We haven’t had the time to release any new freebie scenarios for Dateline: Lovecraft, although we still have plans to do that when other Cthulhu Reborn tentacle-fires die down a bit.
However, one question we get asked pretty often is … can one still obtain a physical copy of the Dateline: Lovecraft newspaper+guidebook pack? For a long time, the best answer we could give to that was that copies were available from the awesome shopfront of the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. But then they ran out of stock of them … which prompted us to make a small batch of new copies (probably the last we’ll do for this incarnation of Dateline). We had plans to catch up with the HPLHS guys at a convention or something and get them the new stock. But … then … COVID.
For a while the boxes of new Datelines sat in our Night-gaunt-stables (aka “the office”), but we eventually took the plunge and shipped them via a slow boat to California. And it turned out to be a VERY slow boat — the parcels took about 7 months to arrive. But, arrive they did, a month or so back.
So … the great news for anyone who still desires a physical Dateline, they are on sale again at HPLHS. The even better news is that for the next few weeks HPLHS are having a site-wide holiday sale. So if you order our pack and quote SOLSTICE2021 at checkout you should get 20% of the retail price.
If you live in a part of the world where the idea of having things shipped from the US provokes 1D20/1D100 SAN … we do have three or four copies of the Dateline packs here in Australia, and even a few loose newspapers. If you contact us via the About link at the top of this blog, we might be able to get them to you semi-affordably.
For those who haven’t previously heard of Dateline: Lovecraft
Dateline: Lovecraft is a massive and highly-realistic newspaper prop — an entire 12-page traditional broadsheet-sized issue of the (fictional) Arkham Advertiser, mentioned occasionally in H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction. This particular issue — the one for October 15, 1928 — is packed full of international and local news stories, many with peculiar and subtly atmospheric hints buried inside the mundane articles. There are also plenty of period ads for Arkham businesses, local gossip columns, and even a full page of classifieds (again, chock full of buried oddities).
To make it a bit easier to find things in the massive sprawl of typeset text, Dateline: Lovecraft also has an associated guidebook which has a mountain of indices to aid in navigation, but also includes loads of story hook ideas, a campaign frame, and even a fully-detailed scenario built around a couple of clippings.
The idea behind Dateline: Lovecraft was to give Game Moderators a cool source of story hooks and ready-made prop handouts which could support original scenarios woven from the hints and oddments mentioned in the newspaper. We even published a few such scenarios here on the blog.
There is a digital version of the newspaper and associated guidebook which can be readily had from DriveThruRPG. It is already a Silver medal best seller on that site.
At various times, however, we’ve created small batches of physical broadsheet newspapers — which are huge in real life — and softcover guidebooks. It is these that we mentioned above … and they look a lot like this:
Cthulhu Reborn 