Saturday 2 July 2016

The Haunting - The Boston Globe's Clippings 'Morgue'



The Boston Globe's Clippings 'Morgue' is no more than a dusty basement filled with filing cabinets and stacked high with old newspapers and other assorted junk. The whole room smells musty and the boiler system  gives out a lot of heat. This underground place; like one alone with the dead.....



Wednesday 7 January 2015

The Haunting - Roxbury Sanitarium

Padded Cell

"Husband and wife were committed to Roxbury Sanitarium, a few miles from Boston. Vittorio is still quite mad, and an interview with the mumbling, huddled man uncovers nothing. Gabriela is conscious and approachable, but has little to say. An evil presence lives in their house, one of which she hates to think of. At night she would sometimes wake to find it leaning over her..."

Adapted from "The Haunting" 

 Chaosium Inc. 2004

 Of course it was my intention to make a series of maps for Roxbury, the grounds, the building with its bleak corridors and dark forbidding rooms, but I ended up with just the one map. This was just a test piece in the beginning, a test to see if I could do a menacing piece, handrawn because I am completely befuddled by 3d software. I think I realised something in creating it, the maps were not the main focus to constructing a Call of Cthulhu adventure, yes they could set the scene, create the atmosphere, but the props were more important. Those essential clues gathered in the game, now that would be a challenge...

So the maps for this adventure became snapshots, very minimal, but always dark, scary and I hope somehow subtly unnerving...

Monday 15 December 2014

The Haunting - Roxbury Postcard


A strange postcard indeed...
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far."

"The Call of Cthulhu" by H. P. Lovecraft 

Written in 1926

"The Call of Cthulhu" was the first Lovecraft book I read and for many years I have wanted to create that feeling it invokes; that darkness in the mundane world. However, it wasn't until my 40s that I discovered the wonderful medium of computers and digital art and a strange band of role playing gamers who created top down maps for their games.

It was at this time, in 2008, that I came across a short gaming module called "The Haunting" with its intriguing whodunnit plot and the use of maps and props. It was my intention to actually use this concept to map out one of Lovecrafts original stories but I soon realised that would be quite a task to undertake on a first outing, why not instead do something that was already a complete adventure, that captured that feeling, why not do "The Haunting".

And so I started, but never finished the project, as with so many things, life sometimes sends us into dark places, and I have been through my own madness. But once again I find myself here and they are worth finishing and sharing. So I present, over the coming weeks, the maps and props for Chaosium's classic  module "The Haunting".

It starts, in my own way, with a postcard..."Having a lovely time"...