Real Life Adventures: Lovecraft’s Providence by Michael Curtis and Brendan LaSalle In celebration of the birthday of one Howard Phillips Lovecraft—he was born on August 20, 1890—we re-present this Real Life Adventure that took two of our own to his birthplace. Goodman Games uses a number of methods to inspire the creativity behind our adventures. What we call “real life adventures” are one such method. This is where we travel to inspirational places or undertake adventurous activities that give us material to write about. In the 2017 Goodman Games Gen Con Program Guide, you can read about several such real life adventures. On July 23, 2017, Michael Curtis and Brendan LaSalle took a trip to Providence, RI – the birthplace of horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, author of “The Call of Cthulhu” and many other well known tales. What follows is the only surviving record of their expedition. To clarify the document’s different narrators, Michael’s account is vertical and Brendan’s is italicized. On a pleasant summer’s day, I found myself in historic Providence, home to Howard Phillips Lovecraft. The purpose of my journey was to explore Lovecraft’s old stomping grounds and experience the city as he did. Joining me for this excursion was Brendan LaSalle, author of—among many things—Age of Cthulhu: A Dream of Japan; Tim Deschene, a Rhode Island native who literally has Lovecraft in his blood; and Brian Courtemanche, a writer for several of Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu books. One could not ask for a better group to investigate Providence’s secrets. Our trip to providence was strange. I kept making jokes about the trip in the days preceding – a famous writer, an ex-military local, the head librarian of a private New England school, and myself heading to Providence to investigate the haunts of the mysterious horror writer the week before a solar eclipse plunges the world into darkness? It was like a Call of Cthuhlu adventure. And with a line-up of investigators like ours I was sure to be the first to die, probably offstage. The jokes were there to cover up a real nervousness I felt. I am not a superstitious man, but I have spent much of my life dreaming up horrors. I don’t believe in the supernatural, but I think about it all the time, and I believe that if it the supernatural is at all real the best chance is that it’s like Lovecraft envisioned – strange and unknowable horrors with alien logic incomprehensible to man. Forget friendly ghosts, quirky witches, and sexy vampires looking for prom dates – if the supernatural is real, it will be precisely the opposite of how we hope it will be. We decided to all read a Lovecraft story before we met. Michael suggested “The Shunned House,” the perfect choice since we were meeting at the house Lovecraft modeled his story on. Reading “The Shunned House” for the first time in probably 20 years, I was struck by its quality. The story invokes horror convention and then completely puts it aside for a wonderfully different take on the Vampire trope, creating a strange, tragic, and horrifying story that ends on a tiny, sweet note of hopefulness that contradicts our expectations of Lovecraft. A masterwork. We began at 135 Benefit St., the location of Lovecraft’s “The Shunned House.” This building dates to 1769 and is one of the many colonial era buildings still standing in Providence. Lovecraft set his tale of ghostly vampirism in this house, as he was familiar with the home from visits to it when an aunt worked there. The house’s bright yellow paint job does little to dismiss the feeling of age hanging about the home—along with the...