The Haunted Palace (1963) dir. Roger Corman

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulu

Random Bucky-related Fact I Uncovered:

The house on the left corner there is 169 Clinton Street (circa 1935), Brooklyn, where H. P. Lovecraft stayed 1924-1926. The area’s multiculturalism horrified him so much he had to write The Horror at Red Hook (1927) about it.

Why's this interesting?

Because if you look at this prop dog tag for Bucky in the MCU...

...You'll see that that next-of-kin address ^ for Bucky 

Is two houses down, behind HP Lovecraft's place, on the street you're looking down at the far-left of that image up there. ^

So the area HP Lovecraft found horrifyingly multicultural in the late 1920s, that's where Steve and Bucky were growing up! 😊

Necronomicon | 1993

If I painted Maleficent in her fairy form I figured I should paint her in her dragon “boss” form too. Again tried to keep true in some ways but wanted to incorporate more of that buggy, semi lovecraftian design too.

So after reading enough of your Lovecraftian short stories, I’m ready to finally dive in and read some Lovecraft. Where should I start?

Either with

or with this one

Both of them have terrific essays putting Lovecraft into context, as a writer and as a person, the Les Klinger one with an introduction by Alan Moore, the Library of America one by editor Peter Straub.

Re-Animator (1985) // Dir. Stuart Gordon

"That awful door in Benefit Street which I had left ajar." - H. P. Lovecraft

Virgil Finlay - The Shunned House

(Weird Tales - October 1937)

IN THE DEEP (horror and the sea for @antichrist-demoncore 🌊)

hermann melville / triangle (2009) / julia armfield / the deep house (2021) / h.p. lovecraft / underwater (2020) / mira grant / 47 meters down: uncaged (2019) / werner herzog / the deep ones

I did a thing! About Nyarlathoteps forms. I'm still bad in eng translation, so i hope i did it not that bad

Also last page that i've changed - bunch of nyarlas

The Haunted Palace (1963) dir. Roger Corman

H.P. Lovecraft - Halloween In Arkham (1979) - The Dreams In The Witch House (Harry O. Morris)

Can I ask, what made you think of the "date to die for" thing.

I mean, what did you think when writing the story? (I love your games.)

So way back in 2021, SFL was first conceptualized as part of a game-jam style game collection (Dread X Collection 2), where the theme was adapting Lovecraftian lore. That version of the game you can play for free as Sucker for Love: Prelude on steam. After that iteration, our publisher signed Akabaka for a three game contract

The Sucker for Love story was loosely planned from the start as a 3 game narrative, with interconnected stories following different protagonists and their romantic encounters with the Outer Gods. The original plans were to first expand Sucker for Love: Prelude into a full, dating-sim game, with the protag, Darling, attempting to win a kiss from multiple detailed Eldritch ladies. Cthulu, the King in Yellow, and Nyarlathotep are 3 of the most recognizable lovecraftian gods with a lot of lore to pull from (along with Azathoth and the Black Goat of the Woods.) For SFL First Date, to keep the scope of the game smaller, Akabaka focused on just those three.

The second game was always planned to be a foil to the first game, where the player could go deep with a single Eldritch goddess instead of wide, so the player could get to spend a lot of time with their love interest. For SFL Date to Die For, the Black Goat of the Woods was a complex but interesting character to adapt from Lovecraft's writings. (That's a whole post on its own...) But for a series about "dating sexy versions of eldritch gods", the Black Goat of the Woods fit really well as a datable love interest, when stripped down to her core trait of being the all-mother with a powerful aura who drives everyone in her proximity to madness with desire.

Originally, the protagonist was planned to be a disaster lesbian, sort of a female version of Darling. But in the actual writing of the plot and dialouge, Aka kept hitting a major plot hole: if Rhok'zan has a powerful sex aura that make everyone go mad with lust, wouldn't Stardust basically get vaporized from her already next-level lust being magnified 1000 fold? The solution was surprisingly simple though- the only human who could survive Rhok'zan's aura even for a second would be an asexual person. (An aside: I think that's something really special about DTDF actually- Stardust truly is the only person that could have saved the day, BECAUSE of her asexuality- not in spite of it. Her asexuality is as central to her story as Darling's all-consuming lust is to his ☆)

Also as a foil to SFL First Date, the second game was planned from the start to have a heavier focus on the 'horror' aspect of the series, and a focus on cultists as a real, present danger. Main inspiration here was The Dunwich Horror, where the threat comes not from the Outer Gods, but from the rabid town of cultists who want all outsiders dead.

So with all of those aspects set, the rest of the narrative for Date to Die For came together from there :)

(As for the third game, the plot has been mostly set for a while, but yall will have to wait and see~)

“That is not dead  Which can eternal lie, Yet with strange aeons Even death may die.” - H.P. Lovecraft

I need a Lovecraftian-style story in which an explorer finds an ancient inscription on a stone monolith, written in a forgotten language, in the antediluvian ruins of a lost city of which only legends formerly spoke.

And then someone translates it, and it turns out to be some king’s plans for an irrigation system.