HPLHS News & Events Summer 2023

Graveyards of Arkham

• September 21, 2023

Andrew had lots of fun today shooting with the crew of Chaosium's Graveyards of Arkham! Greatly looking forward to seeing the finished product!

Arkham Investigator Wallet unboxing

• September 13, 2023

We noticed this nice unboxing video today and thought we'd share it!

Bluesky

• September 13, 2023

Like many of you, we have grown increasingly uninterested in being on Twitter, and very seldom look at it or post things there anymore. Thanks to friend of the HPLHS Bud Baird, we have been invited to join the recent social media alternative Bluesky, and we are now signed up there and will be trying to post there. You'll find us @hplhs.bsky.social. We were never terribly active tweeters in the first place, and when all of our Twitter followers were stolen by a hacker a year or two ago we became even less active. We hope Bluesky proves to be a happier experience for all of us!

As things progress we might completely delete our old Twitter account, and will try to provide a shortcut to the new Bluesky feed if we can figure out how to do it!

Saturnine Chalice

• September 1, 2023

An intrepid group of investigators gathered at headquarters to experience the Call of Cthulhu adventure "The Saturnine Chalice" with Keeper Michael Feldman and custom augmented prop documents by the HPLHS. More gaming later this month!

Featured Member

• September 1, 2023

Our Member of the Month for September, 2023 is Deanna Brown of Whitby, Ontario, Canada.

Deanna says: “Since childhood, I have always been an avid reader and usually could be found with my nose deeply in a book. Fantasy books led to a fascination with myths and legends and science fiction. Once I discovered the horror genre, it quickly became a favourite. So when I discovered Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos around my early 20s, I was pretty quickly engrossed in the Mythos. Cosmic horror became a sort of comfort blanket – a good cosmic horror movie or short story is usually my go-to to decompress after a rough day. Or on any day, really.

Relatively recently, I discovered the Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG. Having played Dungeons and Dragons for many years and interested in roleplay games, I’d heard of the game before but didn’t know a lot about it. During the pandemic, I started listening to Call of Cthulhu actual plays and fell in love with the system. Perhaps ironically, Call of Cthulhu helped keep me sane during the pandemic. I quickly went out and bought the core rulebook and once we could get together again convinced some of my D&D friends to come join the madness with me.

The gamer prop sets from HPLHS have added an extra special something to my games. The Dark Adventure Radio Theatre productions have also been a great inspiration as well as just plain great audio drama adaptations. I’m thankful to the HPLHS for all their great creative work that helps bring Lovecraft’s stories to life.

It is safe to say that Lovecraft, cosmic horror in general, and the Call of Cthulhu RPG have become obsessions of mine. I’m always looking for new movies, games, and books. I wonder about picking up Abdul Alhazred’s Necronomicon next for some light reading?"

Cosmic Horror documentary shoot

• August 28, 2023

Brian Hanson, Charles Bunce and their crew paid a visit to HQ today, to shoot an interview with Sean and Andrew for a documentary film they're producing on the subject of cosmic horror. We were very happy to sit down and talk with them for the afternoon about HPL and his stories and his legacy. It was a lot of fun and we look forward to seeing what they make of our blathering! Thanks to Kevin Stidham for snapping this peek behind-the-scenes!

GenCon Indy!

• August 5, 2023

Sean and Andrew trekked independently to Indianapolis to take part in GenCon23. Thanks to our very good friends at Chaosium for letting us occupy a corner of their booth space at #509 in the Exhibit Hall! We're debuting Arkham Investigator Wallets, along with our award-winning previous prop sets, as well as selected other great stuff from our catalog. It's been great to meet up with numerous members, handing out bonus stamps, and soaking up all the fun and enthusiasm!

Arkham Investigator's Wallet

• July 20, 2023

More good news today as the printed copies of The Dog Walker, the Call of Cthulhu adventure written specifically to accompany the Arkham Investigator's Wallet Prop Set, were delivered to headquarters. There is now just one element of the project yet to be delivered, and we are gearing up to start loading the wallets and packing them into nifty custom-designed boxes. We expect to start shipping all pre-orders as soon as we get back from GenCon the first Monday in August!

Shunned House!

• July 20, 2023

Thanks to our 330 wonderful backers who pushed us well over the finish line on the Kickstarter project for The Shunned House Recluse Replica. After a nail-biting pause in the middle, the campaign roared back to life and ended successfully today. Now we will be delighted to continue working on the project to make it even better than originally conceived!

Featured Member

• July 5, 2023

Our Member of the Month for July, 2023 is Johan Häller of Göteborg, Sweden.

Johan says: “I felt a bit daunted when asked about being the member of the month, though the great honour of being chosen won out fairly quick. I have always found that the nautical setting in the stories, with small fishing hamlets and the vast unknown of the deep ocean, connected me even more on a personal level to the works of the Old Gent.

So, who am I you might ask if you have read this far. I was born and raised on the west coast of Sweden always living close to the sea. The family tree traces its roots back to a small fishing village island as far back as 1670. The genealogy records peter out after this, usually the cause was record destruction by fire (or maybe it was deep ones?). No longer working in the family's traditional trade I find myself working as a postal worker and package delivery. This line of work gives me a lot of time to devote to artistic endeavours.

Being a relentless bookworm since learning to read I found my way to the writings of H.P. Lovecraft (along with Dungeons and Dragons) in high school at around the age of 16. His work intrigued me since I love history, art and archeology. Mix that with a hefty dash of cosmic horror and I was hooked big time. With the rise of the Internet I found a fountain of all things Lovecraft. Since I have always loved to paint, and Grandpa Theobald's oeuvre is a more than an ample well to draw inspiration from, I have been crafting bits of his great mythos on canvas, clay, stone and more.

After some years I was made aware of the HPLHS. Joining the society I found out what a treasure it is, with all my fellow members. My cabinet of curiosities would be far more empty if I never crossed path with the society's excellent online store. My on-going mission to fill that cabinet with baffling and cosmic horror related things is still going strong.

To conclude, a score years and more after I first found Lovecraft's writings I am still on the same red hook."

Arkham Investigator's Wallet

• July 1, 2023

We have been hard at work on a wonderful new prop set for Call of Cthulhu® gamers. It is a real vintage-style leather wallet loaded with over 40 prop documents and other items. The props can be used to enhance any game set in Arkham, and we've also prepared a new scenario specifically to take advantage of the wallet and its many props. Now available for pre-order, we're planning to launch them in person at Gen Con and begin shipping in early August!

The Shunned House: Recluse Replica

• June 30, 2023

Now that the Miskatonic Missives project is being shipped, we are daring to launch a new Kickstarter project. The Shunned House: Recluse Replica is a faithful re-creation of one of the rarest of Lovecraftian collectibles: the uncut pages from W. Paul Cook's printing of "The Shunned House". We acquired one of these earlier this year, and now we are bringing it to you! The Whipple Edition is a luxury collectible, so we are also doing the Roulet Edition, which will be a lovely pamphlet-bound version of HPL's story done in the style of our Miskatonic Literary Society offerings. Please check out the Kickstarter and consider backing it!

Happy Solstice

• June 21, 2023

To celebrate the first day of summer here in the northern hemisphere, we are happy to present this picture of society headquarters with the very nice new shrubbery that our landlord planted last week. We fully expect it to grow out of control and take over the front of the building within months! Wishing all of you in whatever hemisphere a new season of health and happiness.

Miskatonic Missives

• June 20, 2023

After numerous delays of every kind, the Miskatonic Missives books have finally arrived from overseas, and we have started shipping them to all of the wonderful and patient backers of the project! Headquarters is now packed to the brim with Lovecraftian epistolary excess, and we can't wait to parcel it out to all of you!

The Shunned House

• June 18, 2023

The newest episode of Dark Adventure Radio Theatre®, "The Shunned House", is now complete and available for download! All the secret messages are available in the Decoder Club! The CDs are at the replicator, so there's still time to pre-order and score that bonus prop document!

Featured Member

• June 1, 2023

Our Member of the Month for June, 2023 is Alastair McBeath of Morpeth, in the United Kingdom.

Alastair says: “I've had a lifelong fascination with myths, legends, fantasy and horror that began in early childhood. Thankfully, it shows no signs of abating six decades on! I first read a Lovecraft tale in late 1975, in my early teens, when my Dad bought me a two-volume set of paperbacks, The Ghouls: The Stories Behind the Classic Horror Films, edited by Peter Haining. Among these, deep in Vol. 2, was "The Colour Out of Space", hidden behind its movie version's UK title, Monster of Terror (Die, Monster, Die in the US; 1965, American-International). While the film's plot extracts elements from the story, it's no adaptation of Lovecraft's original. Luckily, the text here was pure Lovecraft, and the story made a lasting impact on me, for all I knew nothing of Lovecraft then. That understanding began only in 1983, after I discovered Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu role-playing game (RPG; I started playing RPGs in 1977, with the original Dungeons & Dragons set). Call led me to start tracking down Lovecraft's works, and I recognised "Colour" as soon as I re-read it. Its opening sentence still creates a frisson of anticipation: "West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut."

Years of preparing notes for RPGs led to my working-out timelines for those Lovecraft stories with detail enough to allow it, drawing sketch-maps for the few places similarly described, such as Innsmouth and the Dunwich area. Chaosium began publishing their Lovecraft Country RPG sourcebooks around the same time, during the early 1990s. In addition, the use of realistic RPG handouts for players in Call of Cthulhu, meant I'd been tinkering with those too from discovering the game. Lovecraftian boardgames followed into the 2000s, such as Fantasy Flight's Arkham Horror, plus greater access to more tales from the Lovecraft circle of authors, fresh editions of Chaosium's RPG, and increasingly impressive numbers and designs of Lovecraftian miniature figurines to use in RPGs and pulp-period tabletop wargames.

Suddenly, it was the 40th anniversary of the Call of Cthulhu RPG in 2021, when Chaosium's KickStarter for a reworked reprint of the original boxed set led to my discovery of the HPLHS and its many wonders, visual, tactile and audio - and what a whirlwind of adventures that's been, and continues to be, ever since! And now, I am to be elevated among The Chosen, a Member of the Month. "One of us...One of us..."

A few images. Apparently, I don't record well on photos; not sure why... However, viewable exclusively in the Member Sanctum is a copy of my final sketch map for the Dunwich area, completed in June 1991 (several months before I learnt of Chaosium's Dunwich RPG sourcebook, first published that May; no Internet in those days), and a couple of montage shots of tiny fractions of my Lovecraftian collection, including Vol. 2 of The Ghouls, open to the first page of "Monster of Terror", and a few samples of my HPLHS items, with a mysterious package and letter sent me by a firm of solicitors in Switzerland... I love that the cover illustration for the Mesoamerican Codex booklet has been accidentally fixed in the wrong orientation!

Lastly, a couple of shots of my favourite local haunt, five minutes away, and visible from my back windows, St. Mary's Churchyard, a ten-acre burial ground, whose legibly-datable stones are only 18th century, for all the church itself reuses some 13th century grave covers as windowsills. Most of the church stonework, and one of its larger stained glass windows, is 14th century in date, restored in the 19th. The burial ground has a pleasingly Gothic feel, and I got to know it well, as it was on my regular walk to and from work during the later 1980s and 1990s, occasionally well into the night. Oh, and there were ghouls here once, as a watch-house was built into the graveyard wall's south side in 1831, to guard against them (also known as body-snatchers)."