Support your friendly local gaming store. Chaosium has built a Google Map of stores that stock their products, organised it, and embedded it on their site as a store locator.
As a pet project, here at Geek Native, we’ve had a bash at writing some mythos-themed overlays to wrap over the Google Map embed that we can all now take use to share Chaosium’s store locator across the web.
Break the seal to locate the nearest hidden archives
As you can see, I’m neither a programmer nor an artist, but JavaScript and CSS can ‘gate’ Chaosium’s arcane collection behind a seal. Dare you break the seal? It’s easier on a desktop!
If you progress further, you can see that we have applied a subtle occult haze to the map’s borders. I think this is the opposite of many mythos stories, which ultimately avoid small and unsettling effects in favour of horrors from beyond space and time.
I have had a rummage through Chaosium’s stockists and come up with five which I think are candidates to appear in a mythos adventure.
- Weird Providence (Providence, Rhode Island): Located in the heart of H.P. Lovecraft’s birthplace, this store is a stone’s throw from the historic sites that inspired “The Haunter of the Dark.” It serves as the primary modern-day archive for anyone visiting the author’s former residences or the Providence Athenaeum.
- Orcs Nest (London, United Kingdom): Situated in the West End, this shop is the perfect starting point for a Cthulhu by Gaslight campaign. It is located near the British Museum, which frequently appears in roleplaying games as the source of forbidden Mesopotamian artefacts and research.
- Harrison’s Comics (Salem, Massachusetts): Salem is the historical “Witch City” and the primary architectural inspiration for the fictional Arkham. Stocking up on roleplaying games here feels appropriately atmospheric, given that you are standing in the city that provided the blueprint for the Miskatonic Valley.
- Henry Bear’s Park (Newburyport, Massachusetts): Newburyport is widely known as the real-world model for the decaying maritime town of Innsmouth. Walking to this store allows investigators to see the same “sagging roofs” and coastal geography described in The Shadow Over Innsmouth.
- Thirsty Meeples (Oxford, United Kingdom): With its dense concentration of ancient libraries and gothic architecture, Oxford is the UK’s closest equivalent to the academic mystery of Miskatonic University. It is an ideal setting to pore over rulebooks in a city defined by scholarly tradition and hidden history.
Lovecraft, a terrible racist, was also a terrible cartographer. The Lovecraft Archive maintains a list of the author’s drawings, which includes this 1934 map of the Principal parts of Arkham, sent to Donald Wandrei.
