Goodman Games

I got the freebie yesterday, and was impressed that it was somewhat Lovecraftian. Maybe closer to Stuart Gordon's version of Lovecraft (due to the scantily clad women), but the big bad villain was a somewhat mythos-ish cultist who had used the Worms that Walk spell (I think that's the name of it, it's from HPL's short story the Festival)

Are the others in the series like this as well? Or just in the freebie? (I should note that the other Goodman freebie I got, the DCC, was also Lovecraftian, in a different sense (from his story "The Lurking Fear"), so might have been a theme for the free stuff (didn't see the Xcrawl module).

Off topic, but you nailed my influence on Sinister, dead on, Trance.

//H

There was some Lovecraftian influence on Temple of Blood, for sure, but I've never even heard of this "The Festival" story, nor was I aware of its similarity to the new creature template!

It's not one of his more popular stories, but I think it's the first that quotes from the Necronomicon.

Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say, that happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes. For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth's pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Festival

It's actually Call of Cthulhu d20 that has it (and presumably the 5.6 version of BRP cthulhu), although other than the name "The Worm That Walks", it's implemented quite differently. But basically the same idea, becoming undead by becoming of mass of vermin in human shape.