By G. W. Thomas
I’m looking at my old Call of Cthulhu box set from 1982, the one with the Gene Day artwork, the cracked corners and bindings all roughed up and stained from countless hours of flipping through pages of stats. What I am most struck by is that I owe Sandy Petersen a huge debt of gratitude.
Here’s why: as far back as 1984, I was not an H. P. Lovecraft fan. I found him old-fashioned, verbose, ridiculous. I had, in a fit of prejudgment, dismissed him as a writer I did not read. What changed that? Sandy Petersen and the role-playing game Call of Cthulhu.
The game was originally released in 1981. I didn’t encounter it until 1985, at V-Con in Vancouver, British Columbia. It was my first SF con and it was dedicated to H. P. Lovecraft. (I also met Robert Bloch, the guest of honor.) At one of the dealer’s tables, I came across a cheap copy of Call of Cthulhu. I had been playing Advanced Dungeons&Dragons for five years and was ready for something new. This was just the trick.
Returning home with the game, I now had a reason to redress Mr. Lovecraft and his stodgy prose. It wasn’t easy, but with an eye towards game material, I slogged on until I found I actually enjoyed his work. I began a survey of all the Mythos fiction I could find that ran to 200 stories and several authors’ interviews (L. Sprague de Camp in person and Karl Edward Wagner by mail) before I decided to abandon the task. (Others such as E. P. Berglund and Daniel Harms were made of sterner stuff. I direct you to their work.)
Not completing that ordeal, I did try another: to write a scenario for Call of Cthulhu. This time, I succeeded, for my adventure entitled “City in the Sea” was picked up by Chaosium for Cthulhu Now! My first publication in 1987, only 2 years after starting to play CoC. I followed this with my first fiction sale, “The Man Who Would Be King”, in Eldritch Tales #24 (1990). I was now a published non-fiction and fiction writer and all thanks to HPL, CoC and, of course, Sandy Petersen.
Having read all of Lovecraft, I then moved onto Edgar Allan Poe, another author I had never really enjoyed. Having mastered HPL, Poe was a snap. Poe’s tales and poems reaped dozens of new ideas and stories of my own. From there, I encountered M. R. James, Ambrose Bierce, Robert W. Chambers, Arthur Machen, and a host of others, none of which I would have ever read without HPL.
All this material perked and bubbled through me through the late 80s and early 90s. I produced plenty of tales, poems and non-fiction pieces relating to horror, HPL or role-playing games, including a piece in Writer’s Digest. I’ve taken the majority of these pieces and put them in a book called The Book of the Black Sun, and published it with Double Dragon in 2002. Well, the book is in its second edition (published by my own company now) and I would really like to dedicate it to, you guessed it, the guy who got me started, Sandy Petersen.
Sandy has gone on to do other projects, including the video game Doom (which ate up many hours in 1993-4 – not to mention two hours I’d like to have back when I watched the film of the same name) but Sandy is entitled to them. When I used to play the private detective characters in the old days, I was working out what would eventually become The Book Collector. If you are one of those who listened to “Goon Job” at Pseudopod.com and were pleased with the noir-esque Mythos tale, you, too, should thank Sandy. My intent with that series has been to re-capture the fun I had playing that game many years ago. Thank you, Sandy. Game on!