Russell Smeaton has revealed a stretch goal I helped out with – a set of handouts to help complete your Innsmouth experience.
The project is ending in a few hours, so check it out if your interested in some cool stuff with the Innsmouth look.
One of the projects I’m working on right now is making props and handouts for my recently purchased copy of Chaosium’s Horror on the Orient Express campaign for Call of Cthulhu.
I started with a simple print out of the route map. Decided to experiment a bit to try and produce some different effects I can use for other handouts and props. The end result – or close to it anyway – is a nicely aged map that has a heavier/coated feel to it. Nicer maps designed to hold up the elements have a coated/leathery feel to them, and I wanted to try and replicate that.
A couple of important things to note:
I printed the map on my new Epson Workforce WF-7820 printer. This uses a pigment-based ink. A big goal of this was to see how well this ink resists bleeding when exposed to water, as a common way of artificially aging paper involves water. It did not disappoint.
I printed the map on a single 11×17 sheet of 67-lb cardstock that has a vellum finish.
Ideally, you would let the print sit overnight to ensure it’s completely dry and minimize any possible bleeding. I intentionally took the printed page directly from the printer to soak and age it.
I placed the printed map on a baking sheet and soaked it in coffee. I looked carefully for any signs of bleeding ink. At worst, there was a very, VERY SLIGHT bleeding around black text. Since the original file includes some faint coloring around a lot of the text, it’s hard to tell if there was actual bleed. If so, it was just a faint bleed of black into the surrounding tissue, but it in no way impacted the crisp edges of the text. Again, I wouldn’t expect this result with any inkjet printer, but it seems this pigment-based ink holds up very well to water.
Then the map goes in the oven for 4-5 minutes at 225°. Flipped the map over for another 4-5 minutes. I placed it directly on the sheet, which evidently had some residual cooking spray on it. This discolored a couple of areas on the back. Simple fix is to always place the paper on a piece of parchment paper.
This is where I was going completely experimental to try and get the coated/leathery feel. Basically, I’m using a wax designed to wax and waterproof fabric. In this case, it’s a product called Otter Wax, and it comes in a bar.
Straight out of the oven, I placed the still warm map on the counter and rubbed the bar back and forth over the surface. Again, this didn’t affect the printed details at all. As it’s applied, it adds a subtle, waxy sheen to the surface that slightly brings out the color. Flipped the map and applied wax to the back.
Supposed to let waxed fabric cure in a warm environment for 24 hours, so I initially left the map out overnight. The next day it still had a tacky, wax-like feel to it. Decided to put it in the oven (after I aged some paper for another project) for another 3 minutes. This finished the wax curing / absorbing into the paper. No more wax feel to the surface, and slightly heavier than the base cardstock. I applied a second coat of wax the same way, and put it in the oven again. You definitely feel the wax when you apply it, but coming out of the oven that slight stickiness is gone.
The aging process always makes the paper wavy and wrinkled, so after waxing the first time (and again after waxing the next day) I pressed the map under weight to flatten it out a bit. Then I folded the map and pressed it again.
The final map is definitely heavier than the regular cardstock, and it has a texture and feel very close to what I was going for. I might try another application of wax or two, just to see if it makes a difference. The waxing also enhances the aged look of the coffee-died paper. It adds a subtly mottled appearance to the paper that is very reminiscent of natural parchment.
Finally finished up my latest project.
When working on my Yellow Sign display, I was introduced to the amazing Annotated Edition of The King in Yellow. Unfortunately, I quickly discovered it is no longer available in print. However, it is available to purchase as a PDF. So work began…
I’ve done a few homebound copies of gaming books, but I wanted to take things up a notch on this one. So that means trying a couple of things I haven’t done before. Most significantly, this is my first time working with real leather in any capacity. And I needed a new printer to handle larger paper.
So here are some pictures of the finished product. It was another learning experience, and I already see ways I could have made it better. But overall, I’m happy with how it turned out.
This copy of The King in Yellow Annotated Edition uses a paper with a natural parchment appearance. Subtle variations throughout the paper really give it a nice look that simultaneously says rich and aged. These pictures really don’t do justice to how they look in person. The new printer did a great job with both the text and amazing artwork. The pages are hand-sewn and gilded in gold, with a black ribbon bookmark. The cover is black sheepskin with gold foil on the spine as well as the large yellow sign on the cover. The yellow endsheets also feature the yellow sign, this time in black.
Finished up my Essential Saltes.
Here’s another one of my handmade displays for my Shelf of Madness. This was actually made prior to my Yellow Sign and Carcosian Star Chart displays – after the brain cylinder.
One of my favorite purchased artifacts is a set of stone seals from the ‘Hastur’ experience from the Mysterious Package Company. For those that aren’t familiar with these, they are little engraved stone/resin cylinders that when rolled across a soft medium like clay leave an imprint of part of a story describing Carcosa. I always though these were really cool, but anyone simply looking at them wouldn’t be able to easily see the scenes they depict.
So I decided to make some faux clay tablets that show each scene. These are actually made of a moldable EVA foam that has been painted to look like clay. I then mounted these tablets in shadow boxes with their respective stone seals and tags that include a small excerpt of the story told in each scene.
After finishing this project, I got the green light from my wife to expand my Shelf of Madness 😁, so they have moved around a little since these photos were taken.
(By the way, photographing these was much more difficult than I expected. Apologies for the glare and reflections.)
This all started when I saw this cool star chart an intrepid Keeper made for their game. The constellation referenced in Tatters of the King campaign gave me ideas on the specifics. And it kind of grew from there…
I originally just made the star chart with a couple of notes. Trying to decide which version to go with, I asked around, and it seemed everyone agree that a version with notes was the best way to go. So I decided to expand the notes a bit. Using a floating frame I discovered amongst my various parts and pieces (still a pain to photograph well) I put together a slightly larger display than I first planned.
The chart itself on the left with a museum tag, and a full page of notes on the right outlining each part of the diagram – while still leaving enough mystery to fire the imagination.
Created all in Illustrator and Photoshop. These were actually all printed on a single sheet of paper, then cut/torn out. Just applied a bit of tea/marker/flame to the torn edges that were showing white. This piece features a version of the Yellow Sign created by Zacharias Holmberg that’s quickly becoming my favored version. He’s got some cool designs in his Redbubble shop.
For those that are interested, here’s a full resolution PDF of the complete display that you can print yourself. Be aware that the original was created at a resolution of 600dpi, so this PDF is over 80MB.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SYF2i5FFMlsrRK3ec-55sWo9wW2wpJSX/
Building from my collection of mythos-related games and book, as well as my interest in integrating props into tabletop games, I’ve gradually developed a fondness for displaying my collection. In some areas it’s modest, in other areas less so. I have dubbed this constantly evolving display my Shelf of Madness.
And I’ve recently taken to creating some props and display pieces of my own.
I’ve posted pictures of some of these items here and there, and I’ve gotten a few requests for a more detailed description of some items, where they are from, etc. So I figured I could start posting some of that here as well. That way when I post some new acquisition or creation and someone sees something in the background, I’ll have a place where I can point them to check out what’s in the collection.
You can see all the posts describing the Shelf of Madness here.
Another addition to hang above my Shelf of Madness – followed by a companion piece after some fellow Reddit cultists pointed me to some other variations – these contain a number of examples (9 actually, or maybe 10…) of the Yellow Sign.
The main display includes 4 versions of the Yellow Sign. Three of these are featured in major tabletop games, and the fourth I came across while doing some research on the others.
Top left is the Kevin Ross design, owned by Chaosium, along with his originally intended inverted version a little smaller next to it.
Bottom left is by Kurt Komoda and appears in the Impossible Landscapes campaign for Delta Green by Dennis Detwiller.
Bottom right is by Christian Knutsson for The Yellow King from Pelgrane Press.
Top right is the work of Zacharias Holmberg. You can read a brief explanation of its creation here: https://zachholmbergart.tumblr.com/post/618992728119902208/i-wanted-to-post-my-design-of-the-yellow-sign-with
This includes 5 more variations. The first two are at the top with the notes and are from the earliest printings of Chamber’s The King in Yellow. You can read about them here: https://kmalexander.com/2017/06/20/hunting-the-yellow-sign/.
The beetle-looking version comes from the amazing Annotated Edition of The King in Yellow from Arc Dream Publishing.
Middle version comes from the board game Carcosa from One Free Elephant.
And the spiral version was made famous by the TV show True Detective.
Finally finished my custom bound copy of The Grand Grimoire of Cthulhu Mythos Magic! This isn’t an exact match to Chaosium’s printed cover, but let’s call it heavily inspired by the official cover.
This home bound copy includes a cover made from a strange hide (skin?), aged gold foil title and Cthulhu artwork, custom protective corner and cover hardware, hand-sewn laser-printed pages with gilded edges, a ribbon bookmark, and embossed endsheets with matching headbands.
I’m using this as a learning experience so I can make a cool version of Our Terrible Fate when I finish it, and this was by far the most complex bookbinding project I’ve undertaken yet.
The pages are laser printed and divided into signatures of four sheets (16 pages) each. These signatures are then hand sewn with linen thread. To help keep the printed content aligned despite the tendency of consumer printers to fail at centering content, stitch marks are added to the PDF prior to printing. Once all the signatures are sewn together, the spine is then glued with a flexible glue designed for bookbinding.
After the signatures are bound together, it’s time to trim them. During my past projects this step was done by hand with a box cutter. For this project, I stepped things up and purchased a larger guillotine cutter. Of course, that is one of the first points at which things took a turn for the worse. Not having used this type of cutter before, I made a couple of mistakes before I got it right. Fortunately, nothing went so badly that I couldn’t correct it, though the end result was slightly smaller pages than originally planned.
The end result of trimming the textblock was good enough that I went ahead and gilded the page edges. I used a metallic acrylic paint designed to work well on paper. I’ve used this process before on past projects, but the cleaner edges produced by my guillotine made this work much better this time around. Next, I debossed some linen cardstock for my endsheets using my Cricut. The endsheets were then folded and attached to the text block, along with a ribbon bookmark, moslin to reinforce the spine, and headbands to match the endsheets.
The cover for this project is a bit of a challenge. The artwork on the official hardcover is designed to look like a tome, but not an ordinary one. To begin with, some of the elements aren’t exactly identifiable. There are parts that might be straps, including one that actually covers a portion of the elder sign in the middle of the cover. The elder sign itself is a little different from Chaosium’s usual representation of the symbol. A lot of the stuff on the cover is made to look like metal hardware. And then there is the background of the cover – the material of this tome. It’s unusual to say the least.
I actually started with the cover material – even before the text block – because I knew it was going to be more challenging than my past projects. Trying to approximate the look of the exotic skin from the official book wasn’t going to be as simply as cutting a piece of faux leather. I ended up adapting a couple of techniques I found online to make a heavily textured cover from a combination of butcher paper and acrylic paints. I then glued that to another layer of butcher paper – again using the flexible bookbinding glue.
Then I turned to planning out the other elements of the cover. I wasn’t about to custom order actual metal hardware or take up metalworking, so I would need another material. I also needed to determine which elements I wanted to keep. Using a PDF of the official cover as a reference, I gradually put together a planned version of the cover using vector artwork. This step took the better part of 3-4 days.
I wrapped the material around the boards I cut from chipboard for the front and back cover and spine and affixed with glue. The double layer of butcher paper is thinner than the faux leather I’ve used for previous projects. It’s not quite as flexible, but I definitely understand why bookbinders prefer working with thinner materials. This material also seems like it will hold up better than expected, but time will tell.
For the foil, I used iron-on gold foil cut out using my Cricut. Ran into some challenges with the title on the spine, but finally got it worked out. I also used some watered down acrylic to “age” the foil and better bring out some of the texture of the foil overlaid on the cover material.
Then I turned my attention to the hardware. This took several days with quite a lot of trial and error. The end process consists of heavyweight (110 lb) black cardstock, which is cut and debossed, painted/drybrushed with metallic gold acrylic, and glued together in layers. Some pieces also include resin and some more acrylic. Even the protective corners use this process, with scoring used to allow for clean wrap-around folds to actually protect the cover. The debossing allowed me to get some good detail and a solid overall look without having to custom order hardware.
The hardware was all attached using glue. I considered applying an additional protective layer over the hardware and cover but ultimately decided against it. Everything seems much more resilient than I originally expected. I had planned to make a strap to gold the book closed with a magnetic clasp – there’s even a magnet embedded in the cover chipboard. Unfortunately, the magnet is not strong enough to work the way I wanted, so I decided to leave it out.
In the end, not everything went as expected, but I learned a lot. I’m also pleased with the end result, and am happy to have added this tome to my shelf.
I’ve reached a point where I feel comfortable posting some of the actual game text I’ve written in the hopes of getting some useful feedback. I’ve got a fair bit written, so there should be enough to get some first impressions and thoughts on presentation. I’ve updated the draft content posted to this point to using a knowledge base system, which should make it easier to read through.
For the time being I am calling this work-in-progress game of mine Our Terrible Fate. That may change down the road, but for now it will do.
There’s a lot of background and detailed explanation elsewhere on the site, but here is where I am going to post some of the actual draft text.
I’m always appreciative of feedback – be it criticism, comment, or questions. You can post feedback on the base113 Games subreddit.
Update: A PDF of the first chapter is now available as well. While there’s not much art, the layout should be much easier for many to read. Just click the link through to the draft text, and you should see a link to the PDF version along with an example image of the layout.
Available excerpts of this dark text currently include what is essentially the first chapter of the book, which will serve two purposes:
Links to the current draft content and our subreddit (to post feedback) are provided below:
