#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…

[taperwolf]

Jeez, I just got done plugging a Kenneth Hite product, and now I gotta do it again. The new "Worldbuilder's Toolkit 7" bundle at the Bundle of Holding includes the two published collections of his Suppressed Transmission columns, which originally ran in Steve Jackson Games's Pyramid magazine, in its incarnation as a biweekly subscription-based webzine.

Suppressed Transmission is hard to encapsulate. Ken takes a number of topics — 34 in the first volume — and examines them as fuel for RPG play and storytelling in general. In his first essay, he categorized the topics these fall into as conspiracy, secret history, horror, and alternate history — but the publisher's section headings (again from the first volume) of Historical Weirdness (alternate histories), High Weirdness (bizzare events and happenings), High Weirdos (strange people or beings), Highly Significant Weirdness (creatures and symbols, and symbolic creatures), and Highly Theoretical Weirdness (or how to do this yourself). The There are references to games and game books, particularly from GURPS at the time, but no game stats; this isn't the book for how to have your players fight Spring-Heeled Jack or Le Comte de Saint-Germain, it's about what they (and more!) did, or didn't do, and What It All Means, maybe. Ken's very good at pointing out the sad, fun-ruining truth of certain events and creatures up front, so you can go past that and have fun. For some highlights, the first volume includes the two august figures I mentioned, plus ancient astronauts, ultraterrestrials, the Antarctic Space Nazis, and one of the all-time favorites from the series, "Six Flags Over Roswell", which spins off six alternate histories from different dates of the (supposed) Roswell, NM UFO crash. The second examines such oddities as the Vatican's time viewer, the Voynich Manuscript, Gilles de Rais (the companion to Joan of Arc who became a profligate serial killer), and those Friulian astral werewolves I commented on a bit ago, the Benandanti.

(I do have the remainder of the uncollected essays; when SJG took down that incarnation of Pyramid, they let subscribers download an archive of the postings, which I converted to a personal ebook maybe around 2012? The cross-links are all messed up, but I've never gotten around to fixing them, since I can't legally share the thing, but I reread it regularly. It's got stuff like the essays that later became Ken's Day After Ragnarok and his forthcoming 5e setting, Hellenistika.)

The bundle also includes two books by Ken's Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff compatriot Robin Laws — creator of Gumshoe and Gumshoe games like Esoterrorists (stop magical conceptual terrorists from unleashing Hell), Fear Itself (playing yourself or someone like you in a horror movie), Mutant City Blues (cops in a super-powered universe), Ashen Stars (born from the realization that Star Trek is really a mystery procedural), Cthulhu Confidential (hard-boiled detectives versus the Cthulhu Mythos in a special one-player, one-gamemaster ruleset), and The King In Yellow RPG (four-reality game through Robert W. Chambers's mythos, stripped of the subsequent Lovecraftian encrustations), plus such classics as Hero Wars/HeroQuest (story gaming in Greg Stafford's Glorantha), Feng Shui (time-travelling romp through Asian cinema), and Hillfolk (the interpersonal conflicts of Bronze Age clans in the Levant, one of the settings for his Drama System) — Robin's Laws of Good Game Mastering, a book of GMing advice centered around the realization (obvious in retrospect) that different kinds of players want different rewards and experiences from playing RPGs — and how to give it to them — and Beating the Story, an examination of the hope-fear cycle in storytelling and how to use it in writing and RPG play.

There's a bunch of other stuff in there too, enough that I'm sorely tempted to repurchase these books I already own! The Bundle of Holding is a good bunch; each bundle donates to charities, and you always get DRM-free PDFs.

This ends on November 24, 2020 (if I got the countdown clock right), and the "threshold price" to get the whole shebang goes up as the time draws short, so go get good stuff.

[thegaminggang]

'The King in Yellow - Annotated Edition' First Look and Page Through

Jeff pages through the fantastic new annotated edition of The King in Yellow (with annotations by Kenneth Hite) from ArcDream Publishing.

[karavansara]

Beyond the fence with Ken Hite: The Fall of Delta Green

Beyond the fence with Ken Hite: The Fall of Delta Green

This year’s GenCon was a triumph for Call of Cthulhu, and inparticular for Delta Green – and Kenneth Hite’s The Fall of Delta Green won the Best Setting Ennie Award. A well deserved award, I think.

I have been a long-time fan of Delta Green – some of my material was published in some old handbooks, and one of my stories appears in a Delta Green collection, and I have met some of my best…

[whimseysthrone]

Scope, Scale, & Stakes, Longer Thoughts

Scope, Scale, & Stakes, Longer Thoughts

While Mattias was telling me about a game he’s preparing for, and the layers of growth and reveal that he has planned, he reminded me of terminology I’d first learned in Kenneth Hite’s 3rd ed. GURPS Horror sourcebook (this links to the 4th ed.). Page 71 of the 3rd edition book introduces “scope” and “scale,” two narrative concepts widely applicable to stories beyond horror-gaming. They’re not nec…

[littlethingwithfeathers]

“Thanos is Jr. chewable Cthulhu.” - Kenneth Hite

[shaneivey]

Cassilda's Song: The Spark

Cassilda’s Song: The Spark

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,” “The Tatters of the King,” “Aldeberan and the Yellow Sign,” and “The Stranger.”

This piece was the initial spark for my interpretation of this edition of The King in Yellow. I was reading about alchemy and the first phase of the magnum…

[nerdtrekdotcom]

The Monolith from Beyond Space and Time (OSR)

The Monolith from Beyond Space and Time (OSR)

The Monolith from Beyond Space and Time (OSR) This adventure clocks in at 52 pages, 1 page front cover, 1 page inside of front cover,2 pages of editorial, 1 page ToC, 2 pages of back-list, 1 page inside of back cover, 1 page back cover, leaving us with 43 pages of content, laid out for 6’’ by 9’’.   My review is primarily based on the print softcover version I received from one of my patreons,…

[dieselpunkflimflam]

All Change Points, from Xerxes to the last presidential election, create worlds with clean, efficient Zeppelin traffic. Changing history may produce Zeppelins as an inevitable by-product, much as bombarding uranium produces gamma rays. Often, the quickest way to tell if you are in an Alternate History is to look up, rather than at a newspaper or encyclopedia. From this premise, it is not outside the realm of Plausibility that our history between 1900 and 1936 was, in fact, an Alternate History. It would, at least, explain a lot.

Kenneth Hite

[cornixflagrans]

And it’s out for preorder: The Fall of Delta Green ... Agents-vs.-Cthulhu-goodness by Kenneth Hite, using Robin D. Laws’ Gumshoe system! A very psychedelic trip to the 60ies ...

[aopress]

Tour de Lovecraft Apparel Now Available!

Tour de Lovecraft t-shirts are now available, in sizes from Small to 5XL! https://www.atomicovermindstore.com/collections/apparel

As a component of Kickstarter for Kenneth Hite’s Tour de Lovecraft: The Destinations , we funded this fantastic set of luggage labels, executed with vintage flair by artist Jacob Walker. The Tour de Lovecraft luggage label logos Now we’re proud to announce that these kick-ass logos can all be worn on your body! All 6 logos (Gilman House, Kadath, Hotel Miskatonic, Hyperspace, Dreamlands and…

[taperwolf]

I know I've plugged Ken Hite's stuff a couple of times in the last few weeks, but I'm gonna do it again.

The Bundle of Holding (google that for the link) has 2017's Dracula Dossier up through November 2, 2020. I backed it on Kickstarter back in the day, and it's a fantastic RPG campaign, with possibly the ultimate player handout.

The high concept is this: Dracula (Bram Stoker, 1897) is not a novel. It is an expurgated after-action report of the attempt by the British intelligence service to recruit the ultimate asset — a vampire.

The operation went horribly wrong, of course, and the original band of hunters burned Dracula out of London, and trailed him back to Transylvania to kill him — or so at least some of them thought. The intelligence higher-ups, disturbed by their near escape, hired Stoker to fictionalize the events and release the results as a novel as a disinformation effort, and formed a secret cabal — Operation Edom — to continue research into vampires. Three further attempts to recruit or use Dracula have ensued over the decades, and each time, an operative has taken the unredacted Dracula and added to it their own experiences, researches, and speculations.

This document — the titular "Dracula Dossier" — is what has fallen into the hands of your player characters — the unredacted text, plus the annotations of three generations of MI6 operatives, published as Dracula Unredacted. Out-of-world, the "unredactions" by Hite and co-author Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan draw from real-world spy lore and Stoker's working notes to swell a corking good horror thriller into a spy horror thriller.

The other half of the core gameset is the Director's Handbook, which takes what you're given in Dracula Unredacted and builds into an improvisational campaign for Night's Black Agents, set in the modern day, to track Edom and Dracula's conspiracy down and kill him for good. There are dozens of characters and organizations to encounter or investigate, and for each, the director has a write-up detailing them in three different ways — as an innocent, as an agent of Edom (or another intelligence service), or as a minion of Dracula. This is the improvisational part — the players get to choose who and what to investigate, and the Director uses that and the tools in the book to weave a giant, blood-soaked conspiracy thriller from that.

The bundle includes everything that was in the Kickstarter, in PDF, plus the base Night's Black Agents book, so it's everything you need. Night's Black Agents itself, even apart from the campaign, is great; it pits Jason Bourne-esque burned spies against vampires and their conspiracies in modern Europe. It's great, great stuff.

[thegaminggang]

The Mythos Triumphant: 'The Fall of Delta Green' Reviewed

The Fall of Delta Green, winner of the 2019 ENnie Award for Best Setting, cracks open the eponymous organization’s history for a trip back in time.

[aberrant-eyes]

Tour de Lovecraft: The Destinations - Cthulhu Mythos Places - Kenneth Hite's Tour de Lovecraft: The Destinations explores Lovecraft's settings and the hidden routes connecting his tales. - http://kck.st/2eNs4b6

[mxreese]

The Food Hut segment of the latest episode of Ken & Robin Talk About Stuff deals with an eternal problem that is near and dear to my heart.

Given that a bar may not have craft beers (and even if they do there's a better than even chance that they only have IPAs), and if you don't like wine, or aren't willing to pay the 200% markup on a glass of wine, it's important to have a default cocktail to be able to order quickly should you find yourself at a bar.

But alas, it seems to be a Herculean task to find a bartender that knows how/is able/is willing to make any cocktail that isn't a  "<liquor> and <soda>".

[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?