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Call of Cthulhu "Dead Light" Image Pack
🕑 Added 2023-03-21 12:14:56 +0000 UTCMy regular group has a couple members on holiday so we're keeping ourselves entertained for the next two months by playing one-shots in other systems. First among them has been the classic Call of Cthulhu "Dead Light" available from Chaosium.
The set up
I wanted to set it in a modern period (the mid-90s) and set it in a remote forested region of South Africa just north of the sleepy coastal village of Knysna. Of course, you can set it anywhere (and in any period where an old VW Beetle makes sense)... although if you want to play in the usual 1920s, then this image pack is not for you.
I didn't want any maps - not that kind of game, I just wanted evocative images done in the style of a vintage Tales of the Crypt comic book with lush blacks and heavy ink-work. For the character art I wanted to reference as many 90s actors as I could in the same comic book style, again looking for evocative portraits more than for realism. I used the portraits for the pre-generated characters I made for them as well as for the cast of the NPCs.
I built it all in foundry using an image per scene and I made liberal use of lighting and weather FX to bring the images to life. If you mess around with the advanced lighting options you can get some really amazing results with the underlying images, making static lightning glow and ripple. Great stuff. (Let me know if you want my Foundry file, I'll see if I can arrange - of course with no adventure text or monster/npc stats).
We ran the one-shot over two 4hr sessions on back-to-back evenings (they were so excited to see it to its conclusion they all confirmed in session they didn't want to wait a week) — and we had a blast. It was the first time the group had ever played Call of Cthulhu, but they got the hang of it very quickly and enjoyed its simplicity (as compared to the crunch of D&D 5e) for the change of pace. it was exciting right to the very last roll and I can heartily recommend the one shot.
What is in the image pack:
Portraits:
- 74 character portraits
Scene images:
- Dead light start (character select)
- Exterior Road
- Exterior Diner
- Exterior Truck
- Exterior Forest
- Interior Diner
- Interior WC
- Interior Office
- Interior Cottage
- Interior Study
- Node line (to build chases)
Audio:
- VW Beetle Engine sound
Player handouts:
- 2 Journal notes (taken from the adventure but changed under the advice of Seth Skorkowsky on Youtube)
A token for the Dead Light can be found doing an image search on Google. I found this one on Deviant Art by MichaelArkAngel.
Diegetic music
One of the fun things about playing in a modern period is the access to music from the era we oldies (my group is all 30+ and I'm fast approaching 50) have nostalgia for. So I made sure to make a Spotify playlist of period accurate (nothing after 1995) 90s hits that provided clues ("Shine" by Collective Soul) or red herrings ("Zombie" by Cranberries) for the story. I made sure these were playing at the right times during the opening scenes when key events occurred. The characters has access to this music in the game on a bunch of mix tapes that they'd play on their TDK tape deck in their Beetle.
When they enter the Route 66 diner, the owner has a jukebox with only hits from the 1950s. So I just picked this playlist to slow things down after the excitement on the road.
I deejayed all of this via Spotify while running sound effects (rain, weather and horror chords) from Syrinscape. I uploaded the VW Beetle engine sound to Syrinscape, because that vehicle's engine has such a specific sound, I knew I wanted to include it for immersion.
Note on the art
While I did do a little retouching and compositing on every scene image, it is fair to say that the bulk of the heavy lifting on this pack is done by Midjourney v5. I experimented a little on dialling in the style I wanted. Below are two examples of the prompts I used to make the art.
Example prompt for the scene art: "70s pulp vintage comic art, an old powder blue volkswagen beetle drives along a deserted wet tar road twisting through a dark foreboding forest, raining, night sky, rich black ink, light blues and teals --q 2 --ar 3:2"
Prompt for the portrait art: "70s pulp comic book cover, young charlize theron portrait, very short hairstyle, in the style of tales from the crypt, pen and ink, vintage comic --q 2 --ar 2:3"
Formats
Image formats:
png, jpg & webp
Audio formats:
mp3
