the Cthulhu Wiki]

What fewer may know is that Mark wrote quite a lot of additional material for Call of Cthulhu, mostly for convention play, that has never been published. The “vaults” of the Cthulhu Conglomerate (the Melbourne-based group of writers in which Mark was a key contributor) have taken on almost legendary status.

In 1994 Mark published a (non-convention) scenario in the Chaosium Digest, called Deadwave. It’s my understanding that this was something that had been submitted to Chaosium for consideration on a couple of occasions, but which for whatever reason had never been published by them. Which really is a shame, because it is a superb — and in many ways innovative — piece. When I first read Deadwave back in the day, my mind was literally swimming with its possibilities … because, unlike traditional scenarios, Mark’s scenario is designed to be slotted into an ongoing campaign in a way which factors in prior events in the campaign and uses them to turn the Investigators’ world on its end. It provides a series of quite detailed events, but in a way that is designed to be flexibly customised by the Keeper, all with the ultimate goal of corroding whatever safe and mundane world the players’ characters have built around themselves. Had Trail of Cthulhu existed 15 years earlier, you might have described Deadwave as a unremitting attack by a Mythos force on the Investigators’ Sources of Stability.

When I first started adapting old scenarios from the Chaosium Digest as free high-production-value PDFs, Mark’s scenario was one of those that immediately sprang to mind as being worthy of (finally) being published in such a form. I’m very pleased that I have finally been able to produce such a layout for Deadwave … and even more thrilled that Mark agreed to contribute a brand-new short introduction to the PDF.

In producing the PDF version of Deadwave, I have exercised a slight editorial hand (which those who have read the plain-text version from the Chaosium Digest will notice). Mostly all I’ve done is a little reorganisation and the addition of some bridging text. However, I have made one significant augmentation. At the time when Mark was writing the scenario there was exactly one time-period/setting for Call of Cthulhu — what we would today call the “classic era” (ie the 1920s). However, due to the remarkably flexible way that he had constructed the scenario, it works pretty much just as well for any era of the game where there is some level of Industrial-age technology or later. That means, with just the substitution of a few words here and there, Deadwave could be a Gaslight scenario, or a modern-day scenario … or probably even a near future scenario. I recognized this fact while copy-editing, and decided to include some notes throughout the text to help Keepers take advantage of this flexibility.

My PDF for Deadwave runs to twenty-nine pages, made up of seventeen pages of scenario, a couple of covers and three separate collections of high-quality (double-sided) newspaper props. All up it’s about 15MB in size. Scroll down to the bottom of this posting for the download link, or scoot over to my Downloads page where you can get this and numerous other goodies, all for free.

To give you an idea of what you’ll be getting if you download this PDF, here’s a montage of a few of the page-layouts:

Artwork

The multi-era nature of the scenario also ended up being reflected in the graphic design of the PDF, starting with the covers (above) — the idea for those was to include a “strip” which looked like it was printed in the 1890s, another from the 1920s and a third one from modern-day. The internal art is similarly schizophrenic when it comes to era — samples representatives of all the eras are present throughout:

(above pic, courtesy of the talented AlwaysDisconcerted: check out her page on DeviantArt)

Handouts

One of the interesting challenges of producing a scenario which can be run in three different eras of the game was deciding what to do about handouts: Mark’s original text described two newspaper handouts which are quite important to the early phases of the adventure. Now, obviously a handout which renders these in a 1920s newspaper style isn’t going to be very useful for either Gaslight or modern games (when newspaper looked quite different). I could have just produced some generic non-period-specific handouts, I guess … but in the end I decided to take the plunge and design three separate layouts for each newspaper article, one for each era. Here’s a montage of one of these articles rendered in the three different styles:

Downloads

To download the PDF adaptation of Mark Morrison’s Deadwave, click the link below:

Download Mark Morrison’s “Deadwave” (29 pages, 14.7MB)

As always with all content that I publish here on Cthulhu Reborn, this is provided as a copyrighted file but freely distributable under a Creative Commons license. That means basically, you can do whatever you want with this material … except make money out of it. In case it isn’t blindingly obvious, the copyright holder here is Mark Morrison for the text and me for the layout.

Now … go forth and create The Deadwave

I hope that some folks out there get some use out of this rendition of Deadwave — a lot of work has gone into both the writing (a long time ago), and the design (more recently). But I am very happy that finally, a couple of decades after its writing, Mark’s work is finally out there in a version that (hopefully) does it more justice than the plain text of the Chaosium Digest.

Given the unique and flexible nature of the scenario, there are an endless number of ways that Keepers might weave Deadwave into their scenarios … I’d be fascinated to hear how it infects people’s games (and would encourage anyone who runs it to post on Yog-Sothoth.com or elsewhere to share some details of their own rendition of this poisonous little tale of revenge).

Pleasant nightmares!

All Things Move Toward Their End

So, it’s been a little slow here on Cthulhu Reborn with regard to updates on upcoming free PDF projects … but like some evil shoggoth-filled cauldron, things have been bubbling away with a malevolent evil (though hopefully less smell). So much so in fact that I now have not one, but two scenarios that are almost ready to be released here.

Deadwave

The first of these is Mark Morrison’s legendary scenario Deadwave … which I have spruiked here several times since I had it *almost* ready to release in November. Suffice to say that a variety of real-world commitments and other distractions kept this beast at the 99% mark for longer than I would have preferred … but now all I am waiting on is a hasty glance from a proof-reader, some (hopefully minor) fixes from that … and it will be out!

In the months that this project has been stalled, I have managed to take the opportunity to add a few bells and whistles to the layout. These have mostly been reverse-sides to all six newspaper handouts (two from the 1920s, two from the Gaslight era, and two modern ones). I’ve also taken the time to put together a back cover, which has a blurb which I think quite nicely sums up what Deadwave is about:

 

The Past Is Doomed

The second PDF which I haven’t mentioned before, but is getting pretty close to completion is Geoff Gillan’s 1990s conspiracy piece “The Past Is Doomed.” I’m sure most folks know Geoff as the mastermind behind Horror on the Orient Express (one of the all-time best campaigns for any RPG, IMHO) … but he also wrote some really intriguing and frightening one-shot scenarios for various Chaosium compendiums in the mid-1990s. This scenario dates from this era also, and was published in the Chaosium Digest, where it has sort of been sitting in obscurity ever since.

I will post more about it in the coming weeks, but for now here’s a sneak peek at my cover design for this strange tale of the Mythos Conspiracy against History (for want of a better tagline):