Dawsferatu's House of Horrors

     Long before I became a Z-list internet personality, I had it in my head I was gonna be a paleontologist. I was the quintessential dinosaur kid. I spent hours of my childhood leafing through Gurney’s Dinotopia books, The Ultimate Dinosaur , and later, as my childhood obsession grew into something slightly more scholarly, Greg Paul’s The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs and Anthony J. Martin’s Dinosaurs Without Bones . So of course I’ve seen Jurassic Park more times than I can count.      It would probably be more dramatic if I said I remember the first time I saw Jurassic Park like it was yesterday, but the simple truth is I don’t. In all honesty, I can’t remember a time when I hadn’t seen it--images from the film are so embedded in my psyche it’s like they were there before me, waiting. When I’m on my deathbed and my life is flashing before my eyes, the chances that stills from Jurassic Park will be interspersed between memories of my beloved w...

     Some time ago Jack Guignol made a post applying Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition” to tabletop role playing game source books in which he emphasizes the importance of concision, method, and clarity or “unity of effect.” I find myself in agreement with most of his conclusions, though I will readily admit my weakness for overwrought (and overly long) flavor text in RPGs. But I digress.      While listening to the Weird Studies episode “On Lovecraft” it occurred to me that certain insights from H. P. Lovecraft’s “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” could be applied to the process of writing scenarios and campaigns for Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu in much the same way. Around the half hour mark of the podcast, Phil Ford comments that what he finds most interesting about the methodology Lovecraft outlines in the short essay is “his insistence that the heart of the story is a basically atemporal thing--is basically just this flash of image or...