#Kenneth Hite

[aopress]

Ken Hite's Tour de Lovecraft Brings Him to the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival!

Kenneth Hite descends upon the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival this weekend, to watch, discuss and enjoy the best in new cosmic horror cinema. 28th Annual H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival will take place Oct 6-8, 2023 on all 3 screens at the Hollywood Theatre in Portland, Oregon. Ken’s been invited as a guest, and will be introducing films and hosting Q&A’s throughout the event. If you’d like to meet…

[forthegothicheroine]

Syphilis, a venereal disease, was endemic in the bohemian circles Chambers moved in. It resonates quite strongly with his Yellow Sign, which covertly unites many men in shame, springs from sexual immorality (see "The Yellow Sign"), makes true love impossible, drives those who possess it mad, and ends in horrifying death. The Yellow Sign is no more "actually" syphilis than Poe's Red Death is "actually" tuberculosis; rather, both writers drew on powerful fears for their art, disease likely among them.

Kenneth Hite, The King in Yellow Annotated

[haveyouplayedthisttrpg]

Have you played BUBBLEGUMSHOE ?

By Emily Care Boss, Kenneth Hite, and Lisa Steele

Crime Solvin' Teens, your time has come! Whether your sleuths are inspired by Nancy Drew, Veronica Mars, the Famous Five, or Scooby Doo, Bubblegumshoe is a game of solving mysteries and navigating the social pressures of being a teenage detective. Building on the GUMSHOE mystery rpg framework, Bubblegumshoe adds an elegant Showdown mechanic for the perfect denonuement scena.

[agentgrange]

Listening to season 5 of Blowback on US covert operations in Cambodia, it becomes very apparent to me that Kenneth Hite had to have had a strong understanding of what happened there. The story of Fall of Delta Green reaching its climax by unleashing an inhuman terror by the very agency that claims to exist to contain it, all while backing their own Lovecraftian Phoenix Program is just-- very apt in a way that a lot of games about the US empire fails to capture.

Compare that to other Delta Green resources that are like. "Wouldn't it be fuck up if Bin Laden had a Yithian Lightning Gun and the only thing stopping him was the Patriot Act?"

[jamesdavisnicoll]

Bundle of Holding: Kenneth Hite's Cthulhu

Kenneth Hite's Cthulhu Bundle is a new collection of diverse Cthulhu Mythos ebooks from Atomic Overmind Press by star tabletop roleplaying game designer Kenneth Hite.

[thegaminggang]

Score Scary Savings on Kenneth Hite's Cthulhu Bundle - https://thegaminggang.com/save-money-on-games/score-scary-savings-on-kenneth-hites-cthulhu-bundle/...

[scottslemmons]

I finished reading "The King in Yellow" by Robert W. Chambers, with annotations by Kenneth Hite. Yay for reading! :) https://www.instagram.com/p/C-I7AEdO3OP/

[taperwolf]

I think it was in a Bundle of Holding with Robin Laws's Yellow King RPG some time ago that I got a copy of the original Robert W. Chambers short story collection, The King in Yellow, with annotations by Kenneth Hite. And for various and sundry reasons I only just got around to actually reading it.

Except I now apparently need to search for a copy of the unannotated version, because while I made it through the first story, "The Repairer of Reputations", I kept getting distracted by the footnotes, flipping back and forwards and really messing with the narrative's forward momentum. As interesting as they are, I should pick up the details on which statue of General Philip Sheridan is being referred to, or the 1890s recipe for a Brunswick cocktail, on a second reading.

[taperwolf]

It is in fact exactly that. The "Infinite Worlds" setting of alternate histories and more distant variations on Earth, along with the framework of Homeline and corporate Infinity Unlimited running colonialism and tourism to those worlds, starts in this book, though if I'm remembering right it was sort of a sideshow to the more direct time travel stuff; Ken Hite (and his collaborators) then wrote two books of alternate earths in that meta-setting (as GURPS Alternate Earths and GURPS Alternate Earths II). When 4th edition rolled that meta-setting into the core game, Ken condensed a lot of the information from those books, along with a general update and revision of Time Travel, into GURPS Infinite Worlds.

(And that's how you get the authors of GURPS Infinite Worlds listed as Kenneth Hite, Steve Jackson, and John M. Ford.)

Buckle up! This is GURPS Time Travel (the revised second edition from 1995). Before we dig in though, let us pause and appreciate that magnificent cover painting by John Zeleznik. Triceratops vs. Future Man. I would hang that next to Charles Knight’s Triceratops vs. T-Rex, I kid you not.

Moving on. GURPS Time Travel is a masterpiece. There are far too many GURPS books for me to have any idea which is The Best, but this one should certainly be in contention. It is the definitive RPG book on time travel to date, to my knowledge, for ANY system. For real, its pretty light on GURPS-centric rules, so you can use this for reference for any game that dips into the timestream.

In fact, it is an excellent primer on time travel in general. There’s plenty of discussion of both scientific thought on the matter (outdated now, but still handy) and much chin-stroking over the various strains of fictional time travel. This mechanical pondering of time travel takes up about half the book and covers pretty much all the time travel bases I am willing to consider (I admittedly have a low tolerance for time travel stories!). This forms a bedrock upon with Jackson and science fiction author John M. Ford build a number of campaign frames, both large (Time Corps!) and small (time jumping via drugs!). A lengthy section on parallel earths and all the messes time travel can make rounds things out.

I don’t really know how to convey how wildly out there the book is. The casual discussion of paradoxes and other theoretical quirks of time travel is both boggling, deeply entertaining and omnipresent. It seems intentionally complex, like the book is trying to make you wave your arms in the air in exasperation — and there is a wily fun in that pseudo-frustration. Without a doubt, this book, sitting at the crossroads of all worlds, times and possibilities, is the true and secret heart of GURPS.

[shaneivey]

Aldebaran and the Yellow Sign: Samuel Araya re-envisions an infamous icon

Aldebaran and the Yellow Sign: Samuel Araya re-envisions an infamous icon

EDITOR’S NOTE: Samuel Araya previously explored his process for illustrating The King in Yellow in “The Darkening of Materials,” “No Mask,” “But Stranger Still,” and “The Tatters of the King.”

When I designed the Yellow Sign for this edition of The King in Yellow,I wanted to create something new and even contradictory to the text. (This dissonance certainly will only enrich the readers…

[gamerati]

Wayward the Board Game, Ken Hite is lead designer for Vampire: The Masquerade 5th edition, Pathfinder: Kingmaker as an isolinear computer game, The Sims Mobile for iOS and Android, and is Nintendo preparing a Legend of Zelda mobile game?

[aopress]

Tour de Lovecraft: Final Week for Late Backers! We'll be locking the campaign down in just 7 days, so if you haven't already, hop on now. We're finally coming into the home stretch of the Tour de Lovecraft: The Destinations Kickstarter, and it's just about time to activate our pledge manager and lock down the campaign until delivery.

[forthegothicheroine]

In Rennaisance Italy, the segno giallo ("yellow sign") referred to the yellow veil that the law required prostitutes to wear in Florence, Venice, and other cities. The courtesan and poet Tulia d'Aragona (1510-1556) used that precise expression preparing her petition to Grand Duke Cosimo I (1519-1574) of Florence for an exemption. A student of the Old Masters like Chambers may well have known of this particular symbol, which appears in works by Bugiardini, Veneziano, and especially Titian. The connection between the Yellow Sign and sexual immorality is clearest in this story [The Yellow Sign.]

Kenneth Hite, The King in Yellow Annotated

[haveyouplayedthisttrpg]

Have you played DRACULA DOSSIER ?

By Kenneth Hite

Entirely improvised campaign based on the novel "Dracula" being both a true story and a resource for the players, complete with an annotated version of the novel that exists in the world. Different campaigns will tell very different stories.

[the-art-of-dieselpunk-war]

Have you read The Cthulhu Wars by Kenneth Hite? It seems like it would fit right in with your themes

Thanks for the recommend, I'll have to check it out!

This blog was mostly used as research for a game I was working on but we had to put it on hold a few years ago so I'm sure I've missed anything recent in the niche.

(I keep the blog around since I really love the aesthetic and hope to do something in it in the future again)

[jamesdavisnicoll]

Books Received, January 6 — January 12

Ten works new to me, from SF to fantasy, from novels to tabletop roleplaying games.