This blog marks my self-publishing and Miskatonic Repository debut, with my Cthulhu by Gaslight scenario, An Ill Wind On The Thames.

It’s exciting for this grizzled old hack! Over the past 30 years, I’ve lost count of the newspaper articles, brochures, reports, strategies, advertising, speeches and other crap I’ve written. It paid the bills. Some of it was even good. But this is the first time the baby is entirely mine and the fulfilment of a long-held ambition to publish a story.

It is nice to think this blog could possibly help another creator, but in retrospect my process has been so laborious, unusual and occasionally embarrassing that perhaps the best I can offer is a cautionary tale.

It began in July 2023, in the lead up to Chaosium’s then-anticipated update of the Cthulhu by Gaslight setting. I’m a great lover of hype, since there is little-to-no real excitement to be had in modern life. So I was happily immersing myself in the gaslight milieu. I found some episodes of The Good Friends of Jackson Elias podcast (essential listening) that took a deep dive into the real-life Spiritualism craze of the late 1800s.

And just like that, the entire idea for An Ill Wind On The Thames arrived in my brain.

Lesson One: being struck by this kind of inspiration never happens, except for when it does. So you better grab it.

The story was subsequently augmented with a dash of Hunchback of Notre Dame, which brings me to Lesson Two: steal from the best.

This being Call of Cthulhu, I had to choose a mythos beast to build the scenario around. My choice of monster inspired a title that was immediately declared unreadable by everyone I shared it with.

“Three winds on the Thames?”

“No. Ill winds. Like an omen. It’s a figure of speech.”

“It looks like Roman numerals.”

“No it doesn’t.”

“Yes it does.”

“The Beastie Boys didn’t call their albums Licence to Three or Three Communication.”

“You need to change it.”

“No I don’t. You need to learn how to read.”

Lesson Three: don’t listen to anybody, except for when you should (and check the cover font to see how I eventually solved this problem).

With only a few scribbled notes and the story wedged in my brain, like a couch in a lift, I inflicted it on a group for a first playtest. This provided a proof of concept, more scribbled notes and identified gaps, which I later filled with often unnecessary details, like the history of London’s sewerage system.

Lesson Four: don’t include a history of London’s sewerage system (even though it is really interesting).

The grind of playtesting and rewriting was interrupted by ChaosiumCon Australia in June 2024. For which I did the obvious thing of suddenly deciding to write an entirely different scenario (see lesson one). More importantly, ChaosiumCon gave me the opportunity to meet people like Chaosium’s Bridgett Jeffries, MOB and to reconnect with Australian legend Mark Morrison. Their generous encouragement left me determined to finish the job (see Lesson Three).

In October 2024, more than a year after I started, I foolishly claimed on this very blog that I had ‘finished’ a second draft. It was a major milestone, but what I couldn’t know at that time was the complete upending of my entire life that was just around the corner – in the form of an American Staffordshire Terrier.

I cannot overstate just what a poor decision getting a puppy was, in terms of my creative output. This project could have been completed at least five months earlier, if this dog had not begun chewing up every spare moment of my waking life, along with a pair of my wife’s shoes, every chair leg in the house and the pen from my Kindle Scribe. One of the nice ones.

Lesson Five: puppies are the real horror.

The crunch of learning to use Affinity Publisher and the realisation I had written a behemoth both arrived, not coincidentally, around the same time. Despite having years of publishing experience to fall back on, I still found it very difficult doing everything myself, especially without the benefit of an external deadline.

Happily, I had incredible luck finding my artist, the very talented Martin Kuhn. After a few late nights browsing Deviant Art, Martin said “yes” to a random request from the other side of the world, since he liked the idea of a Lovecraftian story without the cliché of tentacles. Martin joined a small group of fellow professionals and semi-professionals I was lucky to have available for editing and proofing.

Lesson Six: it’s worth paying for good art, good editing and good software.

Lesson Seven: (you probably already know this last one) if you’re in it to make money, forget about it. I’ll be lucky to recoup my expenses and I’ll never recoup my time, but that’s not the point.

The point is: at the end of this process I have fulfilled a life’s ambition of willing a story into life that wasn’t there before, and sharing it.

There’s a lot more I could say about RPGs as storytelling, working in communications, why this ambition has taken so long to realise, why it happened now, my future plans for the Miskatonic Repository, the vanity of starting a website as a writer who hadn’t finished anything, and mostly about my dog. But I’m well over my word limit.

If you have read this far, thank you. I hope you enjoy An Ill Wind On The Thames. It was made with love.

Seven lessons from my first Miskatonic Repository scenario

A whole new world o’ hurt