Every case generates tons of police paperwork. Although there really ought to be more, we created one page for each of the murder victims, providing some insights from the point of view of the Boston Police. These props are adapted from some classic Hollywood prop police paperwork, the form DD5, which was itself probably based on real police documents from the 1930s/'40s.

This map is a composite of two plates from the Atlas of the City of Boston published in 1895 by G. W. Bromley & Co., offering an insanely detailed view of every street and building. While it's tempting to see some kind of occult diagram in the lines drawn between the murder sites, that’s a purely random pattern. Purely random. Starting with the location described in "The Fungi From Yuggoth", we chose a location for the Cornwallis mansion and then located our crime scenes in plausible locations in the neighborhood. The famed Fenway Park baseball stadium was added to the neighborhood in 1911. It was called “Fenway” because there was a swamp, or fen, there originally.

The content of this newspaper article is largely pulled from the Chaosium supplement. The illustrations of the Cornwallises came from the actual September 15, 1891 issue of the Boston Globe. Emily Cornwallis is actually a woman named Mrs. Patrick Nolan, and Ambrose Cornwallis is George Loring. Our thanks go to HPLHS member David Cercone for scanning newspaper microfilms from the Library of Congress. He definitely made his Library Use roll.

The clipping is accompanied by the file card from the Boston Globe morgue, which is an archive of clippings and photos previously published in a newspaper. To learn more about newspaper morgues, watch this fascinating short documentary about the one at the New York Times.

The text of Jeremy’s obituary and most of the others were adapted from real obituary columns published in the 1890s, when such notices were very poetic. We also took the opportunity to pay our respects to two people important to the HPLHS who passed away: Keith Herber, author of "The Fungi from Yuggoth", on which this episode is based, and Neil Dalager, the father of HPLHS shipping shoggoth emeritus Mike Dalager, who appears in the episode as Lazlo and Ucumari. Mr. Dalager provided the handwriting of Nate Ward in a previous HPLHS prop project, and we used his handwriting again for Nate Ward in this episode.

While the details in the main article are an elaborated version of the information from "The Fungi From Yuggoth", other news items and illustrations on this page were taken from real newspapers of the period.

This receipt is a replica of a real one from the HPLHS collection of ephemera. Since Sarah's grocery buying habits are one of many indicators that something is very wrong in the Cornwallis home, we thought this mundane item would provide some interesting insight into her life. Sometimes it's the simplest things that hint at great horrors. The prices are not made up, but based on grocery advertisements of the period.

The diary of Ambrose Cornwallis is an important document in the story, and there were many pages that would have made excellent props. We saw it as an opportunity to provide a picture of the spectacles made by Baron Hauptman, even if only a crude hand-drawn one. The spectacles themselves would have made an awesome prop, but they're a little too complicated to reproduce. We've had them down at HPLHS headquarters for years, and they are a blend of an antique pair of Oddfellows hoodwinks and some optometrist's test gear. The text of the diary page was translated into Latin by HPLHS member Rhett Jenkins, and we thank him heartily. Here's what it says in English:

29 July 1890. The Baron’s visit has been the most exciting event of my life, but today he returns to Roumania with the Child. It has been my greatest privilege to bask in his tremendous power and his great knowledge for these last few days, but even so he has seen fit to bestow on me another gift. It is an exquisite pair of spectacles of his own devising. Although he did not have time to instruct me completely in their use, he assures me that through these special lenses I will see wonders undreamed of. Even Emily was charmed by the Baron’s promises, and I suspect she will find it difficult to avoid the temptation to try to use them. Perhaps I will permit it. It might do her some good if she could finally understand the true nature of our great work. To have found the Boy was my greatest achievement, and now I can prepare myself for the fulfillment of the Prophecy of Nophru Ka. Hail Yog Sothoth! Our day of glory will come!

The labels on the illustration translate as follows, clockwise from the top: "silver framework", "crystal lenses by Baron", "leather strap", "facemask blocks light", "metal blinders".

The letters from Baron Hauptman to Ambrose Cornwallis were players aids in "The Fungi From Yuggoth". We had them translated into German by Eddy Will and then they were hand lettered calligraphically by Josh Yelle. The Baron's seal is an adaptation of the arms of Sigismond Bathory, a 16th-century Prince of Transylvania.

The text of the first letter in English is: "Dear Dr. Cornwallis, Congratulations on your discovery, my Brother. All you have told me indicates that this child is the One. Praise Shub-Niggurath! The prophecy will be fulfilled! I am preparing a lineage and will send it when complete. This should verify beyond a doubt that the boy is the One. He bears the mark, and the stars are right. Hail Yog-Sothoth, Hauptman"

The text of the second letter in English is: "Brother Cornwallis, Everything is moving according to plan. I should be arriving in America May 27th to take charge of young Master Edward. I hope you have properly prepared the boy for the journey. We must not lose our chances this time. The stars do not promise another birth for over a century and the Brotherhood grows impatient! I have been in contact with the parents and they understand our interest and purpose. I expect no interference from that quarter. He is the typical, short-sighted "man of business" and his company is already benefitting from his decision. They will be quite content, I think. I will bring with me a present; a token from the Brotherhood for your invaluable services. It is a pair of spectacles that I have constructed. I will instruct you in their proper use when I arrive. Hail Yog-Sothoth, Hauptman"

The end of the Horror in Boston is our extrapolation of how the Boston Globe might have reported the coverup story given to them by the Boston Police. Obviously, the authorities in Boston had no child murderer whom the police could prosecute and the full situation regarding Jeremy would be difficult to explain to the public. In the interest of keeping public order, the Boston PD dynamited Jeremy in his well and then told reporters they’d cornered a perpetrator who then blew himself up.

We wanted listeners to be able to see the Prophecy of Nophru-Ka. We knew it would be impractical for us to create any kind of realistic papyrus, so we thought a photo of a papyrus might do the trick. Through consultation with the very helpful Dr. Robert Ritner, an Egyptologist at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, we were able to get a photo taken during the right period (late 1800s) of a document from the right period (18th to 16th century BC). The photo is of the Westcar Papyrus, which tells the tale of a magician in the court of the Pharaoh Cheops. The papyrus is written in the hieratic script to which we have added the name Nophru-Ka in hieratic. In our backstory, Galloway originally worked on the dig at Tanis with the archeologist Lepsius. When Galloway published his account of their findings, he included a reference to the Prophecy of Nophru-Ka. The Brotherhood set their sights on him and manipulated him into acquiring the Prophecy and later, with their funding, into leading a dig to find the Well of Nophru-ka. The handwriting on the back is from the cataloging of the photo by the University of Chicago. The handwritten note on the bottom of the back of the photo is Nate’s conclusion that Galloway, perhaps unwittingly, was working for the Brotherhood.

The Egyptian Gazette was an English-language newspaper published in Alexandria in the 1920s. We first did a clipping from this newspaper for "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs", and our thanks go to David Cercone for providing research scanned from microfilm copies in the Library of Congress at that time. This clipping gave us the opportunity to provide some context for the story of Nate's first encounter with the Brotherhood, and show a map of the location of the fictional Well of Nophru-Ka. The map itself comes from the Mitchell/Tanner Universal Atlas of 1848. The map inset detail comes from a different topographical map of Thebes by Pierre Jacotin from a French atlas published in 1826.

Horoscopes are incredibly complicated, and natal charts come in many different forms. We learned a lot about houses and aspects and signs in creating this prop. To create a horoscope for Edward Chandler that would meet the story's purposes and be plausible, we turned to Brazilian astrologer Pedro Ribeiro to help. He prepared a natal chart based on the story's data, and then suggested some rectifications to make it work better for the story. (The "Trutine of Eibon" was his invention.) If you study the chart you may notice that one of the constellations in the zodiac is not one of the traditional twelve: the Brotherhood has its own take on astrology. There is also a cryptic symbol that will appear on a subsequent document....

Before the internet and e-mails, telegrams were the way to send instant messages, and the indefatigable delivery boys of Western Union could find you no matter where you went. This is a replica of a typical Western Union message of the 1920s.

Believe it or not, this prop is only about 2/3 the size of the original 1927 Mauretania brochure upon which it is based. This kind of brochure was provided by the shipping company to travel agents to help them market these extraordinary voyages. We acquired the original on eBay and made some modifications to the ship’s route to conform to the fictional journey in the episode, and did a fair amount of work to restore the images from their old and cracked condition. The Mauretania, a Cunard ship launched in 1906, was the fastest ocean liner in the world in 1924, and one of the most luxurious. The chart of rates is a detailed replica of the original, and the information about life on board the ship comes from another pamphlet issued to Mauretania passengers. The final document was larger than any commercial printer we could find was able to print, so we scaled it down to this size, which is still printed on the largest piece of paper our printer could handle. Our thanks to the team at Dorado Music Packaging, the printer here in Los Angeles that takes care of most of the Dark Adventure printing, for handling this specialty item.

In this era of digital publishing, when you stop to consider that printing in 1924 involved huge amounts of metal type and substantial industrial machinery, it is astonishing to think that a ship would have an entire print shop on board capable of producing a complete newspaper. But they did, and the newspapers they printed were sometimes remarkably thorough daily editions with a mix of wire news, features, games, passenger gossip and shipboard bulletins. The Cunard line printed a paper called the Ocean Times as well as the Atlantic Edition of the Daily Mail. This prop is a replica based on samples of the Daily Mail published aboard the "Aquitania" in 1927, which were very kindly provided by Michael Gallagher, the Public Relations Manager and Historian of Cunard, and Meryl Press, Brand Relations Specialist of Cunard North America. We thank them kindly for their gracious assistance.

This prop is a detailed replica of a real Orient Express ticket, based on research we did when we designed some of the props for Chaosium's massive new version of "Horror on the Orient Express". That game takes place on the Simplon Orient Express which goes from Paris to Constantinople, but there were several Orient Express routes and one that went from Budapest to Klausenberg was the Arlberg Orient Express.

While the characters in our show don’t expressly use this guide to scenic castles, we liked the idea of including it in order to give better context to the world in which Castle Hauptman would have existed. We imagine Kasimir or Jordan picking up this guidebook from a rack in the Nyugati train station in Budapest and bringing it along. The history of Eastern Europe is long and complex, and our Hungarian guide gives an idea of the types of castles located in Eastern Europe and where they are located. With the exception of Castle Hauptman, all of the castles in the booklet are real and most can still be visited. The map at the centerfold is from an atlas published circa 1925 by the Cummins Map Co. of Toronto. The political boundaries in that part of the world changed often and quickly in the time of Lovecraft.

Țuică (sometimes spelled Tsuika) is a traditional Romanian spirit made from plums. This is a replica of an actual vintage Tsuika label that we liked. We printed it on an adhesive label so you can affix it to a bottle if so inclined. We like to imagine that the bar in Charlie Tower's New York apartment has a bottle of Tsuika on the shelf at all times.

The text for this document is by Keith Herber and was included as a player handout in "The Fungi From Yuggoth". It was translated into modern Romanian by friend of HPLHS, Radu Barzoi. He offered to translate it into medieval Romanian, which he assured us is very different from the language as it's spoken today, but our print schedule did not permit us to take advantage of that kind offer. Any flaws in the translation are entirely the fault of HPLHS.

Here's what it says in English: "I, Jan Savechik, humble priest of the Village of Drovosna, in the year of our Lord, 1632, do write this testament in regards to the events surrounding the actions taken by the people of Drovosna against the Baron Hauptman. This testimony differs from the version given to the legates of the church who were sent to investigate the actions of the villagers, and is the one true version. I am writing this in private, and when finished will seal the document with wax bearing a pagan symbol to guard against those would use it to their own purposes, or to signal another who would stand against these forces. In the year of our Lord, 1627, a book belonging to the Baron Hauptman came into my possession. It was a large volume, written in Greek. Its title shall not be repeated here. Blasphemous things were hinted at in the ramblings of a heathen poet who was supposed to written the original, and protection against devils and demons were also offered to the reader. When, in 1628, a young girl the village was taken by the Baron and later killed and her body thrown from the castle walls, her father, in rage, assailed the door of the castle with his hands and screamed his hate for the Baron. It was then, in full sight of the village, the Baron appeared upon the ramparts above the castle gate and with his evil gaze alone, killed the poor peasant. His body lay at the foot of the castle for two days before anyone dared to approach to carry it away. It was then, though I realized I imperiled my soul, I read that accursed volume. What was spoken within those pages shook me to the very heart of my faith, and I still feel as though a cold, dark hand grips my heart. The book told me of monstrous beings who live in another place from us and from the notes written in the margins in the Baron’s hand, I knew that he worshipped these as gods, in particular, one who dwells below the castle in the stinking pits. Arming the villagers with crucifixes from the church, I lead them against the evil Baron. We broke down the doors and ran through the castle, searching for the Baron. A small group of men found entrance to the catacombs below and bravely entered the dark tunnels. I followed at a distance and heard their cries ahead. I hurried on bearing the pagan symbol and the blasphemous book and rounding the corner, saw a devil, a demon that should not be. I screamed as I watched it devour the villagers, crucifixes still clenched in their hands. With gunshots and torches, we forced it back into its stinking hole, and I hammered the pagan symbol onto a great stone, which we used to seal the hole. We did not find the Baron, though his hated servants were slain, and after pulling down one of the great towers, we left the castle to its abandonment. I never spoke of the things that I saw below the castle and it was supposed that the lost men had somehow stumbled into the stinking pit found deep below the castle. I fear that I have risked eternal damnation for my actions, but must write them down to at least cleanse my mind if not my soul. Jan Savechik"

We imagine this is one of many such documents that Nate and Kasimir find in the catacombs below the church in Drovosna, suggested by "The Fungi from Yuggoth". The handbill features holes where this urgent message was nailed to the church doors back in 1552. It probably should really be in Hungarian, since Transylvania was under Ottoman control in 1552 and official pronouncements were probably not issued in Romanian. But maybe this was privately printed by a committee of concerned Romanian citizens. The Romanian translation is by Google, so forgive us, Radu, if it's embarrassingly wrong, but this is what we think it says in English:

"People of Drovosna! WARNING! This region is known to be the lair of Vampires. Although there have been numerous victims over many months, the official inquiry has reached no conclusion and will take no action. You must protect yourselves. Never go anywhere alone. If it looks bad, look away. Save the last bullet for yourself. And may God have mercy on us all."

Spells in the Call of Cthulhu game are a tricky business, and we've always felt that is just as it should be. Spells are hard to understand, hard to implement, and the spellcaster pays a price for casting them. So we took the notion of a spell to “Summon and Bind the Bloodsucker” from the game, wrote it out in the style of a Renaissance incantation and then had it translated into German by Eddy Will. Then we had that translation hand lettered by Josh Yelle. The artwork on the reverse side comes from Leigh McCloskey. We also thank HPLHS member Axel Weiß of the Arkham Insiders podcast for consulting on the German word "Sternenschlurfer".

Translation: "Prudent is he that fears the vampire, yet there is a creature in kind that comes from beyond the stars whose thirst for blood is far more fearsome and more insatiable. This creature is known of many names, but to him who would command it, it shall be known as the Bloodsucker or the Shambler from the Stars. Our earth is not the home of this thing and it shall come here only when called by the sorcerer who may bind it into obedience. Once it has been called, the sorcerer may employ its thirst against his enemies for as long as the sorcerer can command the will of the Bloodsucker. 

Repeat thou this phrase three times and the Bloodsucker shall be unbound and return in haste whence it came.

Immortal people have more time on their hands than the rest of us, so they can spend it tracking stars and making elaborate charts. We decided that Hauptman was blending Western and Chinese astronomical traditions, so this prop is based on a western 17th-century star chart which features Chinese asterisms instead of Western constellations. We decided that Xoth is the star Ras Alhague in the constellation Ophiuchus. We could go on at great length about that star and that constellation, but if you're actually interested you might have more fun looking into it on your own, and if you're not interested we won't bore you with more details. The chart specifies the location of Xoth, updated every 8.5 years, along with a number of notable comets that have passed nearby and some of its aspects with various planets. While Pluto was not officially known to exist when this chart was drawn, we figured that Hauptman and Lang Fu knew a thing or two that most other astronomers didn't, since they're working with Mi-Go. They passed some of this knowledge on to other members of the Brotherhood, including Cornwallis, who also features it in his horoscope of Chandler.

Josh Yelle did the chart, calligraphy and illustration of Ophiuchus. Andrew mined the raw data and did the Latin translation, so blame him if it's all horribly wrong.

This prop is based on another of the player handouts from "The Fungi From Yuggoth" by Keith Herber, although in the original game it is from a different character. As long as we were changing it to be from Lang Fu, we thought it would be fun if we gave him some proper letterhead and a business address. The signature in Chinese was wrangled for us by David Mersault (a DART alumnus who can be heard in our "At the Mountains of Madness" — and seen as Inspector Legrasse in our motion picture version of The Call of Cthulhu — and who currently resides in China).

We realized if you want to trace someone’s family tree from the 1880s back to Ancient Egypt, well, that would require a lot of paper. We figured Baron Hauptman had been working on this for centuries and developed his own process, not to mention a thick book full of charts like this one. In his book, pages would link by reference to other pages, so where you see, for example, Serie 183, that’s an indicator that this link leads to the continuation of the tree on another page of the book. This document was originally drawn on a computer in order to keep the generations tidy, but it was passed onto Josh Yelle who hand lettered it. The tree culminates with the birth of Edward Chandler, February 1, 1880. Many of the people depicted on the tree have symbolic annotations where the Baron has pointed out the astrological significance of Chandler’s forbearers. You will see often repeated the symbol for Ophiuchus, which is an important constellation in the zodiac of the Brotherhood.

On the reverse side is a natal chart for Chandler as drawn by Baron Hauptman himself in the Elizabethan style, based on the data provided by Cornwallis. Our thanks to astrologer and HPLHS member Yael Dragwyla for her coaching in this obscure art form.

This is another page torn from Fraternitas Belvorum. Like the Blutsauger spell above, we figured if you want to bring the Sphinx to life, it should be difficult. This spell is written in Latin and its incantation is in Ancient Egyptian. We thank Rhett Jenkins for rendering the Latin. The incantation in Ancient Egyptian is lifted from the Book of the Dead with a few key substitutions made. The illustration comes from Leigh McCloskey. Here is the English translation:

And once more did Nophru-Ka breathe in the smoke of the sacred incense, and once more the unseen spirit whispered from the darkness. So Nophru-Ka spoke:

And from the stars shall I come to thee in a Lesser Form, but of such might that the Stone Beast itself shall live, though being yet stone. If thou waver not in thy true faith to Nyarlathotep, the great Stone Beast shall do thy bidding, smiting thy enemies, sowing fear, madness and death. This mayest thou, Nophru-Ka, or thy true issue, command.

Fine dining in the 1920s tended to be an ostentatious affair for those who could afford it. Our daily menu for the steamship Ormuz of the Orient Line should make that abundantly clear. It is a composite of items from several different real steamship menus of the period. Cruise ship dinners were social events, and many people signed the menus like high-school yearbooks and kept them as souvenirs of their journey, which is probably why you can find so many of them on eBay. Nate Ward isn't really the kind of guy to collect autographs of his fellow investigators, but we imagined Jenny playfully leaving behind a lipstick print just to make him blush. He keeps the menu because it's all he has to remember her by.

The Marconi International Marine Communication Co., Ltd., funded by the British, was a telegraph company that specialized in oceangoing communication. The content of this message came from "The Fungi From Yuggoth" but we gave it the look of a telegram which one might actually receive while traveling at sea.

We’ve had a couple of variations on this NWI stock certificate in our prop documents collection for years, precisely because "The Fungi from Yuggoth" by Keith Herber has been important to us for a very long time. We couldn't resist the opportunity to design a newer and fancier one, and then cancel it. We imagine Charlie gave this cancelled certificate to Nate after the adventure was over. Whether Charlie made a lot of money shorting NWI or took a bath when the stock crashed depends on which ending you listen to....

This prop’s main purpose was to provide some context for the actions of NWI in Peru. The history of many Central and South American nations has been shaped by the involvement of foreign economic powers like New World, Inc. We imagine Nate having clipped this item from the on-board newspaper of the S. S. Ormuz while the team was sailing to Callao.

Augusto B. Leguía was the president of Peru in 1924. In fact, he was the president of Peru from 1908 to 1912 and again from 1919 to 1930. As dictatorial tyrants go he seems to have been a pretty nice guy, although things did not end well for him. This prop is, you might be surprised to learn, a detailed replica of his actual letterhead and his actual autograph.

This gorgeous map is a modified detail view from the first atlas of Peru, published in 1865 by Libreria de Augusto Durand. You won’t find Machu Picchu, as the famous ruins were only discovered in 1911 by Yale archeologist Hiram Bingham. The journey from Lima to Cuzco was a long (2 to 3 days) and perilous bus ride in the 1920s. These days most people take the hour long flight into the heart of the Andes.

Blue John is indeed a rare form of fluorite with distinctive purplish-blue and yellow bands, used for making ornamental cups and other fancy things. This prop is a replica of real vintage shipping paperwork. The shipping company logo suggests it too might be a wholly-owned subsidiary of NWI....

The text of this note is from "The Fungi from Yuggoth" by Keith Herber. It's written on Chandler's personal notepaper, which bears his rampant lion crest.

A clipping like this is one of the player handouts from "The Fungi from Yuggoth". Our version is from the Chicago Herald and Examiner, since it seems like the kind of news that would be covered in the Chandlers' hometown paper, and while it's only vaguely alluded to during the actual show, we imagine that Nate or Jordan, with their exceptional library use skills, dug it up at some point along the way.

Why? Between Owen's frequent quoting of Sun Tzu and all the eating scenes that happen in the show, we thought it would be a fun way to include listeners in the Chinese food scene. We had five custom fortunes made and put in cookies. Yours was selected at random and there's only one way to know what it says inside. We have tried the cookies and they are pretty good. The box is kind of an awkward fit, but we use it because our original test cookies were all pulverized.

A brochure like this one was a key player handout when we first started playing Cthulhu Lives!®, our own live-action version of Call of Cthulhu back in the late 1980s, and was originally created as a memento of having played "The Fungi from Yuggoth" in 1984. We couldn't resist the opportunity to do a bigger and better one that would feature a detailed map of the location and a glimpse at what people of 1924 imagined the future would be like.

Elaborate mechanical models of the solar system have been around for a very long time, but the world's first planetarium projector really was installed in Germany in 1923 at the wonderful Deutsches Museum in Munich.

Our lapel pins are custom made just for this project. We will not tell you whether or not they actually respond to electromagnetic fields and can be used to monitor your movements.

A high-security facility requires identification of the employees. This badge is inspired by a number of real industrial/scientific I.D. cards. Real identification badges of the 1920s were usually made of celluloid, but sadly nobody makes them that way anymore. Although the design may be a little anachronistic, we figured that NWI is a very forward-thinking organization at the cutting edge of pin technology.

We encourage you to study this schematic of the Polyphasic Transdimensional Manifestation Engine. Let us know if you figure out exactly how it works. The science being conducted at NWI is very advanced. This blueprint features elements of 1920s technology combined with various occult symbology: it is interesting to note that it's hard to tell them apart sometimes. We thank old friend of the HPLHS, Clayton Tripp, for his helpful and cheerful research assistance, and techmeister Fred Manchento for looking over the finished blueprint for more egregious errors.

Those familiar with our Dagon: War of Worlds newspaper prop may recognize the San Francisco Call (a real San Francisco newspaper of the time). We brought it back to document the press coverage of Chandler’s sudden death. We apologize to celebrated actor John Barrymore for casting him posthumously as Edward Chandler. The rendering of the NWI building is by the great Art Deco delineator and architect Hugh Ferriss.

The article about "ball lightning" on the back of the page is referred to in "The Fungi from Yuggoth", although it wasn't an official player handout. And if Chaosium had been around in 1924, we'd like to think this is what one of their newspaper ads might have looked like.

Those familiar with our previous Dark Adventure episode "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" will of course recall Nate Ward’s adventures with Houdini and the mummy of the evil queen Nitocris. This episode takes place about ten years after that one, and in the intervening decade, we decided Houdini had given up on using Nitocris as a prop. Houdini did actually perform a "buried alive" act that nearly killed him in 1915, and this prop is based on a poster that he had made for another attempt scheduled for 1927. (Sadly, Houdini died before the show was ever staged, and the bronze casket that he was going to use for the act was used instead to transport his body from Detroit to New York.) Houdini's poster has been augmented with art by Darrell Tutchton and Andrew Leman.

Andrew was amazed to discover a real Egyptian antiquities permit at an ephemera show in Glendale, CA some time back, and just knew that one day he would be making a detailed replica of it. If you wanted to visit the Great Pyramid or the Sphinx back in the 1920s, you'd need a ticket like this one, bound in cloth covers and stamped in gold in French on one side and Arabic on the other. To make this replica, we commissioned custom wallpaper with a cloth texture for the cover, but sadly we had to settle for black lettering. The interior, except for the specifics having to do with Nate Ward and the year, are an exact match of the real thing. Our shipping shoggoths lovingly hand-make each one of these permits for you.

This prop is a composite of two real vintage maps of the Gizeh plateau outside of Cairo, which indefatigable HPLHS member David Cercone unearthed for us at the Library of Congress. We thank David and the occasionally baffled Congressional Librarians, including Ed Redmond, Geography and Map Reference Specialist, for their assistance in scanning the precious original documents. If you're planning your own assault on the Sphinx, please be aware that we had to change the scale on this map in order to focus on the parts we were interested in, so you shouldn't rely on the accuracy of this particular document.

We thought we could combine a lot of storytelling into a single prop by adding to the map the handwritten locations of Rekemeyer’s dig, Owen’s gunmen, and Chandler’s mooring tower. (The large white area where the mooring tower is located was the golf course of the Mena House Hotel in 1924.) In addition, once we learned what was involved in calculating the time of sunrise at a given location in the pre-digital slide-rule world, we thought listeners might have fun seeing it for themselves. We like to imagine Jordan and Owen passing this map back and forth, working together to plan the attack.

We figured the cataclysmic conclusion of Nate’s ending would be well covered by the press, so we recreated a fictional New York Times front page to document Chandler’s demise in Cairo. This time it's the impeccable profile of Lionel Barrymore as the face of Edward Chandler. Items not regarding Edward Chandler or NWI are authentic articles and ads from the news of the day.

We wanted to provide a map that would help give listeners a sense of where the San Francisco section of the story takes place. This fascinating map restored and enlarged from a vintage Gray Line tour brochure gives a great overview of the Bay area at a very strange scale (travelers to the region should not think that Oakland and Monterey are equidistant from downtown San Francisco – they’re not), and you'll find NWI, the university at Berkeley, Ft. Winfield Scott, Crissy Air Field, the Palace Hotel and other locations depicted. We imagine it was handed out to guests of the Palace Hotel to help orient them to the city, and Nate probably picked it up along the way.

One of the player handouts in "The Fungi from Yuggoth" is a letter from Dr. Dieter to Chandler that alludes to Hitler. For the show, we thought it would serve the story better to have the letter be from Chandler, so we crafted this reply to the original Dieter letter from the game. Some of the text for this letter is read out loud by Jordan Lowell in the show, but we decided to flesh it out more thoroughly for the prop. Hitler was incarcerated in Landsberg Prison in early April of 1924 in the aftermath of his failed Beer Hall Putsch, and while there he began to write Mein Kampf. The original title for that book was supposed to be much longer.

This prop is a detailed replica, but not necessarily of a real military I.D. It is a detailed replica of a real vintage movie prop of a military I.D. from the 1940s, which may or may not itself be what a real military I.D. looked like. The photo was a find on eBay, and was originally of a medical officer with a lower rank. He got promoted to major-general in Photoshop.

Jordan’s ending, which is even more chilling now than it was when we wrote it, put us in a unique position to start to seriously rewrite US history and let Edward Chandler become the Republican nominee for the 1924 US Presidential election. In the real world, it was the 1928 election that Coolidge decided to sit out. John Barrymore again gave dashing good looks to our Edward Chandler.

Fulcanelli is an interesting real-world character whom we decided to incorporate into our story. He really was under suspicion of murder, and we thought a prop newspaper clipping would be the best way to provide a little of his backstory and context. In doing research for this item we discovered that the Parisian occult scene of the 1920s was truly complex and fascinating, and there were a number of bizarre murders in the news. We imagine that Jordan clipped this item and sent it to Nate after the fact.

While looking for 1920s maps of Paris on eBay we found a great one that came bound into a lovely little booklet, and couldn’t resist recreating it as a prop for this collection. In the story we decided the concierge at the Hotel Majestic marked up the map for Charlie, marking the route to the cemetery, as well as a quick side-trip to one of the most infamous occult clubs in the city near the Moulin Rouge. We also added notes leading Nate and Jordan to the Sorbonne (and showing them where to get the best croissants). In the usual style of the HPLHS Prop Dept, this map involves hand-making the booklet and some very careful folding of our custom-made map. The map itself is a careful restoration of a much-revised tourist map of the period published by Robelin.

We thought it would be fun to include Fulcanelli’s gold key (sans arsenic). We found a vintage key of suitable size and then had it engraved with Djemal Sidi’s name and then we had a large lot of them cast and finished in gold.

For the final demise of Edward Chandler, we went back to our favorite fictional newspaper, the Arkham Advertiser, and let them cover the shocking story. John Barrymore did one final turn for us as Edward Chandler. The pictures of Chandler's airship are made from photos of the Graf Zeppelin LZ 127 and a lovely, if slightly anachronistic, photo of downtown Chicago that features the iconic Carbide & Carbon building, which has always been NWI headquarters in our imagination.