Following the successful fundraising for the Achtung! Cthulhu Investigator’s & Keeper’s Guides in just 26 hours, and then smashing a string of Stretch Goals, Modiphius Entertainment has announced a huge new campaign for the terrifying world of Achtung! Cthulhu.

“This is going to be the ultimate Achtung! Cthulhu wartime campaign, with something for everyone whether it’s fighting Nazis and ancient horrors in ice locked ruins, or racing for time to decipher otherworldly mysteries. You’ll have your frozen hands full getting to grips with the enormity of the adventure ahead, and trust me it is going to be our biggest release yet, which you can unlock along with a ton of accessories over the coming weeks”. Chris Birch, Modiphius Entertainment.

“Join us for this dangerous expedition, some of you will not return, but I know every one of you will give your lives before letting the Third Reich raise the Swastika over this accursed ultimate abyss.” Captain Brandon Carter, Assault on the Mountains of Madness

In Achtung! Cthulhu: Assault on the Mountains of Madness, following a trail of strange events, and clues to an ill-fate earlier expedition, the Allies will discover an Antarctic infested with Nazis. They must launch themselves into the frozen continent where they’ll be faced with the power of the elements, unbelievable ancient mysteries and a stunning climax that could change the face of the world forever. Designed for gamers who like in depth mystery, investigation and cataclysmic events, the campaign can easily be tailored for both dark, classic Call of Cthulhu play as well as the pulpier Savage Worlds experience, and is compatible with both systems. The campaign will come with extensive cartography by Michal E. Cross whose sterling map work has made such a success of the Achtung! Cthulhu line. Achtung! Cthulhu : Assault on the Mountains of Madness is being illustrated by special guest artist Korungn from Japan. Korungn has already created a library of stunning and evocative movie style concept art for the setting, which will be revealed week by week.

Modiphius plans to create a stunning full colour 248 page hardback if the goals are met. Assault on the Mountains of Madness builds on the legacy of HP Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and promises to reveal more of the continent (than the hapless investigators are likely to want), along with a treasure trove of cool accessories to bring the world to life.

“It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be left alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.” ― H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness.

Modiphius’ Kickstarter was launched to raise funds for The Keeper’s and Investigator’s Guides to the Secret War – a huge kit bag stuffed full of wartime adventure for the popular Call of Cthulhu and Savage Worlds roleplaying game systems. The books feature Allied & Nazi forces, setting details for the Western and Home Fronts, new rules for World War Two combat, period equipment, secret Nazi plots and mythical organizations, wonder weapons, campaign and plot ideas, occupations, skills, backgrounds plus a whole shoggoth’s worth of Cthulhu villainy, enough for any Keeper to have his investigators dead, insane, or running for their lives in no time! As the Kickstarter campaign meets its stretch goals, you will discover the further danger, terror and insanity awaiting you on the shores of Europe, across the steppes of Mother Russia and the sands of North Africa, down the backstreets and highways of America, and deep in the jungles of Asia. The Investigator’s Guide to the Secret War features a stunning cover by the legendary Spanish artist Pinturero, whilst the Keeper’s Guide cover and all interior illustrations are by Dim Martin, already well known for his dark evocative graphic novel style illustrations in Achtung! Cthulhu releases.

The project has so far unlocked gorgeous full cover hardbacks for both Investigator and Keeper’s Guides, the Shadows of Atlantis campaign, the Eastern Front Guide to the Secret War, the North African Guide and the Assault on the Mountains of Madness campaign. Modiphius have recently revealed they are working on a line of 28mm miniatures with British based Clockwork Goblin miniatures that will be unveiled later in March. The rapid speed at which the Stretch Goals have been unlocked has meant backers of the special PDF Master Bonus level and above (£35+) will be walking away with tons of free Stretch Goals in PDF and this seems set to continue!

The Achtung! Cthulhu Kickstarter can be found HERE

British publisher Modiphius, is taking to crowd-sourcing platform Kickstarter.com to bring its dark vision of a secret World War Two to life.

Inspired by the Cthulhu Mythos of HP Lovecraft, Modiphius Entertainment is launching the Keeper’s and the Investigator’s Guides to the Secret War for use in the terrifying World War Two roleplaying game setting, Achtung! Cthulhu. After twelve months working on Achtung! Cthulhu for the popular Call of Cthulhu and Savage Worlds roleplaying games, Chris Birch, founder of Modiphius decided to launch the brand on Kickstarter. Why? “We have three Achtung! Cthulhu wartime campaigns in the works, with the amazing Zero Point by Sarah Newton already on release. There have been so many people asking when we’ll release the main sourcebooks that we decided to bring them forward and hope that by launching them on Kickstarter it will allow us to create a much bigger and higher quality product for everyone.”

Achtung! Cthulhu – Keeper’s Guide to the Secret War features a fantastic cover by Dim Martin, already well known to Achtung! Cthulhu fans for his inspiring cover and interior art for the Achtung! Cthulhu – Zero Point campaign. This is a full blown tome of dark knowledge that will detail secret Nazi plots, Allied & Nazi special forces & intelligence agencies, mystical missions and wonder weapon development, mythical organisations, campaign and plot ideas, key characters, vile creatures, and new rules for World War Two combat and equipment. All this and a whole shoggoth’s worth of Cthulhu villainy, enough for any Keeper to have his investigators dead, insane, or running for their lives! The Keeper’s Guide to the Secret War will be the essential wartime reference for any Keeper or fan of the Cthulhu Mythos.

Achtung! Cthulhu – Investigator’s Guide to the Secret War features a stunning cover by the legendary Spanish artist Pinturero which will be accompanied by amazing interior illustrations from Dim Martin. The Investigator’s Guide is the definitive guide to the late 30s and 1940s for use by players and Keepers alike. Inside you’ll find a whole kit bag stuffed with cool new occupations, skills, equipment, and backgrounds from all over Europe and the British Commonwealth. Find out how you can play as part of the Allied war effort, or risk everything within the ranks of the partisans or Nazi forces as one of the many brave heroes who fought to bring down the regime from within the borders of the Reich!

As Modiphius meets stretch goals, you will discover the danger, terror, and insanity to be found on the shores of Europe, across the steppes of mother Russia and the sands of North Africa, down the streets of America, and deep in the jungles of Asia. A setting briefing will tell you about how people thought, acted, and lived during the war – information that you can use to bring your characters and NPCs to life. You’ll discover what life was like serving with the different military forces and on the Homefront, and to help you create both player characters and NPCs, you will find an array of both historically correct and fictional backgrounds, or alternatively you can run through the background generator to find out what dark secrets your past contains.

The Achtung! Cthulhu books also try to highlight the real heroes who fought and died, and so at the end of both books there will be a short section on the World War Two memorials and museums you can visit across the battlefields of Europe to learn more about this period.

The Kickstarter is live now at:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/modiphius/achtung-cthulhu-the-ww2-keepers-and-investigators

This October 2012, Twitter fans had better brace themselves as Tweet RPG launches WWII-themed adventure Kontamination, set in the Lovecraft-inspired world of Achtung! Cthulhu.

Tweet RPG is a new way of enjoying role-playing adventures, using one of the most popular online social networks. Through bite-sized story updates and simple daily Tweet votes, players from all across the world work together to shape the hero’s destiny. All you need to join in the fun is a Twitter account and an imagination!

This collaboration between British RPG publisher Modiphius and Tweet RPG brings the terrifying World War II setting of Achtung! Cthulhu into your Twitter feeds. You’ll be playing as a band of German intelligence agents within the ranks of Panzer Brigade 150, a special force tasked with causing chaos and confusion behind the Allied lines in North Belgium during the famous ‘Battle of The Bulge’ in 1944. Your mission is to find out why Hitler’s shadowy ‘Black Sun’ occult group are involved in this operation – will you discover the horrifying truth in time? Expect thrills, intrigue, and the unfettered hell of war, as you traverse the war-torn snow-shrouded forests of the Ardennes.

Kontamination will also be released as a PDF & print adventure supplement for Acthung! Cthulhu, a major series of officially licensed releases for the popular Call of Cthulhu, Savage Worlds / Realms of Cthulhu, and Trail of Cthulhu roleplaying systems. Achtung! Cthulhu drops gamers into the position of characters on both sides of World War II, caught up in terrifying events as the ancient horror Cthulhu seeks to use the madness and chaos of war to further his own malignant goals.

Want to play Kontaminaton on Twitter? All you have to do is follow @tw33t_rpg, find the latest story update, then send a Tweet to vote for your favourite option – simple! The winning choice takes the story onwards. There are also opportunities for individual players to shape the story alone, dice-rolling gameplay elements to add risk and danger, and extended articles to flesh out the narrative. Find out more at www.tweetrpg.co.uk, and follow @Axis_BlackSun and @Allies_SectionD on Twitter to get exciting story hints and clues!

To receive alerts for when the game is about to start and to learn how to get further involved, sign up now by ‘liking’ Modiphius on Facebook - www.facebook.com/Modiphius and following @tw33t_rpg on Twitter - www.twitter.com/tw33t_rpg

For more information, check out www.achtungcthulhu.com or contact chris@modiphius.com

There are two interesting publications available for H.P. Lovecraft aficionados this month.

Cyaegha #6 (the Dutch / Flemish Special) is now available, featuring the work of Cornelis Alderlieste, Toren Atkinson, Eddy C. Bertin, Jaap Boekestein, Cardinal Cox, Marcel Orie and Tais Teng. The editor, Graeme Phillips, is seeking submissions to a non-themed issue. Submissions of art, poetry, fiction or non-fiction should be Lovecraft / Cthulhu Mythos-related. Please contact the editor at the email address given on the website HERE if you are interested in contributing, or would like to purchase a copy of the magazine.

The Lovecraft eZine #13 is also now available, containing five stories and one essay.  Ecstasy of the Gold is a brand new story by Stephen Mark Rainey.  Scale Hall is by Simon Kurt Unsworth, and The Dog Who Wished He’d Never Heard of Lovecraft by Anna Tambour. Rounding off the stories this month is The Ouroboros Apocrypha, a Thomas Ligotti-inspired tale by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy, and Over the Hills by Victor Takac.  And if you’re a Ligotti fan, you’ll enjoy reading Brandon H. Bell’s essay, a reverent take on The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Details HERE

THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS

Starring Matt Foyer and Barry Lynch, Directed by Sean Branney

Running time 104 minutes. The HP Lovecraft Historical Society. www.cthulhulives.org

DVD $24.50

Reviewed by Mike Chinn

It’s been a long time coming, but the anticipated HPLHS follow-up to their wonderful silent movie version of The Call of Cthulhu is finally here. The producers continue with the same conceit as the previous DVD: since Whisperer was published in 1931, it follows that a movie adaptation would be a ‘talkie’. Contemporaneous with Universal’s Frankenstein and Dracula.

Albert Wilmarth (Foyer) of Miskatonic University has been aware for years of New England stories concerning strange flying creatures, but dismisses them as nothing more than folklore – similar to myths found all over the world, with the same motifs and symbolism. A long correspondence with Henry Akeley (Lynch) ofTownshend,Vermont, warning him about the creatures and their motives, does nothing to persuade him otherwise. On the night of a university debate with none other than Charles Fort – which Wilmarth loses – Akeley’s nephew arrives with photographs – one of which apparently shows a dead thing when viewed through a special lens – and a wax recording of both a human voice and non-human sounds. Wilmarth is intrigued but still sceptical. Only when Akeley writes one last time – the tone of his letter so different to before – asking Wilmarth to visit, bringing the Kodak prints and wax cylinder, is he persuaded to travel toVermont.

This is a thoughtful opening-out of the original short story, even if the climax – the third act which Lovecraft didn’t supply – may not appeal to purists. Personally I loved it, though I admit it’s more suited to a wider Pulp tradition that Lovecraft himself. The creatures themselves – the Mi-Go – are tentacle-headed lobsters with a ‘futuristic’ alien technology which looks appropriately quaint and dated. Inevitably digitally created – stop-motion had been planned from the start, but would have taken too long – great pains have been taken to make the final images look more stop-motion that CGI.

Indeed the whole production is a labour of love, filmed on a budget that wouldn’t cover the coffee bill for a Hollywood movie. (A three-quarters full size biplane replica which plays a major part in the film was bought off eBay…). The standards of acting and production values are incredibly high with admirable attention to detail (although one shot of Wilmarth waiting for his train clearly shows a modern diesel locomotive approaching from the background). This is a two-disc set: the extras containing a variety of original trailers, interviews and documentaries for anyone interested in the process of film-making (interesting fact: the teaser trailer was shot months before they had a script – or, obviously, the 1927 hairstyle Foyer wore for filming).

It’s gratifying to watch an adaption of Lovecraft done with love and respect for the original; and it’s a pity it didn’t get a decent theatre release. The producers aren’t saying what they’ll do next (let’s face it, they probably don’t know yet) but Shadow over Innsmouth and The Dunwich Horror were banded about. I would love to see these guys tackle either of those stories. Or both.

David Sutton‘s Shadow Publishing announces its forthcoming titles:

First, The Satyr’s Head: Tales of Terror, edited by David A. Sutton, cover art by Steve Upham. This is the first new edition of the long out of print Transworld/Corgi Book The Satyr’s Head and Other Tales of Terror, first published in 1975. With stories by Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, Joseph Payne Brennan, Eddy C. Bertin, David A. Riley and others, this new edition will bring back into print some ten chilling tales of the supernatural and the sub-human, of ghosts and demons, strange phenomena and the inexplicable.

The Writers From the Shadows series will revive the work of some of the genre writers whose work has been overshadowed and overlooked down the years.

The first of these will be The Female of the Species and Others by Richard Davis (1945-1990). The author worked in the 1970s as a script editor for the BBC’s Out of the Unknown series and edited the first three volumes of The Year’s Best Horror Stories, published by Sphere Books, as well as editing a string of other horror and science fiction anthologies. He published a number of short stories which have remained uncollected and this new book will remedy this. Also included will be an interview conducted with the author in 1969, in which he discusses his writing, his film Viola and working as story editor for Late Night Horror and Out of the Unknown, plus a comprehensive introduction.

Next, Temple of the Fox: Writers from the Shadows Series # 2, by James Wade (1930-1983), collects a number of the author’s genre short stories from the 1960s onwards. After army service, James Wade settled in Korea and he wrote widely on music for a variety of periodicals. His symphonic and chamber music has been performed in many countries, and he completed an opera based on Richard E. Kim’s best-selling novel of the Korean War, The Martyred.  James Wade’s work includes the Cthulhu Mythos yarns, The Deep Ones and A Darker Shadow over Innsmouth and others such as Temple of the Fox, which only ever saw print in Korea. His work has been anthologised by such noted editors as August Derleth, Ramsey Campbell and Herbert Van Thal. The collection will also contain an essay, The Mass Media Horror, a short article first published in 1971, plus some verse and a comprehensive introduction.

Finally comes The Shadow Book of Horror – an anthology of new and obscure short stories. No further details yet on the content or format. Writers may wish to contact David Sutton to receive writers’ guidelines when available. Please use the contact form on the Shadow Publishing website.