Contents Kenneth Hite, Jo Kreil, Ross Payton, Matthew Pook, Ben Riggs, Daniel R
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I SSUE 2 2 , J ANUARY 2 0 1 3 WRITERS: Bobby Derie, Adam Gauntlett, Adam Scott Glancy, Daniel Harms, Contents Kenneth Hite, Jo Kreil, Ross Payton, Matthew Pook, Ben Riggs, Daniel R. Robichaud, Brian Sammons, Greg Stolze. COLUMNS ILLUSTRATORS: Vicente Silvera Catalá, Matt Hansen, Robert Mansperger THE DREAD PAGE OF AZATHOTH 2 Jr., Bradley McDevitt. Cover art by Matt Hansen. THE EYE OF LIGHT AND DARKNESS 6 DIRECtiVES FROM A-CEll 61 ART DIRECTOR: Dennis Detwiller. TALES OF TERROR PAGE DESIGNER: Jessica Hopkins. THE FOUND PHONE 28 EDITORS: Adam Crossingham, Daniel Harms, Shane Ivey, Greg Stolze, John ST. MICHAEL’S GATE 29 Scott Tynes. BARGAIN HUNtiNG 39 SMEdlEY HOUSE 53 FOUNDING EDITOR: John Scott Tynes. MYSTERIOUS MANUSCRIPTS EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: Shane Ivey. THE SAFFRON BOOK 4 AtlAS OF ARKHAM 1911 40 EDITORIAL BOARD: Brian Appleton, Monte Cook, Adam Crossingham, Dennis Detwiller, Adam Scott Glancy, Daniel Harms, Kenneth Hite, Shane ARCANE ARTIFACTS Ivey, Greg Stolze, John Scott Tynes, Ray Winninger. MALYUtiN’S NIGHTMARE MATRYOSHKAS 8 PLAYTESTERS: Simon Brake with John Armitage, Faye Lampshire, Toby Moon and Tom Mulvey; Dion Clark with Sean Allen, Elizabeth Dahl, Patrick FEATURES Kelley, Cameron Monie and Sian Roberts; Adam Flynn with Maggie Benthall, Brenda Flynn, Emily Ronald and Michael Veloso; Samuel Graebner with Matt CHINA DOllS: CHildREN OF MADAM YI 9 Campen, Joshua Chichester and Travis Gasque; Bert Isla with John Barner, STARtiNG YOUR CAll OF CTHULHU CAMPAIGN 30 Michelle Gardner, James Kohl and Susan Wardell; Chris Malone with John Becker, Mark DiPasquale, Sam Friedman and Colleen Riley; Ross Payton SCENARIOS with Aaron Carsten and Tom Church; Jim Phillips with Rob Biddle, Toni Koo and Randall Padilla; Harald Schindler with Simon Menanteau-Ledouble and DIE HIGH 10 Bernard Zahanek; Ralph Shelton with Eric Allen and Dan Owsen. REMEMBER, REMEMBER 42 COPYRIGHT: All contents are © 2013 by their respective creators. The Yellow MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE Sign design is © Kevin Ross and is used by permission. Call of Cthulhu is a trademark of Chaosium Inc. for their roleplaying game of horror and wonder and THE THING IN THE BOX 64 is used by their kind permission. Trail of Cthulhu is a trademark of Pelgrane Press Ltd. The Unspeakable Oath is a trademark of Pagan Publishing for its magazine of OUR SPONSORS-WORSHIP THEM! horror roleplaying. The Unspeakable Oath is published four times per year (more or less) by Arc Dream Publishing under license from Pagan Publishing. AtlAS GAMES 16 MISKATONIC RIVER PRESS 19 SUBMISSIONS: Render us afeared! Submission guidelines are at our website. NECRONOMICON PROVidENCE 2013 27 INNSMOUTH FREE PRESS 32 PODCAST: “Unspeakable!” Still got Sanity points? We’ll see to that. Subscribe SampleCHAOSIUM 38 at iTunes or listen at our website for hours of interviewsfile and actual play. CTHULHU MYTHOS ENCYCLOPEdiA 48 PAGAN PUbliSHING 63 CONTACT: Arc Dream Publishing, 12215 Highway 11, Chelsea, AL, 35043, USA; [email protected]. WEBSITE: www.theunspeakableoath.com. The Dread Page of Azathoth The usual editor’s column will return next issue. Lynn Willis, one the “Cthulhu Mythos anthology” as a viable publishing of the guiding lights of Call of Cthulhu, has passed away. I subgenre. asked Ken Hite, one of the Oath’s own guiding lights and a writer who knows Call of Cthulhu like no one else, to express our But his decades of work on Call of Cthulhu remain his appreciation for Mr. Willis’ peerless contributions to the game. — greatest masterpiece and his truest memorial. Shane Ivey His name is in the credits of the first edition; by the fifth edition, more of the text in the corebook was his than In Memoriam: Lynn Willis Sandy’s. That fifth edition, still the first choice of many Call of Cthulhu devotees, represents Lynn’s fullest BY KENNETH HitE statement about the game and its interplay between human heroism and cosmic nihilism. Lynn, the brilliant With the exception of the game’s creator and designer, editor, wrote and crafted that text to reveal, illuminate, Sandy Petersen, nobody has had more influence on guard, and strengthen Sandy’s design. Around that Call of Cthulhu than its longtime line developer design Lynn shaped rules, supporting material, and a Lynn Willis, who passed away January 18, 2013. He nearly perfect work of utility and art. His precepts were was Chaosium’s third employee, joining the company in laid down by example; his corebook prose as much as the 1978 after the publication of his board game Lords of works he commissioned drew you into running the finest the Middle Sea. He co-authored Basic RolePlaying of all roleplaying games in perhaps its finest form. He with Greg Stafford in 1980, and co-designed the was the best kind of guardian for Call of Cthulhu: one (vastly innovative, and equally vastly under-rated) who not only kept its core safe, but constantly explored Ghostbusters RPG with Greg in 1986. His broad and conquered new territories for the game. vision of Michael Moorcock’s universe and his intuitive understanding of BRP refigured Ken St.-Andre’s wildly As a designer and sometime line developer I stand in (albeit beautifully) uneven Stormbringer RPG into awe of his vision. Run down the row of adventures the elegant Elric!, and his role in polishing Richard on your shelves, of box sets in your game room: Launius’ Arkham Horror board game into a truly Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, The Asylum, Cthulhu cooperative horror exercise should not be understated. Companion, Fragments of Fear, Cthulhu by As a ChaosiumSample editor, he helped shape everything from Gaslight, H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands,file Spawn Cults of Terror to Ringworld to Nephilim, as well of Azathoth, Terror Australis, Great Old Ones, as launching and guiding the Chaosium fiction line Cthulhu Now!, Arkham Unveiled, At Your Door, that saved the company at least once while cementing Fatal Experiments, Blood Brothers, Horror on 2 the Orient Express, Cairo Guidebook, Dark best about it was added or correctly limned by Lynn, not Designs, Fearful Passages, London Guidebook, by the credited author. Miskatonic University, Taint of Madness, Booke of Monstres, No Man’s Land, Dreaming He didn’t do the convention circuit, so I only met him Stone, Before the Fall, Last Rites, Beyond the a couple of times, at the Chaosium offices. He very Mountains of Madness, and Unseen Masters. All much liked a few ideas I pitched him, but sadly my of these were made, and usually made vastly better, by pitches coincided with one of Chaosium’s dry economic Lynn Willis. Behind an “Editor” credit lay a brilliant spells, so we never got to produce the massive Undying eye for the game as it could be played, for the text as it Mars campaign setting we both dreamed of. He was a could read, for the game line as it could be. Every so gentleman, funny and interesting, and I regret the emails often, “L.N. Isynwill” would get a writing credit as well, we never exchanged and the talks we never had more where Lynn had gone above and beyond to elevate some than I regret the game book we never produced. adventure to the standard he demanded of the line. As befits these august pages, I leave the last word to John Perhaps the best summation of what Lynn did for Call Scott Tynes, our esteemed founder and one of the few of Cthulhu as a line comes from the “Clear Credit” designers whose contributions to Call of Cthulhu are section of The Complete Masks of Nyarlathotep, visible against Lynn’s. And yet, Lynn shaped John as he the finest single roleplaying campaign ever produced: shaped all of us who loved the game: Lynn Willis rewrote the succeeding drafts, originating Lynn established a writing style for Call of Cthulhu the historical background, introducing race as a theme, that I’ve never been able to shake, and I’m okay with inserting or adjusting certain characters, writing the that. He had the vocabulary and love of language introductory chapter, and most of the advice, asides, of an English professor but the clarity and precision incidental jokes, etc., and as an afterthought added of a journalist. It was a powerful combination and it the appendix concerning what might be done with manifested across the whole line, as he often took a shipboard time. pretty free editorial hand to shape the manuscripts he edited. I trace my writing style today back to his and In short, nearly every Call of Cthulhu product you’ve am grateful for the standard of editorial excellence he Sampleever loved from the first edition to 2005 exists because set. file Lynn Willis made sure its text was coherent, made sure its gameplay was sound, and made sure it got to print. Lynn Willis, Rest in Peace. And there’s a strong possibility that the thing you like Issue 22 3 Sample file 4 Mysterious Manuscript: The Saffron Book BY BObbY DERIE Physical Description On the banks of the river Ai in the land of Mnar, a race of shepherds settled and founded their cities: Thraa and The Saffron Book is an overlarge bound manuscript, Ilarnek of the white towers, mighty Kadatheron and eighteen inches tall and ten wide, about 80 leaves long, doomed Sarnath. Yet it was long for these settlements to of indeterminate age. Between the sallow leather covers grow, and longer still for the people of Mnar to give up the linen paper is soft off-white, stained at the ages to the the herding of sheep, so that there lasted for ages and yellow of old nicotine, with tiny sparks of what appears to generations of man on the distant pastures, in the wilds be gold or pyrite dust.