
We’re back and we’re looking for strange and interesting people. Sure, that drunken man on the bus who shared the details of his entire family’s military history before announcing that he loved us is memorable, but does he have what it takes to become a great Call of Cthulhu NPC? Well, bad example. He’s totally going in our next game. But our point is that when planning historical games, it can be helpful to research some real people. Or take a bus ride in Milton Keynes. Great NPCs can be found everywhere.

Main Topic: Great NPCs of History
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?

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

News
Grogmeet and ‘zines
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!
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