Skotos Releases H.P. Lovecraft Comic

BERKELEY, CA, August 2, 2005 — Skotos Tech has released a new Cthulhu Mythos comic, Lovecraft Country: Return to Arkham. This moody black and white piece, available for free download at Skotos, is by Shannon Appelcline and illustrated by Saffronrage Solutions.

Lovecraft Country: Return to Arkham is set in and around H.P. Lovecraft's Miskatonic University during the Summer of 1933. Seth Fletcher has traveled to Arkham in search of his brother, gone missing years before, and his explorations will lead him into some of Arkham's strangest locales.

"I consider it a sort of introduction to Arkham," says writer Shannon Appelcline. "We visit many of its more prosaic locations, including Miskatonic University, the Arkham Sanitarium, and one of the several graveyards dotting the city. In the meantime we see an interesting story unraveling, about not just the quest for a missing sibling, but also an investigation into the nature of what is real."

Skotos Tech's two Lovecraftian games, The Tomb of the Desert God and Arkham by Night, form the background of Return to Arkham. Set in between these games, the comic details the aftermath of Tomb's Moroccan expedition, but utilizes the heavily-detailed urban setting of Arkham by Night, a setting previously outlined by game company Chaosium in their H.P. Lovecraft's Arkham supplement, and originally described by H.P. Lovecraft himself in numerous stories.

Return to Arkham is Skotos' second comic book, following their successful Castle Marrach: Awakenings, a fantasy comic set in a secluded castle. Like Awakenings, Return to Arkham is being released under a non-commercial Creative Commons license which gives other creators on the Internet the right to revise, adapt, modify, and republish the story as they see fit.

"Lovecraft Country was what really got us thinking about the Creative Commons in the first place," says Appelcline. "The Cthulhu Mythos has always been created by 'divers hands', with lots of different writers contributing to an ever-evolving mythology. My story drew most directly upon the writings of Lovecraft, but there's also a little bit of Robert Chambers in there. A few characters were drawn from the Skotos games, while some backgrounds came from Chaosium books written by another collection of various peoples. Our releasing this comic under Creative Commons just makes it official: other authors can use our Cthulhuoid contributions."

Skotos' Lovecraft Country game was released this year, and is available for play at www.lovecraftcountry.com ; the comic is available at www.lovecraftcountry.com/comic.

ABOUT SKOTOS

Founded in 1999, Berkeley, California-based Skotos Tech Inc. (http://www.skotos.net) is a developer and publisher of multiplayer games. Its games all center around socialization and new Internet-based communities. Other games currently published by Skotos include Castle Marrach, The Eternal City, Meridian 59: Sacred Haven, and Monsters! Monsters!: Grendel's Revenge. A group of external developers known as "The Skotos Seven" are already working on the next generation of Skotos games, including Lovecraft Country: Arkham by Night.