A horror boardgame of teamwork, and betrayal set in H.P. Lovecraft's Miskatonic University. Now fully funded and with Stretch Goals!
I'll be out of touch until Tuesday afternoon, local time. I'm eager to get to Melbourne, where I'll finally be able to talk to Joshua in person about the game and all the art. I look forward to seeing what you get up to without me around!
Thanks to Anthony Langford, the 363rd member to join our Cult, we made it to the $45,000 stretch goal, meaning we've got single player mode! Every copy of the game will be fully playable with 1-6 players.
Up next, at $50,000 we will get to add a fifth scenario to every copy of the core game. Any backer who wants to will be able to propose a scenario idea, and then every backer will get to vote on them. Then we will collaboratively design and playtest that scenario, and finally, including your scenario in the base game of Cultists of Cthulhu (not an add-on or expansion!). And anyone who participates can put "Scenario Designer at Sixpence Games" on their resume, of course.
Oh man, so much happened in the last few days. On Thursday afternoon I rode a bus through a village called Mystic and into Providence, Rhode Island, home town of H.P. Lovecraft, for a very special NecronomiCon celebrating the 125th anniversary of his birth. The weekend was fittingly dramatic. My phone is having trouble at the moment so I can't show you pictures yet, so I'm going to send out more than one of these emails, with pictures and more information, so keep an eye out!
We hit the $40,000 stretch goal, making it so that Two Player Mode is included in every copy of Cultists of Cthulhu. What's more, we also made the Hotness on BoardGameGeek! I'll have to think of something special to celebrate having gotten both of those. You guys are amazing, thank you.
I got to see an amazing variety of scholars and academics and gamers and readers and fans and some amazing cosplayers, ranging from period clothes to Cthulhu, byakhee, and more than one shoggoth. All sorts of people united in their love of Weird Horror. It was really something beautiful, in a horrifying way.
At one point I looked down and there was blood smeared across both of my hands. I had no memory of it getting there. This is not a joke, this really happened.
I played a French mobster in a Live Action Role Playing game where I drank real absinthe and was killed by a Hound of Tindalos.
I played Cultists of Cthulhu with some of you who'd already backed the campaign, and with some who backed it after having played it, both of which are great.
And perhaps most exciting of all, I got to meet a titan of both the Cthulhu and tabletop gaming worlds, Sandy Petersen, the designer of Cthulhu Wars and the Call of Cthulhu RPG, and got to play Cthulhu Wars with him! Cthulhu Wars is a fantastic area control board game where each player plays as one of the Great Old Ones and their army of minion monsters and cultists. I was Shub-Niggurath and along with two other players lost handily to Cthulhu, but had a blast doing it. It's got a really great engine running in it that really entices you to be aggressive and just destroy the world and chase each other around, slaughtering one another in the wreckage of what was once Earth. It was tons of fun.
Plus, in addition to being a great game, it comes with an amazing set of miniatures. There are a ton of them, they're enormous, and they're surprisingly sturdy: one of my opponents accidentally knocked my Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath off the table and it landed upside down tentacle first and was fine. I got some cool photos of us playing this and I'll post them soon.
Cthulhu Wars did great on kickstarter the first time, and it's coming back soon with an expansion called Onslaught Two. You'll be able to get the original there as well. I highly recommend checking it out, it's a very cool game that is sure to do well.
The kickstarter app seems not to be posting updates. Please comment or like this so I know if it goes through; it should have been posted two days ago.
Early tomorrow morning I will be leaving New York for old Howard Phillips' hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, for NecronomiCon (http://necronomicon-providence.com). I'm excited to see all of the people celebrating everything he created and everything he inspired. This is my first time deliberately voyaging to the birthplace of an author to pay them homage, so it seems significant. I'll get to see his house! Which is also where Dr. Willett lived in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which always intrigued me. Was he daring readers to show up on his doorstep? It's oddly appropriate that it wasn't published until after he was dead, and here I am, showing up also after he's dead. Though it would be more fitting for me to travel back in time and show up before he died...
I'll be talking about my humble contribution to the ongoing story of cosmic horror with Cultists of Cthulhu on Saturday, so come say hi if you're in town. I'll also be tweeting from @SixpenceGames (https://twitter.com/sixpencegames) about all the things man was not meant to see that I'll be seeing.
In other news, here we have three Stretch Goals!
We're so close to two player mode being included with every copy of the game. I really want to get one player mode in there too. What I'm most excited about, though, is this "you guys design a scenario" idea. The idea is, you all suggest anything you want for a scenario - could be a specific Lovecraft story, or a story by someone else, or something entirely original, as long as it's either original or in the public domain or we have permission to use it (and, of course, I get to veto dumb things) - and then I put up a poll that only backers can vote on, and then you all vote which one to make. Then we work together, designing the scenario, and when it's ready it gets included in the final version of Cultists of Cthulhu, and you get listed as a guest designer in the rulebook!
Let me know what you think, and hopefully I'll see some of you at NecronomiCon!