The Good Friends of Jackson Elias

Episode 173: Great NPCs of History

Added 2020-01-07 15:00:55 +0000 UTC

This is our attempt to find interesting and overlooked figures from history and explore how they might make great NPCs for our Call of Cthulhu games. We had a great deal of fun preparing and recording this episode, so it may become a regular format. We will at least have to record one more episode anyway, as we ran out of time and couldn’t include everyone we wanted to.

Be warned that the latter half of the episode gets weird. One of our subjects was a medical innovator who did things to human bodies that might make you uncomfortable. Then again, isn’t that exactly what you want in a Call of Cthulhu NPC?

<figure>Surely the last place you’d expect to encounter any weird medical experiments…</figure>

Links

Things we mention in this episode include:

Great Lives on Radio 4
Hertha Ayrton
“Hertha” by Algernon Charles Swinburne
Girton College, Cambridge
Arc lamps
The Royal Society
The Ayrton fan
Emmeline Pankhurst
Yithians, from “The Shadow Out of Time”
Realism in RPGs
“From Beyond”
Serge Voronoff
Monkey glands
Xenotransplantation
Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard
The Eye (2002)
The Hands of Orlac (1924) (and not “The Hands of Orloff“, as Scott said on the episode!)
Mad Love (1935)
“The Body Politic” by Clive Barker
Voronoff’s castle in Grimaldi
Beyond Re-Animator (2003)
Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov
Nora the Chimpanzee
Testosterone therapy
Joseph Grimaldi
The flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz
“Herbert West — Reanimator”
Stem cells
Mouse with a human ear
Monkey gland sauce
Monkey gland cocktail
The Curse of Nineveh
Masks of Nyarlathotep
Louis Wain

Late last year, Paul attended Grogmeet. This is the gaming convention organised by our good friends at The Grognard Files podcast, taking place at Fanboy3 in Manchester. Paul offers a brief overview of the convention and some titbits about what he got up to there. Dirk the Dice also interviewed Paul for the podcast, and we will link to the recording when it is available.

Dirk sent Paul home with some presents for us all. As well as a copy each of The Pseudo-Nymph, the ‘zine Dirk edited in the 1990s, he also gave us an issue of The Hardcore, which Scott co-edited around the same time. Oh, the memories this brings back!