Coming Up

My blogging projects for next year - main one will be a comparative review of the free retro D&D style games available so comparing like with like this time round unlike my last major comparative review.

The proposed games in this project will be:

• Basic Fantasy RPG
• Labyrinth Lord
• OSRIC
• Swords & Wizardry

I may be willing to include other candidates if they fit with my criteria: freely available as pdf or other electronic format and trying to create an early D&D game experience (old school if you wish to call it that).

An interview with one of my gaming heroes

Allen Varney has got an interview at the Escapist with Paul Jaquays. I remember being a fan of the Dungeoneer magazine even prior to its Judges Guild incarnations so this brought back a lot of good memories. I liked Paul's art and scenario designs particularly the excellent Griffin Mountain, Dark Tower and its Runequest relative Duck Tower.

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.

London's Unknown Museums: 3 Vestry House Museum

The Vestry House Museum is a local history museum in Walthamstow, London. It is not far from the Walthamstow Central Station in the area known as Walthamstow Village. The building was built as a workhouse and had been used as a police station and private house before being used as a museum.

The collection includes the Bremer Car built by Frederick Bremer in 1892 and the first British 4 wheeled car with an internal combustion engine. There are displays relating to life in Walthamstow in the 19th century including a cell from the time that the building had been used as a police station and on dress from the 18th to 20th centuries. There is an interesting display about the industries that used to be based around Walthamstow mainly in the 20th century and it is interesting to get a feel of what life was like in outer London in those times.

This is a free museum and a visit to this could easily be combined with a visit to the Willam Morris Gallery that I featured in my first post in this series.