Trail of Cthulhu & Other Horrors
The backerkit for Trail of Cthulhu 2nd Edition launches on Tuesday! The backerkit link is here, and if you sign up for the alert you can grab the Quickstart for a taste of the game.
Trail 2e is another me-and-Ken joint, ala Borellus Connection or Dracula Dossier. I did most of the rules updates, one of the new campaign frames, and a chunk of the work on the new scenarios. He did the Mythos updates, the other new campaign frame (and sprinkled some local Oklahoma knowledge on mine) - and, oh, wrote the 1st edition book in the first place, so I can’t claim very much credit on this one.
(I bought the very first copy of Trail, back at Dragonmeet 2007. It seems like yesterday, but it was basically an entire career ago.)
We’ve done a lot of podcasting of late.
Mildra the Monk:
https://www.youtube.com/live/ei1Aw3Bb5ec?si=NEcIlLH4z1mh6ZVq
Mage: the Podcast: http://magethepodcast.com/using-trail-of-cthulhu-2e-with-kenneth-hite-and-gareth-ryder-hanrahan/
Just Ken on the Lovecraft eZine:
There are more in the can, too, which will be coming out over the course of the campaign. Keep an eye on my bluesky for updates when I’m not making jokes about the Tale of Years at the back of Lord of the Rings.
—
Speaking of Lord of the Rings, I was over on Ben Riggs’ Reading D&D Aloud to talk about the Problem of Gollum with John Rateliff(!).
Also speaking of Lord of the Rings, I can’t speak about the new One Ring thing, other than to say it’s going really well.
—
Both Worldcon and GenCon ended up being a lot more stressful than planned. Pelgrane got hit by covid at the con, forcing half of our booth staff to isolate and making the last two days a rush of tests and shorthandedness instead of fun times. I somehow escaped covid at GenCon and WorldCon (I suspect I must have had a bout earlier in the summer, and coasted on antibodies), but Worldcon was complicated by the discovery that our five-year-old really doesn’t like flying, and was so upset that a large chunk of every day at the con was taken up with calming her jangled nerves. I still made it to my panels, my Forbidden Planet signing and the Orbit party, but I was a bit of a ghost at the con for much of the weekend.
I also showed up briefly at the International Dublin Writers’ Festival, which is a general writing conference and not a genre conference. The panel took a rather unexpected turn towards real-world spirituality and beliefs, which allowed for fewer D&D references, but it was still an… interesting experience.
Next convention will be Dragonmeet, and I’m booked in for EasterCon in Belfast.
—
I’ve overcorrected post-convention, going close to full hermit which always a danger for a writer. Enforced spontaneity and mandatory serendipity, that’s what I need to work out.
—
Recent reading & watching: I mean, I really can’t count The Lord of the Rings, or the Tolkien Reader’s Companion, or the stack of History of Middle-earth volumes and the like, or the stack of Anglo-Saxon histories. Maybe I can count Splintered Light, but that’s more Tolkien stuff and really of interest only to the sort of nerd who finally got around to joining the Tolkien society. I also ambushed myself with From Manchester with Love and Tony Wilson’s novelisation(!) of 24 Hour Party People, which is one of my favourite movies. (Up there with Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, which I randomly found on youtube after failing to find it for download on any streaming service).
Slow Horses remains a delight. I’ve been told the new series of Rings of Power is a marked improvement on the first, but I need to be in a very specific frame of mind to watch that, and not in the middle of a One Ring project. I also really enjoyed Kaos, so of course it is cancelled.
—
Black Iron 4 continues to crawl forward in the gaps. I’ve given up, for the moment, any pretence of structuring this novel. It’ll be a protoplasmic mess until it grows a spine or two - which, thinking about it, could describe at least three of the point-of-view characters. (And a fourth is pretty much all spine, or all bone anyway.)
—
All right, back to Mercia after a quick trip to 1940s Iceland.
Take care.