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My first HPL book;
is that the most metal
Lovecraft cover ever
or what? |
There were three names that leaped out at me from Appendix N, and you can probably say them with me: Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and H.P. Lovecraft. I had heard of these guys from other sources and now that they were intersecting with Dungeons and Dragons, it was time to run them down. I had read a couple of Lovecraft stories in various horror anthologies along the way, so it was a natural for me to dive right into Arkham and Innsmouth and Dunwich. I've spoken at length about Robert E. Howard. And while I read most of my Clark Ashton Smith in a brief flurry, he never really stuck with me like Howard and Lovecraft.
But there was a whole game devoted to Lovecraft! I was slow to answer the Call of Cthulhu, not because I
didn’t want to play it; I did. Badly. Desperately. It’s just that, no one else
read the same weird shit that I read. Even in my high school, I was an outlier
when it came to Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft. Everyone else who read
those guys were either already my friends, and/or not into gaming. It was a rural suburb of Waco, Texas, in the 1980s. What did you expect?
