Cthulhu

A Happy Tale from Gen Con 2027

Lester

I posted this message earlier on Kickstarter, as an update to the Children of the Elder Sign project, but it’s too good a story to not share here.

College buddy & GDW compatriot Tim Ryan, diced

Hey, gang!

Gen Con was great, but exhausting. Friends dragged me into four different Call of Cthulhu adventures—from 1920s, to cyberpunk, to the depths of space—and introduced me to several new board games. (I highly recommend For Sale.) And I picked up a few treasures in the Dealers Hall, ran into some old colleagues there, and introduced someone to the Bookmark No HP RPG in a spontaneous session while sheltering in a side room during a tornado warning. (Western setting involving cattle rustlers holed up in a farmer’s cabin during a thunderstorm.)

Saturday evening, just after the tornado warning was lifted, a friend asked me to snap a picture of them in front of a Chaosium demo room just off a main hallway. I set my bags and hoodie down at my feet in the middle of the hall to get the picture, waiting for a gap in the passing crowds, and when we were finished and I gathered my stuff, I forgot the little brown paper bag of dice sets I’d gotten at the Black Oak Workshop booth.

When I realized it a few minutes later, we were nearly at the exit, and I figured the bag was long gone. My friend convinced me to retrace our steps, but no dice. (Pun intended.) They suggested checking Lost & Found, but it was late, the halls were crowded, and I thought it was a lost cause.

The next morning, as my old college buddy and GDW compatriot Tim Ryan were on the way to an event, we stopped at Lost & Found on the off chance they’d been returned. And lo and behold, there they were. Someone in that crowd of 74,000 people had seen the unattended little bag, picked it up, and took the time to turn it in instead of taking it home with them.

The person at the counter said, “I work a lot of events, with a lot of crowds, and I have to say, gamers are by far the nicest, kindest of them all.” It’s a sentiment shared by restaurant owners and shop keepers in Indianapolis news stories every year. Gamers are the nicest, most polite of all the convention crowds they see.

I gotta admit, I was a little misty eyed to hear that said about our hobby. I’m a little misty eyed again just telling you. The dice would have been no great loss, but instead they gave me a memory to treasure.

Gamers are the best.

Bookmark “Children of the Elder Sign” PnP Is Go!

Lester

The Children of the Elder Sign sourcebookmark for the Bookmark No HP RPG is now live on DriveThruRPG!

The print-and-play PDF contains four pages to choose from: bookmark format in full color or printer-friendly black-and-white, and the same options for playing card format.

Physical bookmark and playing card versions are in production.

(It’s also part of the Compleat Bookmark No HP RPG PDFs bundle at a 50% discount!)

Children of the Elder Sign – Update

Lester
Nyarlathotep in the guise of Nikola Tesla in Rotomago and Julien Noirel's comic-book adaptation of the prose poem "Nyarlathotep"

As you may recall, as part of Kickstarter’s “Witchstarter” promotion last October, I launched a role-playing game project titled Children of the Elder Sign.* It’s been a bucket-list idea for more years than I can remember, and this seemed a perfect motivation to tackle it at last.

The idea is basically “What if Hercules, et al., were offspring of Lovecraft’s pantheon instead of the Greek/Roman gods?”

Wilbur Whately is an example from Lovecraft’s fiction, of course. (See “The Dunwich Horror.”) And as the villain of the tale, he has a nefarious goal.

But what if he were recast as the protagonist? Better yet, what if his goal were merely to survive? What would it be like to be a half-monstrous character trying to hide in human society, similarly to My Favorite Martian, Resident Alien, etc.? Or ever on the run ala The Incredible Hulk, The Fugitive, or Poker Face?

(And how is it I just now noticed that Bill Bixby starred in two of those things?)

Further, what if instead of designing the setting for only one of my role-playing game lines, I did it for all four?

I’ve read all of Lovecraft’s fiction and poetry a couple of times over the years, so I set about first working on a D6xD6 setting chapter as a way to summarize it, with plans for full Bookmark No HP, d4ce, and D13 RPG versions by October 2026.

As I recall, there’s a bit in Samurai Cat where he finds the Necronomicon and starts reading it, and its curse won’t let him stop. Page after page he reads, with always another page to turn, until the book grows so heavy that it slips out of his grasp and breaks the spell. Writing the D6xD6 chapter has been something like that. The more I revisited the source material, the more I discovered I had forgotten, and I even stumbled upon public-domain stories in the mythos by 11 other authors concurrent with him or just after, and five preceding him.

I had hoped to finish that D6xD6 draft in February, then boil it down to Bookmark No HP RPG size. But come May, with the D6xD6 draft still growing, I decided that if I wanted to get something to my Kickstarter backers anytime soon, I’d better turn to the Bookmark No HP version first.

Fitting a setting within bookmark format is always a fascinating challenge! It’s like writing a formalist sonnet. Or a magic spell. There has to be something of real substance, but based upon dependable mechanics. Otherwise the sonnet, magic, or game just fizzles. And there are lots of “rules lite” games out there that fall limp, like trying to kick a field goal with a deflated football.

Yesterday, after two months of play-testing, revising, editing, and layout, I posted the print-and-play BNHP version to my backers. I’ll get it up on DriveThruRPG eventually, but if you’d like it on the cheap, along with hefty discounts on related stuff … *

*The Kickstarter is still accepting late pledges; here’s the link.

Celebrating Halloween with a new RPG project

Lester

This “Children of the Elder Sign” idea has been rattling around in my head for a few years.

The success of The King of Elfland’s Daughter bundle, and Kickstarter’s October “Witchstarter” promotion, inspired me to finally tackle the project, and to do it for all four Lester Smith Games role-playing systems.

The premise is simple. Imagine you’re a demigod like Hercules, except that your supernatural parent is one of the Lovecraftian deities, like Cthulhu or Nyarlathotep.

Cultists are hunting you as a sacrifice. Mythos investigators want to destroy you. Other beings of Lovecraft’s Yog-Sothothian Cycle view you as a threat. And you have to hide your nature from common folk, lest they panic and word gets out.

Still, you have some hideously divine power within you, just begging to be used.

You can see why I’m excited to be working  on this project! Happy Halloween!