Third Time is the Charm

Okay. So it seemed like a great idea at the time, but all those blog rolls arranged in-between the ABCs we used to have on the Left-Hand side-bar are now history. Yet another abandoned-blog-on-hiatus has hit us with bad web-juju so we've pulled the plug on the whole thing until we can sort out a better way to handle things going forward. We'll strip out the blog rolls at Hereticwerks as well shortly. We'll rebuild them...probably...but right now we're not sure how we're going to handle this situation. Maintaining this sort of thing isn't supposed to be such a pain in the rear-end, but it is getting to be one, and that is unacceptable.

Maybe we'll do a Links page and a smaller, highly curated blog-roll or two. That has got to be better than getting digitally-smacked by yet another zombified abando-blog.

That Is Not Dead Which Can Be Made Into a T-shirt...

So...I was digging through some of the old files of dead projects and such and re-discovered the mini-comic 'Little Wilbur in Lovecraft Land,' from 1988. The original cover-panel looked like this:

On a lark I revised the image slightly, swapped-out the 50cents with a good 'ol IA! and made it green. What do you think?

I kind of like it so I uploaded it to Zazzle and made it into a T-shirt, like this:

Cthulhu T-shirt2 by hereticwerks
More Cthulhu T-Shirts

The 'Little Wilbur' Mini-Comic never did get completed, though several others did, including 'The Sorcerer,' and 'The Book,' and 'Tamarind (Pt.1)'. Maybe I'll use the newly revised image on this blog as a link to all things HPL/Mythosian that I'm working on or posting about. Yeah. A Cthulhudex, of sorts would be a good idea. I wonder what else is lurking around in those old folders and files?

Hither Came Cthulhu...revisited

Hither Came Cthulhu... Posters by hereticwerks
Make custom prints online at zazzle.com

Ia! Ia! We're testing-out Zazzle for producing some posters...

Anthology Builder

Anthology Builder is a web-based outfit that lets you assemble your own custom anthology of short stories hosted at their site. There are a lot of Public Domain tales available, but what makes this site interesting and worth keeping an eye on is that they are also encouraging authors to contribute stories that have previously already been published; the Author Guidelines are HERE. This seems like a handy way to re-print old works that might be buried in old 'zines or out-of-print collections or whatever. A lot of stuff gets published and then gets lost, sure it was in-print or posted or whatever, but once it leaves the desk of the editor it tends to either sink or swim and a lot of it sinks. Fast. This service is sort of like a second chance of sorts. At least it could be, if enough people consider it worthwhile or useful...and enough quality stories get re-printed through them.

We've contributed a few cover designs. The Artist Guidelines are HERE. Submitting properly formatted artwork is a snap. It's non-exclusive, so it's also a potential venue for artists to re-print some of their art, if they want to try things out a bit. So far we've had two people use our 'Shambleau' cover on their anthologies...

Once Anthology Builder manages to get out from under the reprinting of Public Domain stuff and builds up a decent stockpile of material that got lost in the shuffle, got tapped in OP purgatory, or just plain fell through the cracks it will definitely become a lot more interesting and useful. We wish them luck.

Danger 5

Wow. This is running on Australian TV?!?

Danger 5 looks awesome! 

There's also a Danger Monthly (A New Pulp Magazine), and here's a few More Details via Wikipedia, and then there's the Official Website.

Now, it's time to watch Danger 5: The Diamond Girls...gotta love Youtube.

500th Post at Hereticwerks

We've just posted the 31st Episode of Bujilli over at Hereticwerks. This is our 500th post at that blog, plus we've just gained our 101st follower over there as well. Wow! Thanks to all our readers, commenters, subscribers, supporters and followers! You people are wonderful. We appreciate each and every one of you. Thanks for taking some time out of your busy schedules and taking a look at the stuff we've been working on. We're very excited about where this is all heading. So stick around. It ought to be a lot of fun!

Hereticwerks Summary: May 2012

Hereticwerks Summary for May 2012

Monsters

• Orbiculate (Labyrinth Lord)
• Rilligong (Mutant Future/Rogue Space) Bonus: Paper Mini
• Quivering Fungi (Labyrinth Lord)
• Stabber (Mutant Future/Labyrinth Lord)
• Pearl Hoarder (Labyrinth Lord)

• Episode 23
• Episode 24
• Episode 25
• Episode 26
• Episode 27
• Bujilli: How To Play
• Bujilli: Little Brown Journals

Irving was our most popular download for the month of May!
(The Impressionable Young Shoggoth Class for Labyrinth Lord is also doing pretty well...)

We're not quite sure what that means...

RPG Brainstorming: Nu Sinistra

Working on fresh Humanspace Empires RPG stuff in-between a few other projects led us to another old post from the Netherwerks blog that didn't make the transition cleanly. Speculating about the space opera pre-history of Prof. M. A. R. Barker's brainchild Tekumel is all well and good (and quite a lot of fun!)...but what happens if...when...the Lords of Humanspace begin to reconnect with those 770 or so worlds that got 'lost'?

Now that could form the basis of a really intense Space Opera/Sword & Planet mash-up RPG that we'd really like to see...

Reconciliation and Apocalypse during the End of All Known History as powerful interstellar forces reconnect, reconnoiter and forcibly recover hundreds of lost worlds severed from the main universe during a cosmic disaster that plunged them all into their own pocket domains for millennia.  Not all those worlds that have been lost want to be rediscovered or recovered.  One in particular is fighting back and they have gods on their side...

(...With 700+ possible worlds to go muck around with, you don't even have to screw-up Tekumel. Neat.)

Bujilli Continues...

We've just posted the 27th episode of Bujilli today. Every Thursday brings a new episode of Bujilli, hand-crafted from your comments and feedback. Thanks to all of you have been playing along, both those who comment and those are following Bujilli's continuing adventures. Especially now that he's enrolling in the Academy at Wermspittle...

Ahem

Here are some links for those who'd like to know a little bit more about Bujilli:

About Bujilli
Who is Bujilli?
Bujilli's Character Sheet
(currently we're using Labyrinth Lord, but Pathfinder, DCC RPG & other systems are being considered...)
How to Play

Feel free to drop in over at the Hereticwerks blog and check up on Bujilli (or any of our other projects). We consult all the comments on the previous episode before beginning a new one, giving readers a full week to consider the options, discuss matters a bit, and help us decide what happens next. As always, You Decide what happens next.

Five Hundred New Fairytales from Germany

The amazing collection of 500 fairytales gathered by folklorist and historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth has been locked away in an archive in Regensburg, Germany for over 150 years. Jacob Grimm referred to von  Schönwerth as the only person in the world who could possibly replace him or his brother. Now that's high praise. You can read more about this incredible treasure-trove of obscure, once-lost fairytales at The Guardian. They also have a sample fairytale from the collection available for their readers: The Turnip Princess. Good stuff.

RPG Brainstorming: Radioactive Skeletons

A lot of fringe-ish and anomalous phenomena focused web-sites continue to circulate and propagate the meme of radioactive skeletons found at places like Mohenjo Daro or Harappa that somehow 'prove' prehistoric nuclear weapons.

One of the more well thought-out and skeptical dissections of this particular recurring internet-meme can be found at Twitscope. The comments alone are quite interesting, but they do get heated fairly quickly and it wouldn't do to get too caught-up in the political, religious or other debates surrounding this stuff. What we're looking for is something interesting to mess around with in a story or a game, so we're neither advocating nor debunking any of this stuff. We just like the idea and want to see what we can do with it in a fictional and/or gaming context. So Caveat Emptor, make sure you're carrying some (or a lot of) salt, and please don't believe everything just because it's on the internet.

'Evidence' for Ancient Nuclear Wars

• Ancient City Found: Irradiated by Atomic Blast from the Before Us site 
• Radioactive Skeletons Found in Ancient India (excellent example of meme-propagation, essentially a recapitulation of the previous story)
• Radioactive Remains...at the Forbidden History site
• Best Evidence by Philip Coppens

So did something nuclear happen way back when? Who really knows? But take a step back from it all and take a good look at this stuff from the perspective of 'What If?'

Six Quick Scenario-Ideas

1. An archaeological expedition uncovered an ancient ruined civilization where the ruins really are filled with radioactive skeletons...
2. Some adventurers discovered a series of caverns that opened up into a complex of tombs and temples filled with radioactive skeletons. Does the usual curative magic work on radiation poisoning? Can radioactive skeletons be reanimated?
3. Intrepid Interplanetary Explorers uncover a shaft leading deep below the blasted crust of a dead world only to find themselves confronted with a vast underground arcology littered with the radioactive skeletons of some previously undiscovered xenomorph species. 
4. Some enterprising alchemist discovers that by grinding up the remains of the so-called 'smoldering mummies' from the arid regions of some notorious hinterland they can be used to give his otherwise unspectacular concoctions a real bit of oomph, except that a week or so later everyone who experienced such a miraculous cure seem to be wasting away.
5. A cadre of ultra-secret government operatives gain access to a tunnel revealed in an old prospector's diary. The tunnel runs under the Andes mountains and beyond, possibly linking into some sort of synchronized tunnel network that spans multiple worlds or timelines. The first major chamber they find is a massive catacomb-system where each niche is heaped with distorted, radioactive skeletons of things that might not have been wholly human.
6. The tripodal mucoids were not all destroyed in their disastrous invasion of Earth. A secret cabal of survivors went underground, deep below Olympus Mons, and worked for decades on a vengeance weapon that would redeem their defeat by simple microbes. There, in hermetically-sealed bunkers, the mucoids have been perfecting the means of animating the skeletons their agents have been stealing in order to saturate them with high levels of ionizing radiation and releasing them upon an unsuspecting populace of colonists as terror weapons.

Any other ideas?

Singularity & Company: Save The SciFi Project

Just clicked into this as I was doing some research on completely other stuff. This is what appears to be a legitimate effort to rescue the orphaned and forgotten books left languishing due to vagaries in Copyright law, reversion of rights, lapses in judgement (taste?), and so on. They respect the rights of the authors, which is a huge step forward for most of the internet (or publishing). I think it's an interesting project and it might make things a bit more interesting if we start seeing some of the 'lost' scifi of yesteryear begin to re-surface once more. It could spark a lot of new ideas, revive some alternatives no one's really thinking about any more and help (maybe) break down some of the franchise-thinking that passes for scifi now. Or not. But at least it is worth making the attempt...
I'm hoping for the best.
You can find out more at the Singularity & co. Kickstarter page.

Ten Laws to Ponder

Here are Ten Eponymous Laws attributed to science fiction authors, experts, pundits and mythical Irishmen, with a bonus link to a whole pile of other such laws all listed out for your edification and free use at Wikipedia.

1. Murphy's Law
2. Finagle's Law
3. Peter Principle
4. Sturgeon's Law
5. Hanlon's/Heinlein's Razor
6. Clarke's Three Laws
7. The Three Laws of Robotics (Asimov)
8. Niven's Laws
9. Sutton's Law
10. Moore's Law

Still More Eponymous 'Laws.'

Some of these 'laws' are sound advice, like Sturgeon's Law or Hanlon's Razor. Some of these 'laws' seem pretty useful, at least for writers of fiction, such as Clarke's or Niven's laws. Sutton's Law sure gets quoted a great deal as though it were some of the most profound advice ever offered. Others seem a bit cynical except that so many people seem to rush to live up (or down) to the stated expectations, like in the case of the Peter Principle. But what if we could challenge some of these laws? Or are they immutable truths we cannot escape the way some people look upon Murphy's Law?

All laws imply the possibility of breaking the law. It's implicit. So how does one 'break' or violate Clarkes' Law? Can we challenge Finagle's Law? Will we see Moore's law collapse in our life-time?

Brown Jenkin is up for grabs!

Image from: Zombiequadrille at Deviant Art

The Lovecraft eZine is having a contest--you could win a sculpture of Brown Jenkin himself. The details are fairly straight forward and even quite painless. Just go check out the eZine, follow or subscribe to it and you've got a chance at winning your own nasty little rat-thing...
Here's a link.

Bujilli 9

Bujilli's Sojourn: Episode 9 is now live at Hereticwerks.

What happens next is up to You...

Bujilli to Resume at Hereticwerks

After a hiatus of several months, Bujilli will be continuing his adventures at Hereticwerks. The character sheet, Map, and the Wandering Monster Matrix have all been posted to Hereticwerks. The first seven and a half episodes/installments will be re-posted, followed by a quick summary and Bujilli will be ready to go in time for a new episode on Thursday, January 12. New episodes in the series will be posted every Thursday.

Bujilli's Sojourn is an interactive story that gets written based upon the feedback and responses of you, the readers. Each episode will end with a set of options for you to consider and comment upon. The next episode will then be written based upon your decisions, your suggestions and your feedback. You are guiding Bujilli through his first real adventure away from the unscrupulous influence of his maternal uncle. You can help Bujilli find the Synchronocitor and go onwards to other worlds that he might find a place for himself out there somewhere beyond the horizon.

Similar to the old-style Fighting Fantasy books and Choose Your Adventure Books, Bujilli's Sojourn is an adventure that is being created through the ongoing interaction of the readers/players with each blog post in the series. Much like how a classic paper & pencil RPG is played, Bujilli's Sojourn has a character sheet, a constantly updated and evolving Map, a growing bestiary of monsters statted-up for Labyrinth Lord, loads of new spells, and a unique Wandering Monster Matrix, as well as player hand-outs/illustrations and a few other fun bits.

Anyone can play. All you need to do is read the latest episode and post a comment with your suggestion for what you think Bujilli ought to do next. We've included a random die rolling widget along the right-hand side-bar so you can generate whatever die rolls are requested/required in a given episode so feel free to volunteer your results any time. We also are using the Big Purple D30 Rule as promulgated by Jeff Rients...though it doesn't have to be purple. We also need a number between 1 and 6, as in a D6 roll at the end of each episode as that will help determine the whole Wandering Monster thing.

This is a collaborative, open-ended game where you determine what happens next.

You Choose What Bujilli Does and Where He Goes...

You Decide.