Sandy Petersen 🪔
@SandyofCthulhu • 82,005 subscribers
Game Designer and Father of Lovecraftian gaming. CEO of Petersen Games. Also Doom, Age of Empires, etc. Subscribe for exclusive game insights & history!
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I took my 12yo grandson to see Godzilla Minus One in the theater. He was of course excited, but I was a little concerned because would it be too scary. The WHOLE MOVIE he was sitting forward in his seat, his hands gripping the armrests, staring unblinking, jaw agape. He was picking up on stuff I didn't get. But you need to know my grandson has an eidetic (photographic) memory. So I'm watching it, and there's a report that Godzilla is seen near Giza. Big deal I think, but my grandson gasps and says "Oh no!" Because HE had remembered that the girl got a job in Giza. But I had not. When it ended, I asked my grandson if it was too scary. He said, breathlessly, "No!" Then I asked him what was the best part, and he said, "Every part was the best part." I reluctantly had to say that despite my great love for the original 1954 movie, Godzilla Minus One beats it. Two other facts: 1) The IJN Takao was a real ship which survived the war. It even survived Leyte Gulf! 2) Godzilla Minus One cost less than $15 million. We could have made 25 of them for the cost of Avatar: The Way of Water. Or 15 for the cost of Wakanda Forever. Godzilla Minus One punked the American movie system so hard.
Sandy Petersen 🪔407,988 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
For those doubting, Thai commercials are the best in the world. Possibly the entire solar system.
Sandy Petersen 🪔1,980,926 Aufrufe • vor 8 Monaten
Way back in 1975, the early days of D&D, my friend Steve created a huge single-floor dungeon. Instead of traveling up and down to get to harder sections, the monsters (and treasures) got higher level as you wandered further from the entry. The rooms were sorted into clear neighborhoods. It was innovative for 1975. In the exact middle of the place was a chamber with an enormous pile of loose bricks. The bricks detected as magical, so naturally we piled as many as we could into our packs to carry out of the dungeon. Our plan being to figure out what they did later on. We could only carry a hundred pounds or so at a time each, so had to keep going to the central chamber and returning. Eventually we noticed that the pile of bricks we'd stacked in our wagon outside the dungeon wasn't getting bigger, and we figured out that the bricks' "magic" was that they randomly over time teleported back to the central chamber. So what? Well, our party members were always encumbered with bricks, moving at the slowest rate of 6" per turn. And the dungeon's monsters were packed with slow, but tough, things like mummies, giant slugs, shambling mounds, golems, etc. Which now could catch us. We were also going along a predictable route - to and from the chamber, so the smarter monsters set up ambushes for us. Really it was one of the most subtle and clever holistic "traps" I've ever seen, because everything worked in concert. There was no lock to pick, no pit to avoid. It just depended on greed and the dungeon's natural layout. Calling you out though Steve because that was a dirty trick, but what a fun dungeon. Later Steve got a job with TSR and designed one of their minigames (Saga, if you're curious). Even later, he got me in touch with Greg Stafford of Chaosium which eventually allowed me to publish Call of Cthulhu with them and launch my gaming career. So I guess I owe all to Steve, despite those damn bricks.
Sandy Petersen 🪔55,362 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Spears are the best melee weapon ever invented, and we inherited them from earlier hominids (probably Homo erectus). With a spear, a human can take on a lion with a pretty good chance of success. The Masai tribe used to require its youth to kill a lion with a spear as a rite of manhood. Every kid. Spears in some version dominated every battlefield. Yes the Romans used gladius & shield, but they also carried spears (pila). Yes knights carried swords, but at Agincourt, the dismounted English knights used their lances as spears against the French chivalry. Even when firearms came out, spears were used. Up till near the end of the 17th century, pikes were used to protect musketeers from cavalry. The pikes were only discarded when bayonets were invented - allowing every musket to be its own spear. We still use bayonets today of course, but the vastly superior weapons of our age make it mostly superfluous. But the spear is the weapon that put us on top of the food chain, and that won almost every battle fought up till the 19th century. Lindybeige (the guy in the video) did the actual experiment. He had a bunch of guys who had never used spears before battle a bunch of guys who were somewhat familiar with swords. The spears win and win and win.
Sandy Petersen 🪔122,094 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
This is my favorite anti-tank rifle. It's from World War I. I know it's not the best, but it's cool because it looks like a real rifle, instead of a technological nightmare (like the Finnish and Japanese weapons). It only has a pistol grip because it's impossible to wrap your hand around the giant stock.
Sandy Petersen 🪔131,473 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
1960s Czech movies are crazy, as well as crazy good. Here's a few I've seen that YOU ought to watch as well: Fantastic Planet (1967 Franco-Czech co-production; better science fiction film than any anime I've seen) Prague Nights (1969) horror/fantasy anthology Invention For Destruction (1958) the most amazing "animation" I've ever seen, based on a strange combination of cardboard cut-outs, stop-motion, and live-action. Everyone ought to see this. The trailer is shown below. Also, Karel Zeman, the director of Invention For Destruction, did a bunch of other crazy fantasy movies all worth watching. One's about some boy scouts who sail down a river into the past and meet prehistoric monsters.
Sandy Petersen 🪔59,683 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
If you haven't seen this awesome video, check it out. I love The Cultists on YouTube. I take a tiny bit of credit for their existence, because Lovecraft was basically almost unknown before Call of Cthulhu the game came out and it spread far and wide among gamers. Then in 1985 his lore got even more pumped up with Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator and the film geeks. All of that spreading throughout the various nerd subcultures made Lovecraft so beloved that The Cultists can make now make a whole heavy metal muppet Lovecraft alphabet and it's GREAT.
Sandy Petersen 🪔40,748 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
Here are ten battles in which I believe the bad guys won, and it led to ill consequences: 1) Ain Jalut - Mongols defeated by Mamelukes. The Mongols had so much freedom of religion that their general was a Christian. He asked the Crusader states to help out, but they didn't to their everlasting shame. He might have won otherwise. 2) Poltava - Swedes defeated by Peter the Great. If the Swedes had won, they would have controlled the Baltic. While Charles XII himself wasn't a "good guy" Sweden has been benign, as opposed to Russia, which has been 90% a force of darkness in the world. 3) Manzikert. Look it up. 1/3
Sandy Petersen 🪔29,708 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
Frankenstein In the original novel, the female monster is never completed. Instead, Dr. Frankenstein, in a fit of sanity, destroys it; while the monster peers in through a window. The doctor's reason for his actions is that if the monsters can reproduce, they'll outcompete us, and replace humanity. Now, modern genetic theory might say the monster's kids would be normal humans, because they'd just be whatever their gonads produced. But Dr. Frankenstein is before Mendelian theory so didn't knjow that. On the other hand, it's possible that the chemicals and lightning and all that stuff would affect the monster children in some way, making them monstrous as well, even though they wouldn't be assembled from dead chunks. What is your theory?
Sandy Petersen 🪔14,373 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Lovecraft created the twisted fertility goddess Shub-Niggurath, but never actually wrote a story where she takes a major role. At most we encounter other beings who worship her. Most prominently are the fungi from Yuggoth, the dread mi-go. As fungus organisms, you'd think they wouldn't care about sex, and perhaps they don't, but man alive they LOVE fecundity.
Sandy Petersen 🪔33,052 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
This is of the funniest tales from MicroProse. This happened after the company started going to hell about 1992, after it went public. We were all loyal to the company until around that time, when the rot set in. Basically when we learned the company was no longer loyal to US, it cut both ways. The president had replaced his leaders with VPs who were yes-men. We could see Sid Meier, Andy Hollis and other luminaries quietly cutting their losses. And that's when the Brown Bomber put the icing on the cake.
Sandy Petersen 🪔18,794 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
If you read "The Call of Cthulhu" carefully, and do some research, it's possible to work out the size of the creature encountered by the Emma's crew. The narrator says it's "Cthulhu" but we don't know this for sure. It might have "just" been a starspawn. I've done the math for you in the video below. Cutting to the chase, it turns out that Cthulhu is an exceedingly convenient size for tabletop roleplayers. He is, in fact, the same size with respect to humans that the average gamemaster is with respect to 28mm figures. You can scoop up your players' minis in your green flabby claw and say, "This is Cthulhu's size to you puny mortals. Roll for initiative." Cthulhu doesn't even need to regenerate to shrug off their tiny swords and arrows. A mighty wizard's lightning bolt is like a carpet spark. And if that size isn't enough for you, just take it for granted that the monster in the story wasn't Cthulhu, and the real deal is even bigger. Or you can assume Cthulhu has shrunk during the past 12,000 years (the last time he was out and about, causing the Pleistocene extinction) but will soon bulk larger.
Sandy Petersen 🪔21,388 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten
A reminder of what my channel and posts are all about.
Sandy Petersen 🪔12,036 Aufrufe • vor 8 Monaten
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