Tuesday, June 10, 2014

"The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" Comes to Life

Dale Bigford brings us this amazing prop collection based on H.P. Lovecraft's "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward".  He's certainly not the first to tackle this story, but the sheer size and thoroughness of his work puts it in a class by itself.  He's broken the project up into three separate entries covering an overview of the collection's history, a closer look at the physical components, and a rundown of the included paperwork and ephemera. 




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2 comments:

  1. afflictionJune 10, 2014 at 7:05 AM

    Oh, wow. This is one of my favorite HPL stories. Since there are so many paper props, I've long thought it would be fun for folks to tackle making a set from CDW. I will have to spend a lot of time pouring over all the details, but from the snapshots I can see even the specific jars and jugs mentioned in the text are included in the collection.
    I've thought about this and given a good few hours over the years looking for a scribe or calligrapher that would write out letters by hand. I think my best lead so far are local lettering/calligraphy clubs. Online I found many people that do this type of work for weddings - not quite the same idea! And, in my case, looking for and doing are pretty far apart. Any experience?

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  2. CoastConFanJune 10, 2014 at 7:41 AM

    That is a masterful storytelling assemblage. The amount of effort involved in putting this display together has got to be staggering. The backstory only enhances the myriad of items into a plausible storyline and the paper props themselves are excellent. This is a masterpiece of narrative through props.

    I’ve forgotten exactly when, but on Propnomicon we have had a several discussions about using props as a story telling device in games. Image giving this prop set to a group who didn’t know about the Mythos and let them work out what happened.

    The outcome of this experiment might yield a story told in the following YouTube video, which is a condensed version of Call of Cthulhu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amCxbVG8QUs

    Or by DrFaustusAU, a curious Lovecraftian tome in the style of Dr Seuss, but all in rhyme and quite adequately tells the tale of Call of Cthulu (AKA Horton Hears Cthulhu): http://drfaustusau.deviantart.com/gallery/34469914/The-Call-of-Cthulhu-for-beginning-readers well worth the read.

    The rest of DrFuustusAU’s Seuss inspired gallery o Deviant Art: http://drfaustusau.deviantart.com/gallery/34733511/Seussian-Gallery

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