HPLHS News & Events Spring 2025

The Everhart Expedition

• April 16, 2025

Filmed not long ago at HPLHS headquarters....

ChaosiumCon Michigan

• April 15, 2025

Sean and Andrew returned to Ann Arbor, Michigan for the third year in a row to attend ChaosiumCon. There we officially released three new products: the Liber Oblitus monograph, the Gilman House Lounge Hospitality Set, and new vintage prop maps. Sean ran two Call of Cthulhu gaming sessions, his own games The Dog Walker, seen in the top photo, and one currently in development, Eternity at Sea, seen in the bottom photo. They also hosted a little presentation about the use of props in Call of Cthulhu gaming and provided a little preview of some projects in the works! It was a lovely weekend, even if Andrew did come down with a case of strep throat before it was over....

Featured Member

• April 1, 2025

Our Member of the Month for April, 2025 is Jordan Block of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Jordan says: “I grew up not-wealthy in the strange backwoods of the American Midwest with a large, even stranger family. As a small child I was easily frightened and terrified of almost anything. Then we moved into house built in the 1860s. It was old and odd and cobbled together from many additions. I started to stay up to watch old movies on late night TV. Black and white monsters and lurid Hammer Horror creeped into me.

In 1980 I began to play Role-Playing Games, RPGs: a love for which I carry to this day. It was in an issue of Dragon magazine that I first saw it... "Cthulhu". The ads for games we'd never seen, may never see, were a great part of the appeal of Dragon. Snap shots of a world bigger, weirder, geekier than our dusty corner of America's Dairyland. It was one of those wonderful ads that introduced me to cosmic nightmares. The image was mostly gothic. Stormy sky. Ancient house. Cemetery. Three people, looking small and scared, holding a lantern for light. It *could* have been gothic...

But something was off. There was no vampire. No monster from Frankenstein's slab. Just a tentacle. A single tentacle. What was that doing in a graveyard? And then there was the name of the advertised game: "Call of Cthulhu". What was a Cthulhu? why was it calling? This was clearly no game of dungeon crawling and goblin smashing. I couldn't get it out of my head.

It was a bit before I saw the interior of the game. It was stranger and more surreal than I had imagined. It hinted at a world darker, weirder, more unknown than my drab corner of the world. I tried to find out more about this "Mythos", but I was a pre-teen with no cash and no resources. I started to buy old pulp magazines, with their covers lost to time, at flea markets and rummage sales. I read friends' copies of Fangoria and Famous Monsters of Filmland hoping for more hints, more leads to the Mythos.

In 1983 I found a copy of the first paperback edition of Del Rey/Ballantine's "The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre". In one moment I had gone from hunting for scraps of information to feasting on the corpus of the Mythos. After that a secret world was revealed to me. Famous horror writers gave shout-outs to Lovecraft, or Easter-Egged his work in theirs. Musical acts referenced stellar terrors in their work. My two favorite horror films, "Alien" and John Carpenter's "The Thing" were clearly informed by cosmic horror. I picked up every cheap paperback related to the Mythos I could find. I interrogated every bookshop clerk. I wanted more.

In 1984 I finally got to actually play Call of Cthulhu at the GenCon game convention, when it was still in Milwaukee. I watched in fear as my character's sanity spiraled down to madness. I wanted to play the game forever. And I have. In time I moved to the Pacific Northwest where I found Mythos fanatics everywhere I looked. These strangers would become strange friends. I went to the HPL Film Festival many times. I attended gaming conventions where all I did was play Call of Cthulhu for three days straight. I bought canned Mummy Powder from the HPLHS and saw "The Call of Cthulhu" (hosted by Mr. Andrew Leman) at the Seattle International Film Festival. I accompanied my dear friend Kayo at the Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair several years running. There we saw an unpublished photo of H.P. Lovecraft and an unbound printing of one of his books. (Both were beyond our means.) I watched every film, no matter how flawed, even vaguely related to the Mythos. I bought fake radio dramas and real vinyl dramatic readings.

Now I live in the Rust Belt. Surrounded by rotting industrial grandeur and dying small towns. Still the Mythos calls to me. With all its deep unknowns, unpronounceable names, and it's surreal antique stylings... It still calls to me.”

Stream Black Goat

• 24 March, 2025

Black Goat, the 44-min. minute Lovecraftian television pilot created by the HPLHS' very own Davey Robertson (producer, cinematographer, editor of The Call of Cthulhu and The Whisperer in Darkness), and Executive Produced by Sean and Andrew, is now available to the public! It's not a direct Lovecraft adaptation, but it's infused with more than a little Lovecraftian mojo.

Black Goat will be premiering on Screambox TV Friday March 28th at 8 pm ET, and then will be available on demand streaming at Midnight Friday March 8th through the Screambox app and website!

Ave et Vale Equinox

• March 15, 2025

Today marks the 88th anniversary of the passing of H.P. Lovecraft. We thank him for the many works he left behind, which have fascinated and inspired us.

Starting today and going until the Equinox on March 20, we are offering 15% off all purchases in our online store. Just use the discount code "EQUINOX25" at checkout!

Arkham Horror

• March 11, 2025

Many months back, an aging collector who shall remain nameless came by headquarters and dropped off his entire lovingly curated collection of Arkham Horror game materials. He no longer wanted it, and thought HPLHS would be the place to leave it. We are not active players of the game ourselves, so the collection has been sitting in our library since it was dropped off.

Then a couple of weeks ago, Timothy Garrett was at HQ to attend one of the playtesting sessions of a tabletop game we currently have in development. He noticed all these elaborate custom-made boxes full of Arkham Horror material and was quite intrigued, as he is a fan of the game. He's also a professional archivist, and volunteered to come back and review the entire collection and let us know what we have. Today was his return visit, and he spent the morning in the library going over everything, and it turns out it's quite a lot! Multiple editions, including card games, rare figures and more.

Our sincere renewed thanks to our nameless benefactor for donating all this material, and to Timothy for assessing it all. We don't know quite what we're going to do with it yet, but we're glad to have it.

Featured Member

• March 1, 2025

Our Member of the Month for March, 2025 is Eric McAfee of Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Eric says: “I discovered H.P. Lovecraft while playing Dungeons and Dragons around 1980. I had just gotten the new Deities and Demigods book, which featured a chapter on the Cthulhu Mythos with all the usual suspects. Later, I had the opportunity to DM for a group of scientists (I was 17, they were all PhDs in their 40s and friends of my friend’s father) who were determined to venture into hell and kick the collective asses of Asmodeus, Baalzebub, and Jubilex. I had never witnessed such a dedicated band of warriors—people who followed the rules with mathematical and probabilistic precision—after doing that they were ready to take on Cthulhu and his pantheon of cronies and sworn enemies (and I was only 17!).

I started reading Lovecraft and began with At the Mountains of Madness, "The Call of Cthulhu", The Shadow Out of Time, and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" for starters. I believe these stories tap into a profound cosmic truth: that we are merely the remotest speck of dust in an endless void, oblivious to the vast, ancient forces that lie beyond our comprehension. What I love about cosmic horror is that it's like being able to briefly tap into Douglas Adams’ Total Perspective Vortex from the Hitchhiker’s Guide series. Even though we can all feel lucky to continue to not be aware of our overwhelming insignificance, it IS fun, however, to become briefly aware of it just so we're reminded of how lucky we are to be ignorant!

As a scientific software developer with a penchant for impossible geometry and alternative physics, I like to think of some of these ideas as Tempinetic (Temporal Kinetic) Theory, and mainly I do it because I think it's fun. I also enjoy puzzle and mystery games, immersive experiences, and escape rooms. In that spirit, though, physics is the greatest puzzle of all!

I love playing guitar and experimenting with synthesizers, exploring the cosmic possibilities of sound. I’m also passionate about prop making and am continually inspired by the remarkable talent and eye popping creations of HPLHS and other members. I’m eagerly looking forward to the book-binding phase of Christian Matzke’s Necronomicon project when he completes his epic effort.

I attended college in North Carolina and have called it home ever since, though I do have family in California (both in Los Angeles and in the north). My sister once worked in the film industry before changing careers; my son is a software developer, and my daughter is pursuing graduate studies in Chemistry. Meanwhile, my husky Sprigle is always insisting on an expedition to Antarctica—apparently, an ancestor once sent a postcard from there, and she’s eager to go explore and sniff around.”

Call of the Sea

• February 26, 2025

Headquarters was pleased today to host a play session for an upcoming Call of Cthulhu® adventure, "Call of the Sea: The Everhart Expedition".

Led by keeper Michael Feldman, a brave quartet played their way through a section of the new tabletop game based on the successful Spanish video game, "Call of the Sea". For some it was their first experience with Call of Cthulhu roleplaying. The session was captured on video to be used in conjunction with the crowdfunding campaign which will start in some 40 days.

The players were all experienced voice actors: Yuri Lowenthal, Cissy Jones, Tara Platt, and Regi Davis. Zach Wilson ran the cameras and microphones. Andrew Leman provided some custom props to enhance the experience, HPLHS style, while unnamed workers on the roof provided constant noisy interruptions!

Library Acquisitions

• February 26, 2025

We are pleased to add several fun new items to the society's library. They include a dozen new Little Blue Books on a variety of interesting subjects, shown above. We also found on some forgotten shelves some Call of Cthulhu gaming zines from the early 1990s published by our dear old friend John Tynes at Pagan Publishing. Stark Raving Mad! is an amazing trip back in time with interviews from some of the earliest writers and artists for the game. We've also added four of the first five issues of The Unspeakable Oath!

Playtesting

• February 21, 2025

We are working here at HQ on a number of new gaming projects, among other things. For the last few weeks intrepid teams have been gathering to playtest Call of Cthulhu adventures in the works, written by Sean Branney. Pictured above are the gangs who have so far essayed the latest game, set in the Pacific Northwest. We thank them for their service, and hope to be able to announce more specific details soon.

Featured Member

• February 1, 2025

Our Member of the Month for February, 2025 is Allan Carey of Brisbane, Australia.

Allan says: “ It was through the roleplaying game Call of Cthulhu that I was introduced to the world of HP Lovecraft in 1987.

The game has brought me much joy and entertainment and continues to do so to this day, but diving into the works of Lovecraft added depth and dimension that I couldn’t have known without them.

Since that time I have heard many say this was the direction they approached Lovecraft from, and I have often wondered which direction is best: Lovecraft to game or game to Lovecraft? One without the other doesn’t exist for me, though, I imagine, not all would say that.

My great love for his work is in his prolific writing, his adoption of modern ideas and supportive collaboration with his fellow writers. The way he encouraged others to add to and create within his works has encouraged me over the years to do the same, using games and prop making, which has since turned into a business, TYPE40.

I have had the great pleasure and privilege to work with Andrew and Sean from HPLHS on several projects and this has given me an even deeper love for the world of Lovecraft.

Fun fact, my favourite Lovecraft story is Polaris”

Fire Update 2

• January 27, 2025

Thanks to the unrelenting work of firefighting crews, helped out this weekend by the first rainy weather southern California has seen in months, the Eaton and Palisades fires are now almost entirely contained. We send our deepest condolences to all the many members, friends and colleagues who lost homes, cars, studios, work and so much else.

Fire Update

• January 15, 2025

We could not be more pleased to announce that the Eaton fire, the one that most closely threatened/threatens HPLHS headquarters, is now 45% contained. HPLHS staff member Kacey Camp, who has been evacuated from her Altadena home since the fire began, is now allowed to return to her home. Early reports indicate that although she's got some damage from the wind, there is little if any from the fire itself, despite the fact that her house is just a block or two from the western perimeter of the fire. Her neighborhood has power and potable water, although no gas service. She is very glad to be going home!

HQ Fire Update!

• January 10, 2025

FIRE

• January 8, 2025

The Los Angeles area has been hit by high winds which have in turn fanned a series of massive wildfires. This happens most years, but it has never been so close to headquarters before. Several members of the HPLHS team have been ordered to evacuate their homes until crews can get the flames under some control. HQ is not currently in the evacuation zone, but that could change. We may or may not be open regular hours this week. We send our very best wishes to everyone in the affected area for their safety and for a swift return to normal, and our thanks to all the personnel who are fighting the fires.