Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Podcast Review: Cthulhu Podcast

The Cthulh podcast is a quite long established podcast mainly based on readings of stories from H P Lovecraft and other writers of horror stories.


Content
As the name of the podcast reveals the main content is readings of H.P. Lovecraft's famous tales of horror, but there are quite frequent episodes with readings of other authors stories. The supporting content of music from the 1920s and either descriptions of historical events, such as the Scopes Monkey Trial or Prohibition, or readings of books from the period like Teddy Roosevelt's Journey through the Brazilian Wilderness. To be honest I wouldn't miss the music tracks being omitted though they do help to break up the sound of the podcast from being just spoken word. FNH is the main reader of the content and has a clear voice with relatively little in the way of an accent which makes it easy to understand what is going on. With the longer stories like the current serialisation on the Case of Charles Dexter Ward it would be nice to have a compliation show with just the main story in either one large file or a few installments.


Technical
The sound quality is clear and free of background noise, but there is no use made of backing music or sound effects on the readings by FNH though some of the other contributors do use these. The podcast is in mono with a 64k bit rate giving reasonably sized files.


Overall
I recommend this highly to fans of horror fiction audiobooks as it has good readings of Lovecraft's stories and some interesting new stories being read. The other content is valuable to anyone seeking an understanding of life in the 1920s particularly players of Call of Cthulhu, Trail of Cthulhu or other roleplaying games using a 1920s setting. This makes a good companion to the H.P. Lovecraft literary podcast that I recently reviewed.

FNH has a number of other current podcasts containing a mixture of content, primarily readings of books, but including reviews of print and play games. These will be reviewed by me in the near future.

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