Great NPCs of History

We’re back and we’re looking for strange and interesting people. Sure, that drunken man on the bus who shared the details of his entire family’s military history before announcing that he loved us is memorable, but does he have what it takes to become a great Call of Cthulhu NPC? Well, bad example. He’s totally going in our next game. But our point is that when planning historical games, it can be helpful to research some real people. Or take a bus ride in Milton Keynes. Great NPCs can be found everywhere. The true home of horror. Main Topic: Great NPCs of History This is our attempt to find interesting and overlooked figures from history and explore how they might make great NPCs for our Call of Cthulhu games. We had a great deal of fun preparing and recording this episode, so it may become a regular format. We will at least have to record one more episode anyway, as we ran out of time and couldn’t include everyone we wanted to. What we lack in quantity, we try to make up for in quality. Be warned that the latter half of the episode gets weird. One of our subjects was a medical innovator who did things to human bodies that might make you uncomfortable. Then again, isn’t that exactly what you want in a Call of Cthulhu NPC? Surely the last place you’d expect to encounter any weird medical experiments… Links Things we mention in this episode include: * Great Lives on Radio 4 * Hertha Ayrton * “Hertha” by Algernon Charles Swinburne * Girton College, Cambridge * Arc lamps * The Royal Society * The Ayrton fan * Emmeline Pankhurst * Yithians, from “The Shadow Out of Time” * Realism in RPGs * “From Beyond” * Serge Voronoff * Monkey glands * Xenotransplantation * Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard * The Eye (2002) * The Hands of Orlac (1924) (and not “The Hands of Orloff“, as Scott said on the episode!) * Mad Love (1935)