Chaosium included d20 stats as an appendix in three releases ( see Lovecraft Country ), but have since dropped the " dual stat " idea.

( See Lovecraft Country.

Detailed map of Lovecraft Country, showing one possible location of Arkham.

Arkham is a fictional city in Massachusetts, part of the Lovecraft Country setting created by H. P. Lovecraft and is featured in many of his stories, as well as those of other Cthulhu Mythos writers.

Dunwich is found in the fictional Miskatonic River Valley of Massachusetts, part of the imaginary region sometimes called Lovecraft Country.

Innsmouth, Massachusetts is a fictional town in the writings of H. P. Lovecraft, part of the Lovecraft Country setting of the Cthulhu Mythos.

* Lovecraft Country

** Reprinted in Return to Lovecraft Country, ed.

Detailed map of Lovecraft Country

Lovecraft Country is a term coined by Keith Herber for the New England setting, combining real and fictitious locations, used by H. P. Lovecraft in many of his weird fiction stories, and later elaborated by other writers working in the Cthulhu Mythos.

In its 1998 supplement Dead Reckonings, Chaosium defined Lovecraft Country as " a land located in the northeast of Massachusetts.

" If one were to replace Martin's Beach with another seaside town, Innsmouth, one would have a list of the most significant locations in Lovecraft Country.

Other Lovecraft stories that make use of Lovecraft Country settings include " The Festival ", " The Colour out of Space ", " The Strange High House in the Mist ", " The Dreams in the Witch House ", and " The Thing on the Doorstep ".

Between 1990 and 1998, Chaosium released a number of Lovecraft Country gamebooks for the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game, series created by author / editor Keith Herber.

Since 1998, the Lovecraft Country name seems to have fallen out of use at Chaosium, though some of the books have been rereleased in the 2000s ( H. P.

Skotos, an online game company, has licensed Chaosium's Lovecraft Country material.

They have produced two games, Lovecraft Country: The Tomb of the Desert God and Lovecraft Country: Arkham by Night, as well as a comic, Lovecraft Country: Return to Arkham, written by Shannon Appelcline.

The name was invented either by Lovecraft, or by Albert Baker, the Phillips ' family lawyer.

It might also have been a pun on " all-has-read ", since Lovecraft was an avid reader in youth.

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.

Writer Dirk W. Mosig notes that Lovecraft was a " mechanistic materialist " who embraced the philosophy of cosmic indifferentism.

Smith was one of " the big three of Weird Tales, along with Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft, where some readers objected to his morbidness and violation of pulp traditions.

") He was a member of the Lovecraft circle, ( Smith's literary friendship with H. P. Lovecraft lasted from 1922 until Lovecraft's death in 1937 ).

It was Smith who in fact later introduced Donald Wandrei to Lovecraft.

This was followed by a fan letter from H. P. Lovecraft, which was the beginning of 15 years of friendship and correspondence.

Clark Ashton Smith was the third member of the great triumvirate of Weird Tales, with Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard.

Between 1947 and 1951 he was the editor at the pioneering paperback publisher Avon Books, where he made available highly affordable editions of the works of A. Merritt, H. P. Lovecraft, and C. S. Lewis ' Silent Planet space trilogy, bringing these previously little-known authors a wide readership.

The most significant of these was H. P. Lovecraft who also wrote an excellent conspectus of the Gothic and supernatural horror tradition in his Supernatural Horror in Literature ( 1936 ) as well as developing a Mythos that would influence Gothic and contemporary horror well into the 21st century.

As he studied many scientific advances of biology, astronomy, geology, and physics, Lovecraft was more and more confounded and fueled his skepticism on humanity.

Lovecraft was also influenced by authors such as Gertrude Barrows Bennett ( who, writing as Francis Stevens, impressed Lovecraft enough that he publicly praised her stories and eventually " emulated Bennett's earlier style and themes "), Oswald Spengler, Robert W. Chambers ( writer of The King in Yellow, of whom Lovecraft wrote in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith: " Chambers is like Rupert Hughes and a few other fallen Titans — equipped with the right brains and education but wholly out of the habit of using them ").

Lovecraft was a keen amateur astronomer from his youth, often visiting the Ladd Observatory in Providence, and penning numerous astronomical articles for local newspapers.

The term " Cthulhu Mythos " was coined by Lovecraft's correspondent and fellow author, August Derleth, after Lovecraft's death ; Lovecraft jocularly referred to his artificial mythology as " Yog-Sothothery ".

Lovecraft was relatively unknown during his own time.

Lovecraft was not a very active letter-writer in youth.

The initial interest in letters stemmed from his correspondence with his cousin Phillips Gamwell but even more important was his involvement in the amateur journalism movement, which was initially responsible for the enormous number of letters Lovecraft produced.

In 2005 the prestigious Library of America canonized Lovecraft with a volume of his stories edited by Peter Straub, and Random House's Modern Library line have issued the " definitive edition " of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness ( also including " Supernatural Horror in Literature ").

Joseph Curwen may be inscribed in the line of characters in Lovecraft stories, including both villains and antiheroes, notable for their individualistic or egocentric demeanor, higher-than-average intelligence or charisma and usually low moral standards, who manage to deal actively with evil, unknown forces while at the same time avoiding the negative side-effects of such activities — even if the latter do affect a variable number of innocent people.

As editor of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line, Carter, in effect created a literary canon of significant fantasy works which though it included the works of pulp writers Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft included other writers not working in that tradition.

Lovecraft said that the story was based on a dream, which was in turn inspired by the last line of Lord Dunsany's story " The Probable Adventure of the Three Literary Men ", quoted in the story itself: " the unreverberate blackness of the abyss ".

Additional milieu were provided by Chaosium with the release of Dreamlands, a boxed supplement containing additional rules needed for playing within the Lovecraft Dreamlands, a large map and a scenario booklet, and Cthulhu By Gaslight, another boxed set which moved the action from the 1920s to the 1890s.

Lovecraft himself humorously referred to his mythos as " Yog Sothothery " ( Mosig coincidentally suggested the term Yog-Sothoth Cycle of Myth be substituted for Cthulhu Mythos ) and at times had to remind readers his mythos creations were entirely fictional.

Writer Will Murray noted that while Lovecraft often used his fictional pantheon in the stories he ghostwrote for other authors, he reserved Arkham and its environs exclusively for those tales he wrote under his own name.

" Derleth himself believed that Lovecraft wished for other authors to actively write about the myth-cycle as opposed to it being a discrete plot device.

With studied playfulness, Smith and Lovecraft borrowed each other's coinages of place names and the names of strange gods for their stories, though so different is Smith's treatment of the Lovecraft theme that it has been dubbed the ' Clark Ashton Smythos '.

Lovecraft portrays this potential for a growing gap of man's understanding of the universe as a potential for horror.

This group of writers became known as the " Lovecraft Circle ", since they all freely borrowed elements of Lovecraft's stories – the mysterious books with disturbing names, the pantheon of ancient alien entities, such as Cthulhu and Azathoth, and eldritch places, such as the New England town of Arkham and its Miskatonic University – for use in their own works with Lovecraft's encouragement.

Prolific American writer Joyce Carol Oates wrote an introduction for a collection of Lovecraft stories.

Although Lovecraft is known mostly for his works of weird fiction, the bulk of his writing consists of voluminous letters about a variety of topics, from weird fiction and art criticism to politics and history.

Lovecraft drew extensively from his native New England for settings in his fiction.

Lovecraft, his influence is apparent in the Lovecraftian feel of the monsters for Quake, and he created the fourth and final " episode " of the game.

In 1932, H. P. Lovecraft also used the figure of The Black Man in his tale " The Dreams in the Witch-House " as a synonym for the Devil, but he also uses the term and description for Nyarlathotep, a malevolent entity of his own creation.

Lovecraft was obsessed with the Arabian Nights and had no doubt read the Fitzgerald translation-the couplet follows Fitzgerald's metre and rhyme pattern for the first half of a Khayyam quatrain.

Lovecraft only provided specific information about Shub-Niggurath in his “ revision tales ”, stories published under the names of clients for whom he ghost-wrote.

The Not-to-Be-Named-One, not being named, is difficult to identify ; a similar phrase, translated into Latin as the Magnum Innominandum, appears in a list in " The Whisperer in Darkness " and was included in a scrap of incantation that Lovecraft wrote for Robert Bloch's " The Shambler from the Stars ".

Nyarlathotep is a name used for various characters in the works of H. P. Lovecraft and other writers.

In a 1921 letter to Reinhardt Kleiner, Lovecraft related the dream he had had — described as " the most realistic and horrible I have experienced since the age of ten " — that served as the basis for his prose poem " Nyarlathotep ".

In 1969, he had written " Lovecraft in Retrospect ", an essay for the fanzine Shadow, " condemning work outright.