Larking around on set: (L-R) Dan Wheeler AKA ‘Gert of the Well’, Ryan Mulchrone AKA ‘Ezra Whitmarsh’ and Joseph Chance AKA time traveller ‘TG Wells’

We are tickled pink to welcome Dan Wheeler and Joseph Chance from The Apocalypse Players for a spin in our time machine on Monday.

PastMaster is renowned for its unwavering historical accuracy and realism *ahem!* so how will our Game Master react when Dan and Joseph dive off the rails and into the occult machinations of fictional Arkham Massachusetts?

Drawing on their encyclopedic knowledge of horror-themed tabletop role playing game Call of Cthulhu our heroes tool up and head into the noir-est of noir scenarios to confront something… almost beyond imagination.

Episode drops on Monday 14th July. Don’t miss it.

PS if you’re curious to hear more of these guys there’s no better place to start than with their Bleak Prospect series. Be prepared for chills…

Ready to break bones: Dan Wheeler gets tough

AI in the news

Musk: loose cannon

Tech capitalist Elon Musk’s AI firm has deleted posts praising Hitler from its Grok chatbot, The Guardian reports.

The artificial intelligence firm xAI deleted the “inappropriate” posts on X after the company’s chatbot began referring to itself as MechaHitler and making antisemitic comments in response to user queries.

xAI responded to user complaints by restricting Grok to image generation rather than text responses and said it had taken action to ban hate speech before the chatbot posts on X.

However clever Musk might be, I always have the feeling he is winging it and is, not to put too fine a point on it, slightly deranged. This is a good reminder in any case that AI needs serious oversight before its creations are set out into the world.

I spy with my magic eye…

AI: funny but not necessarily on purpose

At PastMaster we spend quite a bit of our time making dubious AI images illustrating our adventures - please do see our Instagram channel for infinite examples…

But it takes quite a bit of work to generate the type of pictures we actually want. The AI Weirdness blog picks out plenty of examples of the frustrations of ‘prompt engineering’.

The above picture demonstrates Chat GPT’s flawed and slightly patronising response when asked to create a magic eye image of a unicorn.

AI is an intriguing technology, but it’s often obtuse when asked to obey simple commands. Then again, perhaps one day we’ll yearn for the halcyon days when AI was rubbish.

Love, Death and Cthulhu

The ‘caged god’: freaky

A little primer for anyone who’s unfamiliar with Call of Cthulhu, the TTRPG played by this week’s PastMaster guests the Apocalypse Players: it’s a bit like Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), but the setting is different. Instead of wizards, warriors and goblins, think private dicks, tough dames and a terrifying unknowable alien power.

Drawing heavily on the cosmic horror of novelist HP Lovecraft, it is very often set in Prohibition era America, although gothic settings and modern scenarios are pretty common too.

Having played it a few times the thing I enjoy most about it is that unlike in D&D, which sees the players on a relentless surge towards power and glory, Cthulhu almost always requires that the player characters flirt with insanity (either temporary or indefinite), such is the horror of the alien intelligence they must face. So as a player you get to embrace glorious and demented failure. So much more interesting than total victory, don’t you think?

PS if you aren’t familiar with the brilliant Netflix series Love, Death and Robots, check out series 3, ep 8 - a clearly Cthulhu-inspired episode.

UNTIL NEXT TIME

Tan and the PastMaster crew.

PS if you’ve got any suggestions for what you’d like to see the PastMaster team try next, get in touch:

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Email: pastmasterpod@gmail.com