The audio from the June Fringe meeting is now online. I continue to cringe about the sound quality, but Jo has recently invested in a new amp, so hopefully the next set of readings will be much better.

David J. Rodger was our first reader. He presented a Cthulhu Mythos tale set in Nazi-occupied Norway during WWII. David is clearly aware that all Finns are evil witches.

Pete Sutton gave us a quick peek at a novel he is writing, featuring seven Crusader knights. He followed that by another of his magpie stories.

Finally we have the traditional Q&A.

There are lots of things arising from that which require notes.

When Pete mentions that Jo writes Grimdark he is, of course, referring to our own Joanne Hall, not that Abercrombie fellow who doesn’t have nearly the same body count.

We mention that Pete read another magpie story at something called Word of Mouth. I do have the audio from that, but it turned out to be too long for the BristolCon podbean account (without upgrading) so I’m going to run it on Salon Futura.

David makes mention of something called BRP. That’s Chaosium’s Basic Role Playing system, which formed the core of all of the rule sets they produced back in the day.

If you’d like to know more about David’s work with the Cthulhu Mythos, he has a guest post about it on Pete’s blog. I’d like to have a much longer chat with him about how you use the Mythos these days. A pub event after he’d had a few beers was not the right time to do it.

The deadly Call of Cthulhu scenario that David refers to is “Roots” by Simon Brake which appears in the collection, Things We Leave Behind from Stygian Fox.

And finally, Wikipedia has little to say about alternative versions of the magpie song, other than to confirm Pete’s assertion that the version he is using is older than the one used by the TV programme.