On the Road to Riga

In a helpful example of synchronicity, Meliadhor brings us this assemblage of items and ephemera from a period railroad trip to Riga. It's a great example of the storytelling-via-props idea David Anaxagoras was discussing in Friday's post.  The set includes a hand bound leather journal, camera, a period map of the Riga railroad route, tickets, and an authentic railroad watch. 

Motoring to Arkham

"Fghtan" brings us this vintage road atlas map of Lovecraft country. It's a great recreation of the kind of period ephemera you could pick up at nearly every roadside gas station, right down to the color palette . The only changes I would make are giving Arkham its canon location in Essex County and losing the "Shoggone" in-joke, but that's just nit-picking.

A Real Adventure Journal

Jason Rippetoe sent over this real-life example of an adventurer's journal. From 1868, the notes and ephemera of Charles Shepherd's journey through Tsarist Russia.

Passport to Adventure

Greg Oakes sent over a link to a feature on classic era archaeologist James Henry Breasted that features some beautiful passport scans and period photography.

"At Archaeology Now there is an article with accompanying photographs describing archaeologist James Henry Breasted's 1919-1920 journey through the Middle East. Accompanying this is a set of photographs of Visa and entry stamps, letters of introduction etc that I thought you might be interested in – I see a great Jackson Elias passport prop in the offing!"

If I have some time this weekend I'm going to try recreating some of the passport stamps. The resolution of the scans is a little low to isolate them and lift clear copies.

Tramp Steamer Ticket, Redux

Here's the tramp steamer passenger ticket from yesterday converted into a PDF with customizable typewritten entries. You can download the file from Google Docs over here.

Tramp Steamer Ticket

This is a passage ticket for the kind of small ship typically found in pulp adventures. Large passenger lines could afford to have custom printed tickets for each ship, but the smaller lines and independents would broker passage at dockside or through a port agent. Just click through to download the high resolution version from Picasa. It can be printed out on cardstock and filled out by hand, or you can add typewritten entries in a graphics program before printing.

From Paper Props

Zeppelin Goldmine

Kurt Hockenbury sent over a note pointing out this fantastic period resource on Zeppelins- "Zeppelin: the Story of a Great Achievement". The public domain book is filled with information and pictures that would be invaluable for anyone running a pulp-style adventure or event. Some absolutely massive scans of airship deckplans from the book are also available on Flickr, courtesy of "Fings":



You'll find the full-sized version of this deckplan over here.



And this one can be found here.

Arkham Train Ticket

Yet another set of paper props from Caillean McMahon, Maureen Hennessey, and curator Francesca Tronetti of the Women in Technology project- Boston Line train tickets for both Arkham and Miskatonic University. As always, just click through for the high resolution versions.

The Last Expedition

Steve Ludnow of the Dark Door LARP group in the UK has posted a gallery of photographs from their latest event:The Last Expedition. After seeing the pictures and reading a description of the plot, I wish I'd had a chance to be there. What better way to spend a weekend than fighting Nazis and the minions of Ithaqua on board a ship bound for the Antarctic?

The ship was by far the greatest prop of them all. It is actually the residential and organisation HQ for a water activity centre in the heart of the London Docklands, run as a B&B by the Scout Association. It was built in 1933.

Browse around the rest of the gallery and you'll find some impressive ice zombie makeup and a scratchbuilt diving suit that really deserves a write-up of it's own.



Mr. Ludnow and his cohorts also produced some great paper props, including maps, diaries, and documents like this boarding pass and an expedition newspaper.





This is exactly the kind of high-immersion game I'd love to see more of, but for some reason this style of event seems relatively rare. Based solely on the coverage available on the web it also seems to be a very European thing, despite it being a style of play that was, if not invented, at least popularized in the United States by the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society.

One possible explanation is that the largest and most immersive LARPs in the US aren't part of the conventional LARP community at all- they're airsoft and paintball games. Do a little Googling and you can find dozens of high-end scenario games featuring custom built sets, props, and costumes in support of detailed, multi-day storylines. There's a clear bias towards plots in the action-adventure vein that don't require much in the way of role-playing, but there seems to be a core group of players that take storytelling and characterization seriously.

Miskatonic Expedition Cigarette Card

One of the most troublesome aspects of exploration is the incessant need for funding. While the vast majority of the Miskatonic University expedition to the Antarctic was payed for by the Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation, there were still opportunities to stretch the available funds further with sponsorships. This wasn't a practice unique to the Miskatonic effort. Almost every Arctic and Antarctic expedition of the early 20th century received money and supplies from commercial sponsors eager to take part in the adventure of exploration while promoting their products.

One of the expedition's lesser known sponsors was DeVost Tobacco, which not only supplied a cash payment and supplies of cigarettes and pipe tobacco to the party, but also featured it in the "Exploring Our World" collection of cigarette cards. This was card number 14 in the series of 50. The front is a painted color photograph of a Dornier Wal amphibious plane undergoing flight tests on the open ocean, while the back featured the title "Wings Over Antarctica" and a description of the aircraft's role in penetrating the icy continent's interior. The card was available in random packs of DeVost brand cigarettes from July of 1930 to January of 1931, when news of the expedition's tragic end resulted in it being pulled from circulation by DeVost. As a result, both the card and complete sets of the full collection are incredibly rare.



Click through for the full-sized graphic. It's sized to fit on a standard 3.5" by 2" business card.

Blank 1920's Era United States Pilot's License

This United States pilot's license was in use from 1926 to 1934. Just print it out on some manila cardstock and you'll have a reasonably accurate recreation of the original. Click through on the pictures for the high resolution versions.

License interior, with trimming guides



License cover


One of the source photographs, for comparison.



If you have any suggestions for improving the accuracy of this prop document, or additional reference materials that might be useful, please drop me a line.

Arkham Postcard

The source material for this project is a vintage postcard from 1919 depicting the Salem, Massachusetts railroad and trolley station. I chose that particular card for a couple of reasons. First, Lovecraft based many of the details of Arkham on Salem so it's only natural that we can map the period features of the real town to his fictional creation. Second, the station is a named location in the "Arkham" supplement from Chaosium that players are likely to visit or at least be aware of. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the original card was produced before the magic year of 1923. That means it's now in the public domain and I'm free to use it any way I want without any copyright worries.

After scanning the original I did some basic cleanup work to remove the dust and dirt that had accumulated on the card over the last eighty some years. I had originally intended to replace the existing Salem-specific caption with a new one generated using a matching font, but after fiddling around for an hour I couldn't find one that matched the lettering on the card. Since that's about the limit of my short attention span I decided to recycle the existing caption and generate any additional letters using bits of the printed text.



The letter "K" in Arkham is a bit dodgy, but it's good enough to pass a casual inspection.

Here's the final file at 300 DPI sized to reproduce the 5 7/16" by 3 1/2" measurements of the original. Just click through for the high resolution version.



And here's the back of the card:

Arkham Trolley Ticket

If you're running a prop-heavy "Call of Cthulhu" game this Arkham trolley ticket makes a nice wallet filler, but it can also serve as a useful clue to someone's movements around the town. It looks best if it's printed out on a light-colored sheet of construction paper or card. If you have a color printer you might want to modify the ticket number to print out in blue or red ink for a more realistic appearance. Since it's sized for a 1" by 2" ticket you can print out a couple of copies at once on a sheet of paper and then trim each ticket out individually.

If you're really dedicated there are a couple of things you can do to make it even more realistic. Duplicating the perforations of a real roll ticket can be accomplished by running a pounce wheel along the short sides. Hit the corners with a hole punch and you'll have a good facsimile of the notches used to make ripping the tickets off the roll easier. If you have a any custom punches you can use them to simulate a ticket that's been used on a transfer.

Just click on the picture for the full-sized version.

Ship Profiles and Deckplans

Considering how many CoC scenarios are tied to the sea it's surprising there aren't more resources describing ships from the 1920's. Here are a couple of scans of exactly that. The smaller ones are just profiles, but the largest is the full profile and deckplan from a period freighter working the lumber trade.

As always, click on the pictures here for the full sized version. I haven't cleaned these up at all so you may want to do a little retouching.