Call of Cthulhu is a horror fiction role-playing game based on H. P. Lovecraft's story of the same name and the associated Cthulhu Mythos.

The term was first coined by August Derleth, a contemporary correspondent of Lovecraft, who used the name of the creature Cthulhu — a central figure in Lovecraft literature and the focus of Lovecraft's famous short story The Call of Cthulhu ( first published in pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928 )— to identify the system of lore employed by Lovecraft and his literary successors.

Although not formalised and acknowledged as a mythos per se, Lovecraft did correspond with contemporary writers ( Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long, Henry Kuttner, and Fritz Lieber – a group referred to as the " Lovecraft Circle ") – and shared story elements: Robert E. Howard's character Friedrich Von Junzt reads Lovecraft's Necronomicon in the short story " The Children of the Night " ( 1931 ), and in turn Lovecraft mentions Howard's Unaussprechlichen Kulten in the stories " Out of the Aeons " ( 1935 ) and " The Shadow Out of Time " ( 1936 ).

Black Sabbath's " Behind the Wall of Sleep " appeared on their 1970 debut album and is based on Lovecraft's short story " Beyond the Wall of Sleep ".

Progressive metal band Dream Theater's song " The Dark Eternal Night " is based on Lovecraft's story " Nyarlathotep ".

" Gramma ", a short story made into a film in the 1980s anthology horror show The New Twilight Zone, mentions Lovecraft's notorious fictional creation Necronomicon, also borrowing the names of a number of the fictional monsters mentioned therein.

Lovecraft Historical Society produced a silent film version of Lovecraft's story The Call of Cthulhu.

Lovecraft's short story " The Rats in the Walls " makes reference to Trimalchio, reading, " There was a vision of a Roman feast like that of Trimalchio, with a horror in a covered platter.

* Robert Harrison Blake, a character based on Robert Bloch from H. P. Lovecraft's short story " The Haunter of the Dark "

Lovecraft's celebrated short story, The Call of Cthulhu ( 1928 ), the titular entity emerges from the vast and ancient alien city of R ' lyeh, which is described in terms of " non-Euclidean geometry " and contains angles which are " all wrong " ( appearing acute but behaving as if obtuse, for example ) and planes which could be horizontal or slanted depending on how the observer looks at them.

According to Lovecraft's short story, R ' lyeh is a sunken city in the South Pacific and the prison of the entity called Cthulhu.

Shub-Niggurath is first mentioned in Lovecraft's revision story " The Last Test " ( 1928 ); she is never actually described in Lovecraft's fiction, but is frequently mentioned or called upon in incantations.

The reference to " Astarte ", the consort of Baal in Semitic mythology, ties Shub-Niggurath to the related fertility goddess Cybele, the Magna Mater mentioned in Lovecraft's " The Rats in the Walls ", and implies that the " great mother worshipped by the hereditary cult of Exham Priory " in that story " had to be none other than Shub-Niggurath.

The Black Goat may be the personification of Pan, since Lovecraft was influenced by Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan ( 1890 ), a story that inspired Lovecraft's " The Dunwich Horror " ( 1929 ).

Despite similarities in theme and name, Nyarlathotep does not feature at all in Lovecraft's story " The Crawling Chaos ", ( 1920 / 21 ) an apocalyptic narrative written in collaboration with Winifred V. Jackson ( aka Elizabeth Berkeley ).

The name was first applied to the creatures in Lovecraft's short story " The Whisperer in Darkness " ( 1931 ), elaborating on a reference to ' What fungi sprout in Yuggoth ' in his sonnet cycle Fungi from Yuggoth ( 1929 – 30 ) which described the contrasting vegetation on alien dream-worlds.

Lovecraft's horror short story The Shadow Over Innsmouth says that he originally came from Panton.

For example, one of the " hints " that Raglan James leaves Lestat is a copy of H. P. Lovecraft's short story, The Thing on the Doorstep.

It appears, inter alia, as an illustration in Jorge Luis Borges ' famous essay " A New Refutation of Time ", and may have inspired H. P. Lovecraft's 1918 short story " Polaris ".

Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright first rejected the story, and only accepted it after writer Donald Wandrei, a friend of Lovecraft's, falsely claimed that Lovecraft was thinking of submitting it elsewhere.

Lovecraft's short story.

The story was frequently anthologized even during Lovecraft's lifetime, including in Dashiell Hammett's 1931 collection Creeps by Night.

The phrase " mad Arab ", sometimes with both words capitalized in Lovecraft's stories, is used so commonly before Alhazred's name that it almost constitutes a title.

Lord Dunsany, Edward Plunkett, has been cited as a major influence on both this tale and other of Lovecraft's works

It has also been noted that this is one of Lovecraft's most famous tales in both this and the " weird fantasy " style.

Critic William Fulwiler argues that Edgar Rice Burroughs ' At the Earth's Core was one of Lovecraft's primary inspirations for " The Nameless City ", citing " the reptile race, the tunnel to the interior of the earth, and the ' hidden world of eternal day '" as elements common to both tales.

In both editions, players take on the role of investigators in H. P. Lovecraft's Massachusetts town of Arkham.

Abdul is a common Arabic name component ( but never a name by itself ; additionally the ending-ul and the beginning Al-are redundant ), but Alhazred may allude to Hazard, a pun on the book's destructive and dangerous nature, or a reference to Lovecraft's ancestors by that name.

The last major reference in Lovecraft's fiction to Azathoth was in 1935's " The Haunter of the Dark ", which tells of " the ancient legends of Ultimate Chaos, at whose center sprawls the blind idiot god Azathoth, Lord of All Things, encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers, and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a demonic flute held in nameless paws.

Lovecraft's books ( e. g., The Hobb's End Horror in reference to The Dunwich Horror ).

H. P. Lovecraft is also an important touchstone for Ligotti: a few stories, " The Sect of the Idiot " in particular, make explicit reference to Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, and one, " The Last Feast of Harlequin ," was dedicated to Lovecraft.

", which is a reference to H. P. Lovecraft's fiction, specifically the body of work encompassing the Cthulhu Mythos.

Lovecraft's first mention of the Old Ones appears in his most famous story, “ The Call of Cthulhu ” ( 1926 ), where he uses the term in reference to Cthulhu's spawn.

Franklin's past — with his attempts to re-animate the dead and subsequent exile from the scientific community — may be a reference to Dr. Herbert West from H. P. Lovecraft's Herbert West, Re-Animator.

Lovecraft's novel The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, a winged creature called " the Shantak-bird " is described as having " the head of a horse ", also as " big as an elephant " with " scales instead of feathers ".

Brian Lumley instead associated them with the creature Yibb-Tstll, noting that they " suckle " at the creature's " black breasts "-suggesting that they possess a mouth, which would seem to contradict Lovecraft's description of them as " faceless ", although it is possible that the creature's mouths are somehow concealed, or that Lumley was speaking metaphorically.

The creature was first mentioned in Lovecraft's novella The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath ( 1926 ).

The creature first appeared in H. P. Lovecraft's short story " The Shadow out of Time " ( 1936 ).

* The creature known as Dagon is first introduced in Lovecraft's 1917 tale of the same name.

The being was created by British author Ramsey Campbell, who was inspired by a similar creature in H. P. Lovecraft's commonplace book.

Cthulhu is a fictional giant creature, one of the Great Old Ones in H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos.