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Finally finished my Tattered project31 October 2009

Pure fluke, but it's Halloween evening right here right now so the final release date couldn't be much better.

Paul over at YSDC has now posted the first episode of the "Tatters Of The King" audiogame on the forum and - month by month - that thread will now grow with more episodes, art and commentary about what is already shaping up to be a very memorable game based on Chaosium's excellent campaign book.

Whether you're a tabletop roleplayer or not, these binaurally recorded Call of Cthulhu roleplaying sessions are a lot of fun to listen to. Think of it as kinda an improvised play in (probably) around 30x 2-3hr episodes, all for free.

Over a year ago now, when the Tatters game was first planned, Paul asked me to compose some music to go along with the game and so - very gradually - I've been putting together tracks that express some of what I feel about the Tatters Of The King campaign, about the Hastur mythology as it appears in Call of Cthulhu and about the King In Yellow and Chambers' original work. All in all, these things make for some deeply inspiring source material.

The end result is the album which in the end I did decide to call "Tattered". You can hear the whole thing for free on my Last.fm profile page if you're interested.

I've also just uploaded shots of the CD Cover and a virtual cover for the MP3 download edition.

Tatters of the King9 October 2009

The Upper House is a track from my new soundtrack for the YSDC/BURPS Tatters of the King audiogame. You can download it for free right on the forum thread page there.

The rest of the album - which I think I'm calling just "Tattered", but haven't quite decided yet - will be released here and there when I get the necessary arrangements made (and is already freely available to YSDC Patrons).This particular track relates to the vast, eerie monastery on the Plateau of Leng where certain monstrous events are likely to take place in the audiogame.

Dear Esther30 September 2009

"Dear Esther" is a unique videogame. Some wouldn't call it a game at all.

Presented as a free downloadable add-on for Valve's Half-Life 2 game, it is a product of Portsmouth (UK) University's TheChineseRoom research unit.

As the unidentified protagonist you explore what appears to be a bleak Hebridean island in a first-person view and - at numerous points around the isle that you may or may not reach - fragments of story are narrated, pieces of soundtrack are played and symbolism and metaphor are played out in your surroundings. A story is written upon the island, its words fragmented across the hilltops, beaches, cliffs and caves. The more you explore, the more of the story you'll encounter.

There aren't any guns or monsters, no brain-teasing puzzles or platform-jumping games - you just explore, look and listen and the story reveals itself.

The effect it creates is greatly enhanced by the achingly beautiful Jessica Curry soundtrack (which is actually freely available to download whether you play the game or not) and by Nigel Carrington's superb voice performance as the narrator.

There's a little bit of art, couple shots from the game, a better explanation and some notable quotes from reviewers on the project page that ought to convince you to play if you're still in two minds after all my rambling effervescence. Now, it's some time since Dear Esther was released and it's won numerous accolades for its script, concept and audio. Its graphics, whilst far from poor, were fairly ordinary. The idea, the story and the accoustics always seemed rather more important than the graphics.

Now though, talented artist and modder Robert Briscoe is giving Esther a visual - and to some degree structural - overall. Maps, models and textures are all being updated and improved to make the island seem more real and the experience more immersive. The work in progress on new textures and maps looks amazing. There are a few terrific before-and-after shots on this page and many more beautiful images throughout Briscoe's blog.

It may be some time before the new version of Esther becomes available but looking at its websites today got me all nostalgic over the engrossing and moving experience of playing this "game" and very enthusiastically looking forward to the overhauled re-release.

Fun with Hastur12 September 2009

I help out around the database over at Yog-Sothoth.com (hereafter known as YSDC) the bubbling hub at the centre of the web when it come to all things Cthulhu-gaming related.

Well, with a third major audiogame behind them ("Walker in the Waste"), the resident roleplaying team are just about to set off on a new adventure I'm very excited about. "Tatters of the King" is just the most gorgeous Call of Cthulhu campaign ever. Full of mystery, horror, drama and pathos. The Hastur mythology - around which the campaign obviously revolves - is some of the most surreal and beautiful weirdness to come out of the whole "Cosmic Horror" school.

I was asked - nearly a year ago I think - to work on a soundtrack to accompany the new audiogame podcast series and wrote a few tracks at the time which I'm fairly pleased with. Then something unspeakable happened to my PC and the economy kinda fell over too. That led to rather a long sojourn in the world of trying-to-make-enough-money-to-eat but - with luck - the end of that long, shoggoth-filled corridor may be dimly in sight.

So anyway, with the audiogame about to start I managed to squeeze in a bit of time to work on some new tracks. It's all about inspiration, I find. I very seldom ever just sit down to "spend time writing music". I either had some tune appear in my head and I'm trying to dig it out of there or I'm working to a specific goal - as with the Tatters themes. Reading the scenario is obviously wonderful inspiration; there are scenes in there that honestly make the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. But another great source of inspiration is art.

I have some aimless Hastur-related doodling of my own I'll probably never get around to polishing enough to upload but far more useful has been the work of others.

It surprises me how little overtly Hasturian art there is around given the mythology's - to me - rich, evocative atmosphere. Nonetheless, I have a few noteworthy things to point at and they've all helped me cook up some music ideas.

Over on Livejournal a feller by the name of Catfish Charlie has a rather lovely image of the tattered King himself.

Then here on DA, ~gutterball's King in Yellow speaks very closely of certain scenes from the Tatters campaign book. Those hypnotic eyes and the sweeping vacuum of motion in the image create a great feeling of vast alien spaces, of a strange miasma of horror and love. Great stuff!

Viktor Kvant's impressive Lovecraftian gallery on his Dreamhours.com site has a touch of Hastur in there including an especially strange "King in Yellow". The whole gallery is well worth a look for the Lovecraft fan.

Best of all when it comes to Hastur-related imagery here on DA has to be a pair of images by the talented ~sandpaperdaisy.

Cassilda has the most stunning satiny textures happening and captures an amazing expression of wistful, distant, despair.

The staggering King in Yellow is likely my favorite thing on the whole of DA. There's so much utterly monsterous horror packed into this image, and yet all inferred and vague, dreamy and confusing - the perfect Hastur mythos image.

Well I'd better get back to writing. The eventual Tatters music is likely to be first heard from YSDC on the Tatters audiogame and/or Yog-Radio podcasts but should eventually make it to my Last.fm or theSixtyOne profile pages.

Older News

Normal service will resume shortly
1 June 2009

Knights of the Dinner Table
4 April 2009

Lovecraftian Tales Update
28 March 2009

Lovecraftian Tales
23 March 2009

World Builder
14 March 2009

Avatar Deluge
12 March 2009

Pickman's Model
2 March 2009

Articles

TIS3 in production17 October 2008

Over at Arkhamsoft, the production team for Quin's Intern's Story - part 3 project is now up and running. The team currently comprises Quin, Bud, DarthKiwi, Sylv, Warge and myself. There may still be a couple more names to add to that in the coming weeks but work is already under way with maps, models, scripts, music and artwork all starting to appear. This third part of Intern is by far the most ambitious yet and, under Quin's direction, should turn out to be a very memorable addition to the annals of Lovecraftian videogaming.

1400 Alt Names10 October 2008

The Book of Alt Names passed another couple milestones recently. With the ongoing contribution of lots of creative folks there are now over 1400 original names for Cthulhu Mythos deities, monsters and spells and over 4000 votes have been cast.

Image Retargetter21 April 2008

Image Retargetting, or "Content Aware Image Resizing" is a term coined by Drs Ariel Shamir and Shai Avidan in defining a process where by images can be stretched or squashed, horizontally or vertically without important parts of the image being distorted.

In simple terms, Image Retargetting allows you to make images wider, narrower, taller or shorter without smooshing up the important details. Normally, if you were to stretch or squeeze a family photograph, the people in the shot would look too wide/tall/thin/short and it'd be obvious to anyone looking at the image that it had been distorted. With Image Retargetting, you can stretch (or shrink) the image, without your distorting your folks out of shape!

The Image Retargetter is a sleek, powerful and feature-packed tool that'll allow you to resize and change the aspect ratio of your images in exactly this way. You can even export unique image display applets that, placed on any website, will allow your images to stretch - without distorting - to fit any layout.

Allicorn Music

Tattered

A soundtrack produced for the Yog-Sothoth.com audiogame of the spectacular Chaosium "Call of Cthulhu" roleplaying campaign Tatters of the King which is themed on the Hastur mythos.

You can listen to the whole thing free on my Last.fm page and buy it on CD or digital download for as little as £3 at Lulu.com.

In Remote Places

My album inspired by the spectacular horror fiction of H.P.Lovecraft. You can download a couple free tracks, find more information and buy the album for as little as £3.99 at the In Remote Places page.

Music at Last.fm

The monolithic MP3 monster that is Last.fm probably contains more music than you could listen to in an entire lifetime. You can hear a whole heap of my material on there including the entire Tattered, In Remote Places, Emancipation, Network and Pareidolia albums, all for free. Here's my Last.fm page.

Music at The61

The61 is a great little music appreciation social network with some of the slickest DHTML+AJAX interface ideas you'll see anywhere. Here's my profile there.

Allicorn Art / Blogs

DeviantArt profile

DeviantArt is a whopping great vault full of art of many kinds. It provides one of the better examples of a user-content-driven, AJAX-heavy "Web 2.0" site (IMHO) and - of course - is stuffed full of excellent arty content. Here's my DeviantArt profile page. This is my main "blog". Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and all those other awful sites are just stubs to keep things tied together.

Arkhamsoft blog

I don't update this that often. There's rarely - these days - anything I would say there but not on DA. Nonetheless, it's here.

MySpace profile

This is my MySpace profile page. Basically a stub-profile to connect that social network to this page although you'll find some music there and a handful of older blog articles.

Facebook profile

An even more pointless and narcissistic place than MySpace (which at least for a time appeared to be about music promotion and sharing). I have a stub profile there too to link that network to this page. The address is www.facebook.com/allicorn.

Twitter page

The address is www.twitter.com/AllicornUK. I use their convenient RSS syndication to post links to updates across various sites which help keep them tied together. If you're not interested in anything I have to say but like the free media content then this is the link for you.

Allicorn Projects

The Book of Alternative Dead Names

The bizarre deities and freakish monsters of H.P.Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos are frequently known by many names. At The Book of Alternative Dead Names you can look up the ingenious alternate names for Deities, Monsters and forbidden knowledge that folks have submitted. You can vote on which you like most. Best of all, you can submit your own!

Pixelponies

My Cafepress Store with lots of 8-bit retro style apparel with a predictably horsey theme.

Arkhamsoft

Styling ourselves as a Cthulhu content collective, Arkhamsoft is a loose band of various creative sorts who all happen to be far too fascinated by H.P.Lovecraft and enjoy producing digital media - especially video games - with Lovecraftian themes.

Yog-Sothoth

Yog-Sothoth.com is Grand Central for all things Cthulhu-gaming related on the web. I hang out there and help out with the site a little. I'm easily reached there.

Gilt-Edged Management Systems

Another company I'm involved with. At GEMS, we apply cutting edge web technologies to develop unique solutions for specific business needs. Our star product at the moment is GEMS Help, a suite of subscription-based hosted services including project management, contract assurance, CRM, stock control, helpdesk and more.

Allicorn Art Feed

Tattered - mp3 version31 October 2009

Art to identify the digital download version of "Tattered" my soundtrack produced to accompany the YSDC "Tatters of the King" audiogame. More blurbs on my website. You can listen to the whole thing...

Tattered31 October 2009

CD cover art for "Tattered" my soundtrack produced to accompany the YSDC "Tatters of the King" audiogame. More blurbs on my website. You can listen to the whole thing for free at my Last.fm profile.

DA newstyle avatar Starchild3 October 2009

Giant wallpaper still from this wacky animation starring the DA starey-eyed default avatar guy who features in a whole collection of animations and pics.1680x1050, POV

Knowledge23 September 2009

This is one of a set of several images made for use as backdrops in the interface of the CMS and intranet of a hi-tech client. Some new branding just meant these are all no longer in use and I figu...

Fibreoptic23 September 2009

This is one of a set of several images made for use as backdrops in the interface of the CMS and intranet of a hi-tech client. Some new branding just meant these are all no longer in use and I figu...