Regency Cthulhu
Amanda Brighton was bored to death with this year’s Season; ever since R’lyeh had risen from the sea there had been a burst of interest in the Great Old Ones, and all the ton could talk about was the Egyptian revival in home decorating — if Amanda had to look at one more badly carved image of faceless Nyarlathotep in some Society lady’s salon, she really would be plunged into gibbering madness — and how to clean Leng porcelains and whether Lord Byron truly owned an original Unaussprechlichen Kulten or whether he’d been hoodwinked by an unscrupulous German forger. Oh, it wasn’t that she didn’t appreciate how useful the R’lyehians had been, devouring that wicked Napoleon for dabbling in devilry during his exile on Elba, but so few of Great Britain’s brave naval and military officers had come through mentally or physically unscathed that the list of eligible bachelors had grown positively dismal: old men and simpering Exquisites. And with France gone, fashions had become positively farouche.
Help me do some brainstorming.
A fashionable dress color called “out of space.” A dark-skinned foreign nobleman from Carcosa (perhaps tittered at by society as being “half-wog”?). A Lord Pickman, ancestor of the Bostonian painter Richard Upton Pickman who ran with the ghouls? — he’d be more suitable if I made this a Regency Gothic! Comments from the Carcosan about hunting? — “Hunting, she is no challenge in Carcosa since we breed a line from Tindalos.” “A line of hounds, sir?” “Ah, is that the word?” Peppering one’s repartee with the Elder Tongue instead of French, now that France no longer exists: “Oh, ia, Lady Belknap’s dress is so mglw’nafh, and I told her that in no uncertain terms.” A man of bulbous-eyed Deep One blood squeezed uncomfortably into the tight trousers and stiffly starched cravat as he tries to follow Beau Brummell’s lead? There were virtually no women in the earliest Lovecraftian stories, which is clearly why R’lyehian men would greet the concept of the London Season so enthusiastically — a chance to meet and shop for women.
What other fun ideas/riffs on the Mythos could I throw into a story?
drupagliassotti @ April 20, 2007