Matt, Paul and I spent last Thursday evening stuffing and addressing envelopes, and Paul popped most of the 100-odd copies of The Blasphemous Tome in the post on Friday. We’ve heard that they have started turning up in people’s homes, or at least that’s what we take the screams to mean. We have no idea how long the international deliveries will take, or whether secret orders within post offices across the world have warded against its eldritch secrets passing through their hands, but all being well, it should be less than a week. If you are a backer, and haven’t received your copy by then, please check that your address details are up to date in Patreon. Paul has tried contacting everyone with incomplete addresses, but he is still waiting for a few of you to reply.
This odd little volume has been a delight to produce. It’s largely light-hearted fun, but we’ve put a few more substantial articles in there, including discussions of games we’ve enjoyed recently, some film reviews and a scenario of small-town Lovecraftian horror that ended up being about twice as long as we’d planned. In fact, the whole publication is about 50% longer than we’d anticipated. Apparently we’re as bad at being succinct on the page as we are on the podcast.
Issue 1 Table of Contents
The layout of the zine may strike younger readers as eccentric, or perhaps abhorrent. Matt, who laid it out, complained entertainingly at every step of the process. For good or ill, we set out to make the Tome look like an artefact of the 1980s, slipped through the cracks of time and deposited, blinking, into a strange and harsh new age. I know just how it feels. Achieving this involved using a limited number of fonts (mainly Courier, which only made Matt cry harder), keeping the layout as basic as possible, and artificially introducing strange angles and blemishes to make it appear that the whole thing had been hand-assembled using razor blades and paste. Matt has been drinking heavily since, and now only communicates with Paul and me through enthusiastically incoherent expletives.
Matt has dubbed the process he uses to replicate the old-school layout “shitification”.
As well as all the backers who made this possible, we would also like to thank Jonathan Wyke, John Ossoway and Lucy Fricker for providing some excellent artwork! We will start on issue 2 late this year, with a view to releasing it in March/April 2017. If you have any ideas for articles you’d like to see, please let us know.
I received my copy The Blasphemous Tome (issue 1) last week. Ahh the nostalgia as I skimmed through the pages after opening the envelope. Spot on for having ‘the feel’ of an 80’s zine, the quirky layout, slightly out of true text has this looking and feeling like a publication harking back to the ‘heady days’ of fan-based publications.
The articles are far more polished and professional than ‘zines of the past – something for which we ought to be thankful, well I am!
Only downside is that we have to wait ages for the next :/
I’m really glad to hear you liked it, Lee!
It’s going to be a long year’s wait for us as well. The Tome was a hell of a lot of fun to produce, and I kind of want to play hooky from my other writing duties to work on more of it. 🙂