From the site of the callipygian Salome.

Today I can finally announce the identity of the special guest contributor to the Red Phone Box story collection to be published by Ghostwoods Books in October.

Warren Ellis has agreed to write a story for the collection. We have many talented writers in the project, but having a story from Warren in the book is obviously a huge treat for all of us.

As you may or may not know, like many games writers I’m also a frustrated author. The lovely Salome has taken on three of my stories for the Red Phone Box collection which, as you can see, is also being contributed to by one of my favourite creative people ever.

So, I’m sure you’ll all buy it. If you go to the site you can read some (quite a few) of these braided stories of the weird and get a taste for it.

Urban Faerie: Cthulings

Art by the awesome Dave Allsop

Cthuling’s

For Urban Faerie

Cthuling’s aren’t faeries but are a related creature, dependent upon man’s consciousness and concocted out of the leftovers of ancient, bloody, unsympathetic gods, fears of the alien and of Frankenstein science that is beyond the ken of normal folk.

Given such a terrifying pedigree you would expect the Cthulings to be powerful, nasty, demigods that could devastate both the real world and faerieland but, while they are nasty little bastards that can cause no end of havoc in both realms they’re actually more of a nuisance than a truly horrifying danger – though they have ambitions.

The gradual erosion of the horror that elder gods once held – either in religion or in fiction – into cartoonish shorthand for a cynical ‘the horror, the horror’ with a knowing, postmodern wink, has simultaneously lead to their longevity and power – such as it is – and their diminishing into a joke. Something that really, really grips their shit.

Cthuling’s have a Napoleon complex to end all Napoleon complexes and so many chips on their shoulder you’d think someone had built a Wimpy there. They desperately want to be terrifying and frightening and come up with complex and nefarious schemes to try and restore human and faerie horror. Needless to say this risks drawing attention and harm upon the faerie world, directly or indirectly and this places the Seedy and Unseedy Faerie courts in direct opposition to these cute, cuddly wittle elder gods.

Muscle: 2
Skill: 3
Wits: 5
Magick: 4
Luck: 1
Good At: ‘Intricate plots and schemes’ OR ‘Being incredibly cute’.
Earning Charms: Cthuling’s earn charms by destroying ‘cutesy’ mythos artifacts or genuinely scaring people.
Spending Charms: The Stars are Right – By spending a charm the Cthuling is considered to have a statistic of 6 for a single roll.