Marriage License Prop

Here's another marriage license, similar to the one I posted last week.

Whately's Vitalizer

So what exactly was Old Whately doing for all those years before "The Dunwich Horror"? He was quite the hermit in his dotage, but that extensive library of occult tomes probably took some traveling, and some money, to put together in his younger years. Hmmmmm...how could a magically gifted follower of Yog-Sothoth fund his collecting and travel at the same time?

I wish I could say that backstory was foremost in my mind when I came up with this, but the truth is I was just messing around with ideas for Halloween bottle labels. After all, you can never have too many questionable elixers for your party. As always, click through for the high resolution version.

More Telegrams

A kind emailer sent me a pointer to a collection of blank telegram forms for "Call of Cthulhu" players. It doesn't look like the site has been updated since 2003, and the other pages are dead, but for now it offers ten different designs for Keepers looking to liven things up.

Seal Of Dagon

This is a conjectural "Seal of Dagon" based on the trident design used in Stuart Gordon's 2001 film "Dagon". As a low-budget adaptation of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" it has it's moments, but one thing I really enjoyed was the design work for the "Deep One" architecture and implements. It's suitably organic and evocative of deep-ocean life forms without ripping off H.R. Giger, a design trap that far too many low-budget films fall into. Personally, I think "Gigerization" happens because production designers without a lot of money to work with look at Giger's work and decide that "organic" means "covered with corrugated plastic piping". Since corrugated plastic pipe is cheap, and you can stick it into and onto almost anything, we get film after film with piles of props and even entire sets built from great snaking mounds of the stuff. Sci-Fi Channel, I'm looking at you.

But I digress.

In addition to drawing on the "Dagon" trident for inspiration I wanted a South Seas feel for the seal, in reference to the original home of Innsmouth's Deep Ones. Something that would echo Maori moku designs or Polynesian aesthetics without falling too deep into the "tribal" design ghetto. You can decide for yourself if I succeeded.

As always, click through to get the full-size version and then save it to your hard-drive.

Period Western Union Telegram

What would a "Call of Cthulhu" prop site be without the obligatory Western Union telegram?

Click the picture below to get the full-size, high resolution version and then save that to your hard drive.

If you just want to bang out a quick and dirty telegram, open the blank telegram image in a graphics program, add a layer with your message text in a typewriter font, and print.

If you want something a little more realistic you'll need some yellow paper and a word processing program. Open a new 8 1/2" by 11" document and put the blank telegram image on the top of the page. Then use the bottom half of the page to type out your message, again with a typewriter font. Print out the document, cut the page so the blank telegram is on one sheet of paper and your message text is on the other, and then carefully cut out the strips of paper containing your message text. Then use a glue stick to attach the strips of text to the blank telegram sheet.

Tada! An almost instant telegram.



Here's a rough guide to how your document should look if you're using the more involved technique I described above.



Here's an actual Western Union telegram to give you an idea how it should look.

The Void

Jade Cthulhu Idol

I banged this Cthulhu idol out in a couple of hours, more out of an interest in trying a faux jade painting technique than anything else. The idol itself is Sculpy polymer clay over a core of armature wire and a big honkin' bolt. Why the bolt? So the idol can cause compasses in close proximity to swing towards it. The steel in the bolt is probably enough to do that on it's own, but I went to the trouble of using a massive salvage magnet to fully magnetize it. Yeah, it's a cheap effect, in every sense, but it amuses me to no end.

I'm really happy with how the jade finish came out. The paint job was done by hand, with a base coat of dark green and then two shades of lighter green applied by stippling with an old, worn out craft brush. That produced a great mottled green appearance that I finished off with two coats of Future acrylic for a smooth, polished stone finish.





The pictures really don't do it justice. The combination of my poor photography skills and the unholy glare produced by the acrylic finish made getting any decent shots an impossible task.