I'm in the doghouse, and I deserve to be. I'm not sure I'll make the dog collar a permanent fashion accessory (we're pretty casual around here for such elaborate bling), but it is appropriate in the short term. When clients ask me why I'm wearing a dog collar with a tag labeled "Providence," I'll explain to them that some really important people wanted to remind me that my clients are taking me away from what I'm supposed to be doing.
One day, I'll tell you the story about how the Poet snagged the Puppetmaster, the Sculptor and the Cultist up into a mad scientist project, all while Sploit got sucked into some kind of psychological testing project. Lesson: even a deep team bench can be devestated by the realities of people chasing a living (the flip side being, of course, it is so much easier if someone is paying you a wage and telling you it is your job.)
Solutions: an even deeper team bench and a recontemplation of what it means to provision them. Armchair quarterbacking yourself mid-recovery is gauche, though, and I'm already in the Lovecraftian doghouse. Why bring a knife to a rocket propelled grenade launcher fight?
Your outpouring of friendly support is amazing, and has barely felt like stalking at all! I'm humbled by it and don't take any of you for granted. I've missed you too. The pre-production wheels are already in motion of making sure we earned that support, although the proof will be in the pudding.
As any scientist will tell you, it is the unexpected result that is the most intriguing. Unfortunately, for us, the unexpected came in the form of what we call the Eldritch Curse. We can't say for sure that it's a curse. Maybe one is just not meant to play with the dark, weird, and otherworldly. Whatever the case, we've known for a year now that there is something strange and magical about working on Eldritch Errors and, with every Book, we brace ourselves for the unpredictable. From death to birth and with gunshots or car accidents, we have learned to be prepared for whatever the universe throws our way. With Book Three, easily the most intense and complex chapter to date, we knew that whatever happened, it would be big.
When I saw the full moon in the sky during the pre-dawn drive to work, I knew it was time to shutter up Schmeldritch. Otherwise, people might wonder if Book Three has started or not, and you might as well say it has: once the interludes are over, we tend to get pretty quiet here in favor of EldritchErrors.com to help new players jump in. It is always so hard to avoid indulging in one brief William Castle moment before shuttering this place up, though. It will be the first Schmeldritch post new participants stumble into for a while. This time, I might even indulge and give myself two brief moments to set that stage.
It goes without saying that the Eldritch crew thinks I'm insane, they've grown used to the mad scientist cackle coming from my office from time to time. My expectations for "Red Moon Rising" are obviously higher than they were even for "Scream in the Mountains," and after that many of us were going "holy crap!" May I recommend that experienced participants change their tin foil hats daily during Book Three and leave it at that?
For new participants, welcome to the party, you're still fashionably early. Don't worry that Eldritch Errors has been going since last April, Book Three was developed with you in mind. It was also developed with Book One participants in mind, as well, so you'll have lots to discover together. You might even argue that new participants only missed the confusing, complicated setup to the real action.
Until we see each other again, I leave you with a quote from Lovecraft: "I hate the moon - I am afraid of it - for when it shines on certain scenes familiar and loved it sometimes makes them unfamiliar and hideous."
It all started when that strange, short new staff member reported in for duty just before the holidays. It claimed it came from the "home office" and that it was paid for out of someone else's budget, but it refused to give us a picture of when it was 12 years old for our staff page (claims that was before photography was invented) and didn't want a phone extention. Mike tried to distract him with the "origami-a-day" calendar, but he was more interested in our production plans for Book Three.
I think we've managed to keep his creepy tentacles out of the storyline, but I totally blame him for falling behind on the meta materials, including the amazing stories you've been telling. I'm told they are calling it the Cthecret Cthanta Worm. We call it Worst Intern Ever, but only when we think it isn't watching us.
The Quiet Zone is one of the strangest chunks of real estate in North America, and an "alternate history" of how it came to be lies at the heart of the tale we're asking participants to dive into with Eldritch Errors. If Book One was in part inspired by real Sentries, then Book Two was inspired at least in part by the Guardian of the Quiet, Wesley Sizemore, an eye witness to the 1988 telescope collapse in Green Bank. This recent PBS & Wired Science segment on the Quiet Zone (noticed by Varin) explores the Zone further.
In Book One, we asked you to show us your creativity. For Book Two, we want to encourage something a bit more in the spirit of H.P. Lovecraft -- we want you to tap the Eldritch storyteller in you and share it with everyone else. As storytellers we believe we can use anything under the Sun to tell our story, and so we believe you can too. No messy self-addressed envelopes this time around, just a quick email to inquiry at this blog's domain with a link to where we can enjoy your EE creation and the address where we should send your participatory commemoration. Those of you who have already been telling stories can count yourself a step ahead of crowd.
We've got a mystery to share with you, too. We don't want to show you the back yet, even though there isn't anything on the back you haven't already experienced. Sometimes, though, what you choose to focus on from a Book makes a detail suddenly more significant. We owe it to you let that discovery come first from inside the narrative rather than from a commemoration of it. You'll have an opportunity early in Book 3 to clarify your understanding of something you already know, and when that happens what's on the back will seem more natural and less like a reveal.
I've been writing for the last month about H.P. Lovecraft, meandering from talking about his work to his scientific leanings to his letter writing. It has made me look like such a tremendous geek (or at least that's what my commercial clients tell me.) Part of that was certainly to help illuminate what I mean when I say that Eldritch Errors is inspired more by the author than his works, but I also want to set up a more radical proposition. Lovecraft was working with ideas from the 21st century, but he was forced to explore them with 19th and 20th century technologies (such as letter writing instead of email.)
Lovecraft was an alternate reality game designer, a writer who believed his stories must be "devised with all the care & verisimilitude of an actual hoax," stories that he unfolded like forensic investigations. He was also an Open Source advocate and loved implied share alike licensing (although I suspect the license I linked too is more restrictive than what he believed in.) He delighted when others lifted references from his work and equally delighted incorporating their references back into his work. He had an intimate relationship with his readers, because he was frequently the one mailing them the manuscript to read. It shouldn't be surprising that tabletop gaming and non-tabletop gaming have so embraced his work (now public domain) and played such a key role in preserving and extending it.
Explaining what Eldritch Errors is presents challenges, both for those of us crafting the experience and for the participants involved in it. It is similar to a number of things: you can talk about how it is both like and unlike an alternate reality game, or how it is both like and unlike live action roleplaying games. Each of those labels works on some level for setting your expectations on the kinds of experiences you might have participating in Eldritch Errors, but they might also suggest things that aren't as true.
Describing what Eldritch Errors is should frankly be the job of the other site; I'm cheating if I have to do it here. However, there is no client whose ultimate needs must drive this production, so the intentions of what we hope to craft stem from the experiments that we want to explore, not from a marketing need. Eldritch Errors didn't appear from a vacuum; it is the continuation of past experiments that also shed a light on the kinds of experiences participants have already had ... and what you might expect from Eldritch Errors in the future.
H.P. Lovecraft wrote more letters than it is easy to imagine, unless of course you live in the Age of Email. Scholars conservatively estimate that he wrote over 100,000 letters in his life: they have about 10,000 preserved, and to publish even those unabridged would take 100 volumes each 400 pages long. About a thousand of them are in print across a few handfulls of volumes. For me, his letters are both his towering artistic achievement, and his towering creative achievement in developing his relationship with the fans he did have, fans who would end up preserving his work for all of us. Lovecraft tries to disavow the power of his letters in a paragraph that sound suspiciously like the way many emailers and bloggers would describe writing today:
"Nobody expects anything of a letter, or judges any man's style by one. Even when I write one by hand I pay no attention to rhetorick, but just sail along at a mile-a-minute pace ... If you were to analyse the language of this letter you would find it shot all to hell with solecisms and bad rhythms."
I can't let that stop me: there seems to be so much power in his letters, an easy elegence of style that smells suspiciously 21st century. In an essay that Lovecraft wrote defending his work "Dagon," for example, he penned a line that I think is among the most revealing glimpses into his soul as an artist: "There are probably seven persons, in all, who really like my work; and they are enough. I should write even if I were the only patient reader, for my aim is merely self-expression." Here's the story of one of those "seven persons" and a few of the tidbits from those letters that have shaped my view of Lovecraft.