Sunday, June 7, 2015

The Sedefkar Simulacrum

I was happy to see there's a new Kickstarter underway for the "Sedefkar Simulacrum" from Chaosium's "Horror on the Orient Express".    It's one of the defining original artifacts created for the tabletop "Call of Cthulhu" game, and the quality of the work from sculptor delphes desvoivres speaks for itself.  I have a feeling that years from now fans who don't get on board will be kicking themselves for not getting a copy. 




I also wanted to mention that although the Simulacrum project is licensed from Chaosium, they have no involvement beyond that.  It breaks my heart having to point that out, but the meltdown of the company's "Horror on the Orient Express" Kickstarter has cast a pall over everything associated with it.

That's a damn shame, but they brought it upon themselves.  There's absolutely no excuse for not giving people what they expected, in the time frame they expected it, in return for their pledge.  I say that as someone with direct experience running a Kickstarter.  I was frantic because my promised shipping date had to be pushed back two weeks.  Seeing people who supported Chaosium having to wait years still infuriates me.

5 comments:

CoastConFan said...

I had always thought that the 1972 film, Horror Express would make a good scenario for CoC RPG. Especially since it was based on the story by John W. Campbell, Who Goes There? (1938), which in turn was the basis for Thing from Another World (1951) which was reprised again as The Thing (1982) & etc.. The story for Horror Express is indeed Mythos inspired as Campbell also wrote Mythos stories himself. For that matter he was a fan when he was a kid himself. This may prove to be an interesting twist.

I remember Chaosium fondly from the late ‘70s with their new spin on fantasy games, with titles as Red Bear White Moon (1975) and Rune Quest (1978), which broke the mold on the classic Tolkenesque/pseudo medieval D&D, fantasy games. This was well before they got into the Call of Cthulhu RPG published in 1981, although initially it used a version of the system from Rune Quest.

Anyway you can view the entire movie Horror Express on Youtube for inspiration https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7fpWt59qDc

Summery for Horror Express from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horror_Express

Propnomicon said...

@ CoastConFan

I couldn't agree more about "Horror Express". That movie absolutely terrified me as a child.

I understand there's been a major shake up at Chaosium thanks to the disastrous Kickstarters effectively killing the company. I hope they can recover.

Anonymous said...

Was that the one with a frozen abominable snowman coming to life on the Orient Express and killing people?

alex kaeda said...

I backed "horror on the orient express", and i'll admit, ive been disapointed. It broke my rpg group.

Im hopimg chaosium recovers.

Cherie B. said...

I don't know anything about the Kickstarter, but unfortunately my experience with Chaosium hasn't been a positive one. One year for my birthday, I received two gift certificates for their store. I tried to use one to buy some items, the transaction initially went through, the money used, but at the end I got an error stating that no payment had been made. I stupidly tried to use the second one, same thing happened. I ended up paying with my credit card. I repeatedly tried contacting them through every customer service method I could find and never received a response.

They've been around long enough that I have to assume my experience isn't typical, but I've never tried buying from them again (nor have those friends), and thankfully have been able to find enough used material and ideas elsewhere that I've never had to.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to go off on a rant like that, but your comments reminded me of my experience with their company, and based on my (admittedly extremely limited) experience, their KS results don't surprise me at all.