OLDSKULL LIBRARY - The Call of Cthulhu

LOVECRAFT remains unique among the conceptualists and imagination drivers in weird fiction. Not only was he an intellectual and creative genius, he understood the unlimited power inherent in artistic collaboration. He even collaborated intensely with other literary artists that he would never meet. Through such entrusted sharing, he encouraged other writers and visionaries to enmesh their own visions and fantasies with the darkly emergent world of his own Cthulhu Mythos. He sincerely believed that through such shared creation, the unreal unreality of his worlds — their “verisimilitude” — would be exponentially strengthened, thereby creating more deeply resonant works that would cause the reader to involuntarily doubt, and then journey beyond, the perilous borderland which lies between the imagined and the real.

In the spirit of that venturesome sharing beyond time and physical confinement, Wonderland Imprints is proud to present a uniquely illustrated edition of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror masterwork, The Call of Cthulhu. Herein, Lovecraft’s original text has been reimagined as a confessional journal created by F. Wayland Thurston, of Boston, who died soon after he came to the ruinous attention of the Cult of Cthulhu. He was murdered for his heresy of revelation, and the comprehension of the rising of the unearthly corpse city R’lyeh. Instead of treating Thurston’s writings as fiction, I have created a series of artworks which crystallize the events, locales, thoughts, and nightmares experienced by Thurston and his companions.

This volume features 30 full-color plates inspired by Lovecraft’s creation, as well as the full original tale, edited and illustrated by Kent David Kelly. You will not find this otherworldly art gallery elsewhere from other artists or publishers; I created it uniquely for this book as an experiment in immersive storytelling.

Another fine creation from Wonderland Imprints, Only the Finest Works of Fantasy. (12,500 words, 64 pages.)

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Of Note: To avoid confusion, please note that this work is not a supplement to the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game. This is a separate entity, a work of fiction titled and written by H. P. Lovecraft (1926), originally published in Weird Tales (1928), offered forthwith in a uniquely illustrated edition designed as a unique art gallery by Kent David Kelly, of Wonderland Imprints (2022). I hope that you enjoy this experimental journey. Downward …

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For the associated art pack, if you would like to use the licensed art, see here:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/404804/Oldskull-Art-Pack-IV--Cthulhu

Disclaimer: This product contains assets that were procedurally generated with the aid of creative software powered by machine learning.

The software used to create the raw output of this artwork was Midjourney AI, as prompted and curated by Kent David Kelly. Additional necessary refinement software (“Handcrafted” in DriveThruRPG parlance) used by Kent David Kelly to further customize the individual raw AI outputs included the following, with between four and seven software suites being used per piece: [1] Affinity Photo, [2] ChaiNNer, [3] FaceApp, [4] GFPGAN Inference, [5] Microsoft Picture Manager, [6] Paint Classic, [7] PowerPoint, [8] Python Colaboratory (Colab), [9] PyTorch, and [10] 4x_Deviance_60000G.pth.

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