We’re back and we’re looking at monsters, hoping against hope that they don’t look back at us! In particular, we’re talking about our favourite monsters from Lovecraft and Call of Cthulhu. There’s one entry on our list that was created especially for the game, and another that has rarely seen use at the gaming table. No matter where they came from, however, they will all be happy to devour you. Or worse.

It is difficult to believe that Lovecraft isn’t responsible for certain real creatures too.

We’re also back to using our old Top 3 format for this, with each of us counting down our three favourites. Thank you to listener Danial for reminding us that we hadn’t done one of these for a long time and suggesting monsters as a topic! We’ll revisit this format soon with a look at our favourite Lovecraftian gods, once we’ve worked out how to pronounce all their names.

On second thoughts, maybe some names should remain unutterable.

While discussing one of Paul’s choices, we recommended a book named The Throne of Bones, by Brian McNaughton. Happily it is not only in print, but also available as an inexpensive ebook. You can find a nice little review of it here.

We’re still trying to find out how the cover artist got a picture of Scott’s living room.

In our introductory chat, we make mention of recent posts by user specialflesh on Reddit, featuring photographs of Lovecraft that none of us had ever seen before. You can find them here. At the time of posting, specialflesh had posted no pictures from his or her account that were NSFW; we can’t promise this won’t change, especially given that username!

And where does he find all those photographs anyway?

The other thing we mention in the introduction is the Kickstarter campaign for Lovecraftesque, a new Lovecraftian story game from Black Armada (AKA Becky Annison and Joshua Fox). We were going to play a session of it and discuss it on this episode, but life had other plans. Life is mean like that sometimes. It never returns our phone calls either.

Lovecraftesque is illustrated by Robin Scott, whose work isn’t made any less lovely by being deeply disturbing.

One of the things that makes Lovecraftesque unusual is that the players control a single investigator between them, taking turns to navigate him or her through a deadly maze of clues. This possibly makes Lovecraftesque the closest gaming experience to an actual Lovecraft story. At the time of posting, the campaign has another 15 days to run. It is fully funded and has hit a number of stretch goals. One of the upcoming goals, tantalisingly within reach, is a scenario by Scott, named Change Our Vile Bodies, which promises body horror and weirdness on a West Country hippie commune in the early 1970s.

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