A flood of vintage NYPD crime photos will be resurfacing digitally, thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Many date from the prime period of Lovecraftian horror, making them ideal handout fodder for your Trail of Cthulhu games. These images, including crime scene images from murder investigations, bring real-life grit to […]
Category Archives: Trail of Cthulhu
On the Flames Rising blog, reviewer Steven Dawes says about the epic Eternal Lies campaign: “Eternal Lies is simply the most well developed and well designed adventure book I’ve ever seen!” Steven adds, “The campaign storyline is loyal to and very worthy of the Cthulhu Mythos. The rules and organization of the book are easy […]
Jason Thompson, over on his blog, mockman.com, reviews The Dreamhounds of Paris. Jason says, “This is great stuff. The Surrealists and the Mythos belong together.” Adding, “The idea of the Surrealists being Randolph-Carter-level Dreamers (or even better than that Carter dude) is genius; I can’t imagine historical figures who fit the role more.” “In short, […]
A GUMSHOE core clue can be seen as a key, giving the PCs access to a door, behind which more of the story waits. With the key, they can interact with, change, master, and adjust that story. Sometimes a core clue can be a literal key. Literal for the characters, that is, and imagined by […]
Forget your shrooms, your blotter dots. For me the opener to the gateway of creativity was always speed. Gobble a handful of bennies and work through the night boom flash bang. Only problem I faced or so I thought was making sure I had enough canvases on hand to last through a period of explosive […]
The following memo was found in the archives of the Russian Academy of Sciences. It sheds light on the complicated relationship between the surrealist Dreamhounds of Paris and both the French Communist Party (PCF) and the intelligence arm of its Soviet masters. July 6, 1932 To: Trofim Lysenko, Russian Academy of Sciences From: Konstantin Strezhakov, […]
While running Trail of Cthulhu for the first time might be intimidating, never fear – there are a wealth of resources to guide you through your first games: New Trail of Cthulhu Keeper questions and advice on Yog-Sothoth.com GUMSHOE 101, Kevin Kulp’s helpful overview of GUMSHOE The Enchiridion of Elucidation, a guidebook for both players […]
Dreamhounds of Paris already stretches Trail of Cthulhu’s default time frame by covering events of the surrealist movement from the 1920s. While researching the book I found some details ripe for Lovecraftian parallel that fell on the other side of the time divide. Although the surrealist movement never recovers from the Occupation and the flight […]
See P. XX A column on roleplaying by Robin D. Laws The surrealist films your player characters help to create as the Dreamhounds of Paris one day wind up on YouTube. The ones fit for human observation, at any rate. In 1928, expat American photographer and painter Man Ray and French poet Robert Desnos […]
One figure I’d hoped to feature as a possible player character in Dreamhounds of Paris is the painter Yves Tanguy. His imaginary biomorphic landscapes seem as dreamlandish as better-documented movement cohorts Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, or André Masson. Their undulating forms evoke a primordial soup on the verge of spawning life. His careful delineations of […]