The Dunwich Horror (part 2)

We’re back and we’re continuing our exploration of the hidden corners of Dunwich. The locals seem quite welcoming and some of them may even be described as undecayed. Those Whateleys are especially interesting, although we’re not quite sure why they’ve installed what sounds like a swimming pool in the top floor of their house. We’re sure there’s a perfectly innocent explanation.

Main Topic: The Dunwich Horror

This is the second installment in our ongoing look at Lovecraft’s foundational weird tale, The Dunwich Horror. Last episode, we looked at the opening of the story, exploring Dunwich itself. This time, we learn more of Wilbur Whateley’s ill-fated outing to Miskatonic University. Of course, this leads into discussions about how best to represent 4-dimensional geometry, why having eyes on your hips is only fairly weird, and whether an arrangement of tentacles could really be something unknown to our solar system.

News

Good friend of the Good Friends, Anthony Lee-Dudley, sent us a copy of Hypergraphia issue 1. This is a new Mythos gaming fanzine that explores the connection between eldritch horror and language. It is packed with strange and wonderful articles from familiar names. A most entertaining way to lower your SAN score.

We had a bit of good news that came in too late to make it into the episode. The members of EN World recently had a poll to determine their favourite RPG podcast. There were 99 podcasts nominated and over 9,000 votes. Somehow, we were voted the most popular in the talk category! This was entirely unexpected and utterly delightful! Thank you to everyone who voted for us! Congratulations also to our good friends at The Grognard Files, who came in second. “What Would the Smarty Party Do?” also made the top 5 and How We Roll was number 6 in the actual play category. This is a fantastic time for UK gaming podcasts! If you would like to hear the countdown of the top 20, check out the latest epsiode of Morrus’ Unofficial Tabletop RPG Talk.

We recently asked our Patreon backers whether there were any more rewards we might offer them. One suggestion was to share outtakes from our episodes. Well, we listened! If you are a backer, you should soon see a new RSS feed pop up in Patreon with rough cuts of new episodes as they come out. And when we say “rough”, we mean it — this is what it sounds like when we record, barring anything too slanderous to share. These recordings include flubbed takes, stuff we cut for length and, most terrifyingly, the unmixed sounds we emit for our songs. Don’t say we didn’t warn you!

Other Stuff

In Dunwich, the song of the whippoorwill portends doom. Our songs may not prove quite as fatal, but they will still devour your soul. We have two new $5 Patreon backers, and so we have gathered outside their windows at dusk to sing our thanks to them.

From the look on his face, souls cause fearsome heartburn.

As a result of the recent release of issue 4 of The Blasphemous Tome, we have a lot of new backers to thank. Everyone who backed us at the $1 and $3 levels before the end of last year will receive their thanks in either this or the following episode. It will take us longer to get to everyone who backed us at the $5 level or higher, however. The dark forces we draw upon for our songs are not easily contained and we dast only summon them twice per episode. Please be patient with us as we work through our backlog.

Two of the backers we thank in this episode create things that our listeners would probably enjoy, so we promised to link to them. If you’ve received a copy of issue 4 of The Blasphemous Tome, you’ve already seen some of John Sumrow‘s marvellous art. He has been kind enough to share a number of his drawings with us, much to our delight. If you like the picture below, you can find many more on his portfolio site.

We also mention another new backer known as Lord Mordiggian (Lord Mordi to his friends), who is the singer of the Lovecraftian metal band, Crafteon. We end the episode with their song “From Beyond”. If you would like to hear more of their work, they are on Bandcamp, YouTube and Spotify.