Episode 149: Dunwich Horror (part 3)

In this latest journey through Dunwich, we touch on a few topics that demand links.

• Matt mentions the recent Kickstarter for The Littlest Lovecraft: The Dunwich Horror. In particular, we touch on the All About Cows tie-in book.
• Paul suggests that Lovecraft’s use of dialect might have been inspired by James Russell Lowell’s Biglow Papers.
• We offer some background about party lines in the story, including some (very) personal insights.
• Wilbur’s diary hints at the Hollow Earth. We discussed Lovecraft’s use of this theme in our episode abou subterranean spaces.

Our good friends at the HP Lovecraft Historical Society have released their Dark Adventure Radio Theatre adaptation of Masks of Nyarlathotep. This is an appropriately epic audio play, spanning 6 CDs in its physical manifestation. It is also available as a digital download.

We mention the upcoming Dudley Bug Ball gaming convention, scheduled to take place on the 23rd of February at the Station House Hotel in Dudley. 

Some other good friends of ours — Matt Ryan and Noah Lloyd — have released the Reckoning of the Dead 2018 Annual. This ‘zine-style booklet contains two full Call of Cthulhu scenarios, expanded from one-page seeds from their website. This publication is exclusively for their Patreonbackers. See the Reckoning of the Dead website for more details.

We received some goodies in the post from Lord Mordiggian of Crafteon! These included a copy of the band’s CD, Cosmic Awakening, some posters and an especially cool T-shirt. You can see the latter below, modelled (well, held up) by Scott. Thank you very much, Lord Mordi!

Matt contaminated our discussion about nice, wholesome black metal by mentioning his new Cthulhu plushes. We promised a photograph (see website for the horror).

The hills (of Dunwich) are alive with the sound of music. This is probably a generous definition of “music”. And, arguably, “alive”. Semantics aside, we thank two new $5 Patreon backers with songs. We have had a lot of new backers recently and it will take us a while to work through the backlog. Please bear with us. Your song is as inevitable as death and only slightly less unpleasant.

At long last, we can announce the winners of our Pulp Heroes competition. In our recent episode about The Two-Headed Serpent, we asked listeners to send us brief write-ups of heroes for Pulp Cthulhu. The three of us each ranked the entries and totalled up our scores. We’ve put together a special page for the entries, which will go up later today, but the short version is as follows:

• Joint 3rd place: Wilson MacGyver, David South and Cthulhu Bob
• 2nd: Inkhorn
• 1st: Frank Delventhal

Many thanks to everyone who entered! There were some wonderful ideas and it was hard work to choose between them. Congratulations to Frank who will receive a copy of The Two-Headed Serpent from Chaosium.

And once again, we are releasing the unedited version of this episode to Patreon backers. This is a warts, pseudopods and all version of what things actually sound like when we’re recording. It will also give you a maddening insight into the kinds of sounds we make when thanking our $5 backers. 1D3/1D10 SAN at least.