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Gospel of Nicodemus or other?

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Nicodemus (; Greek: , Nikódēmos; Imperial Aramaic: 𐡍𐡒𐡃𐡉𐡌𐡅𐡍, romanized: Naqdīmūn; Hebrew: נַקְדִּימוֹן, saint in a number of Christian traditions. He is depicted as a Naqdīmōn) is a New Testament figure venerated as a Pharisee and a member of the Sanhedrin who is drawn to hear Jesus's teachings. As is the case with Lazarus, Nicodemus is not mentioned in the synoptic Gospels, and is mentioned only by John, who devotes more than half of Chapter 3 of his gospel and a few verses of Chapter 7 to Nicodemus, and lastly mentions him in Chapter 19.

Nicodemus is considered by both Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Church traditions to have secretly been a disciple of Jesus on the basis of the narrative in John 19; there is no explicit mention of his discipleship in the Gospel of John. Owing to his insistence on a hearing for Jesus according to Jewish law, Nicodemus is sometimes referred to as "defender of Jesus".

Although there is no clear source of information about Nicodemus outside the Gospel of John, Ochser and Kohler, writing in The Jewish Encyclopedia in 1905, identify him with Nicodemus ben Gurion, mentioned in the Talmud as a wealthy and popular holy man reputed to have had miraculous powers. Some 21st-century historians make the same connection. Other scholars reject this identification, arguing that the biblical Nicodemus is likely an older man at the time of his conversation with Jesus, while Nicodemus ben Gurion was on the scene forty years later, at the time of the First Jewish-Roman War.

An apocryphal work under his name - the Gospel of Nicodemus - was produced in the mid-4th century, and is mostly a reworking of the earlier Acts of Pilate, which recounts the Harrowing of Hell.

Nicodemus Visiting Christ, 1899 painting. Nicodemus (left) talking to Jesus, by Henry Ossawa Tanner

Christus und Nicodemus, by Fritz von Uhde (1848-1911)

Nicodemus is mentioned in three places in the Gospel of John:

The first time Nicodemus is mentioned, he is identified as a Pharisee who comes to see Jesus at night. According to the scripture, Jesus went to Jerusalem for the Passover feast. While in Jerusalem he chased the moneychangers from the temple and overturned their tables. His disciples remembered then the words of Psalm 69: "Zeal for your house will consume me." After these events "many believed in his name when they saw the signs that he was doing". When Nicodemus visits Jesus he makes reference to these events: "Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with him".

Jesus replies: "Unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God." Then follows a conversation with Nicodemus about the meaning of being " born again" or "born from above" ( Greek: ἄνωθεν): Nicodemus explores the notion of being literally born again from one's mother's womb, but most theologians recognise that Nicodemus knew Jesus was not speaking of literal rebirth. Theologian Charles Ellicott wrote that "after the method of Rabbinic dialogue, [Nicodemus] presses the impossible meaning of the words in order to exclude it, and to draw forth the true meaning. 'You cannot mean that a man is to enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born. What is it, then, that you do mean?'" In this instance, Nicodemus chooses the literal (rather than the figurative) meaning of anōthen and assumes that that meaning exhausts the significance of the word.

Jesus expresses surprise, perhaps ironically, that "a teacher of Israel" does not understand the concept of spiritual rebirth:

Jesus answered him, "Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things? Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen, but you do not receive our testimony."

In Chapter 7, Nicodemus advises his colleagues among "the chief priests and the Pharisees", to hear and investigate before making a judgment concerning Jesus, reminding them that Jewish law requires that a person must be heard before they can be condemned. Their mocking response argues that no prophet comes from Galilee. Nonetheless, it is probable that he wielded a certain influence in the Sanhedrin.

Finally, when Jesus is buried, Nicodemus brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes-about 100 Roman pounds (33 kilograms, or 73 lb). Nicodemus must have been a man of means; in his book Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week, Pope Benedict XVI observes that, "The quantity of the balm is extraordinary and exceeds all normal proportions. This is a royal burial."

Nicodemus is venerated as a saint in Eastern and Oriental Orthodoxy and in Catholicism. The Eastern Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic Churches commemorate him on the Sunday of the Holy Myrrhbearers, which is celebrated on the Third Sunday of Pascha (i.e., the second Sunday after Easter). Sacred tradition holds that his relics were found on 2 August, along with those of Saint Stephen the Protomartyr; Gamaliel; and Gamaliel's second son, Abibon (also, "Abibas"; "Abibo"). This event is commemorated on that date in the Eastern churches, while the Catholic General Roman Calendar marks the anniversary of the translation of Nicodemus' remains, rather than their discovery, which by the same tradition occurred the following day, 3 August. In the Roman Martyrology, Nicodemus' feast day is 31 August, celebrated jointly with Saint Joseph of Arimathea, and generally followed in the Roman Rite tradition.

This does not preclude local preferences and traditions from being applied, as dioceses, national churches and religious institutes may have their own days of observance approved. For example, at the St. Nicodemus and St. Joseph of Arimathea Church, which the Franciscan Order established in Ramla in the 19th century, permission from the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem was obtained to celebrate the feast day of the two saints on the Saturday of the third week of Easter, so that the link between their role in the burial of Jesus and Easter solemnities would be highlighted in the Holy Land. The church has a painting above its altar, attributed to Titian, The Deposition from the Cross, which shows the two saints.

Eastern Christianity (including Eastern and Oriental Orthodoxy and Eastern-rite Catholics):

Discovery of the saint's relics: 2 August

As a Holy Myrrhbearer: Third Sunday of Pascha (Easter)

Roman-rite Catholicism:

Translation of the saint's relics: 3 August

Feast day: 31 August

Entombment, by Titian

Nicodemus figures prominently in medieval depictions of the Deposition or Descent from the Cross in which he and Joseph of Arimathea are shown removing the dead Christ from the cross, often with the aid of a ladder.

Like Joseph, Nicodemus became the object of various pious legends during the Middle Ages, particularly in connection with monumental crosses. He was reputed to have carved both the Holy Face of Lucca and the Batlló Crucifix, receiving angelic assistance with the face in particular and thus rendering the works instances of acheiropoieta.

Both of these sculptures date from at least a millennium after Nicodemus's life, but the ascriptions attest to the contemporary interest in Nicodemus as a character in medieval Europe.

Persuaded: The Story of Nicodemus by David Harder is a fictionalized account of the life of Nicodemus. According to the author, he used episodes and timetables sourced from all four gospels and the Acts of the Apostles to develop his novel's timeline of events and extensively researched the culture, politics and history of the period. He consulted the Passion Translation version of the Bible to do so; scripture quoted within the novel is taken from there. Harder has spoken of his attempts to bring biblical characters to life in a relatable way, while maintaining overall historical and scriptural accuracy.

In Henry Vaughan's "The Night", Nicodemus is significant to the poem's theme: He serves as the departure point and illustration of its meditation on night's relationship with experience of God.

In 18th-century Lutheranism, prescribed readings were assigned throughout the year; the gospel text of the meeting of Jesus and Nicodemus at night was assigned to Trinity Sunday. Johann Sebastian Bach composed several cantatas for the occasion, of which O heilges Geist- und Wasserbad, BWV 165 , composed in 1715, stays close to the gospel based on a libretto by the court poet in Weimar, Salomo Franck.

In popular music, Nicodemus' name was used figuratively in Henry Clay Work's 1864 American Civil War-era piece "Wake Nicodemus", an abolitionist song hailing the end of slavery, which at that time was popular in minstrel shows. In 1978 Tim Curry covered the song on his debut album Read My Lips. The song's layered connotations gave it an association with the anti-slavery-and by extension, the civil rights-movement in the § United States.

Ernst Pepping composed an Evangelienmotette ( motet on gospel text) Jesus und Nikodemus in 1937. In 1941, The Golden Gate Quartet, sang the Gospel "God Told Nicodemus", in the African-American Jubilee style. The song "Help Yourself" by The Devil Makes Three, from their 2009 Do Wrong Right album, contains a very informal retelling of the relationship between Nicodemus and Jesus.

Nicodemus is portrayed by Diego Matamoros in the 2003 film The Gospel of John.

The figure of Nicodemus appears in several television productions:

During the struggle between Protestants and Catholics in Europe, from the 16th century to the 18th, a person professing a creed different from the locally approved one often risked severe penalties-in many cases, capital punishment. There developed the use of " Nicodemite", usually a term of disparagement, referring to a person who is suspected of public misrepresentation of their actual religious beliefs. The term is recorded from at least 1529 (in, at first, a slightly different sense, although still related to religious concealment or reticence). It is a reference to the clandestine night visit of Nicodemus to Jesus, suggesting an analogy between the undeclared belief of Nicodemus and the reluctance of some dissenters from Catholicism to risk being open about their true creed. To John Calvin, who opposed all veneration of saints, the fact of Nicodemus becoming a Catholic saint in no way exonerated this "duplicity". Calvin used the word in his 1544 Excuse à messieurs les Nicodemites referring to religious dissemblers in France-outwardly, conforming Catholics; inwardly, adherents of Protestantism. He was apparently not completely comfortable with the term's allusion to Nicodemus, however; subsequent editions of the work reduced the label's use and later French editions replaced the word with " faux ('false') Nicodemus" instead. While the epithet initially applied to crypto-protestants, it later came to be used broadly for anyone suspected of exhibiting a false appearance of their religious adherence and concealing their genuine beliefs.

The discussion with Jesus is the source of several common expressions of contemporary American Christianity, specifically, the descriptive phrase " born again" used to describe salvation or baptism by some groups, and John 3:16, a commonly quoted verse used to describe God's plan of salvation.

The Nicodemus National Historic Site, commemorating the only remaining western town established by African Americans during the Reconstruction Period following the American Civil War, is in Kansas. The National Park Service indicates the town's name came from the 1864 piece, "Wake Nicodemus" by Henry Clay Work. Some point to the lyrics' use of the name Nicodemus as a figurative reference to the biblical figure. In the case of the song, Nicodemus is an enslaved African, long deceased, but acknowledged in the lyrics as both prophet and herald of freedom. The contrast in the lyrics between night and morning, and the enslaved Nicodemus' certainty in what the metaphorical "morning" would bring, have been seen as drawing a parallel to, and being inspired by, the story of the biblical figure. In one story, emancipation, and in the other, salvation, is to come "in the morning"; each Nicodemus has faith in their eventual advent. The lyrics of first verse (in part), the chorus, and the fourth verse, say:

Nicodemus, the slave, was of African birth,
And was bought for a bagful of gold;
[...]
"Wake me up!" was his charge,
at the first break of day-
Wake me up for the great Jubilee!

The "Good Coming" is almost here!
It was long, long, long on the way!
Now run and tell Elijah to hurry up, Pomp
And meet up at the gum tree down in the swamp,
To wake Nicodemus today.
[...]
'Twas a long weary night - we were almost in fear
That the future was more than he knew;
'Twas a long weary night - but the morning is near,
And the words of our prophet are true.

-  Extract from "Wake Nicodemus" by Henry Clay Work (1864)

Rosamund Rodman noted in a 2008 article that slaves who learnt to read generally did so in secret and at night, due to risks of punishment for this forbidden activity. The gospel's Nicodemus came to Jesus to learn from him, also in secret and at night, for fear of repercussions. Such connections and allusions lead Rodman to conclude that the town's name has its ultimate origin with the biblical figure. Daniel Burke notes that, "To blacks after the Civil War, he was a model of rebirth as they sought to cast off their old identity as slaves".

On 16 August 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. invoked Nicodemus as a metaphor concerning the need for the United States to be "born again" in order to effectively address social and economic inequality. The speech was called "Where Do We Go From Here?", and delivered at the 11th Annual SCLC Convention in Atlanta, Georgia.

1. ^ Driscoll, James F. (1911). "Nicodemus" . In Herbermann, Charles (ed.). Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 11. New York: Robert Appleton Company.

2. ^

3. ^ Ochser, Schulim; Kohler, Kaufmann (1905). "Nicodemus". In Singer, Isidore; et al. (eds.). The Jewish Encyclopedia. Vol. 9. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. pp. 299-300.

4. ^ See, for instance:

5. ^ Carson, D. A. (1991). The Gospel according to John. Leicester: InterVarsity. p. 186.

6. ^ Bauckham, Richard (1996). "Nicodemus and the Gurion Family". The Journal of Theological Studies. 47 (1): 1-37. doi:10.1093/jts/47.1.1. ISSN 0022-5185. JSTOR 23966458.

7. Watkins, H. W., ^ Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers on John 3, accessed 10 February 2016

8. ^

9. ^ "Finding of the relics of Righteous Saint Νikόdēmos: Commemorated on August 2". Orthodox Church of America.

10. ^

11. ^ "Sacrosanctum concilium, solemnly promulgated by his holiness Pope Paul VI", Constitution of the Sacred Liturgy, 4 December 1963, archived from the original on 10 June 2023

12. ^ "Church of St Nicodemus & St Joseph of Arimathea: Israel, Middle East". Lonely Planet. n.d. Archived from the original on 9 February 2023.

13. ^ Schiller, Gertrud (1972). "The Passion of Jesus Christ". In Iconography of Christian Art. Volume 2. Translated by Janet Seligman. Greenwich, CT, United States: New York Graphic Society. pp. 144-145, 472-473.

14. ^ Harder, David (2020). Persuaded: The Story of Nicodemus, a Novel. Emerald House Group, Incorporated. Front matter; preface. ISBN 978-1-62020-710-9.

15. ^ "Historical Q&A: David Harder (Persuaded: The Story of Nicodemus)". Family Fiction. 29 June 2020. Archived from the original on 1 October 2022.

16. ^ Durr, R. A. (1960). "Vaughan's 'The Night'". The Journal of English and Germanic Philology. 59 (1): 34-40. ISSN 0363-6941. JSTOR 27707404.

17. ^

18. ^ "Henry Clay Work Biography". notablebiographies.com.

19. ^ "The Devil Makes Three - 'Help Yourself' Lyrics". Genius. Archived from the original on 5 July 2022.

20. ^ "The Gospel of John". Rotten Tomatoes. Fandango Media.

21. ^ "The Living Bible (1952)". The A.V. Club.

22. ^ Ostling, Richard N. (4 April 1977). "Franco Zeffirelli's Classical Christ for Prime Time". Time. Archived from the original on 26 August 2023.

23. ^ Ng, Alan (11 April 2020). "Reviews: The Chosen". Film Threat. Archived from the original on 13 August 2023.

24. ^ Overell, M. Anne (2004). "A Nicodemite in England and Italy: Edward Courtenay, 1548-56". In David M. Loades (ed.). John Foxe at Home and Abroad. Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate. pp. 117-135. ISBN 978-0-7546-3239-9.

25. ^ Livingstone, Elizabeth A., ed. (2006). "Nicodemism". The Concise Oxford Dictionary of the Christian church. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. p. 411. ISBN 978-0-19-861442-5. Calvin applied it to those converts to Protestantism in Catholic France who outwardly continued RC practices. In modern times Nicodemism covers all forms of religious simulation.

26. ^ Eire, Carlos M. N. (1986). "Calvin against the Nicodemites". War against the idols: The reformation of worship from Erasmus to Calvin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 234-275. ISBN 978-0-521-30685-0. p. 243: Calvin argues that since the cowardly Nicodemus changed into an honorable and courageous Christian, it is not right to use his name as a defense for timid simulation.

27. ^ "Nicodemus National Historic Site", National Park Service.

28. ^ Work, Henry Clay (1864), "Wake Nicodemus", Historic Sheet Music Collection, Connecticut College Digital Commons, [1545]

29. ^ Rodman, Rosamond C. (2008). "Naming a Place Nicodemus". Great Plains Quarterly. 28 (1): 49-62. ISSN 0275-7664. JSTOR 23534184.

30. ^ King, Martin Luther Jr. (16 August 1967), "'Where Do We Go From Here?', Address Delivered at the Eleventh Annual SCLC Convention", The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University

"St. Nicodemus" in Butler's Lives of the Saints

Cornel Heinsdorff: Christus, Nikodemus und die Samaritanerin bei Juvencus. Mit einem Anhang zur lateinischen Evangelienvorlage (Untersuchungen zur antiken Literatur und Geschichte, Bd. 67), Berlin/New York, 2003.

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Nicodemus (; Greek: , Nikódēmos ; Imperial Aramaic: 𐡍𐡒𐡃𐡉𐡌𐡅𐡍, romanized: Naqdīmūn; Hebrew: נַקְדִּימוֹן, saint in a number of Christian traditions. He is depicted as a Naqdīmōn) is a New Testament figure venerated as a Pharisee and a member of the Sanhedrin who is drawn to hear Jesus's teachings.

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Ecology Discussion

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Earth's land surfaces can be easily observed from space. Most photosynthetic plants on Earth use chlorophyll which absorbs blue and red light and less green light and so appears green. Although some green color is absorbed by Earth's plants, less is absorbed than the other colors.

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Fables of the Flames

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The fables originally belonged to the oral tradition and were not collected for some three centuries after Aesop's death. By that time a variety of other stories, jokes and proverbs were being ascribed to him, although some of that material was from sources earlier than him or came from beyond the Greek cultural sphere.

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Fairy Tales

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Children's and Household Tales (from the German: Kinder- und Hausmärchen ) is a collection of fairy tales first published on 20 December 1812 by the Grimm brothers or "Brothers Grimm", Jacob and Wilhelm. This collection is commonly known as Grimms' Fairy Tales among English speakers.

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Sci Source Idea's

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Like all good space sims, Elite: Dangerous is at its best when we're able to project our own strange stories onto its starry backcloth. As Chris Thursten points out in his review, Elite is a universe that you "inhabit" in whatever way makes sense to you.

You might establish trade routes, go hunting for black holes, or maybe just wander off and find a quiet corner of the galaxy to contemplate life and death. In Elite, outer space is a story engine that benefits greatly from what you bring to it. Is the galaxy a battleground to fight over, or an infinite puzzle to solve?

In this edition of 'If you like,' I go wandering through the film, art, and literature of space travel. I find bored space truckers, strange anomalies, and yes, even a few people who just want to figure out how to live alongside one another.

Aurora, by Kim Stanley Robinson

The latest novel from Mars-trilogy author Kim Stanley Robinson, Aurora outlines an image of space travel as an essentially social experience. But even if human beings are at the core of this story's take on a colonizing, "generational" starship, there's still a lot of work to do in order to maintain its mission. Life in space, and on this ship, can be difficult. As Gerry Canavan argues in his thought-provoking review, the spaceship "functions, but only just barely, and with constant corrective intervention from its human caretakers."

Aurora ostensibly deals with a massive, relatively slow-moving colony ship as it approaches its destination, the star Tau Ceti. But it's been in space for 160 years and now exists as an impossibly-remote outpost of humanity. As the ship nears the new system, it's clear that nothing so complex as space travel can be accomplished without accounting for the human factor. The sheer vastness of Elite's galaxy can sometimes feel as intimidating as it is wondrous. And as pilots, much of what we get out its sandbox is what we bring with us to begin with, including our ability to solve problems we didn't see coming. In a similar way, Robinson's Aurora represents an expertly crafted look at space travel as a referendum on human ambition and what drives so many of us to dream of the stars in the first place.

Atropa, directed by Eli Sasich

Some of the smartest-looking sci-fi around these days appears in the form of short films. With Eli Sasich's Atropa, we get a super-compact look at a mysterious encounter in deep space that resists easy answers. One thing I love about Elite's approach to the space sim genre is its sense of style. The game imagines space travel as a mixture of hard metal and holographic displays. Atropa shares the same approach, while also delivering a healthy dose of '80s sci-fi nostalgia from its design. For an interesting look into the development of the short, check out this interview with the director Sasich here.

As a follow-up to Atropa, I'd also recommend the short film Wanderers, directed by Erik Wernquist. With its Carl Sagan voiceover sample and majestic collection of space vistas, it has a more romantic, head-in-the-cosmic-dust-clouds approach to the space exploration. It's also simply beautiful. Several discarded scenes that didn't make the final version of Wanderers can also be seen here.

Hardware: The Definitive SF Works of Chris Foss

As an illustrator, Chris Foss's work in the 1970s and '80s has come to define so much of what we associate with space sci-fi today. His colorful starships and evocative planetary landscapes have informed the imagery of space travel in our heads that seems to persist, long after a novel is finished or a film ends. With Hardware: The Definitive SF Works of Chris Foss, we have a lovely collection that includes the covers he created for writers such as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Philip K. Dick, as well as his design work for film directors Ridley Scott and Stanley Kubrick.

For a different look at the artist, it's also worth checking out the excellent documentary, Jodorowsky's Dune, the never-completed but legendary cinematic take on the Frank Herbert novel. Foss contributed spaceship design work to the project, and it's fascinating to get a glimpse of his part in the famously creative backstory to one of best-but never-finished-science fiction films of all time.

Dark Star, directed by John Carpenter

Often referred to as John Carpenter's "student film," 1974's Dark Star helped to usher in an age of space-based science fiction that had more in common with a used car than a gleaming starship. Carpenter's vision of space as a mixture of mundane work punctuated by deadly encounters with alien species, disagreeable computers, and unstable crew members has become a classic example of a more blue-collar look at intergalactic travel. It also contains a sense of humor, and willingness to poke fun at particular sci-fi tropes, that is often missing from so much of the po-faced science fiction we see today.

The basic plot of the film involves a small crew of spaceship functionaries who have been travelling for 20 years. Their work involves scanning star systems and destroying unstable planets that might hinder future colonization efforts. But their experience isn't one of flawless technology and bright lights. If Elite presents a universe of possibility, it also gives players the freedom to make mistakes and express a very human willingness to put a few dents in the proverbial bumper during a docking maneuver. The Dark Star ship is cramped, dirty, and malfunctioning. In this way the film is a clever and prescient look at how, for all its benefits, technology is still built and maintained by human beings, and therefore forever essentially flawed somehow.

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If you like Elite: Dangerous, you'll also like...

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Like all good space sims, Elite: Dangerous is at its best when we're able to project our own strange stories onto its starry backcloth. As Chris Thursten points out in his review, Elite is a universe that you "inhabit" in whatever way makes sense to you.

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More Riddler Ideas
Release Date (Prison riddle slash device or program?)

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A successful Jedi trap consisted of four elements:[1]

1. An irresistible bait.Example: Darth Sidious used General Grievous to lure Obi-Wan Kenobi to Utapau.

2. A remote location, that was easily fortified, with a sharply restricted field of action. It was also preferable for the location to belong to someone else as major damage usually ensued.Example: Utapau.

3. A powerful warrior to fight the Jedi. It was also advantageous to have an overwhelming number of troops stationed nearby to ensure that the Jedi could not escape. Having the killer as the bait was an efficient choice as the Jedi would continue to advance, even after they realized the extent of the trap.Example: General Grievous on Utapau.

4. Establish a win-win situation. If the Jedi lost, then the plotter succeeded in their attempt. If the Jedi won, then the weaker would-be Jedi killer was removed and thus saved the plotter the trouble of removing them later. It was also possible to have a third win, by which the Jedi, by answering the trap at all was prevented from interfering elsewhere.Example: Obi-Wan Kenobi was sent to Utapau while Sidious turned Anakin Skywalker to the dark side

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Character Art

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Fields

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Magic Polish fields is a new series of photos published by the Polish artist Przemysław Kruk, previously featured for his infra-red pictures. Here he focuses on the intriguing shapes that fields can take in the middle of the countryside. For this collection, the photographer gathered pictures he took over almost twenty years in his mother country and elsewhere in Europe. The ground undulate like waves in ocean as play of colors between the fields and sunrays confer his work a very singular style.

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Surprising Wavy Photographs of European Fields

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Magic Polish fields is a new series of photos published by the Polish artist Przemysław Kruk, previously featured for his infra-red pictures. Here he focuses on the intriguing shapes that fields can take in the middle of the countryside. For this collection, the photographer gathered pictures he took over almost twenty years in his mother country and elsewhere in Europe.

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Bad science reporting

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Bad Science is a book by Ben Goldacre, criticising mainstream media reporting on health and science issues. It was published by Fourth Estate in September 2008. It has been positively reviewed by the British Medical Journal and the Daily Telegraph and has reached the Top 10 bestseller list for Amazon Books.

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Segregation

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Plessy v. Ferguson , 163 U.S. 537 (1896), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court issued in 1896. It upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation laws for public facilities as long as the segregated facilities were equal in quality - a doctrine that came to be known as " separate but equal".

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Psionic Powers

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Check out our other SRD sites! Traveller SRD | Swords and Wizardry SRD | 5th Edition SRD | Dungeon World SRD | 13th Age SRD | d20HeroSRD | The Modern Path SRD | d20PFSRD | 3.5e SRD | GumshoeSRD | FateCoreSRD | Starjammer SRD | OGN Articles

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Creatures

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Misc

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Nicolas Bouvier (better known as ) is a science fiction illustrator and concept artist based in Seattle, Washington. The French-born artist has been an active artistic director and concept designer in the gaming industry since 1996, and his concept designs have been used to bring to life the worlds of Halo 4, Assassin's Creed, Cold Fear, and Rage. Meanwhile his artwork has appeared on the covers of more than 100 books!

Here's hoping this gallery of Sparth's incredible artwork inspires you to create a science fiction masterpiece of your own.

Artwork by Nicolas Bouvier (aka Sparth).

To find out more about this artist and to see more works visit www.sparth.com and his pages on Tumblr and ArtStation.

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Nicolas Bouvier (better known as ) is a science fiction illustrator and concept artist based in Seattle, Washington. The French-born artist has been an active artistic director and concept designer in the gaming industry since 1996, and his concept designs have been used to bring to life the worlds of Halo 4, Assassin's Creed, Cold Fear, and Rage.

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Room for a castle TL2 World Creation

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Castle Life - Rooms in a Medieval Castle

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All about life in a medieval Castle. Rooms in a Medieval Castle

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Wiki of resources

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Yet Another resource filled blog

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UPDATE! Hello redditors! I'm putting together a pdf with all of my house rules (and without all of my crazy public musings about rules) and I will link to it at the top of this page as soon as it's done. Thanks for stopping by!

The rules for Stars Without Number are free!

This all started because I wanted to include a way for PCs to get critical hits and that led me to expanding upon the central rules. When I first GMed Stars Without Number I tweaked it slightly to give PCs a little more edge, and to make some of the generic qualities of combat a little more exciting. Being able to critically hit an opponent is a big thing and it's not part of the rules as written. As much as I enjoy the rules, I think older game systems evolved into modern systems because around the table there is a real need to serve the players' basic drive to succeed in heroic and exciting ways. At the time I was GMing my players didn't want to keep playing Stars Without Number, but it still lingers in my mind as one of the superior OSR systems. What follows here is a collection of all of my personal notes and house rules, culled from my old blog:

I have noticed that character disadvantages in multiple game systems have some real failures on designers' parts. GURPS alone has about four or five different variations of "impulsiveness" that when you really examine the rules behind them become quite game-y. The whole point-buy system of character creation lends itself to min/maxing and I'm not fond of it, though I do like giving my players the option to spend points into customizing their characters. I prefer the idea that if you can purchase an advantage it comes with a random disadvantage. Otherwise you can wind up with a character who becomes a walking tank with minimal conflicts during downtime.

I made a listing of the Traits from Fallout and edited them slightly to fit into Stars Without Number, then I went over them and fidgeted with them all a little so nobody would be able to cancel out the negative quality from one trait by selecting another with a more powerful positive effect.

Ripped almost word-for-word from the Fallout Wiki.
Choose one, or roll two randomly (1d12):

1 Bruiser: A little slower, but a little bigger. You may not hit as quickly, but they will feel it when you do! Your initiative suffers a -4 penalty, but your overall Strength is increased by +2 and you do an additional point of damage with unarmed attacks.

2 Destroyer: The flamethrower that burns twice as bright burns half as long. All of your attacks with weapons are considered critical hits regardless of your roll, but equipment tends to break very easily when you use it as all of your misses with weapons are critical fumbles.

3 Fast Metabolism: Your metabolic rate is twice normal. This means that you are much less resistant to radiation and poison, but your body heals faster. Healing rates are doubled, and recovery times are halved; saving throws against radiation suffer a -3 penalty and poisons are considered one toxicity level higher.

4 Finesse: Your attacks show a lot of finesse. You don't do as much damage, but you hit more often. +1 attack bonus; -1 damage.

5 Gifted: You have more innate abilities than most, so you have not spent as much time honing your skills. +1 to all ability scores; receive one less skill point per level.

6 Good Natured: You studied less-combative skills as you were growing up. Your combat skills suffer significantly, but other skills are substantially improved. +1 to all Culture, Persuade, and Tech/Medical rolls; -3 to all attack rolls.

7 Hair Trigger: By not paying attention to any threats, you can act a lot faster in a turn. This lowers your armor class to just what you are wearing, but you react much faster in a combat turn. +4 to initiative and you always win ties; no Dexterity bonus for defense.

8 Hoarder: You may not be very strong, but somehow you carry more than your fair share of equipment. You gain +3 to encumbrance but -1 to overall strength.

9 Sex Appeal: You've got the "right" stuff that makes you particularly attractive to others. But those who are not amenable to your attractiveness tend to become quite jealous. +2 to Persuade checks and reaction modifiers when appropriate, and -2 when inappropriate.

10 Skilled: Since you spent more time improving your skills than a normal person, you start with better skill levels. The tradeoff is that you do not gain any extra abilities. You may add 3 skill points at 1st level, but do not take an Upgrade at 1st level.

11 Small Frame: You are not quite as big as other people, but that never slowed you down. You can't carry as much and your Encumbrance is -2, but you're more agile with +2 to overall Dexterity.

12 Strong Arm: You swing harder, not better. Your unarmed attacks are very brutal and add +1d4 damage, but lack finesse. You never cause a critical hit with unarmed melee damage.

Character Creation is a step by step process.
1. GENERATE ABILITY SCORES
2. CHOOSE or RANDOMLY ROLL TRAITS
3. CHOOSE BACKGROUND PACKAGE
4. DETERMINE GOAL and SELECT CLASS & TRAINING PACKAGE, SPEND SKILL POINTS
5. EXTRAS: SELECT UPGRADE and RECEIVE SETBACK(S)

It's more important to me that player's define an overall goal for their character, or life's mission, because I can construct adventures around the goal. Character disadvantages, or Setbacks, are also integral to character creation. The player would have to take at least one as the last step. But then, I also wanted to make it something that could be used to improve a character. If somebody wants to start with more money, then they'd take a Setback. If they want to improve one of their abilities by +1, then they'd take a Setback.

Upgrades
A tricky proposition, because they basically will work like Feats and I didn't want to unbalance the rules that are already established here. I didn't want to change the focus of the game, but merely supplement what is already there with a little boost for players and make it a little more cinematic.

When feats were first implemented in 3rd edition D&D, I think the idea might have been to strip away special combat moves from non-warrior classes and introduce a way of customizing combat options for warriors. I don't think it ended up really working, since most times I've played 3rd edition non-warrior PCs still want to trip, bull rush, charge, grapple, and pin their opponents. Also, I've heard of DMs who will construct encounters specifically to foil the combat abilities of a warrior, so somebody whose built their character to fight hordes of orcs and goblins with Great Cleave is going to end up facing off against a lone minotaur or giant most of the time, and in my mind that defeats the point of creating those kinds of characters. Why specialize if you never get to use your specialization?

When looking at my options of what to include, I decided to make two rules for myself:
1) no Upgrades that simply add bonuses to skill checks
2) as few combat-related Upgrades as possible

For inspiration I started with the Fallout wiki again, and constructed a rudimentary set of Upgrades. I managed to avoid combat-related Upgrades until I realized I wanted to put in critical hits. At first I only had three combat-related Upgrades, but as I analyzed the skills that were available I saw a few huge holes within the structure of combat that I really felt could be filled with a few new things. I had a secondary list of skills that were affected by Upgrades and as I transferred skills from one list to the other I ended up with a list of skills that weren't affected by my Upgrades at all. This included all of the versatile skills that are frequently considered "must haves" for a sci-fi setting like Computer, Navigation, Perception, and Stealth. This means nobody can take a single Upgrade which sets their inherent skill at a higher level from the other players who might not select the same Upgrade.

The Tactics and Leadership skills were a headache though.

Mechanically this all ended up working well. The only thing left was to tweak a few of the Upgrades so that some would have requirements that made sense. In most places this was simply having a point in a specific skill that seemed related, but I was keen to give level requirements for the few combat Upgrades I included and still have them be balanced for warrior-types to get them early and have them feel somewhat out of reach for non-warriors. After all of that I reviewed the list of Upgrades that required a skill, then trimmed the requirements from some and left the rest intact.

Finally, I created one class-specific Upgrade for each of the three classes.

Here is a basic summary of each Upgrade (with Prerequisites listed in parenthesis).

Animal Empathy: use Persuade to change the attitude of a wild or domestic animal - affects animals with any level of Intelligence
Assessment: choose a subject and in place of a combat action make a Perception check - succeed and the GM tells you the subject's total attack bonus without modifiers
Better Criticals: gain a damage bonus of +1d6 every time you score a critical hit (Level 6+)
Chemist: make drugs or chems that last twice as long with a Science/Intelligence roll (Skill: Science 1+)
Demolition Expert: when using explosives of any kind you never critically fumble a roll, and when determining damage roll twice and take the best result (Level 6+)
Die Hard: when hit points are reduced to 0, immediately perform one last action (not movement) before collapsing (Class: Warrior)
Dodger: natural Armor Class is 3 points lower
Eidetic Memory: +2 on checks to remember things, including saving throws against effects that alter or erase memories, no unskilled penalties on Intelligence rolls (Must be taken at 1st level.)
Grim Reaper: killing somebody in combat immediately allows you to move and make another attack (Level 14+)
Healer: doubles the effectiveness of medicine or any kind of medical care you give
Intense Training: raise an ability by a single point - can take this multiple times
Jack-of-All-Trades: use any Profession, Tech, or Vehicle skill without untrained penalties (Class: Expert)
Life Giver: gain an additional Hit Point per level - can take this multiple times
Martial Artist: choose a style - may be selected multiple times, each time a new style is learned - taking any style raises the martial artist's unarmed combat damage to 1d10 (Skill: Combat/Unarmed 1+) ...without going into details, there are five different styles, each style gives two maneuvers which can only be performed by those with the Upgrade
Master Tactician: apply a Tactics skill check bonus to allies using Leadership skill (Skill: Leadership 0+, Tactics 1+)
More Criticals: critical hits occur whenever you exceed your target number to hit by 5, instead of having to exceed your target number by 10 (Level 6+)
Pack Rat: halve the encumbrance rating of all items you carry down to a minimum of 1
Paralyzing Palm: using an Unarmed attack the target must make a Physical Effect saving throw or cannot act for 1d4 rounds (Skill: Combat/Unarmed 1+, Level 6+)
Prone Fighting: suffer no penalties on attack rolls for being prone, and opponents do not gain any bonus to hit with melee attacks while you are prone
Psychic Focus: choose a Psionic power, either targets suffer a -3 penalty to their saving throws against that power, or it costs half as many Psi Points to activate (round up) - can take this more than once, each time it applies to a different power (Class: Psychic)
Silent Running: can use Stealth and suffer no penalties for movement speed or armor worn (Level 8+)
Skilled: gain four skill raises to four different skills that you have at least 0+ in
Smooth Talker: suffer no unskilled penalty for any Charisma-based or social skill checks
Sneak Attack: when hitting surprised or unaware opponents (using Stealth) automatically inflict the maximum possible damage, no roll is necessary - opponents who cannot be surprised are immune (Level 2+)
Stonewall: whenever targeted by an ability that would knock you down, you may resist the knockdown with a successful Physical Effect save
Super Slam: you knock an opponent down to the ground when you inflict half of their Constitution score in damage from a single hit using an unarmed attack
Swift Learner: at each level earn an additional +1 skill point (Int 10+)
Taunt: make a skill check with either Persuade or Tactics, with success the target is shaken and you manage to get something out of them - during combat, use an action and if the target fails a Mental Effect save they are shaken for three rounds (-2 to all attack rolls, checks, and saving throws) - cannot Taunt somebody more than once in a given scene
Toughness: reduces damage you take by 1 point, to a minimum of 1 point (Con 10+)
Track: You can find and follow tracks left by other creatures - lots of modifiers!
Two-Fisted: reduce the penalty for attacking with your primary hand from -4 to -1 and for your off hand from -8 to -2
Wild Talent: choose a Level 1 Psionic power, you have developed a single Psionic ability - it costs 1 point of System Strain to use the power - may only be taken once (cannot be taken by Psychics)

32 Upgrades, or 36 if you count the different styles of Martial Arts, with 12 of them being used purely for combat. I'm leery about more than a third of them being primarily for combat, but I honestly couldn't think of any that I would want to get rid of. It's a pretty good ratio too since the maximum Upgrades a character could earn over their career is 12, and that's only if they make it to 20th level.

Skills
The skill system in Stars Without Number is based on 1970s-era Traveller (roll 2d6 usually against a target number of 8, add your skill and ability modifier), but the level and combat system is like a simplified version of 1st edition AD&D (roll d20 and add your class bonus, skill bonus, and opponent's Armor Class to the roll).

While learning the skills from Stars Without Number I only found one thing incongruous, and that is the distinction between Postech and Pretech specialties under the Tech skill. The classifications seemed rather arbitrary and open-ended, and perhaps that was done on purpose to give the GM control over what could fall under those categories of Tech.

Postech: Mechanical and electronic technology developed after the Scream, including almost all of the technology in use on modern frontier worlds.
Pretech: Advanced technology dating from before the Scream, often requiring manufacturing techniques that are no longer available on the frontier.

The definitions rely far too much upon the campaign setting presented within the rulebook and even though it is a very generalized setting, for a while I simply chose to ignore those words while I toyed with the system. Then I find myself confronted with them while I tweaked the skills to fit my custom rules, and found myself forced to remove the two skills associated with them. Instead of simply gutting them entirely, I am choosing to replace them with some specialties that I find more appropriate, and sorely lacking from the skills already available.

Mechanical: This covers propulsion systems for most types of non-starship vehicles, all forms of power plant or engine (steam, gasoline, diesel, fuel cell, etc.), robotics, and automated factories.
Electronic: Any kind of electronic device not covered by the other specialties. This includes most forms of communications technology (radios, satellite uplinks, etc. ), electronic countermeasures, force shields, deflector arrays, sonar and acoustic gear (including underwater equipment), concealable or remote surveillance gear (hidden cameras, wiretaps, etc.) and all forms of audio, film, video and holographic editing equipment.

I was influenced by GURPS to make an electronic/mechanical split. GURPS goes overboard with specializations though, so I thought it was fun being able to look at ALL of these different versions of electronics and be able to umbrella them under one skill.

There is also one weird overlap with starships. If you're attempting to fly stealthily within a star system it's an opposed skill check of Computer vs. Vehicle/Space or Tech/Astronautic, whichever is higher. I personally don't think Vehicle/Space should be used to avoid detection, unless there is something in the space to hide behind or around, which means trying to hide your starship from detection would always come down to a Tech roll. Thinking of the scene in the first episode of Firefly, Wash tries to shut down all of the systems on his ship to avoid detection, but the ship is also perched inside a larger piece of space wreckage. It just makes sense to me that it would always default to Tech/Astronautic unless there's something for the pilot to use as "cover."

Kevin Crawford had this to say:

"The reason I put in that skill bifurcation was largely to implicitly leave "crazy Terran Mandate tech" as the exclusive domain of characters focused on tech as their main character angle. If you're just dabbling in tech, you're going to go with Tech/Postech, because that's the great majority of what you'll encounter. You'll only go so far as to take Tech/Pretech if it's really your concept that your character is a master of all things sparking and glowy. As a consequence, Tech/Pretech is going to be lower than your character's Postech skills, making Pretech work harder and a more significant test of your character's abilities without requiring special effort from the GM to set it off. As a thematic generalization, you could really replace the two skills with "Tech/Stuff Any Professional Tech Should Be Able To Fix" and "Tech/Stuff Only Elite Wrenchmonkeys Can Handle" and get the same effect. The split you've done between Mechanical and Electronic can work just fine- Traveller does it that way, if I'm remembering right. Still, you might consider just dropping the bifurcation completely, and going with "Tech/Standard" or some such. A character whose concept is "I'm a Space Mechanic" is going to feel obligated to buy both Mechanical and Electronic skills at roughly the same level of competence, and that's going to cost substantially more than the -0 or -1 skill in Tech/Pretech that they might otherwise feel sufficient to signify their tech-awesomeness. Skill points in SWN are very limited, and you might find your tech-concept PCs struggling a bit to keep up both skills at the levels that feel "right" to them. As for the weird overlap in detection, that was a quiet gesture toward "lone pilot" competence. A character with the "I'm a pilot" concept is going to have a very good Vehicle/Space skill, but may only nod toward Tech/Astronautics. I'd rather let the pilot be able to handle that situation without requiring help, for the sake of all those space operas with lone pilots in their trusty fighters. If that's not the genre you want to emulate and you want to play up the necessity of a ship's engineer, then requiring Tech/Astronautics should work fine."
Which all makes sense.
And thus ends my mental dithering over skill checks with Stars Without Number rules.
The more I tinkered with Stars Without Number (how many times can I link to it? not enough, it's awesome!), the more my version is turning into a simplified tabletop version of the Fallout 1 video game.

One of the big things that SWN is missing is an easy way to heal. In fact, healing is virtually nonexistent. There are rules for healing while resting, and then the Psychic class has a Biopsionics discipline that can mitigate hit point loss, but otherwise the only piece of equipment that can heal is a medical kit which only increases a doctor or nurse's skill. I've been looking at healing in several games (not just SWN and Fallout) and trying to find a way to give players a balanced way to heal without requiring a Psychic, or science fiction spellcaster. My options are a little limited, but again, Fallout provides an easy solution with drugs. Or "Chems" as they are more often referred to.

I had been ignoring drugs at first but since I included an Upgrade for making drugs last longer, I'm turning my attention to them now. In Fallout 1 drugs had a strong risk-reward mechanic, you could get a huge boost to a skill which would help out in a fight or ease your way through dialogue with an unruly NPC, but you always ran the risk of getting addicted and suffering withdrawal. I remember playing Fallout 1 and always trying to guess if this was a fight that I might need a dose of Psycho to help out with, because I didn't want to take that stuff and suffer the after effects, but I didn't want to die either. Fallout 3 virtually removed withdrawal, or made it so easy to get rid of the addiction that it's almost laughable why you would ever second guess using drugs.

I consider these to be a rough draft for playtesting.

Drugs, or "Chems," are any chemical, medicinal or otherwise, used to cause changes in a person's behavior or biological systems. The effects of drugs "stack" to provide larger bonuses together than either does individually, but this commonly leads to addiction.
Drugs may have simultaneous effects, usually with some kind of balance - it might lower one stat while raising another. The practical upshot of this is that a character can receive an extraordinary bonus to some critically required skill, but some other skill or ability is going to suffer.
Drugs are divided into two groups: addictive, and non-addictive. Abusing most drugs regularly will result in addiction, causing withdrawal symptoms when the chem wears off, resulting in lowered stats unless you continue to take the drug, or seek a restorative cure.

Anti-Tox: A potent and nearly universal antidote for poisons and toxins found on many worlds. Anti-Tox must be injected via syringe or auto-injector, and upon application acts as a Tech/Medical skill check against the poison's Toxicity. Only one application of Anti-Tox can be used effectively during each Interval of a poison. (non-addictive)
Healing Powder: A primitive analgesic paste made with plants, roots and bark. After it is applied 1d6 hit points are restored, but Dexterity suffers by -2 for 1 day. Repeat doses increases the duration of the penalty by 1 extra day. (non-addictive)

Medpak: This item consists of a small syringe filled with a nano-medication and a gauge for measuring the status of the contents. The syringe and the gauge are housed on the back of a patch that wraps around an arm. When exposed to oxygen the nano-medication instantly spoils. It was originally created as a prototype for a more universal medical gel which was never refined. They are plentiful and easy to come by in more civilized areas, although on the outskirts of civilization they can be quite rare and fetch high prices. It takes a full-round to apply a Medpak, the person administering the Medpak can concentrate on nothing else. When the medicine is injected it provides immediate healing of the body's minor wounds, healing 2d4+1 hit points. Crippled limbs and broken bones are not restored with Medpaks. (non-addictive)

Hydros: A flavorless but unpleasant paste which is ingested and begins to take effect almost immediately. Hydros has the amazing effect of being able to keep muscle tissue from atrophying while broken bones heal. This curative agent heals bones faster thus any crippled limb can usually be restored quickly with a generous helping of Hydros. After one dose of Hydros, the healing time for broken bones or crippled limbs are halved (applied after Tech/Medical might reduce the healing time). Hydros leaves the patient in a dreamlike haze while it is in their system and is addictive like morphine. While healing with Hydros, the user's Perception is reduced by -3, movement is cut in half, and they suffer a -2 to Dexterity for the duration of the healing time. Hydros is expensive and debilitating but effective. (addictive)

Null: Null is a highly potent psychopharmaceutical which makes the user temporarily impervious to pain. Null grants the user 16 bonus hit points that are lost first, meaning users suffering less than 16 points of damage will be uninjured when the drug wears off. The effect is immediate upon injection and lasts for one hour. The user suffers no ill effects from taking Null but most packages come with a label warning that the drug is highly addictive and should only be used under extreme conditions. (addictive)

Anti-Rad: An anti-radiation chemical that can significantly reduce the danger of irradiated areas. Anti-Rad is reasonably common and, like most legitimate medicinals, is non-addictive. Members of every starship engine crew should never be without a bottle of Anti-Rad pills! Anti-Rad increases saving throws against radiation by +8 and lasts for 1 full day, but requires an hour before its effects are felt. Taking multiple doses of Anti-Rad doesn't increase the total resistance (the effects do not stack) nor does it extend the drug's active duration. (non-addictive)

Radpak: An intravenous chemical solution, administered just like a Medpak, that bonds with radiation particles and passes them completely and harmlessly through your system. It cannot be used to reverse radiation poisoning, but instead is meant to be used after being exposed to radiation to rid yourself of it before poisoning sets in or gets worse. It works instantly, preventing Constitution loss from radiation poisoning, but stays in the system for several days (1d4). It has numerous adverse side effects, most notably headaches (-2 Perception), stomach pains (-2 to Initiative), hair loss (very slim chance), and it acts as a potent diuretic. (non-addictive)

Rush: Excelenol is a powerful and highly addictive stimulant that quickens the central nervous system. It is extracted from protein-enhanced insects and administered via an inhaler. The initial euphoric rush which lends the drug its street name rarely lasts more than a minute, but during that time the user is filled with a burst of energy and strength. The user receives +4 to Initiative and +3 to overall Dexterity and Constitution for 1 minute (10 rounds). (addictive)

Crackerjack: An injected drug composed of strange, unknown chemicals of military origin. It comes with its own unique delivery system (administered like a Medpak). Upon injection the effects are immediate and last for 10 rounds, the user gains +4 to Armor Class and +4 to any attack rolls, but any rolls made with Intelligence or Wisdom suffer -3. (addictive)

Bug Juice: An advanced steroid that was popularized by professional athletes and their clandestine use of the drug. The drug is a thin green liquid typically contained in small bottles, but can also be synthesized into swallowable gelcaps. It increases Strength and reflexes, designed specifically to increase a person's deadliness in hand-to-hand combat. Consequently, any combat style whose effectiveness is influenced by Strength reaps a significant benefit from the use of Bug Juice. In those situations where unarmed combat is the law, a quick dose or two of Bug Juice prior to the commencement of hostilities can drastically shift the odds. Unfortunately, Bug Juice is highly addictive and anyone using it more than once is running a severe risk. A person going through Bug Juice withdrawal is in no condition to fight hand-to-hand. After ingesting, it takes 2d6 minutes to take effect but then lasts for 3 hours. It gives the user +4 to Strength and Constitution affecting Encumbrance and Hit Points accordingly, and also bestows +1d6 to melee and unarmed damage. (addictive)

Captivax: Designed to increase memory related functions and speed up other mental processes. These red capsules are a popular party drug, widely appreciated for their effect on creativity. They are, of course, highly addictive. It takes 2d6 minutes for Captivax to take effect but lasts for 3 hours. It gives the user +2 to overall Intelligence, +2 to Perception, and a +4 to Charisma-based rolls. (addictive)

Addiction: Each time a character takes an addictive drug there is a chance he becomes dependent upon the drug. If this happens the character's body (or mind) is in need of a daily dose of the drug to avoid withdrawal symptoms which manifest as ability score or attribute penalties. In addition to this daily requirement, the character no longer receives the benefits of taking the drug (or drugs) which he is addicted to. At least, not until he overcomes his withdrawal.
Each drug has a percentage chance of becoming an addiction, multiple uses in the same day increase this percentage regardless of which drug was taken. The GM should roll this secretly and inform the player only of his penalties when acquiring an addiction.
Hydros: +10%, -3 Str/Dex
Null: +30%, -3 Dex/Int
Rush: +25%, -4 Str/Wis/Chr
Crackerjack: +20%, -3 Int/Wis/Chr
Bug Juice: +25%, -2 Str/Dex/Con
Captivax: +15%, -3 Dex/Int/Chr
For example: If a character took a dose of Rush he would have a 25% of becoming addicted to Rush. If he took Rush again in the same day his chance of getting addicted to the second dose would rise to 50%. If later on he applies Hydros to his wounds then the GM would add 10 to his addiction roll and the character would now have a 60% of becoming addicted to Hydros.

I think I can rephrase that last part about addiction better. I'm not sure I'll actually use Crackerjack, I really like the name though!

Physical or mental quirks which impair your character and leave you at a disadvantage. You might acquire Setbacks through the regular course of the game, but characters do not normally start with any Setbacks.
Players may elect to start their characters with a Setback (or several Setbacks) in the interest of making your character more interesting and realistic to role-play. For each Setback you take during character creation you may raise your character's level by one (but receive only half the experience points), start with 1000 more credits, or receive an extra Trait or Upgrade.
When taking a Setback during character creation you must roll 2d6 for it, with a minus 1 modifier to the roll for each Setback after the first. If you get the same Setback twice, take a Setback one slot above your roll. (If you rolled an Injury twice, then your second Setback would actually be an Addiction.) If you receive a Terminally Ill Setback you cannot take any more Setbacks.

2) Terminally Ill
3) Limited Sense
4) Medical Condition
5) Mental Case
6) Injury
7) Addiction
8) Socially Afflicted
9) Sleep Disorder
10) Stomach Upset
11) Butterfingers
12) Space Sickness

Addiction : You just can't focus on your daily life without indulging some habit you've formed. You have become addicted to some relatively harmful substance (tobacco) or you are severely addicted to some relatively harmless substance (coffee). Either way you suffer mentally when you don't have access to the object of your addiction, and prolonged unavailability makes you irritable and difficult to work with. You may choose the nature of your character's addiction, it might even be a psychological addiction but the effects are the same. You suffer a -1 to all rolls if the substance is not available after 24 hours. If you are forced to go without for another 24 hours then you suffer -3 to Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma until you indulge your addiction. If you go two weeks without the substance all of your affected scores permanently drop by two points, but you're no longer addicted.

Butterfingers : You are physically awkward and tend to make simple mistakes due to poor motor skills. Tech and Vehicle skills cost double the normal points, and skill Raises can never be used to increase them. Additionally, your critical fumbles have a -3 modifier.

Injury : You choose the nature of the injury (war wound, chronic back pain, botched surgery, etc.) but the effects are always the same. Roll Constitution against 10+ once per day. Failing the roll means you wake up with the pain and it might last throughout the rest of the day. While affected by the pain your Dex and Int are reduced by -5 for six hours. After every six hours you can attempt another Constitution roll against 10+ to recover from the pain. Success means you deal with the pain and the negative effects dissipate, but failure means it continues for another six hours. If you fall asleep while suffering from the pain then you do not get any decent rest and lose 1d4 Hit Points the next day as a result of exhaustion. You cannot die from this loss of Hit Points.

Limited Sense : Choose either mild deafness or myopia. Mild deafness will result in -2 to Perception and any hearing-based rolls. Myopia leaves you with a -2 penalty to see or affect things farther away than 15 yards.

Medical Condition : You have an untreatable cardiovascular disease which leaves you susceptible to feeling weak and potentially getting killed. You have a -2 penalty on any roll to remain conscious, avoid death, or resist disease or poison. In addition, your natural healing rate is cut in half (round up) and you lose System Strain at twice the normal level.

Mental Case : Some men carry a darkness inside of them that eats away at their will to live. You suffer from chronic depression and must make a Wisdom check at 8+ every morning to do anything but acquire and consume the minimum necessities for survival. Make this same check whenever you must choose between two or more actions. If you fail you take the path of least resistance. This usually means staying put and doing nothing. If somebody else shows up and demands that you do something with him failing the check means you go along with them out of apathy. On days that you pass the check you're consumed with a mania that forces you to take extreme chances and throw yourself into dangerously risky situations. Whenever you find yourself in a fight you are consumed by a death wish and throw yourself into the fight recklessly.

Sleep Disorder : You suffer from chronic insomnia and when the GM declares you must make a Constitution roll against 9+ to fall asleep easily. If you fail you lose sleep that night and the next day your Strength and Dexterity are reduced by four points (this doesn't affect Encumbrance). The insomnia continues until you succeed at the nightly Constitution roll. The GM secretly rolls 1d10 to determine how many days pass before you suffer from insomnia again. Whenever you have a traumatic experience the GM can require a Constitution roll to begin another episode of insomnia. Additionally, when you do manage to fall asleep you tend to be difficult to wake and subtract -2 to attempts to wake up.

Socially Afflicted : There is something about that is distasteful to others. You might be lacking in manners, impulsively blurt out your thoughts, completely oblivious to jests, or simply ugly as sin. Most of the time people get a bad impression from you, subtract 3 from all reaction rolls made against you or a group you are with. In addition to being disagreeable, you have difficulty communicating with others and have -2 to Instructor, Persuade, and any other social skill that might require you to be convincing.

Space Sickness : You suffer from "zero-gravity maladjustment syndrome," or space sickness. You are miserable in free fall, micro- and zero-gravity. You can never adapt to such environments and suffer -2 to all rolls and Armor Class. As well, roll Constitution against 8+ and if you fail you vomit, which is problematic if you're wearing a vacc suit.

Stomach Upset : You have a chronic gastrointestinal disorder which leaves you vigilant about what you consume or else suffer eventual starvation. You have a special diet that needs to be adhered to and your body will slowly consume itself if you don't receive the nutrients you require. You may choose what kind of diet restrictions the character has (vegan, all fruit, raw meat, etc.) and if for some reason you're unable to comply to the diet you begin to suffer the effects of starvation.

Terminally Ill : Your character is not long for this world. At the beginning of every session you must make a Physical Effect or Luck saving throw, your choice. If you fail you suffer a -4 to all rolls for the rest of that session. A failed roll also means you must make an Athletics/Con roll at 8+ (ignore the -4 penalty) or else they permanently lose 1 Hit Point. If this reduces you to 0 Hit Points, your character has died.

New Weapon: Flamethrower
Damage 2d6, Range 3 meter cone or 6 meter line, Magazine 50, Encumbrance 4
When spraying an area no attack roll is necessary. Instead everyone in the area must make an Evasion or Luck save to avoid damage. When set to shoot a stream of flame an attack roll is made as normal. Anyone hit by the flamethrower is set on fire and takes an additional 1d6 damage per round afterward, unless they spend their entire turn extinguishing the flames. Firing the weapon in two consecutive rounds overheats it, preventing it from being fired for one round. Reloading takes two rounds.

Finally, odds & ends Skill Points: Each class doubles their skill points per level.
( If you do the math, a Warrior or Psychic will have to spend all of their skill points in one skill just to keep it at it's maximum level. Only at 10th level do they finally get a "spare" point to spend elsewhere. Most players want to have more range than one specialization, so I'm giving it to them.)

Ability Score Modifiers: I give a slightly different breakdown, as seen in the table on the right.
( I felt the range was too limited, and I just think there should be something special for having a 3 or 18 in an ability.)

Training Costs for Skills: Waived at 2nd and 3rd level. Characters are assumed to have been training beforehand. At 4th level and beyond money and time must be spent to raise skills.
( This is just a personal preference. Especially with new players, nobody likes to feel that they managed to survive to a higher level and then suddenly get hit with having to spend money.)

Lazarus Patch: All 1st level characters start with one at no cost.

Combat: Players don't like keeping track of their enemies' Armor Class, so I just give them a target number to hit that is lower than 20 based on the AC of whoever they're fighting. It's kind of like THAC0 in that respect, though I believe the correct name for what I'm doing would have to be THAC20
( I would like to change it to an ascending Armor Class system, but I'm being lazy and I'm also worried that I've changed too much already. Also, I let people make called shots and critical hits, and I kept a copy of GURPS 4e handy to use tables from that.)

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recycled thoughts and house rules for Stars Without Number

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UPDATE! Hello redditors! I'm putting together a pdf with all of my house rules (and without all of my crazy public musings about rules) and I will link to it at the top of this page as soon as it's done. Thanks for stopping by! The rules for Stars Without Number are free!

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Another Resource Filled Blog

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1d20 Random Space Station/Star Port Encounters Table

1. Grizzled corporate veteran looking for the cheapest party of adventurers for a job.

2. An antique combat cyborg warrior looking for passage to Vega to see his family. They're in danger from a foreign plot

3. Nervous adventurers looking to unload a cache of alien artifacts and unknown weapons from the Chasm

4. An alien robot looking for one last job to go out in a blaze of glory

5. A group of gun runners whose clients paid them but were destroyed. They have to unload the merchandise or else

6. A tinker dealing in robots and probes looking for agents for new markets

7. A metal dealer looking for asteroid miners and rare Earth metal debris is taking new clients on.

8. A group of Vegan warriors/mercs are looking for others to help fight in a nasty protracted system war.

9. A Traveler is looking for others to help him map a sector of space known as the Chasm

10. A dealer in relics from the Chasm is looking for agents to help him in a new venture.

11. The Union of Spheres is looking for other mercs to help out on the front lines and they pay well

12. A group of refugees is looking for passage out of the system right now and they have only trade goods with them.

13. A droid begging for parts watches the crowd for some one or something. He's actually a fully functioning information broker droid and willing to trade with anything

14. A war bot veteran is spinning tales of the great battles he has fought in for 10 credits a story. Some of these stories are current

15. A group of zero gee acrobats are preforming and pan handling. They are actually some of the most deadly assassins out there. They will kill for a price

16. An alien book maker is taking odds on the local interstellar conflicts and will make good on the real long shots. Can tell the mark about the forces of both sides

17. A water and food seller is surrounded by crowds and selling food at hundreds of credits inflated prices. His agents approach your group.

18. A mercenary medical droid is selling its services to the highest bidder and has three other agents working the crowd. One approaches your group

19. A group of travelers is looking for passage on the next flight out. Didn't you see their pictures on a near by wanted poster?

20. A group of adventurers from a primitive plane is looking for passage to the next star system. They look very shifty especially that "wizard" of theirs. One of them approaches you.

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1d20 Random Space Station/Star Port Encounters For Stars Without Numbers Or Your Old School Space Opera Campaign

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1d20 Random Space Station/Star Port Encounters Table Grizzled corporate veteran looking for the cheapest party of adventurers for a job. An antique combat cyborg warrior looking for passage to Vega to see his family.

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Resource Filled Blog

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"Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending." - Carl Bard Actually, I kind of can make a brand new start, and I will.

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Entry into Hindu Faith

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Guru Granth Sahib ( Punjabi (Gurmukhi)eg.ਓ : ( Gurū Gra°th Sāhib Jī), Punjabi pronunciation: [ɡʊɾu ɡɾəntʰ sɑhɪb], ) is the religious scripture of Sikhism, regarded by Sikhs as the final, sovereign, and eternal living guru following the lineage of the ten human Sikh gurus of the Sikh religion.

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Building Court Houses from which to evict people from their homes growing homeless problems.

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In what Courts Service chiefs are calling a once-in-a-generation investment, the 135 million euro project will see work begin in the new year on new courts in Drogheda, Letterkenny, Limerick and Wexford and the modernising of buildings in Cork, Mullingar and Waterford.

Chief Justice Susan Denham said the courts will offer a future of a great change.

"The investment in these seven projects is the largest single investment in regional court structures in the history of the state," she said.

"These projects will bring world-class court facilities to each city or town. Each new courthouse will be of a standard befitting the serious nature of the business conducted there, and respectful of the dignity of the people who are called upon to appear in court, in any capacity."

Construction work will begin early next month and take up to 24 months to complete with the Courts Service marking 2017 for the first cases to be heard.

About 700 construction jobs will be sustained in the build.

Separately a new state-of-the-art Family & Children's Court complex is being planned for Hammond Lane in Dublin.

Facilities in the new venues will include video-conferencing, digital recording and electronic display of evidence in court rooms, public spaces, consultation rooms and waiting areas, juror facilities and dedicated rooms for lawyers and the media.

There will also be a ccommodation for witnesses, victims and their relatives with greater emphasis put on privacy, security and comfort, the Courts Service said.

"These projects will set a new standard for court facilities in Ireland, operating with a flexibility and security, providing suitable, modern accommodation for all court users," a spokesman for the Courts Service said.

The construction is being done under a public private partnership with the BAM group.

Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald said : "This Government has proved itself to be one of the most reforming in the history of the State when it comes to the courts and the legal system.

"It is only right that as we update our laws and legal systems that we also update our courts infrastructure."

Press Association

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Construction set to begin on seven new courthouses - Independent.ie

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In what Courts Service chiefs are calling a once-in-a-generation investment, the 135 million euro project will see work begin in the new year on new courts in Drogheda, Letterkenny, Limerick and Wexford and the modernising of buildings in Cork, Mullingar and Waterford. Chief Justice Susan Denham said the courts will offer a future of a great change.

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Environments

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Architectural projection for show TV advertising forTV advertising forFeature filmTV advertisingFeature film
Avowed - Axis studios 2020 : Digital Matte Painting

Toyota Frozen II - Improductibles 2019 : Digital Matte Painting

Le Bazar de la Charité - Fix Studio 2019 : Concept / Digital Matte Painting

Noëlle - MPC 2019 : Digital Matte Painting

Shazam! - MPC 2019 : Digital Matte Painting

Aquaman - MPC 2018 : Digital Matte Painting

Victor Hugo, ennemi d'état - Fix studio 2018 : Matte Painting

Delsey - Passion Paris 2018 : Matte Painting

KFC - Mathematic 2018 : Concept Design / Matte Painting

ING Direct - Mathematic 2018 : Matte Painting

Citroen DS - Nighshift 2017 : Matte Painting

Lancome - Brunch 2017 : Matte Painting

Manor - Passion Paris 2017 : Concept Design

Roberto Cavalli - Onirim 2017 : Matte Painting

Mitsubishi Eclipse - Mathematic 2017 : Matte Painting

Oasis Be Fruit - Fix studio 2017 : Matte Painting

Novartis - Brunch 2017 : Matte Painting

Sécurité Routière - Fix studio 2016 : Concept Design / Matte Paintingg

Hollywood - Fix studio 2016 : Concept Design / Matte Painting

Futuroscope - Cube Creative 2016 : Concept Design

Cartier Winter Tale 2016 - NKI 2016 : Matte Painting

Peugeot Senses - FIXSTUDIO 2016 : Matte Painting

World of Warcraft - Fighting Fish 2016 : Matte Painting

Canal + - BRUNCH 2016 : Matte Painting

Swarovski - Copywright 2016 : Concept Design / Matte Painting

Marseille - CGEV 2015 : Matte Painting

Les Tuches 2 - CGEV 2015 : Matte Painting

Pension Complète - CGEV 2015 : Matte Painting

Casanova - CGEV 2015 : Matte Painting

Prince de LU - CUBE CREATIVE 2015 : Colorscript / Matte Painting Supervision

Monster Legends - CUBE CREATIVE 2015 : Matte Painting

Nissan Pathfinder - NKI 2014 : Matte Painting

France 3 Hiver - Cube Creative 2014 : Matte Painting / Touch Up

Cartier Winter Tale 2014 - Cube Creative 2014 : Art Direction / Matte Painting Supervision

Prince de LU - Cube Creative 2013 : Matte Painting

Cartier Winter Tale - Unit Image 2012 : Concept Design & Matte Painting

Cartier - Cosmo AV 2012 : Concept Design & Matte Painting

L'Odyssée de Cartier - Wizz / Digital District 2011 : Concept Design & Matte Painting

Renault Twizy / David Guetta - Digital District 2012 : Matte Painting

ELITE Models - Mathematic 2012 : Matte Painting

Tipp-Ex season 2 - Mathematic 2012 : Concept Design & Matte Painting

Popular Mechanics - 2011 : Matte Painting

The Lorax- Macguff 2010 : Set & Props Texturing

Chocapic- Mathematic 2012 : Concept Design

Cinderella 3D- Delacave Studio 2011 : Matte Painting - Character & Set/Props Texturing

Arthur and the Invisibles 2 - BUF 2009 : Environment Modeling & Texturing

Personal Work - Matte Painting / Concept Design

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Thiên-Co PHAM // Digital Matte Painter - Art Director - Paris - Matte painting - Concept Artist - VFX - Advertising - Feature Film - Movie - Illustrator

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Architectural projection for show TV advertising forTV advertising forFeature filmTV advertisingFeature film Avowed - Axis studios 2020 : Digital Matte Painting Toyota Frozen II - Improductibles 2019 : Digital Matte Painting Le Bazar de la Charité - Fix Studio 2019 : Concept / Digital Matte Painting Noëlle - MPC 2019 : Digital Matte Painting Shazam!

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Sci-fi Movies That Don't Involve Aliens. P2.

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Post with 18391 votes and 535454 views. Shared by eatingketchupchips. Sci-fi Movies That Don't Involve Aliens. P2.

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This post is a brief introduction and collection of resources for the rpg Stars without numbers. Dont know it? Dont worry, just start reading below. Already know it? Good! start reading beneath the line for the rules and other resources.
The game in short:
Stars Without Number is a retro science fiction role playing game influenced by the Old School Renaissance. It is inspired by older dnd editions. Its main claim to fame is it extensive collection of tools to support gm's in creating a sandbox campaign.
Some Reviews:
" So, on the whole, absolutely awesome. I love the sandbox style, I love the old-school feel that isn't entirely bound to old-school thinking, I love the modular options to the rules. I also love that it has just the right balance of default setting"- The RPGPundit

" Perhaps if you want to build the entire Universe then maybe CT is the way you want to go. Stars Without Number though provides you with a basic system that allows for complexity and it is aimed at modern day sci-fi." - rpgknights

'' this is the first game I've ever read that fulfills the unfulfilled promise of OD&D to take the PCs from rogues on the make to movers and shakers in the world and does so seamlessly'' -Grognardia

Note: The writer of this post is biased so do read some other reviews.
The game in action: Swan song, a youtube roleplay series using the stars without number ruleset An example sector Interested? Good, here are the rules:
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/86467/Stars-Without-Number-Free-Edition Yes indeed, the basic version of this rpg is completely free, so no need to pay to see what it is about.

The paid edition does include things like mechs, ai and more, so if you like it, you can find that here: http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/94621/Stars-Without-Number%3A-Core-Edition
some basic tools: additions for your game: DM Resources
Running a sandbox rpg is difficult sometimes. You need to improvise sometimes, these plot hooks and random tables etc should help you keep up appearances.
Rule changes Additional (free) reading: Do you have more to share or add about Stars without number? Please DM or post!

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r/rpg - the complete resource package for Stars Without Number: completely free

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This post is a brief introduction and collection of resources for the rpg Stars without numbers. Dont know it? Dont worry, just start reading below. Already know it? Good! start reading beneath the line for the rules and other resources.

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"The thing about evolving on a death world is that you don't really realise you're doing so until you get the chance to leave it. Up to that point the presence of carnivorous monsters, venomous micropredators, extreme climatic conditions, geological instability, the most lethal cocktail of microbial and viral life forms in the galaxy and of course the crushing gravity, seemed entirely natural. Until we left Earth we thought ourselves rather weak, frail, defenceless creatures because we only had earth fauna to compare ourselves to. You can imagine our surprise then, upon joining the galactic community to find ourselves in fact to be enormous, robust and insanely dangerous in our own right." - Anonymous.

The Galaxy is a big place, and life will get started practically anywhere. Butsapient life requires stability, peace, and an ecosystem that's generally conducive to allowing a species to get away with devoting lots of calories to all that spare brainpower, and sitting around thinking about things. On the nastier kinds of world, life is too hectic, too dangerous and too unforgiving for any animal to become sapient.

Or so the galactic community used to believe, before the discovery of Homo Sapiens.

It turns out that the conventional wisdom was wrong, it's just that the native sophonts of a deathworld treat their intellect in much the same way as a vicious predator might treat its claws - as a weapon, and as a survival tool. Humanity has spent thousands of generations eking out a living on a planet where simply surviving from day to day is a serious challenge, and have come to view themselves as the plucky underdogs, struggling to slay dragons and conquer impossible odds. Human stories are full of insurmountable challenges and the heroes who rise to meet them.

As far as the rest of the galaxy is concerned, however, humans are lightning-fast killing machines that are effectively impervious to all but the most powerful weaponry. In the Jenkinsverse, humans aren't just the aliens - we're the alien monsters.

And it's only a matter of time before we leave Earth...

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Misc

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Artist & author of Structura I, II, and III. 343-Microsoft - Halo 5 Art Director. Credits: Halo 4, Assassin's Creed, RAGE, Prince of Persia, AITD 4, & about 100 book covers. photographer whenever i...

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Environments

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DeviantArt is the world's largest online social community for artists and art enthusiasts, allowing people to connect through the creation and sharing of art.

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Postmodernist Gibberish for factions lovecraft links in to me

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Egalitarianism as Interpreted by a Feminist

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The fallacies fly thick and fast as a feminist ideologue attempts to explain why egalitarianism is not a superior moral framework to feminism. Update: Mike has responded very maturely here: https://twitter.com/mikerugnetta/status/621045053490917376 Note: MIke's wonderful "explanation of egalitarianism" here, and it is just as misapprehended as his video: http://mikerugnetta.tumblr.com/post/123744373585/op-onions-pretty-disappointed-with-idea-channel "As far as I understand it, the general principle of egalitarianism is "equality".

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Corporate Medical drama resource for details

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Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients is a book by the British physician and academic Ben Goldacre about the pharmaceutical industry, its relationship with the medical profession, and the extent to which it controls academic research into its own products.

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Whilst not a huge fan elements could be taken...

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Howard Phillips Lovecraft (, ; August 20, 1890 - March 15, 1937) was an American writer of weird, science, fantasy, and horror fiction. He is best known for his creation of the Cthulhu Mythos.

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Lovecraft spent most of his life in New England. After his father's institutionalization in 1893, he lived affluently until his family's wealth dissipated after the death of his grandfather. Lovecraft then lived with his mother, in reduced financial security, until her institutionalization in 1919. He began to write essays for the United Amateur Press Association, and in 1913 wrote a critical letter to a pulp magazine that ultimately led to his involvement in pulp fiction. He became active in the speculative fiction community and was published in several pulp magazines. Lovecraft moved to New York City, marrying Sonia Greene in 1924, and later became the center of a wider group of authors known as the "Lovecraft Circle". They introduced him to Weird Tales, which would become his most prominent publisher. Lovecraft's time in New York took a toll on his mental state and financial conditions. He returned to Providence in 1926 and produced some of his most popular works, including The Call of Cthulhu, At the Mountains of Madness, The Shadow over Innsmouth, and The Shadow Out of Time. He would remain active as a writer for 11 years until his death from intestinal cancer at the age of 46.

Lovecraft's literary corpus is based around the idea of cosmicism, which was simultaneously his personal philosophy and the main theme of his fiction. Cosmicism posits that humanity is an insignificant part of the cosmos, and could be swept away at any moment. He incorporated fantasy and science fiction elements into his stories, representing the perceived fragility of anthropocentrism. This was tied to his ambivalent views on knowledge. His works were largely set in a fictionalized version of New England. Civilizational decline also plays a major role in his works, as he believed that the West was in decline during his lifetime. Lovecraft's early political views were conservative and traditionalist; additionally, he held a number of racist views for much of his adult life. Following the Great Depression, Lovecraft's political views became more socialist while still remaining elitist and aristocratic.

Throughout his adult life, Lovecraft was never able to support himself from earnings as an author and editor. He was virtually unknown during his lifetime and was almost exclusively published in pulp magazines before his death. A scholarly revival of Lovecraft's work began in the 1970s, and he is now regarded as one of the most significant 20th-century authors of supernatural horror fiction. Many direct adaptations and spiritual successors followed. Works inspired by Lovecraft, adaptations or original works, began to form the basis of the Cthulhu Mythos, which utilizes Lovecraft's characters, setting, and themes.

Lovecraft was born in his family home on August 20, 1890, in Providence, Rhode Island. He was the only child of Winfield Scott Lovecraft and Sarah Susan (née Phillips) Lovecraft. Susie's family was of substantial means at the time of their marriage, as her father, Whipple Van Buren Phillips, was involved in business ventures. In April 1893, after a psychotic episode in a Chicago hotel, Winfield was committed to Butler Hospital in Providence. His medical records state that he had been "doing and saying strange things at times" for a year before his commitment. The person who reported these symptoms is unknown. Winfield spent five years in Butler before dying in 1898. His death certificate listed the cause of death as general paresis, a term synonymous with late-stage syphilis. Throughout his life, Lovecraft maintained that his father fell into a paralytic state, due to insomnia and overwork, and remained that way until his death. It is not known whether Lovecraft was simply kept ignorant of his father's illness or whether his later statements were intentionally misleading.

After his father's institutionalization, Lovecraft resided in the family home with his mother, his maternal aunts Lillian and Annie, and his maternal grandparents Whipple and Robie. According to family friends, his mother, known as Susie, doted on the young Lovecraft excessively, pampering him and never letting him out of her sight. Lovecraft later recollected that his mother was "permanently stricken with grief" after his father's illness. Whipple became a father figure to Lovecraft in this time, Lovecraft noting that his grandfather became the "centre of my entire universe". Whipple, who often traveled to manage his business, maintained correspondence by letter with the young Lovecraft who, by the age of three, was already proficient at reading and writing.

Whipple encouraged the young Lovecraft to have an appreciation of literature, especially classical literature and English poetry. In his old age, he helped raise the young H. P. Lovecraft and educated him not only in the classics, but also in original weird tales of "winged horrors" and "deep, low, moaning sounds" which he created for his grandchild's entertainment. The original sources of Phillips' weird tales are unidentified. Lovecraft himself guessed that they originated from Gothic novelists like Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, and Charles Maturin. It was during this period that Lovecraft was introduced to some of his earliest literary influences, such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner illustrated by Gustave Doré, One Thousand and One Nights, Thomas Bulfinch's Age of Fable, and Ovid's Metamorphoses.

While there is no indication that Lovecraft was particularly close to his grandmother Robie, her death in 1896 had a profound effect on him. By his own account, it sent his family into "a gloom from which it never fully recovered". His mother and aunts wore black mourning dresses that "terrified" him. This is also the time that Lovecraft, approximately five-and-a-half years old, started having nightmares that later would inform his fictional writings. Specifically, he began to have recurring nightmares of beings he referred to as "night-gaunts". He credited their appearance to the influence of Doré's illustrations, which would "whirl me through space at a sickening rate of speed, the while fretting & impelling me with their detestable tridents". Thirty years later, night-gaunts would appear in Lovecraft's fiction.

Lovecraft's earliest known literary works were written at the age of seven, and were poems restyling the and other Greco-Roman mythological stories. Lovecraft would later write that during his childhood he was fixated on the Greco-Roman pantheon, and briefly accepted them as genuine expressions of divinity, foregoing his Christian upbringing. He recalled, at five years old, being told Santa Claus did not exist and retorted by asking why "God is not equally a myth?" At the age of eight, he took a keen interest in the sciences, particularly astronomy and chemistry. He also examined the anatomical books that were held in the family library, which taught him the specifics of human reproduction that were not yet explained to him. As a result, he found that it "virtually killed my interest in the subject".

In 1902, according to Lovecraft's later correspondence, astronomy became a guiding influence on his worldview. He began publishing the periodical Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy, using the hectograph printing method. Lovecraft went in and out of elementary school repeatedly, oftentimes with home tutors making up for the lost years, missing time due to health concerns that have not been determined. The written recollections of his peers described him as withdrawn but welcoming to those who shared his then-current fascination with astronomy, inviting them to look through his prized telescope.

By 1900, Whipple's various business concerns were suffering a downturn, which resulted in the slow erosion of his family's wealth. He was forced to let his family's hired servants go, leaving Lovecraft, Whipple, and Susie, being the only unmarried sister, alone in the family home. In the spring of 1904, Whipple's largest business venture suffered a catastrophic failure. Within months, he died at age 70 due to a stroke. After Whipple's death, Susie was unable to financially support the upkeep of the expansive family home on what remained of the Phillips' estate. Later that year, she was forced to move to a small duplex with her son.

Lovecraft called this time one of the darkest of his life, remarking in a 1934 letter that he saw no point in living anymore; he considered the possibility of committing suicide. His scientific curiosity and desire to know more about the world prevented him from doing so. In fall 1904, he entered high school. Much like his earlier school years, Lovecraft was periodically removed from school for long periods for what he termed "near breakdowns". He did say, though, that while having some conflicts with teachers, he enjoyed high school, becoming close with a small circle of friends. Lovecraft also performed well academically, excelling in particular at chemistry and physics. Aside from a pause in 1904, he also resumed publishing the Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy as well as starting the Scientific Gazette, which dealt mostly with chemistry. It was also during this period that Lovecraft produced the first of the fictional works that he would later be known for, namely " The Beast in the Cave" and " The Alchemist".

It was in 1908, prior to what would have been his high school graduation, that Lovecraft suffered another unidentified health crisis, though this instance was more severe than his prior illnesses. The exact circumstances and causes remain unknown. The only direct records are Lovecraft's own correspondence wherein he retrospectively described it variously as a "nervous collapse" and "a sort of breakdown", in one letter blaming it on the stress of high school despite his enjoying it. In another letter concerning the events of 1908, he notes, "I was and am prey to intense headaches, insomnia, and general nervous weakness which prevents my continuous application to any thing".

Though Lovecraft maintained that he was going to attend Brown University after high school, he never graduated and never attended school again. Whether Lovecraft suffered from a physical ailment, a mental one, or some combination thereof has never been determined. An account from a high school classmate described Lovecraft as exhibiting "terrible tics" and that at times "he'd be sitting in his seat and he'd suddenly up and jump". Harry Brobst, a psychology professor, examined the account and claimed that chorea minor was the probable cause of Lovecraft's childhood symptoms, while noting that instances of chorea minor after adolescence are very rare. In his letters, Lovecraft acknowledged that he suffered from bouts of chorea as a child. Brobst further ventured that Lovecraft's 1908 breakdown was attributed to a "hysteroid seizure", a term that has become synonymous with atypical depression. In another letter concerning the events of 1908, Lovecraft stated that he "could hardly bear to see or speak to anyone, & liked to shut out the world by pulling down dark shades & using artificial light".

Few of Lovecraft and Susie's activities between late 1908 and 1913 were recorded. Lovecraft described the steady continuation of their financial decline highlighted by his uncle's failed business that cost Susie a large portion of their already dwindling wealth. One of Susie's friends, Clara Hess, recalled a visit during which Susie spoke continuously about Lovecraft being "so hideous that he hid from everyone and did not like to walk upon the streets where people could gaze on him." Despite Hess' protests to the contrary, Susie maintained this stance. For his part, Lovecraft said he found his mother to be "a positive marvel of consideration". A next-door neighbor later pointed out that what others in the neighborhood often assumed were loud, nocturnal quarrels between mother and son, were actually recitations of William Shakespeare, an activity that seemed to delight mother and son.

During this period, Lovecraft revived his earlier scientific periodicals. He endeavored to commit himself to the study of organic chemistry, Susie buying the expensive glass chemistry assemblage he wanted. Lovecraft found his studies were stymied by the mathematics involved, which he found boring and would cause headaches that would incapacitate him for the remainder of the day. Lovecraft's first non-self-published poem appeared in a local newspaper in 1912. Called Providence in 2000 A.D., it envisioned a future where Americans of English descent were displaced by Irish, Italian, Portuguese, and Jewish immigrants. In this period he also wrote racist poetry, including "New-England Fallen" and "On the Creation of Niggers", but there is no indication that either were published during his lifetime.

In 1911, Lovecraft's letters to editors began appearing in pulp and weird-fiction magazines, most notably . A 1913 letter critical of Fred Jackson, one of Argosy's more prominent writers, started Lovecraft down a path that would define the remainder of his career as a writer. In the following letters, Lovecraft described Jackson's stories as being "trivial, effeminate, and, in places, coarse". Continuing, Lovecraft argued that Jackson's characters exhibit the "delicate passions and emotions proper to negroes and anthropoid apes." This sparked a nearly year-long feud in the magazine's letters section between the two writers and their respective supporters. Lovecraft's most prominent opponent was John Russell, who often replied in verse, and to whom Lovecraft felt compelled to reply because he respected Russell's writing skills. The most immediate effect of this feud was the recognition garnered from Edward F. Daas, then head editor of the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA). Daas invited Russell and Lovecraft to join the organization and both accepted, Lovecraft in April 1914.

With the advent of United I obtained a renewed will to live; a renewed sense of existence as other than a superfluous weight; and found a sphere in which I could feel that my efforts were not wholly futile. For the first time I could imagine that my clumsy gropings after art were a little more than faint cries lost in the unlistening void.

-Lovecraft in 1921.

Lovecraft immersed himself in the world of amateur journalism for most of the following decade. During this period, he advocated for amateurism's superiority to commercialism. Lovecraft defined commercialism as writing for what he considered low-brow publications for pay. This was contrasted with his view of "professional publication", which was what he called writing for what he considered respectable journals and publishers. He thought of amateur journalism as serving as practice for a professional career.

Lovecraft was appointed chairman of the Department of Public Criticism of the UAPA in late 1914. He used this position to advocate for what he saw as the superiority of archaic English language usage. Emblematic of the Anglophilic opinions he maintained throughout his life, he openly criticized other UAPA contributors for their "Americanisms" and "slang". Often, these criticisms were embedded in xenophobic and racist statements that the "national language" was being negatively changed by immigrants. In mid-1915, Lovecraft was elected vice-president of the UAPA. Two years later, he was elected president and appointed other board members who mostly shared his belief in the supremacy of British English over modern American English. Another significant event of this time was the beginning of World War I. Lovecraft published multiple criticisms of the American government and public's reluctance to join the war to protect England, which he viewed as America's ancestral homeland.

In 1916, Lovecraft published his first short story, "The Alchemist", in the main UAPA journal, which was a departure from his usual verse. Due to the encouragement of W. Paul Cook, another UAPA member and future lifelong friend, Lovecraft began writing and publishing more prose fiction. Soon afterwards, he wrote " The Tomb" and " Dagon". "The Tomb", by Lovecraft's own admission, was greatly influenced by the style and structure of Edgar Allan Poe's works. Meanwhile, "Dagon" is considered Lovecraft's first work that displays the concepts and themes that his writings would later become known for. Lovecraft published another short story, " Beyond the Wall of Sleep" in 1919, which was his first science fiction story.

Lovecraft's term as president of the UAPA ended in 1918, and he returned to his former post as chairman of the Department of Public Criticism. In 1917, as Lovecraft related to Kleiner, Lovecraft made an aborted attempt to enlist in the United States Army. Though he passed the physical exam, he told Kleiner that his mother threatened to do anything, legal or otherwise, to prove that he was unfit for service. After his failed attempt to serve in World War I, he attempted to enroll in the Rhode Island Army National Guard, but his mother used her family connections to prevent it.

During the winter of 1918-1919, Susie, exhibiting the symptoms of a nervous breakdown, went to live with her elder sister, Lillian. The nature of Susie's illness is unclear, as her medical papers were later destroyed in a fire at Butler Hospital. Winfield Townley Scott, who was able to read the papers before the fire, described Susie as having suffered a psychological collapse. Neighbour and friend Clara Hess, interviewed in 1948, recalled instances of Susie describing "weird and fantastic creatures that rushed out from behind buildings and from corners at dark." In the same account, Hess described a time when they crossed paths in downtown Providence and Susie was unaware of where she was. In March 1919, she was committed to Butler Hospital, like her husband before her. Lovecraft's immediate reaction to Susie's commitment was visceral, writing to Kleiner that "existence seems of little value", and that he wished "it might terminate". During Susie's time at Butler, Lovecraft periodically visited her and walked the large grounds with her.

Late 1919 saw Lovecraft become more outgoing. After a period of isolation, he began joining friends in trips to writer gatherings; the first being a talk in Boston presented by Lord Dunsany, whom Lovecraft had recently discovered and idolized. In early 1920, at an amateur writer convention, he met Frank Belknap Long, who would end up being Lovecraft's most influential and closest confidant for the remainder of his life. The influence of Dunsany is apparent in his 1919 output, which is part of what would be called Lovecraft's Dream Cycle, including " The White Ship" and " The Doom That Came to Sarnath". In early 1920, he wrote " The Cats of Ulthar" and " Celephaïs", which were also strongly influenced by Dunsany.

It was later in 1920 that Lovecraft began publishing the earliest Cthulhu Mythos stories. The Cthulhu Mythos, a term coined by later authors, encompasses Lovecraft's stories that share a commonality in the revelation of cosmic insignificance, initially realistic settings, and recurring entities and texts. The prose poem " Nyarlathotep" and the short story " The Crawling Chaos", in collaboration with Winifred Virginia Jackson, were written in late 1920. Following in early 1921 came " The Nameless City", the first story that falls definitively within the Cthulhu Mythos. In it is one of Lovecraft's most enduring phrases, a couplet recited by Abdul Alhazred; "That is not dead which can eternal lie; And with strange aeons even death may die." In the same year, he also wrote " The Outsider", which has become one of Lovecraft's most heavily analyzed, and differently interpreted, stories. It has been variously interpreted as being autobiographical, an allegory of the psyche, a parody of the afterlife, a commentary on humanity's place in the universe, and a critique of progress.

On May 24, 1921, Susie died in Butler Hospital, due to complications from an operation on her gallbladder five days earlier. Lovecraft's initial reaction, expressed in a letter written nine days after Susie's death, was a deep state of sadness that crippled him physically and emotionally. He again expressed a desire that his life might end. Lovecraft's later response was relief, as he had become able to live independently from his mother. His physical health also began to improve, although he was unaware of the exact cause. Despite Lovecraft's reaction, he continued to attend amateur journalist conventions. Lovecraft met his future wife, Sonia Greene, at one such convention in July.

Lovecraft's aunts disapproved of his relationship with Sonia. Lovecraft and Greene married on March 3, 1924, and relocated to her Brooklyn apartment at 259 Parkside Avenue; she thought he needed to leave Providence to flourish and was willing to support him financially. Greene, who had been married before, later said Lovecraft had performed satisfactorily as a lover, though she had to take the initiative in all aspects of the relationship. She attributed Lovecraft's passive nature to a stultifying upbringing by his mother. Lovecraft's weight increased to 200 lb (91 kg) on his wife's home cooking.

He was enthralled by New York City, and, in what was informally dubbed the Kalem Club, he acquired a group of encouraging intellectual and literary friends who urged him to submit stories to Weird Tales. Its editor, Edwin Baird, accepted many of Lovecraft's stories for the ailing publication, including " Under the Pyramids", which was ghostwritten for Harry Houdini. Established informally some years before Lovecraft arrived in New York, the core Kalem Club members were boys' adventure novelist Henry Everett McNeil, the lawyer and anarchist writer James Ferdinand Morton Jr., and the poet Reinhardt Kleiner.

On January 1, 1925, Sonia moved from Parkside to Cleveland in response to a job opportunity, and Lovecraft left for a small first-floor apartment on 169 Clinton Street "at the edge of Red Hook"-a location which came to discomfort him greatly. Later that year, the Kalem Club's four regular attendees were joined by Lovecraft along with his protégé Frank Belknap Long, bookseller George Willard Kirk, and Samuel Loveman. Loveman was Jewish, but he and Lovecraft became close friends in spite of the latter's antisemitic attitudes. By the 1930s, writer and publisher Herman Charles Koenig would be one of the last to become involved with the Kalem Club.

Not long after the marriage, Greene lost her business and her assets disappeared in a bank failure. Lovecraft made efforts to support his wife through regular jobs, but his lack of previous work experience meant he lacked proven marketable skills. The publisher of Weird Tales was attempting to make the loss-making magazine profitable and offered the job of editor to Lovecraft, who declined, citing his reluctance to relocate to Chicago on aesthetic grounds. Baird was succeeded by Farnsworth Wright, whose writing Lovecraft had criticized. Lovecraft's submissions were often rejected by Wright. This may have been partially due to censorship guidelines imposed in the aftermath of a Weird Tales story that hinted at necrophilia, although after Lovecraft's death, Wright accepted many of the stories he had originally rejected.

Sonia also became ill and immediately after recovering, relocated to Cincinnati, and then to Cleveland; her employment required constant travel. Added to his feelings of failure in a city with a large immigrant population, Lovecraft's single-room apartment was burgled, leaving him with only the clothes he was wearing. In August 1925, he wrote " The Horror at Red Hook" and " He", in the latter of which the narrator says "My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration [...] I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyze, and annihilate me." This was an expression of his despair at being in New York. It was at around this time he wrote the outline for " The Call of Cthulhu", with its theme of the insignificance of all humanity. During this time, Lovecraft wrote " Supernatural Horror in Literature" on the eponymous subject. It later became one of the most influential essays on supernatural horror. With a weekly allowance Greene sent, Lovecraft moved to a working-class area of Brooklyn Heights, where he resided in a tiny apartment. He had lost approximately 40 pounds (18 kg) of body weight by 1926, when he left for Providence.

Back in Providence, Lovecraft lived with his aunts in a "spacious brown Victorian wooden house" at 10 Barnes Street until 1933. He then moved to 66 Prospect Street, which would become his final home. The period beginning after his return to Providence contains some of his most prominent works, including The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, "The Call of Cthulhu" and The Shadow over Innsmouth. The former two stories are partially autobiographical, as scholars have argued that The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is about Lovecraft's return to Providence and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is, in part, about the city itself. The former story also represents a partial repudiation of Dunsany's influence, as Lovecraft had decided that his style did not come to him naturally. At this time, he frequently revised work for other authors and did a large amount of ghostwriting, including , "Winged Death", and "The Diary of Alonzo Typer". Client Harry Houdini was laudatory, and attempted to help Lovecraft by introducing him to the head of a newspaper syndicate. Plans for a further project were ended by Houdini's death in 1926. After returning, he also began to engage in antiquarian travels across the eastern seaboard during the summer months. During the spring-summer of 1930, Lovecraft visited, among other locations, New York City, Brattleboro, Vermont, Wilbraham, Massachusetts, Charleston, South Carolina, and Quebec City.

Later, in August, Robert E. Howard wrote a letter to Weird Tales praising a then-recent reprint of Lovecraft's " The Rats in the Walls" and discussing some of the Gaelic references used within. Editor Farnsworth Wright forwarded the letter to Lovecraft, who responded positively to Howard, and soon the two writers were engaged in a vigorous correspondence that would last for the rest of Howard's life. Howard quickly became a member of the Lovecraft Circle, a group of writers and friends all linked through Lovecraft's voluminous correspondence, as he introduced his many like-minded friends to one another and encouraged them to share their stories, utilize each other's fictional creations, and help each other succeed in the field of pulp fiction.

Meanwhile, Lovecraft was increasingly producing work that brought him no remuneration. Affecting a calm indifference to the reception of his works, Lovecraft was in reality extremely sensitive to criticism and easily precipitated into withdrawal. He was known to give up trying to sell a story after it had been once rejected. Sometimes, as with The Shadow over Innsmouth, he wrote a story that might have been commercially viable but did not try to sell it. Lovecraft even ignored interested publishers. He failed to reply when one inquired about any novel Lovecraft might have ready: although he had completed such a work, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, it was never typed up. A few years after Lovecraft had moved to Providence, he and his wife Sonia Greene, having lived separately for so long, agreed to an amicable divorce. Greene moved to California in 1933 and remarried in 1936, unaware that Lovecraft, despite his assurances to the contrary, had never officially signed the final decree.

As a result of the Great Depression, he shifted towards socialism, decrying both his prior political beliefs and the rising tide of fascism. He thought that socialism was a workable middle ground between what he saw as the destructive impulses of both the capitalists and the Marxists of his day. This was based in a general opposition to cultural upheaval, as well as support for an ordered society. Electorally, he supported Franklin D. Roosevelt, but he thought that the New Deal was not sufficiently leftist. Lovecraft's support for it was based in his view that no other set of reforms were possible at that time.

In late 1936, he witnessed the publication of The Shadow over Innsmouth as a paperback book. 400 copies were printed, and the work was advertised in Weird Tales and several fan magazines. However, Lovecraft was displeased, as this book was riddled with errors that required extensive editing. It sold slowly and only approximately 200 copies were bound. The remaining 200 copies were destroyed after the publisher went out of business for the next seven years. By this point, Lovecraft's literary career was reaching its end. Shortly after having written his last original short story, " The Haunter of the Dark", he stated that the hostile reception of At the Mountains of Madness had done "more than anything to end my effective fictional career". His declining psychological and physical states made it impossible for him to continue writing fiction.

On June 11, Robert E. Howard was informed that his chronically ill mother would not awaken from her coma. He walked out to his car and committed suicide with a pistol that he had stored there. His mother died shortly thereafter. This deeply affected Lovecraft, who consoled Howard's father through correspondence. Almost immediately after hearing about Howard's death, Lovecraft wrote a brief memoir titled "In Memoriam: Robert Ervin Howard", which he distributed to his correspondents. Meanwhile, Lovecraft's physical health was deteriorating. He was suffering from an affliction that he referred to as "grippe".

Due to his fear of doctors, Lovecraft was not examined until a month before his death. After seeing a doctor, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer of the small intestine. He remained hospitalized until he died. He lived in constant pain until his death on March 15, 1937, in Providence. In accordance with his lifelong scientific curiosity, he kept a diary of his illness until he was physically incapable of holding a pen. Lovecraft was listed along with his parents on the Phillips family monument. In 1977, fans erected a headstone in Swan Point Cemetery on which they inscribed his name, the dates of his birth and death, and the phrase "I AM PROVIDENCE"-a line from one of his personal letters.

H. P. Lovecraft as an eighteenth-century gentleman by Virgil Finlay

Lovecraft began his life as a Tory, which was likely the result of his conservative upbringing. His family supported the Republican Party for the entirety of his life. While it is unclear how consistently he voted, he voted for Herbert Hoover in the 1928 U.S. presidential election. Rhode Island as a whole remained politically conservative and Republican into the 1930s. Lovecraft himself was an Anglophile who supported the British monarchy. He opposed democracy and thought that the United States should be governed by an aristocracy. This viewpoint emerged during his youth and lasted until the end of the 1920s. During World War I, his Anglophilia caused him to strongly support the entente against the Central Powers. Many of his earlier poems were devoted to then-current political subjects, and he published several political essays in his amateur journal, The Conservative. He was a teetotaler who supported the implementation of Prohibition, which was one of the few reforms that he supported during the early part of his life. While remaining a teetotaler, he later became convinced that Prohibition was ineffectual in the 1930s. His personal justification for his early political viewpoints was primarily based on tradition and aesthetics.

As a result of the Great Depression, Lovecraft reexamined his political views. Initially, he thought that affluent people would take on the characteristics of his ideal aristocracy and solve America's problems. When this did not occur, he became a socialist. This shift was caused by his observation that the Depression was harming American society. It was also influenced by the increase in socialism's political capital during the 1930s. One of the main points of Lovecraft's socialism was its opposition to Soviet Marxism, as he thought that a Marxist revolution would bring about the destruction of American civilization. Lovecraft thought that an intellectual aristocracy needed to be formed to preserve America. His ideal political system is outlined in his 1933 essay "Some Repetitions on the Times". Lovecraft used this essay to echo the political proposals that had been made over the course of the last few decades. In this essay, he advocates governmental control of resource distribution, fewer working hours and a higher wage, and unemployment insurance and old age pensions. He also outlines the need for an oligarchy of intellectuals. In his view, power must be restricted to those who are sufficiently intelligent and educated. He frequently used the term "fascism" to describe this form of government, but, according to S. T. Joshi, it bears little resemblance to that ideology.

Lovecraft had varied views on the political figures of his day. He was an ardent supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He saw that Roosevelt was trying to steer a middle course between the conservatives and the revolutionaries, which he approved of. While he thought that Roosevelt should have been enacting more progressive policies, he came to the conclusion that the New Deal was the only realistic option for reform. He thought that voting for his opponents on the political left would be a wasted effort. Internationally, like many Americans, he initially expressed support for Adolf Hitler. More specifically, he thought that Hitler would preserve German culture. However, he thought that Hitler's racial policies should be based on culture rather than descent. There is evidence that, at the end of his life, Lovecraft began to oppose Hitler. Harry K. Brobst, Lovecraft's downstairs neighbor, went to Germany and witnessed Jews being beaten. Lovecraft and his aunt were angered by this, and his discussions of Hitler drop off after this point.

Lovecraft was an atheist. His viewpoints on religion are outlined in his 1922 essay "A Confession of Unfaith". In this essay, he describes his shift away from the Protestantism of his parents to the atheism of his adulthood. Lovecraft was raised by a conservative Protestant family. He was introduced to the Bible and the mythos of Saint Nicholas when he was two. He passively accepted both of them. Over the course of the next few years, he was introduced to Grimms' Fairy Tales and One Thousand and One Nights, favoring the latter. In response, Lovecraft took on the identity of "Abdul Alhazred", a name he would later use for the author of the Necronomicon. Lovecraft experienced a brief period as a Greco-Roman pagan shortly thereafter. According to this account, his first moment of skepticism occurred before his fifth birthday, when he questioned if God is a myth after learning that Santa Claus is not real. In 1896, he was introduced to Greco-Roman myths and became "a genuine pagan".

This came to an end in 1902, when Lovecraft was introduced to space. He later described this event as the most poignant in his life. In response to this discovery, Lovecraft took to studying astronomy and described his observations in the local newspaper. Before his thirteenth birthday, he had become convinced of humanity's impermanence. By the time he was seventeen, he had read detailed writings that agreed with his worldview. Lovecraft ceased writing positively about progress, instead developing his later cosmic philosophy. Despite his interests in science, he had an aversion to realistic literature, so he became interested in fantastical fiction. Lovecraft became pessimistic when he entered amateur journalism in 1914. The Great War seemed to confirm his viewpoints. He began to despise philosophical idealism. Lovecraft took to discussing and debating his pessimism with his peers, which allowed him to solidify his philosophy. His readings of Friedrich Nietzsche and H. L. Mencken, among other pessimistic writers, furthered this development. At the end of his essay, Lovecraft states that all he desired was oblivion. He was willing to cast aside any illusion that he may still have held.

Race is the most controversial aspect of Lovecraft's legacy, expressed in many disparaging remarks against non-Anglo-Saxon races and cultures in his works. Scholars have argued that these racial attitudes were common in the American society of his day, particularly in New England. As he grew older, his original racial worldview became classist and elitist, which regarded non-white members of the upper class as honorary members of the superior race. Lovecraft was a white supremacist. Despite this, he did not hold all white people in uniform high regard, but rather esteemed English people and those of English descent. In his early published essays, private letters, and personal utterances, he argued for a strong color line to preserve race and culture. His arguments were supported using disparagements of various races in his journalism and letters, and allegorically in some of his fictional works that depict miscegenation between humans and non-human creatures. This is evident in his portrayal of the Deep Ones in The Shadow over Innsmouth. Their interbreeding with humanity is framed as being a type of miscegenation that corrupts both the town of Innsmouth and the protagonist.

Initially, Lovecraft showed sympathy to minorities who adopted Western culture, even to the extent of marrying a Jewish woman he viewed as being "well assimilated". By the 1930s, Lovecraft's views on ethnicity and race had moderated. He supported ethnicities' preserving their native cultures; for example, he thought that "a real friend of civilisation wishes merely to make the Germans more German, the French more French, the Spaniards more Spanish, & so on". This represented a shift from his previous support for cultural assimilation. His shift was partially the result of his exposure to different cultures through his travels and circle. The former resulted in him writing positively about Québécois and First Nations cultural traditions in his travelogue of Quebec. However, this did not represent a complete elimination of his racial prejudices.

His interest in weird fiction began in his childhood when his grandfather, who preferred Gothic stories, would tell him stories of his own design. Lovecraft's childhood home on Angell Street had a large library that contained classical literature, scientific works, and early weird fiction. At the age of five, Lovecraft enjoyed reading One Thousand and One Nights, and was reading Nathaniel Hawthorne a year later. He was also influenced by the travel literature of John Mandeville and Marco Polo. This led to his discovery of gaps in then-contemporary science, which prevented Lovecraft from committing suicide in response to the death of his grandfather and his family's declining financial situation during his adolescence. These travelogues may have also had an influence on how Lovecraft's later works describe their characters and locations. For example, there is a resemblance between the powers of the Tibetan enchanters in The Travels of Marco Polo and the powers unleashed on Sentinel Hill in " The Dunwich Horror".

One of Lovecraft's most significant literary influences was Edgar Allan Poe, whom he described as his "God of Fiction". Poe's fiction was introduced to Lovecraft when the latter was eight years old. His earlier works were significantly influenced by Poe's prose and writing style. He also made extensive use of Poe's unity of effect in his fiction. Furthermore, At the Mountains of Madness directly quotes Poe and was influenced by The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. One of the main themes of the two stories is to discuss the unreliable nature of language as a method of expressing meaning. In 1919, Lovecraft's discovery of the stories of Lord Dunsany moved his writing in a new direction, resulting in a series of fantasies. Throughout his life, Lovecraft referred to Dunsany as the author who had the greatest impact on his literary career. The initial result of this influence was the Dream Cycle, a series of fantasies that originally take place in prehistory, but later shift to a dreamworld setting. By 1930, Lovecraft decided that he would no longer write Dunsanian fantasies, arguing that the style did not come naturally to him. Additionally, he also read and cited Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood as influences in the 1920s.

Aside from horror authors, Lovecraft was significantly influenced by the Decadents, the Puritans, and the Aesthetic movement. In "H. P. Lovecraft: New England Decadent", Barton Levi St. Armand, a professor emeritus of English and American studies at Brown University, has argued that these three influences combined to define Lovecraft as a writer. He traces this influence to both Lovecraft's stories and letters, noting that he actively cultivated the image of a New England gentleman in his letters. Meanwhile, his influence from the Decadents and the Aesthetic Movement stems from his readings of Edgar Allan Poe. Lovecraft's aesthetic worldview and fixation on decline stems from these readings. The idea of cosmic decline is described as having been Lovecraft's response to both the Aesthetic Movement and the 19th century Decadents. St. Armand describes it as being a combination of non-theological Puritan thought and the Decadent worldview. This is used as a division in his stories, particularly in " The Horror at Red Hook", " Pickman's Model", and " The Music of Erich Zann". The division between Puritanism and Decadence, St. Armand argues, represents a polarization between an artificial paradise and oneiriscopic visions of different worlds.

A non-literary inspiration came from then-contemporary scientific advances in biology, astronomy, geology, and physics. Lovecraft's study of science contributed to his view of the human race as insignificant, powerless, and doomed in a materialistic and mechanistic universe. Lovecraft was a keen amateur astronomer from his youth, often visiting the Ladd Observatory in Providence, and penning numerous astronomical articles for his personal journal and local newspapers. Lovecraft's materialist views led him to espouse his philosophical views through his fiction; these philosophical views came to be called cosmicism. Cosmicism took on a more pessimistic tone with his creation of what is now known as the Cthulhu Mythos, a fictional universe that contains alien deities and horrors. The term "Cthulhu Mythos" was likely coined by later writers after Lovecraft's death. In his letters, Lovecraft jokingly called his fictional mythology " Yog-Sothothery".

Dreams had a major role in Lovecraft's literary career. In 1991, as a result of his rising place in American literature, it was popularly thought that Lovecraft extensively transcribed his dreams when writing fiction. However, the majority of his stories are not transcribed dreams. Instead, many of them are directly influenced by dreams and dreamlike phenomena. In his letters, Lovecraft frequently compared his characters to dreamers. They are described as being as helpless as a real dreamer who is experiencing a nightmare. His stories also have dreamlike qualities. The Randolph Carter stories deconstruct the division between dreams and reality. The dreamlands in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath are a shared dreamworld that can be accessed by a sensitive dreamer. Meanwhile, in " The Silver Key", Lovecraft mentions the concept of "inward dreams", which implies the existence of outward dreams. Burleson compares this deconstruction to Carl Jung's argument that dreams are the source of archetypal myths. Lovecraft's way of writing fiction required both a level of realism and dreamlike elements. Citing Jung, Burleson argues that a writer may create realism by being inspired by dreams.

Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form-and the local human passions and conditions and standards-are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all. Only the human scenes and characters must have human qualities. These must be handled with unsparing realism, ( not catch-penny romanticism) but when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown-the shadow-haunted Outside -we must remember to leave our humanity and terrestrialism at the threshold.

- H. P. Lovecraft, in note to the editor of Weird Tales, on resubmission of "The Call of Cthulhu"

The central theme of Lovecraft's corpus is cosmicism. Cosmicism is a literary philosophy that argues that humanity is an insignificant force in the universe. Despite appearing pessimistic, Lovecraft thought of himself as being a cosmic indifferentist, which is expressed in his fiction. In it, human beings are often subject to powerful beings and other cosmic forces, but these forces are not so much malevolent as they are indifferent toward humanity. He believed in a meaningless, mechanical, and uncaring universe that human beings could never fully understand. There is no allowance for beliefs that could not be supported scientifically. Lovecraft first articulated this philosophy in 1921, but he did not fully incorporate it into his fiction until five years later. " Dagon", "Beyond the Wall of Sleep", and " The Temple" contain early depictions of this concept, but the majority of his early tales do not analyze the concept. "Nyarlathotep" interprets the collapse of human civilization as being a corollary to the collapse of the universe. "The Call of Cthulhu" represents an intensification of this theme. In it, Lovecraft introduces the idea of alien influences on humanity, which would come to dominate all subsequent works. In these works, Lovecraft expresses cosmicism through the usage of confirmation rather than revelation. Lovecraftian protagonists do not learn that they are insignificant. Instead, they already know it and have it confirmed to them through an event.

Lovecraft's fiction reflects his own ambivalent views regarding the nature of knowledge. This expresses itself in the concept of forbidden knowledge. In Lovecraft's stories, happiness is only achievable through blissful ignorance. Trying to know things that are not meant to be known leads to harm and psychological danger. This concept intersects with several other ideas. This includes the idea that the visible reality is an illusion masking the horrific true reality. Similarly, there are also intersections with the concepts of ancient civilizations that exert a malign influence on humanity and the general philosophy of cosmicism. According to Lovecraft, self-knowledge can bring ruin to those who seek it. Those seekers would become aware of their own insignificance in the wider cosmos and would be unable to bear the weight of this knowledge. Lovecraftian horror is not achieved through external phenomena. Instead, it is reached through the internalized psychological impact that knowledge has on its protagonists. "The Call of Cthulhu", The Shadow over Innsmouth, and The Shadow Out of Time feature protagonists who experience both external and internal horror through the acquisition of self-knowledge. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward also reflects this. One of its central themes is the danger of knowing too much about one's family history. Charles Dexter Ward, the protagonist, engages in historical and genealogical research that ultimately leads to both madness and his own self-destruction.

For much of his life, Lovecraft was fixated on the concepts of decline and decadence. More specifically, he thought that the West was in a state of terminal decline. Starting in the 1920s, Lovecraft became familiar with the work of the German conservative-revolutionary theorist Oswald Spengler, whose pessimistic thesis of the decadence of the modern West formed a crucial element in Lovecraft's overall anti-modern worldview. Spenglerian imagery of cyclical decay is a central theme in At the Mountains of Madness. S. T. Joshi, in H. P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West, places Spengler at the center of his discussion of Lovecraft's political and philosophical ideas. According to him, the idea of decline is the single idea that permeates and connects his personal philosophy. The main Spenglerian influence on Lovecraft would be his view that politics, economics, science, and art are all interdependent aspects of civilization. This realization led him to shed his personal ignorance of then-current political and economic developments after 1927. Lovecraft had developed his idea of Western decline independently, but Spengler gave it a clear framework.

Lovecraft shifted supernatural horror away from its previous focus on human issues to a focus on cosmic ones. In this way, he merged the elements of supernatural fiction that he deemed to be scientifically viable with science fiction. This merge required an understanding of both supernatural horror and then-contemporary science. Lovecraft used this combined knowledge to create stories that extensively reference trends in scientific development. Beginning with " The Shunned House", Lovecraft increasingly incorporated elements of both Einsteinian science and his own personal materialism into his stories. This intensified with the writing of "The Call of Cthulhu", where he depicted alien influences on humanity. This trend would continue throughout the remainder of his literary career. " The Colour Out of Space" represents what scholars have called the peak of this trend. It portrays an alien lifeform whose otherness prevents it from being defined by then-contemporary science.

Another part of this effort was the repeated usage of mathematics in an effort to make his creatures and settings appear more alien. Tom Hull, a mathematician, regards this as enhancing his ability to invoke a sense of otherness and fear. He attributes this use of mathematics to Lovecraft's childhood interest in astronomy and his adulthood awareness of non-Euclidean geometry. Another reason for his use of mathematics was his reaction to the scientific developments of his day. These developments convinced him that humanity's primary means of understanding the world was no longer trustable. Lovecraft's usage of mathematics in his fiction serves to convert otherwise supernatural elements into things that have in-universe scientific explanations. " The Dreams in the Witch House" and The Shadow Out of Time both have elements of this. The former uses a witch and her familiar, while the latter uses the idea of mind transference. These elements are explained using scientific theories that were prevalent during Lovecraft's lifetime.

Setting plays a major role in Lovecraft's fiction. A fictionalized version of New England serves as the central hub for his mythos, called " Lovecraft Country" by later commentators. It represents the history, culture, and folklore of the region, as interpreted by Lovecraft. These attributes are exaggerated and altered to provide a suitable setting for his stories. The names of the locations in the region were directly influenced by the names of real locations in the region, which was done to increase their realism. Lovecraft's stories use their connections with New England to imbue themselves with the ability to instill fear. Lovecraft was primarily inspired by the cities and towns in Massachusetts. However, the specific location of Lovecraft Country is variable, as it moved according to Lovecraft's literary needs. Starting with areas that he thought were evocative, Lovecraft redefined and exaggerated them under fictional names. For example, Lovecraft based Arkham on the town of Oakham and expanded it to include a nearby landmark. Its location was moved, as Lovecraft decided that it would have been destroyed by the recently-built Quabbin Reservoir. This is alluded to in "The Colour Out of Space", as the "blasted heath" is submerged by the creation of a fictionalized version of the reservoir. Similarly, Lovecraft's other towns were based on other locations in Massachusetts. Innsmouth was based on Newburyport, and Dunwich was based on Greenwich. The vague locations of these towns also played into Lovecraft's desire to create a mood in his stories. In his view, a mood can only be evoked through reading.

Early efforts to revise an established literary view of Lovecraft as an author of "pulp" were resisted by some eminent critics; in 1945, Edmund Wilson sneered: "the only real horror in most of these fictions is the horror of bad taste and bad art." However, Wilson praised Lovecraft's ability to write about his chosen field; he described him as having written about it "with much intelligence". According to L. Sprague de Camp, Wilson later improved his opinion of Lovecraft, citing a report of David Chavchavadze that Wilson had included a Lovecraftian reference in Little Blue Light: A Play in Three Acts. After Chavchavadze met with him to discuss this, Wilson revealed that he had been reading a copy of Lovecraft's correspondence. Two years before Wilson's critique, Lovecraft's works were reviewed by Winfield Townley Scott, the literary editor of The Providence Journal. He argued that Lovecraft was one of the most significant Rhode Island authors and that it was regrettable that he had received little attention from mainstream critics at the time. Mystery and Adventure columnist Will Cuppy of the New York Herald Tribune recommended to readers a volume of Lovecraft's stories in 1944, asserting that "the literature of horror and macabre fantasy belongs with mystery in its broader sense."

By 1957, Floyd C. Gale of Galaxy Science Fiction said that Lovecraft was comparable to Robert E. Howard, stating that "they appear more prolific than ever," noting L. Sprague de Camp, Björn Nyberg, and August Derleth's usage of their creations. He said that "Lovecraft at his best could build a mood of horror unsurpassed; at his worst, he was laughable." In 1962, Colin Wilson, in his survey of anti-realist trends in fiction The Strength to Dream, cited Lovecraft as one of the pioneers of the "assault on rationality" and included him with M. R. James, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, J. R. R. Tolkien, and others as one of the builders of mythicised realities contending against what he considered the failing project of literary realism. Subsequently, Lovecraft began to acquire the status of a cult writer in the counterculture of the 1960s, and reprints of his work proliferated.

Michael Dirda, a reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement, has described Lovecraft as being a "visionary" who is "rightly regarded as second only to Edgar Allan Poe in the annals of American supernatural literature." According to him, Lovecraft's works prove that mankind cannot bear the weight of reality, as the true nature of reality cannot be understood by either science or history. In addition, Dirda praises Lovecraft's ability to create an uncanny atmosphere. This atmosphere is created through the feeling of wrongness that pervades the objects, places, and people in Lovecraft's works. He also comments favorably on Lovecraft's correspondence, and compares him to Horace Walpole. Particular attention is given to his correspondence with August Derleth and Robert E. Howard. The Derleth letters are called "delightful", while the Howard letters are described as being an ideological debate. Overall, Dirda believes that Lovecraft's letters are equal to, or better than, his fictional output.

Los Angeles Review of Books reviewer Nick Mamatas has stated that Lovecraft was a particularly difficult author, rather than a bad one. He described Lovecraft as being "perfectly capable" in the fields of story logic, pacing, innovation, and generating quotable phrases. However, Lovecraft's difficulty made him ill-suited to the pulps; he was unable to compete with the popular recurring protagonists and damsel in distress stories. Furthermore, he compared a paragraph from The Shadow Out of Time to a paragraph from the introduction to The Economic Consequences of the Peace. In Mamatas' view, Lovecraft's quality is obscured by his difficulty, and his skill is what has allowed his following to outlive the followings of other then-prominent authors, such as Seabury Quinn and Kenneth Patchen.

In 2005, the Library of America published a volume of Lovecraft's works. This volume was reviewed by many publications, including The New York Times Book Review and The Wall Street Journal, and sold 25,000 copies within a month of release. The overall critical reception of the volume was mixed. Several scholars, including S. T. Joshi and Alison Sperling, have said that this confirms H. P. Lovecraft's place in the western canon. The editors of The Age of Lovecraft, Carl H. Sederholm and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, attributed the rise of mainstream popular and academic interest in Lovecraft to this volume, along with the Penguin Classics volumes and the Modern Library edition of At the Mountains of Madness. These volumes led to a proliferation of other volumes containing Lovecraft's works. According to the two authors, these volumes are part of a trend in Lovecraft's popular and academic reception: increased attention by one audience causes the other to also become more interested. Lovecraft's success is, in part, the result of his success.

Lovecraft's style has often been subject to criticism, but scholars such as S. T. Joshi have argued that Lovecraft consciously utilized a variety of literary devices to form a unique style of his own-these include prose-poetic rhythm, stream of consciousness, alliteration, and conscious archaism. According to Joyce Carol Oates, Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe have exerted a significant influence on later writers in the horror genre. Horror author Stephen King called Lovecraft "the twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale." King stated in his semi-autobiographical non-fiction book Danse Macabre that Lovecraft was responsible for his own fascination with horror and the macabre and was the largest influence on his writing.

Lovecraft's writings have influenced the speculative realist philosophical movement during the early twentieth-first century. The four founders of the movement, Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and Quentin Meillassoux, have cited Lovecraft as an inspiration for their worldviews. Graham Harman wrote a monograph, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy, about Lovecraft and philosophy. In it, he argues that Lovecraft was a "productionist" author. He describes Lovecraft as having been an author who was uniquely obsessed with gaps in human knowledge. He goes further and asserts Lovecraft's personal philosophy as being in opposition to both idealism and David Hume. In his view, Lovecraft resembles Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, and Edmund Husserl in his division of objects into different parts that do not exhaust the potential meanings of the whole. The anti-idealism of Lovecraft is represented through his commentary on the inability of language to describe his horrors. Harman also credits Lovecraft with inspiring parts of his own articulation of object-oriented ontology. According to Lovecraft scholar Alison Sperling, this philosophical interpretation of Lovecraft's fiction has caused other philosophers in Harmon's tradition to write about Lovecraft. These philosophers seek to remove human perception and human life from the foundations of ethics. These scholars have used Lovecraft's works as the central example of their worldview. They base this usage in Lovecraft's arguments against anthropocentrism and the ability of the human mind to truly understand the universe. They have also played a role in Lovecraft's improving literary reputation by focusing on his interpretation of ontology, which gives him a central position in Anthropocene studies.

H. P. Lovecraft memorial plaque at 22 Prospect Street in Providence. Portrait by silhouettist E. J. Perry.

Lovecraft was relatively unknown during his lifetime. While his stories appeared in prominent pulp magazines such as Weird Tales, not many people knew his name. He did, however, correspond regularly with other contemporary writers such as Clark Ashton Smith and August Derleth, who became his friends, even though he never met them in person. This group became known as the "Lovecraft Circle", since their writings freely borrowed Lovecraft's motifs, with his encouragement. He borrowed from them as well. For example, he made use of Clark Ashton Smith's Tsathoggua in .

After Lovecraft's death, the Lovecraft Circle carried on. August Derleth founded Arkham House with Donald Wandrei to preserve Lovecraft's works and keep them in print. He added to and expanded on Lovecraft's vision, not without controversy. While Lovecraft considered his pantheon of alien gods a mere plot device, Derleth created an entire cosmology, complete with a war between the good Elder Gods and the evil Outer Gods, such as Cthulhu and his ilk. The forces of good were supposed to have won, locking Cthulhu and others beneath the earth, the ocean, and elsewhere. Derleth's Cthulhu Mythos stories went on to associate different gods with the traditional four elements of fire, air, earth, and water, which did not line up with Lovecraft's original vision of his mythos. However, Derleth's ownership of Arkham House gave him a position of authority in Lovecraftiana that would not dissipate until his death, and through the efforts of Lovecraft scholars in the 1970s.

Lovecraft's works have influenced many writers and other creators. Stephen King has cited Lovecraft as a major influence on his works. As a child in the 1960s, he came across a volume of Lovecraft's works which inspired him to write his fiction. He goes on to argue that all works in the horror genre that were written after Lovecraft were influenced by him. In the field of comics, Alan Moore has described Lovecraft as having been a formative influence on his graphic novels. Film director John Carpenter's films include direct references and quotations of Lovecraft's fiction, in addition to their use of a Lovecraftian aesthetic and themes. Guillermo del Toro has been similarly influenced by Lovecraft's corpus.

The first World Fantasy Awards were held in Providence in 1975. The theme was "The Lovecraft Circle". Until 2015, winners were presented with an elongated bust of Lovecraft that was designed by cartoonist Gahan Wilson, nicknamed the "Howard". In November 2015 it was announced that the World Fantasy Award trophy would no longer be modeled on H. P. Lovecraft in response to the author's views on race. After the World Fantasy Award dropped their connection to Lovecraft, The Atlantic commented that "In the end, Lovecraft still wins-people who've never read a page of his work will still know who Cthulhu is for years to come, and his legacy lives on in the work of Stephen King, Guillermo del Toro, and Neil Gaiman."

In 2016, Lovecraft was inducted into the Museum of Pop Culture's Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. Three years later, Lovecraft and the other mythos authors were posthumously awarded the 1945 Retro-Hugo Award for Best Series for their contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos.

Starting in the early 1970s, a body of scholarly work began to emerge around Lovecraft's life and works. Referred to as Lovecraft studies, its proponents sought to establish Lovecraft as a significant author in the American literary canon. This can be traced to Derleth's preservation and dissemination of Lovecraft's fiction, non-fiction, and letters through Arkham House. Joshi credits the development of the field to this process. However, it was marred by low quality editions and misinterpretations of Lovecraft's worldview. After Derleth's death in 1971, the scholarship entered a new phase. There was a push to create a book-length biography of Lovecraft. L. Sprague de Camp, a science fiction scholar, wrote the first major one in 1975. This biography was criticized by early Lovecraft scholars for its lack of scholarly merit and its lack of sympathy for its subject. Despite this, it played a significant role in Lovecraft's literary rise. It exposed Lovecraft to the mainstream of American literary criticism. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was a division in the field between the "Derlethian traditionalists" who wished to interpret Lovecraft through the lens of fantasy literature and the newer scholars who wished to place greater attention on the entirety of his corpus.

The 1980s and 1990s saw a further proliferation of the field. The 1990 H. P. Lovecraft Centennial Conference and the republishing of older essays in An Epicure in the Terrible represented the publishing of many basic studies that would be used as a base for then-future studies. The 1990 centennial also saw the installation of the "H. P. Lovecraft Memorial Plaque" in a garden adjoining John Hay Library, that features a portrait by silhouettist E. J. Perry. Following this, in 1996, S. T. Joshi wrote his own biography of Lovecraft. This biography was met with positive reviews and became the main biography in the field. It has since been superseded by his expanded edition of the book, I am Providence in 2010.

Lovecraft's improving literary reputation has caused his works to receive increased attention by both classics publishers and scholarly fans. His works have been published by several different series of literary classics. Penguin Classics published three volumes of Lovecraft's works between 1999 and 2004. These volumes were edited by S. T. Joshi. Barnes & Noble would publish their own volume of Lovecraft's complete fiction in 2008. The Library of America published a volume of Lovecraft's works in 2005. The publishing of these volumes represented a reversal of the traditional judgment that Lovecraft was not part of the Western canon. Meanwhile, the biannual NecronomiCon Providence convention was first held in 2013. Its purpose is to serve as a fan and scholarly convention that discusses both Lovecraft and the wider field of weird fiction. It is organized by the Lovecraft Arts and Sciences organization and is held on the weekend of Lovecraft's birth. That July, the Providence City Council designated the "H. P. Lovecraft Memorial Square" and installed a commemorative sign at the intersection of Angell and Prospect streets, near the author's former residences.

Lovecraft's fictional Mythos has influenced a number of musicians, particularly in rock and heavy metal music. This began in the 1960s with the formation of the psychedelic rock band H. P. Lovecraft, who released the albums H. P. Lovecraft and H. P. Lovecraft II in 1967 and 1968 respectively. They broke up afterwards, but later songs were released. This included "The White Ship" and "At the Mountains of Madness", both titled after Lovecraft stories. Extreme metal has also been influenced by Lovecraft. This has expressed itself in both the names of bands and the contents of their albums. This began in 1970 with the release of Black Sabbath's first album, Black Sabbath, which contained a song titled "Behind the Wall of Sleep", deriving its name from the 1919 story "Beyond the Wall of Sleep." Heavy metal band Metallica was also inspired by Lovecraft. They recorded a song inspired by "The Call of Cthulhu" titled "The Call of Ktulu", and a song based on The Shadow over Innsmouth titled "The Thing That Should Not Be". These songs contain direct quotations of Lovecraft's works. Joseph Norman, a speculative scholar, has argued that there are similarities between the music described in Lovecraft's fiction and the aesthetics and atmosphere of black metal. He argues that this is evident through the "animalistic" qualities of black metal vocals. The usage of occult elements is also cited as a thematic commonality. In terms of atmosphere, he asserts that both Lovecraft's works and extreme metal place heavy focus on creating a strong negative mood.

Lovecraft has also influenced gaming, despite having personally disliked games during his lifetime. Chaosium's tabletop role-playing game Call of Cthulhu, released in 1981 and currently in its seventh major edition, was one of the first games to draw heavily from Lovecraft. It includes a Lovecraft-inspired insanity mechanic, which allowed for player characters to go insane from contact with cosmic horrors. This mechanic would go on to make appearance in subsequent tabletop and video games. 1987 saw the release of another Lovecraftian board game, Arkham Horror, which was published by Fantasy Flight Games. Though few subsequent Lovecraftian board games were released annually from 1987 to 2014, the years after 2014 saw a rapid increase in the number of Lovecraftian board games. According to Christina Silva, this revival may have been influenced by the entry of Lovecraft's work into the public domain and a revival of interest in board games. Few video games are direct adaptations of Lovecraft's works, but many video games have been inspired or heavily influenced by Lovecraft. Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, a Lovecraftian first-person video game, was released in 2005. It is a loose adaptation of The Shadow over Innsmouth, The Shadow Out of Time, and "The Thing on the Doorstep" that uses noir themes. These adaptations focus more on Lovecraft's monsters and gamification than they do on his themes, which represents a break from Lovecraft's core theme of human insignificance.

Several contemporary religions have been influenced by Lovecraft's works. Kenneth Grant, the founder of the Typhonian Order, incorporated Lovecraft's Mythos into his ritual and occult system. Grant combined his interest in Lovecraft's fiction with his adherence to Aleister Crowley's Thelema. The Typhonian Order considers Lovecraftian entities to be symbols through which people may interact with something inhuman. Grant also argued that Crowley himself was influenced by Lovecraft's writings, particularly in the naming of characters in The Book of the Law. Similarly, The Satanic Rituals, co-written by Anton LaVey and Michael A. Aquino, includes the "Ceremony of the Nine Angles", which is a ritual that was influenced by the descriptions in "The Dreams in the Witch House". It contains invocations of several of Lovecraft's fictional gods.

There have been several books that have claimed to be an authentic edition of Lovecraft's Necronomicon. The Simon Necronomicon is one such example. It was written by an unknown figure who identified themselves as "Simon". Peter Levenda, an occult author who has written about the Necronomicon, claims that he and "Simon" came across a hidden Greek translation of the grimoire while looking through a collection of antiquities at a New York bookstore during the 1960s or 1970s. This book was claimed to have borne the seal of the Necronomicon. Levenda went on to claim that Lovecraft had access to this purported scroll. A textual analysis has determined that the contents of this book were derived from multiple documents that discuss Mesopotamian myth and magic. The finding of a magical text by monks is also a common theme in the history of grimoires. It has been suggested that Levenda is the true author of the Simon Necronomicon.

Although Lovecraft is known mostly for his works of weird fiction, the bulk of his writing consists of voluminous letters about a variety of topics, from weird fiction and art criticism to politics and history. Lovecraft biographers L. Sprague de Camp and S. T. Joshi have estimated that Lovecraft wrote 100,000 letters in his lifetime, a fifth of which are believed to survive. These letters were directed at fellow writers and members of the amateur press. His involvement in the latter was what caused him to begin writing them. He included comedic elements in these letters. This included posing as an eighteenth-century gentleman and signing them with pseudonyms, most commonly "Grandpa Theobald" and "E'ch-Pi-El." According to Joshi, the most important sets of letters were those written to Frank Belknap Long, Clark Ashton Smith, and James F. Morton. He attributes this importance to the contents of these letters. With Long, Lovecraft argued in support and in opposition to many of Long's viewpoints. The letters to Smith are characterized by their focus on weird fiction. Lovecraft and Morton debated many scholarly subjects in their letters, resulting in what Joshi has called the "single greatest correspondence Lovecraft ever wrote."

Despite several claims to the contrary, there is currently no evidence that any company or individual owns the copyright to any of Lovecraft's works, and it is generally accepted that it has passed into the public domain. Lovecraft had specified that R. H. Barlow would serve as the executor of his literary estate, but these instructions were not incorporated into his will. Nevertheless, his surviving aunt carried out his expressed wishes, and Barlow was given control of Lovecraft's literary estate upon his death. Barlow deposited the bulk of the papers, including the voluminous correspondence, in the John Hay Library, and attempted to organize and maintain Lovecraft's other writings. Lovecraft protégé August Derleth, an older and more established writer than Barlow, vied for control of the literary estate. He and Donald Wandrei, a fellow protégé and co-owner of Arkham House, falsely claimed that Derleth was the true literary executor. Barlow capitulated, and later committed suicide in 1951. This gave Derleth and Wandrei complete control over Lovecraft's corpus.

On October 9, 1947, Derleth purchased all rights to the stories that were published in Weird Tales. However, since April 1926 at the latest, Lovecraft had reserved all second printing rights to stories published in Weird Tales. Therefore, Weird Tales only owned the rights to at most six of Lovecraft's tales. If Derleth had legally obtained the copyrights to these tales, there is no evidence that they were renewed before the rights expired. Following Derleth's death in 1971, Donald Wandrei sued his estate to challenge Derleth's will, which stated that he only held the copyrights and royalties to Lovecraft's works that were published under both his and Derleth's names. Arkham House's lawyer, Forrest D. Hartmann, argued that the rights to Lovecraft's works were never renewed. Wandrei won the case, but Arkham House's actions regarding copyright have damaged their ability to claim ownership of them.

In H. P. Lovecraft: A Life, S. T. Joshi concludes that Derleth's claims are "almost certainly fictitious" and argues that most of Lovecraft's works that were published in the amateur press are likely in the public domain. The copyright for Lovecraft's works would have been inherited by the only surviving heir named in his 1912 will, his aunt Annie Gamwell. When she died in 1941, the copyrights passed to her remaining descendants, Ethel Phillips Morrish and Edna Lewis. They signed a document, sometimes referred to as the Morrish-Lewis gift, permitting Arkham House to republish Lovecraft's works while retaining their ownership of the copyrights. Searches of the Library of Congress have failed to find any evidence that these copyrights were renewed after the 28-year period, making it likely that these works are in the public domain. However, the Lovecraft literary estate, reconstituted in 1998 under Robert C. Harrall, has claimed that they own the rights. They have been based in Providence since 2009 and have been granting the rights to Lovecraft's works to several publishers. Their claims have been criticized by scholars, such as Chris J. Karr, who has argued that the rights had not been renewed. Joshi has withdrawn his support for his conclusion, and now supports the estate's copyright claims.

1. ^ Lovecraft did not coin the term "Cthulhu Mythos". Instead, this term was coined by later authors.

2. The house was later moved to 65 Prospect Street to accommodate the building of ^ Brown University's Art Building.

3. ^ He wrote several travelogues, including one on Quebec that was the longest singular work that he wrote.

4. This is the only one of Lovecraft's stories that was published as a book during his lifetime. ^ W. Paul Cook had previously made an abortive attempt to publish "The Shunned House" as a small book between 1927 and 1930.

5. ^ L. Sprague de Camp also stated that the two men began calling each other "Monstro". This is a direct reference to the nicknames that Lovecraft gave to some of his correspondents.

6. Lewis Theobald, Jun., the full version of Grandpa Theobald, was derived from the name of ^ Lewis Theobald, an eighteenth-century Shakespearean scholar who was fictionalized in Alexander Pope's The Dunciad.

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Howard Phillips Lovecraft (, ; August 20, 1890 - March 15, 1937) was an American writer of weird, science, fantasy, and horror fiction. He is best known for his creation of the Cthulhu Mythos. Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Lovecraft spent most of his life in New England.

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Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that held the U.S. Constitution did not extend American citizenship to people of black African descent, and thus they could not enjoy the rights and privileges the Constitution conferred upon American citizens. The decision is widely considered the worst ever rendered in the Supreme Court's history, being widely denounced for its overt racism, perceived judicial activism and poor legal reasoning, and for its crucial role in the start of the American Civil War four years later. Legal scholar Bernard Schwartz said that it "stands first in any list of the worst Supreme Court decisions". Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes called it the Court's "greatest self-inflicted wound".

The decision involved the case of Dred Scott, an enslaved black man whose owners had taken him from Missouri, a slave-holding state, into Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory, where slavery was illegal. When his owners later brought him back to Missouri, Scott sued for his freedom and claimed that because he had been taken into " free" U.S. territory, he had automatically been freed and was legally no longer a slave. Scott sued first in Missouri state court, which ruled that he was still a slave under its law. He then sued in U.S. federal court, which ruled against him by deciding that it had to apply Missouri law to the case. He then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In March 1857, the Supreme Court issued a 7-2 decision against Scott. In an opinion written by Chief Justice Roger Taney, the Court ruled that people of African descent "are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States". Taney supported his ruling with an extended survey of American state and local laws from the time of the Constitution's drafting in 1787 that purported to show that a "perpetual and impassable barrier was intended to be erected between the white race and the one which they had reduced to slavery". Because the Court ruled that Scott was not an American citizen, he was also not a citizen of any state and, accordingly, could never establish the " diversity of citizenship" that Article III of the U.S. Constitution requires for a U.S. federal court to be able to exercise jurisdiction over a case. After ruling on those issues surrounding Scott, Taney struck down the Missouri Compromise as a limitation on slave owners' property rights that exceeded the U.S. Congress's constitutional powers.

Although Taney and several other justices hoped the decision would settle the slavery controversy, which was increasingly dividing the American public, the decision only exacerbated interstate tension. Taney's majority opinion suited the slaveholding states, but was intensely decried in all the other states. The decision inflamed the national debate over slavery and deepened the divide that led ultimately to the American Civil War. In 1865, after the Union's victory, the Court's ruling in Dred Scott was superseded by the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which abolished slavery, and the Fourteenth Amendment, whose first section guaranteed citizenship for "[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof".

Historians agree that the Court decision was a major disaster for the nation as it dramatically inflamed tensions leading to the Civil War. In 2022 historian David W. Blight argues that 1857 was, "the great pivot on the road to disunion...largely because of the Dred Scott case, which stoked the fear, distrust and conspiratorial hatred already common in both the North and the South to new levels of intensity." The ruling is widely considered a blatant act of judicial activism with the intent of bringing finality to the territorial crisis resulting from the Louisiana Purchase by creating a constitutional right to own slaves anywhere in the country while permanently disenfranchising all people of African descent. The court's decision to overturn the Missouri Compromise, which had already been replaced with the Kansas-Nebraska Act and thus was a legally moot issue, is cited as proof of this because the latter act was determined by the due process of popular sovereignty, and thus could not be overturned the same way the court did the Missouri compromise. During the United States election of 1860, abolitionists formed the Republican Party that rejected the ruling as being corrupted by partisanship and non-binding because the court had no jurisdiction. Their Presidential nominee, Abraham Lincoln, stated he would not permit slavery anywhere in the country except where it already existed, which directly contradicted the court's ruling. His election is considered the final event that led the Southern states to secede from the Union, igniting the American Civil War.

In the late 1810s, a major political dispute arose over the creation of new American states from the vast territory the United States had acquired from France in 1803 through the Louisiana Purchase. The dispute centered on whether the new states would be "free" states, like the Northern states, in which slavery would be illegal, or whether they would be "slave" states, like the Southern states, in which slavery would be legal. The Southern states wanted the new states to be slave states in order to enhance their own political and economic power. The Northern states wanted the new states to be free states for their own political and economic reasons, as well as their moral concerns over allowing the institution of slavery to expand.

In 1820, the U.S. Congress passed legislation known as the " Missouri Compromise" that was intended to resolve the dispute. The Compromise first admitted Maine into the Union as a free state, then created Missouri out of a portion of the Louisiana Purchase territory and admitted it as a slave state; at the same time it prohibited slavery in the area north of the Parallel 36°30′ north, where most of the territory lay. The legal effects of a slaveowner taking his slaves from Missouri into the free territory north of the 36°30′ north parallel, as well as the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise itself, eventually came to a head in the Dred Scott case.

Dred Scott was born a slave in Virginia around 1799. Little is known of his early years. His owner, Peter Blow, moved to Alabama in 1818, taking his six slaves along to work a farm near Huntsville. In 1830, Blow gave up farming and settled in St. Louis, Missouri, where he sold Scott to U.S. Army surgeon Dr. John Emerson. After purchasing Scott, Emerson took him to Fort Armstrong in Illinois. A free state, Illinois had been free as a territory under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, and had prohibited slavery in its constitution in 1819 when it was admitted as a state.

In 1836, Emerson moved with Scott from Illinois to Fort Snelling in the Wisconsin territory in what has become the state of Minnesota. Slavery in the Wisconsin Territory (some of which, including Fort Snelling, was part of the Louisiana Purchase) was prohibited by the U.S. Congress under the Missouri Compromise. During his stay at Fort Snelling, Scott married Harriet Robinson in a civil ceremony by Harriet's owner, Major Lawrence Taliaferro, a justice of the peace who was also an Indian agent. The ceremony would have been unnecessary had Dred Scott been a slave, as slave marriages had no recognition in the law.

In 1837, the army ordered Emerson to Jefferson Barracks Military Post, south of St. Louis. Emerson left Scott and his wife at Fort Snelling, where he leased their services out for profit. By hiring Scott out in a free state, Emerson was effectively bringing the institution of slavery into a free state, which was a direct violation of the Missouri Compromise, the Northwest Ordinance, and the Wisconsin Enabling Act.

Before the end of the year, the army reassigned Emerson to Fort Jesup in Louisiana, where Emerson married Eliza Irene Sanford in February 1838. Emerson sent for Scott and Harriet, who proceeded to Louisiana to serve their master and his wife. Within months, Emerson was transferred back to Fort Snelling. While en route to Fort Snelling, Scott's daughter Eliza was born on a steamboat under way on the Mississippi River between Illinois and what would become Iowa. Because Eliza was born in free territory, she was technically born as a free person under both federal and state laws. Upon entering Louisiana, the Scotts could have sued for their freedom, but did not. One scholar suggests that, in all likelihood, the Scotts would have been granted their freedom by a Louisiana court, as it had respected laws of free states that slaveholders forfeited their right to slaves if they brought them in for extended periods. This had been the holding in Louisiana state courts for more than 20 years.

Toward the end of 1838, the army reassigned Emerson back to Fort Snelling. By 1840, Emerson's wife Irene returned to St. Louis with their slaves, while Dr. Emerson served in the Seminole War. While in St. Louis, she hired them out. In 1842, Emerson left the army. After he died in the Iowa Territory in 1843, his widow Irene inherited his estate, including the Scotts. For three years after John Emerson's death, she continued to lease out the Scotts as hired slaves. In 1846, Scott attempted to purchase his and his family's freedom, but Irene Emerson refused, prompting Scott to resort to legal recourse.

Having been unsuccessful in his attempt to purchase his freedom, Dred Scott, with the help of his legal advisers, sued Emerson for his freedom in the Circuit Court of St. Louis County on April 6, 1846. A separate petition was filed for his wife Harriet, making them the first married couple to file freedom suits in tandem in its 50-year history. They received financial assistance from the family of Dred's previous owner, Peter Blow. Blow's daughter Charlotte was married to Joseph Charless, an officer at the Bank of Missouri. Charless signed legal documents as security for the Scotts and later secured the services of the bank's attorney, Samuel Mansfield Bay, for the trial.

It was expected that the Scotts would win their freedom with relative ease. By 1846, dozens of freedom suits had been won in Missouri by former slaves. Most had claimed their legal right to freedom on the basis that they, or their mothers, had previously lived in free states or territories. Among the most important legal precedents were Winny v. Whitesides and Rachel v. Walker. In Winny v. Whitesides, the Missouri Supreme Court had ruled in 1824 that a person who had been held as a slave in Illinois, where slavery was illegal, and then brought to Missouri, was free by virtue of residence in a free state. In Rachel v. Walker, the state supreme court had ruled that a U.S. Army officer who took a slave to a military post in a territory where slavery was prohibited and retained her there for several years, had thereby "forfeit[ed] his property". Rachel, like Dred Scott, had accompanied her enslaver to Fort Snelling.

Scott was represented by three different lawyers from the filing of the original petition to the time of the actual trial, over one year later. The first was Francis B. Murdoch, a prolific freedom suit attorney who abruptly left St. Louis. Murdoch was replaced by Charles D. Drake, an in-law of the Blow family. When Drake also left the state, Samuel M. Bay took over as the Scotts' lawyer. Irene Emerson was represented by George W. Goode, a proslavery lawyer from Virginia. By the time the case went to trial, it had been reassigned from Judge John M. Krum, who was proslavery, to Judge Alexander Hamilton, who was known to be sympathetic to freedom suits.

Dred Scott v. Irene Emerson finally went to trial for the first time on June 30, 1847. Henry Peter Blow testified in court that his father had owned Dred and sold him to John Emerson. The fact that Scott had been taken to live on free soil was clearly established through depositions from witnesses who had known Scott and Dr. Emerson at Fort Armstrong and Fort Snelling. Grocer Samuel Russell testified that he had hired the Scotts from Irene Emerson and paid her father, Alexander Sanford, for their services. Upon cross examination, however, Russell admitted that the leasing arrangements had actually been made by his wife, Adeline.

Thus, Russell's testimony was ruled hearsay, and the jury returned a verdict for Emerson. This created a seemingly contradictory outcome in which Scott was ordered by the court to remain Irene Emerson's slave, because he had been unable to prove that he was previously Irene Emerson's slave.

Bay moved immediately for a new trial on the basis that Scott's case had been lost due to a technicality which could be rectified, rather than the facts. Judge Hamilton finally issued the order for a new trial on December 2, 1847. Two days later, Emerson's lawyer objected to a new trial by filing a bill of exceptions. The case was then taken on writ of error to the Supreme Court of Missouri. Scott's new lawyers, Alexander P. Field and David N. Hall, argued that the writ of error was inappropriate because the lower court had not yet issued a final judgment. The state supreme court agreed unanimously with their position and dismissed Emerson's appeal on June 30, 1848. The main issue before the court at this stage was procedural and no substantive issues were discussed.

Before the state supreme court had convened, Goode had presented a motion on behalf of Emerson to have Scott taken into custody and hired out. On March 17, 1848, Judge Hamilton issued the order to the St. Louis County sheriff. Anyone hiring Scott had to post a bond of six-hundred dollars. Wages he earned during that time were placed in escrow, to be paid to the party that prevailed in the lawsuit. Scott would remain in the sheriff's custody or hired out by him until March 18, 1857. One of Scott's lawyers, David N. Hall, hired him starting March 17, 1849.

The St. Louis Fire of 1849, a cholera epidemic, and two continuances delayed the retrial in the St. Louis Circuit Court until January 12, 1850. Irene Emerson was now defended by Hugh A. Garland and Lyman D. Norris, while Scott was represented by Field and Hall. Judge Alexander Hamilton was presiding. The proceedings were similar to the first trial. The same depositions from Catherine A. Anderson and Miles H. Clark were used to establish that Dr. Emerson had taken Scott to free territory.

This time, the hearsay problem was surmounted by a deposition from Adeline Russell stating that she had hired the Scotts from Irene Emerson, thereby proving that Emerson claimed them as her slaves. Samuel Russell testified in court once again that he had paid for their services. The defense then changed strategy and argued in their summation that Mrs. Emerson had every right to hire out Dred Scott, because he had lived with Dr. Emerson at Fort Armstrong and Fort Snelling under military jurisdiction, not under civil law. In doing so, the defense ignored the precedent set by Rachel v. Walker. In his rebuttal, Hall stated that the fact that they were military posts did not matter, and pointed out that Dr. Emerson had left Scott behind at Fort Snelling, hired out to others, after being reassigned to a new post.

The jury quickly returned a verdict in favor of Dred Scott, nominally making him a free man. Judge Hamilton declared Harriet, Eliza and Lizzie Scott to be free as well. Garland moved immediately for a new trial, and was overruled. On February 13, 1850, Emerson's defense filed a bill of exceptions, which was certified by Judge Hamilton, setting into motion another appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court. Counsel for the opposing sides signed an agreement that moving forward, only Dred Scott v. Irene Emerson would be advanced, and that any decision made by the high court would apply to Harriet's suit, also. In 1849 or 1850, Irene Emerson left St. Louis and moved to Springfield, Massachusetts. Her brother, John F. A. Sanford, continued looking after her business interests when she left, and her departure had no impact on the case.

Both parties filed briefs with the Supreme Court of Missouri on March 8, 1850. A busy docket delayed consideration of the case until the October term. By then, the issue of slavery had become politically charged, even within the judiciary. Although the Missouri Supreme Court had not yet overturned precedent in freedom suits, in the 1840s, the court's proslavery justices had explicitly stated their opposition to freeing slaves. After the court convened on October 25, 1850, the two justices who were proslavery anti-Benton Democrats - William Barclay Napton and James Harvey Birch - persuaded John Ferguson Ryland, a Benton Democrat, to join them in a unanimous decision that Dred Scott remained a slave under Missouri law. However, Judge Napton delayed writing the court's opinion for months. Then in August 1851, both Napton and Birch lost their seats in the Missouri Supreme Court, following the state's first supreme court election, with only Ryland remaining as an incumbent. The case thus needed to be considered again by the newly elected court. The reorganized Missouri Supreme Court now included two "moderates" - Hamilton Gamble and John Ryland - and one staunch proslavery justice, William Scott.

David N. Hall had prepared the brief for Dred Scott, but died in March 1851. Alexander P. Field continued alone as counsel for Dred Scott, and resubmitted the same briefs from 1850 for both sides. On November 29, 1851, the case was taken under consideration, on written briefs alone, and a decision was reached. However, before Judge Scott could write the court's opinion, Lyman Norris, co-counsel for Irene Emerson, obtained permission to submit a new brief he had been preparing, to replace the original one submitted by Garland.

Norris's brief has been characterized as "a sweeping denunciation of the authority of both the [Northwest] Ordinance of 1787 and the Missouri Compromise." Although he stopped short of questioning their constitutionality, Norris questioned their applicability and criticized the early Missouri Supreme Court, ridiculing former Justice George Tompkins as "the great apostle of freedom at that day." Reviewing the court's past decisions on freedom suits, Norris acknowledged that if Rachel v. Walker was allowed to stand, his client would lose. Norris then challenged the concept of "once free, always free", and asserted that the court under Tompkins had been wrong to rule that the Ordinance of 1787 remained in force after the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1788. Finally, he argued that the Missouri Compromise should be disregarded whenever it interfered with Missouri law, and that the laws of other states should not be enforced, if their enforcement would cause Missouri citizens to lose their property. In support of his argument, he cited Chief Justice Roger B. Taney's opinion in the United States Supreme Court case Strader v. Graham, which argued that the status of a slave returning from a free state must be determined by the slave state itself. According to historian Walter Ehrlich, the closing of Norris's brief was "a racist harangue that not only revealed the prejudices of its author, but also indicated how the Dred Scott case had become a vehicle for the expression of such views". Noting that Norris's proslavery "doctrines" were later incorporated into the court's final decision, Ehrlich writes (emphasis his):

From this point on, the Dred Scott case clearly changed from a genuine freedom suit to the controversial political issue for which it became infamous in American history.

On March 22, 1852, Judge William Scott announced the decision of the Missouri Supreme Court that Dred Scott remained a slave, and ordered the trial court's judgment to be reversed. Judge Ryland concurred, while Chief Justice Hamilton Gamble dissented. The majority opinion written by Judge Scott focused on the issue of comity or conflict of laws, and relied on " states' rights" rhetoric:

Every State has the right of determining how far, in a spirit of comity, it will respect the laws of other States. Those laws have no intrinsic right to be enforced beyond the limits of the State for which they were enacted. The respect allowed them will depend altogether on their conformity to the policy of our institutions. No State is bound to carry into effect enactments conceived in a spirit hostile to that which pervades her own laws.

Judge Scott did not deny the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise, and acknowledged that its prohibition of slavery was "absolute", but only within the specified territory. Thus, a slave crossing the border could obtain his freedom, but only within the court of the free state. Rejecting the court's own precedent, Scott argued that "'Once free' did not necessarily mean 'always free.'" He cited the Kentucky Court of Appeals decision in Graham v. Strader, which had held that a Kentucky slaveowner who permitted a slave to go to Ohio temporarily, did not forfeit ownership of the slave. To justify overturning three decades of precedent, Judge Scott argued that circumstances had changed:

Times now are not as they were when the former decisions on this subject were made. Since then not only individuals but States have been possessed with a dark and fell spirit in relation to slavery, whose gratification is sought in the pursuit of measures, whose inevitable consequence must be the overthrow and destruction of our government. Under such circumstances it does not behoove the State of Missouri to show the least countenance to any measure which might gratify this spirit. She is willing to assume her full responsibility for the existence of slavery within her limits, nor does she seek to share or divide it with others.

On March 23, 1852, the day after the Missouri Supreme Court decision had been announced, Irene Emerson's lawyers filed an order in the St. Louis Circuit Court for the bonds signed by the Blow family to cover the Scotts' court costs; return of the slaves themselves; and transfer of their wages earned over four years, plus 6 percent interest. On June 29, 1852, Judge Hamilton overruled the order.

The case looked hopeless, and the Blow family could no longer pay for Scott's legal costs. Scott also lost both of his lawyers when Alexander Field moved to Louisiana and David Hall died. The case was undertaken by Roswell Field, who employed Scott as a janitor. Field also discussed the case with LaBeaume, who had taken over the lease on the Scotts in 1851. After the Missouri Supreme Court decision, Judge Hamilton turned down a request by Emerson's lawyers to release the rent payments from escrow and to deliver the slaves into their owner's custody.

In 1853, Dred Scott again sued his current owner John Sanford, but this time in federal court. Sanford returned to New York and the federal courts had diversity jurisdiction under Article III, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution. In addition to the existing complaints, Scott alleged that Sanford had assaulted his family and held them captive for six hours on January 1, 1853.

At trial in 1854, Judge Robert William Wells directed the jury to rely on Missouri law on the question of Scott's freedom. Since the Missouri Supreme Court had held that Scott remained a slave, the jury found in favor of Sanford. Scott then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the clerk misspelled the defendant's name, and the case was recorded as Dred Scott v. Sandford, with an ever-erroneous title. Scott was represented before the Supreme Court by Montgomery Blair and George Ticknor Curtis, whose brother Benjamin was a Supreme Court Justice. Sanford was represented by Reverdy Johnson and Henry S. Geyer.

When the case was filed, the two sides agreed on a statement of facts that claimed Scott had been sold by Dr. Emerson to John Sanford, though this was a legal fiction. Dr. Emerson had died in 1843, and Dred Scott had filed his 1847 suit against Irene Emerson. There is no record of Dred Scott's transfer to Sanford or of his transfer back to Irene. John Sanford died shortly before Scott's manumission, and Scott was not listed in the probate records of Sanford's estate. Also, Sanford was not acting as Dr. Emerson's executor, as he was never appointed by a probate court, and the Emerson estate had been settled when the federal case was filed.

The murky circumstances of ownership led many to conclude the parties to Dred Scott v. Sandford contrived to create a test case. Mrs. Emerson's remarriage to abolitionist U.S. Representative Calvin C. Chaffee seemed suspicious to contemporaries, and Sanford was thought to be a front and to have allowed himself to be sued, despite not actually being Scott's owner. Nevertheless, Sanford had been involved in the case since 1847, before his sister married Chaffee. He had secured counsel for his sister in the state case, and he engaged the same lawyer for his own defense in the federal case. Sanford also consented to be represented by genuine pro-slavery advocates before the Supreme Court, rather than to put up a token defense.

Historians discovered that after the Supreme Court heard arguments in the case but before it issued a ruling, President-elect James Buchanan wrote to his friend, Supreme Court Associate Justice John Catron, to ask whether the case would be decided by the Court before his inauguration in March 1857. Buchanan hoped that the decision would quell unrest in the country over the slavery issue by issuing a ruling to take it out of political debate. He later successfully pressured Associate Justice Robert Cooper Grier, a Northerner, to join the Southern majority in Dred Scott to prevent the appearance that the decision was made along sectional lines. According to historian Paul Finkelman:

Buchanan already knew what the Court was going to decide. In a major breach of Court etiquette, Justice Grier, who, like Buchanan, was from Pennsylvania, had kept the President-elect fully informed about the progress of the case and the internal debates within the Court. When Buchanan urged the nation to support the decision, he already knew what Taney would say. Republican suspicions of impropriety turned out to be fully justified.

Biographer Jean H. Baker argues that Buchanan's use of political pressure on a member of a sitting court was regarded then, as now, to be highly improper. Republicans fueled speculation as to Buchanan's influence by publicizing that Taney had secretly informed Buchanan of the decision. Buchanan declared in his inaugural address that the slavery question would "be speedily and finally settled" by the Supreme Court.

On March 6, 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Dred Scott in a 7-2 decision that fills over 200 pages in the United States Reports. The decision contains opinions from all nine justices, but the "majority opinion" has always been the focus of the controversy.

Seven justices formed the majority and joined an opinion written by Chief Justice Roger Taney. Taney began the Court's opinion with what he saw as the core issue in the case: whether or not black people could possess federal citizenship under the U.S. Constitution.

The question is simply this: Can a negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all of the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guarantied [sic] by that instrument to the citizen?

In answer, the Court ruled that they could not. It held that black people could not be American citizens, and therefore a lawsuit to which they were a party could never qualify for the " diversity of citizenship" that Article III of the Constitution requires for American federal courts to have jurisdiction over cases that do not involve federal questions.

The primary rationale for the Court's ruling was Taney's assertion that black African slaves and their descendants were never intended to be part of the American social and political landscape.

We think ... that they [black people] are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word "citizens" in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time [of America's founding] considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them.

Taney then extensively reviewed laws from the original American states that involved the status of black Americans at the time of the Constitution's drafting in 1787. He concluded that these laws showed that a "perpetual and impassable barrier was intended to be erected between the white race and the one which they had reduced to slavery". Thus, he concluded, black people were not American citizens, and could not sue as citizens in federal courts. This meant that U.S. states lacked the power to alter the legal status of black people by granting them state citizenship.

It is difficult at this day to realize the state of public opinion in relation to that unfortunate race, which prevailed in the civilized and enlightened portions of the world at the time of the Declaration of Independence, and when the Constitution of the United States was framed and adopted. ... They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order ... and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.

This holding normally would have ended the decision, since it disposed of Dred Scott's case, but Taney did not conclude the matter before the Court in the normal manner. He went on to assess the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise itself, writing that the Compromise's legal provisions intended to free slaves who were living north of the 36°N latitude line in the western territories. In the Court's judgment, this would constitute the government depriving slaveowners of their property-since slaves were legally the property of their owners-without due process of law, which is forbidden under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. Taney also reasoned that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights implicitly precluded any possibility of constitutional rights for black African slaves and their descendants. Thus, Taney concluded:

Now, ... the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution. ... Upon these considerations, it is the opinion of the court that the act of Congress which prohibited a citizen from holding and owning property of this kind in the territory of the United States north of the [36°N 36' latitude] line therein mentioned is not warranted by the Constitution, and is therefore void....

Taney held that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, marking the first time since the 1803 case Marbury v. Madison that the Supreme Court had struck down a federal law, although the Missouri Compromise had already been effectively overridden by the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Taney made this argument on a narrow definition of the Property Clause of Section 3 of Article 4 of the Constitution. The Property Clause states, "The Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States..." Taney made the argument that the Property Clause "applied only to the property which the States held in common at that time, and has no reference whatever to any territory or other property which the new sovereignty might afterwards itself acquire." Taney asserted that because the Northwest Territory was not part of the United States at the time of the Constitution's ratification, Congress did not have the authority to ban slavery in the territory. According to Taney, the Missouri Compromise exceeded the scope of Congress's powers and was unconstitutional, and thus Dred Scott was still a slave regardless of his time spent in the parts of the Northwest Territory that were north of 36°N, and he was still a slave under Missouri law, and the Court had to follow Missouri law in the matter. For all these reasons, the Court concluded that Scott could not bring suit in U.S. federal court.

Justices Benjamin Robbins Curtis and John McLean were the only two dissenters from the Court's decision, and both filed dissenting opinions.

Curtis's 67-page dissent argued that the Court's conclusion that black people could not possess federal U.S. citizenship was legally and historically baseless. Curtis pointed out that at the time of the Constitution's adoption in 1789, black men could vote in five of the 13 states. Legally, that made them citizens of both their individual states and the United States federally. Curtis cited many state statutes and state court decisions supporting his position. His dissent was "extremely persuasive", and it prompted Taney to add 18 additional pages to his opinion in an attempt to rebut Curtis's arguments.

McLean's dissent deemed the argument that black people could not be citizens "more a matter of taste than of law". He attacked much of the Court's decision as obiter dicta that was not legally authoritative on the ground that once the court determined that it did not have jurisdiction to hear Scott's case, it should have simply dismissed the action, rather than passing judgment on the merits of the claims.

Curtis and McLean both attacked the Court's overturning of the Missouri Compromise on its merits. They noted that it was not necessary to decide the question and that none of the authors of the Constitution had ever objected on constitutional grounds to the Congress's adoption of the antislavery provisions of the Northwest Ordinance passed by the Continental Congress or the subsequent acts that barred slavery north of 36°30' N, or the prohibition on importing slaves from overseas passed in 1808. Curtis said slavery was not listed in the constitution as a "natural right", but rather a creation of municipal law. He pointed out the constitution said "The Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States; and nothing in this Constitution shall be so construed as to Prejudice any Claims of the United States, or of any particular State." Since slavery was not mentioned as an exception, he felt a prohibition of it fell within the scope of needed rules and regulations Congress was free to pass.

The Supreme Court's decision in Dred Scott was "greeted with unmitigated wrath from every segment of the United States except the slave holding states." The American political historian Robert G. McCloskey described:

The tempest of malediction that burst over the judges seems to have stunned them; far from extinguishing the slavery controversy, they had fanned its flames and had, moreover, deeply endangered the security of the judicial arm of government. No such vilification as this had been heard even in the wrathful days following the Alien and Sedition Acts. Taney's opinion was assailed by the Northern press as a wicked "stump speech" and was shamefully misquoted and distorted. "If the people obey this decision," said one newspaper, "they disobey God."

Many Republicans, including Abraham Lincoln, who was rapidly becoming the leading Republican in Illinois, regarded the decision as part of a plot to expand and eventually impose the legalization of slavery throughout all of the states. Some southern extremists wanted all states to recognize slavery as a constitutional right. Lincoln rejected the court's majority opinion that "the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution," pointing out that the constitution did not ever mention property in reference to slaves and in fact explicitly referred to them as "persons". Southern Democrats considered Republicans to be lawless rebels who were provoking disunion by their refusal to accept the Supreme Court's decision as the law of the land. Many northern opponents of slavery offered a legal argument for refusing to recognize the Dred Scott decision on the Missouri Compromise as binding. They argued that the Court's determination that the federal courts had no jurisdiction to hear the case rendered the remainder of the decision obiter dictum-a non binding passing remark rather than an authoritative interpretation of the law. Douglas attacked that position in the Lincoln-Douglas debates:

Mr. Lincoln goes for a warfare upon the Supreme Court of the United States, because of their judicial decision in the Dred Scott case. I yield obedience to the decisions in that court-to the final determination of the highest judicial tribunal known to our constitution.

In a speech at Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln responded that the Republican Party was not seeking to defy the Supreme Court, but he hoped they could convince it to reverse its ruling.

We believe, as much as Judge Douglas, (perhaps more) in obedience to, and respect for the judicial department of government. We think its decisions on Constitutional questions, when fully settled, should control, not only the particular cases decided, but the general policy of the country, subject to be disturbed only by amendment of the Constitution as provided in that instrument itself. More than this would be revolution. But we think the Dred Scott decision is erroneous. We know the court that made it, has often over-ruled its own decisions, and we shall do what we can to have it to over-rule this. We offer no resistance to it.

Democrats had refused to accept the court's interpretation of the U.S. Constitution as permanently binding. During the Andrew Jackson administration, Taney, then Attorney General, had written:

Whatever may be the force of the decision of the Supreme Court in binding the parties and settling their rights in the particular case before them, I am not prepared to admit that a construction given to the constitution by the Supreme Court in deciding any one or more cases fixes of itself irrevokably [ sic] and permanently its construction in that particular and binds the states and the Legislative and executive branches of the General government, forever afterwards to conform to it and adopt it in every other case as the true reading of the instrument although all of them may unite in believing it erroneous.

Frederick Douglass, a prominent black abolitionist who considered the decision to be unconstitutional and Taney's reasoning contrary to the Founding Fathers' vision, predicted that political conflict could not be avoided:

The highest authority has spoken. The voice of the Supreme Court has gone out over the troubled waves of the National Conscience.... [But] my hopes were never brighter than now. I have no fear that the National Conscience will be put to sleep by such an open, glaring, and scandalous tissue of lies....

According to Jefferson Davis, then a U.S. Senator from Mississippi, and future President of the Confederate States of America, the case merely "presented the question whether Cuffee [a derogatory term for a black person] should be kept in his normal condition or not . . . [and] whether the Congress of the United States could decide what might or might not be property in a Territory-the case being that of an officer of the army sent into a Territory to perform his public duty, having taken with him his negro slave".

Irene Emerson moved to Massachusetts in 1850 and married Calvin C. Chaffee, a doctor and abolitionist who was elected to Congress on the Know Nothing and Republican tickets. Following the Supreme Court ruling, pro-slavery newspapers attacked Chaffee as a hypocrite. Chaffee protested that Dred Scott belonged to his brother-in-law and that he had nothing to do with Scott's enslavement. Nevertheless, the Chaffees executed a deed transferring the Scott family to Henry Taylor Blow, the son of Scott's former owner, Peter Blow. Chaffee's lawyer suggested the transfer as the most convenient way of freeing Scott since Missouri law required manumitters to appear in person before the court.

Taylor Blow filed the manumission papers with Judge Hamilton on May 26, 1857. The emancipation of Dred Scott and his family was national news and was celebrated in northern cities. Scott worked as a porter in a hotel in St. Louis, where he was a minor celebrity. His wife took in laundry. Dred Scott died of tuberculosis on November 7, 1858. Harriet died on June 17, 1876.

Economist Charles Calomiris and historian Larry Schweikart discovered that uncertainty about whether the entire West would suddenly become slave territory or engulfed in combat like " Bleeding Kansas" gripped the markets immediately. The east-west railroads collapsed immediately (although north-south lines were unaffected), causing, in turn, the near-collapse of several large banks and the runs that ensued. What followed the runs has been called the Panic of 1857.

The Panic of 1857, unlike the Panic of 1837, almost exclusively impacted the North, a fact that Calomiris and Schweikart attribute to the South's system of branch banking, as opposed to the North's system of unit banking. In the South's branch banking system, information moved reliably among the branch banks and transmission of the panic was minor. Northern unit banks, in contrast, were competitors and seldom shared such vital information.

Southerners, who had grown uncomfortable with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, argued that they had a constitutional right to bring slaves into the territories, regardless of any decision by a territorial legislature on the subject. The Dred Scott decision seemed to endorse that view.

Although Taney believed that the decision represented a compromise that would be a final settlement of the slavery question by transforming a contested political issue into a matter of settled law, the decision produced the opposite result. It strengthened Northern opposition to slavery, divided the Democratic Party on sectional lines, encouraged secessionist elements among Southern supporters of slavery to make bolder demands, and strengthened the Republican Party.

In 1860, the Republican Party explicitly rejected the Dred Scott verdict in their official platform, stating "the new dogma that the Constitution, of its own force, carries slavery into any or all of the territories of the United States, is a dangerous political heresy, at variance with the explicit provisions of that instrument itself, with contemporaneous exposition, and with legislative and judicial precedent; is revolutionary in its tendency, and subversive of the peace and harmony of the country."

In 1859, when defending John Anthony Copeland and Shields Green from the charge of treason, following their participation in John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, their attorney, George Sennott, cited the Dred Scott decision in arguing successfully that since they were not citizens according to that Supreme Court ruling, they could not commit treason. The charge of treason was dropped, but they were found guilty and executed on other charges.

Justice John Marshall Harlan was the lone dissenting vote in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which declared racial segregation constitutional and created the concept of " separate but equal". In his dissent, Harlan wrote that the majority's opinion would "prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott case".

Charles Evans Hughes, writing in 1927 on the Supreme Court's history, described Dred Scott v. Sandford as a "self-inflicted wound" from which the court would not recover for many years.

In a memo to Justice Robert H. Jackson in 1952, for whom he was clerking, on the subject of Brown v. Board of Education, the future Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote that " Scott v. Sandford was the result of Taney's effort to protect slaveholders from legislative interference."

Justice Antonin Scalia made the comparison between Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) and Dred Scott in an effort to see overturned:

Dred Scott ... rested upon the concept of " substantive due process" that the Court praises and employs today. Indeed, Dred Scott was very possibly the first application of substantive due process in the Supreme Court, the original precedent for... .

Scalia noted that the Dred Scott decision had been written and championed by Taney and left the justice's reputation irrevocably tarnished. Taney, who was attempting to end the disruptive question of the future of slavery, wrote a decision that "inflamed the national debate over slavery and deepened the divide that led ultimately to the American Civil War".

Chief Justice John Roberts compared Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) to Dred Scott, as another example of trying to settle a contentious issue through a ruling that went beyond the scope of the Constitution.

1977: The Scotts' great-grandson John A. Madison, Jr., an attorney, gave the invocation at the ceremony at the Old Courthouse in St. Louis, a National Historic Landmark, for the dedication of a National Historic Marker commemorating the Scotts' case tried there.

2000: Harriet and Dred Scott's petition papers in their freedom suit were displayed at the main branch of the St. Louis Public Library, following the discovery of more than 300 freedom suits in the archives of the U.S. circuit court.

2006: A new historic plaque was erected at the Old Courthouse to honor the active roles of both Dred and Harriet Scott in their freedom suit and the case's significance in U.S. history.

2012: A monument depicting Dred and Harriet Scott was erected at the Old Courthouse's east entrance facing the St. Louis Gateway Arch.

1. ^ Hall, Kermit (1992). Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States. Oxford University Press. p. 889. ISBN 9780195176612. American legal and constitutional scholars consider the Dred Scott decision to be the worst ever rendered by the Supreme Court. Historians have abundantly documented its role in crystallizing attitudes that led to war. Taney's opinion stands as a model of censurable judicial craft and failed judicial statesmanship.

2. ^ Urofsky, Melvin (January 5, 2023). "Dred Scott decision | Definition, History, Summary, Significance, & Facts | Britannica". Encyclopædia Britannica. Among constitutional scholars, Scott v. Sandford is widely considered the worst decision ever rendered by the Supreme Court. It has been cited in particular as the most egregious example in the court's history of wrongly imposing a judicial solution on a political problem. A later chief justice, Charles Evans Hughes, famously characterized the decision as the court's great "self-inflicted wound."

3. ^ Carrafiello, Michael L. (Spring 2010). "Diplomatic Failure: James Buchanan's Inaugural Address". Pennsylvania History. 77 (2): 145-165. doi:10.5325/pennhistory.77.2.0145. JSTOR 10.5325/pennhistory.77.2.0145.

4. Roberta Alexander, "Dred Scott: The decision that sparked a civil war." ^ Northern Kentucky Law Review 34 (2007): 643+ excerpt.

5. David W, Blight, "Was the Civil War Inevitable?" ^ The New York Times Dec. 22, 2022

6. ^ ""No Rights Which the White Man was Bound to Respect": The Dred Scott Decision | ACS". March 19, 2007.

7. ^ ""No Rights Which the White Man was Bound to Respect": The Dred Scott Decision | ACS". March 19, 2007.

8. ^ Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (2001)

9. ^ Ehrlich, Walter (2007). They Have No Rights: Dred Scott's Struggle for Freedom. Applewood Books.

10. ^ Gardner, Eric (Spring 2007). "'You Have No Business to Whip Me': The Freedom Suits of Polly Wash and Lucy Ann Delaney". African American Review. 41 (1): 40, 47. JSTOR 40033764.

11. Lawson, John, ed. (1921). American State Trials. Vol. 13. St. Louis: Thomas Law Book Company. pp. 237-238.

12. ^ Finkelman, Paul (December 2006). "Scott v. Sandford: The Court's Most Dreadful Case and How It Changed History". Chicago-Kent Law Review. 82 (1): 25 - via Scholarly Commons @ IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law.

13. Boman, Dennis K. (2000). "The Dred Scott Case Reconsidered: The Legal and Political Context in Missouri". American Journal of Legal History. 44 (4): 421, 423-424, 426. doi:10.2307/3113785. JSTOR 3113785.

14. ^ Ehrlich, Walter (September 1968). "Was the Dred Scott Case Valid?". The Journal of American History. Organization of American Historians. 55 (2): 256-265. doi:10.2307/1899556. JSTOR 1899556.

15. ^ Hardy, David T. (2012). "Dred Scott, John San(d)ford, and the Case for Collusion" (PDF). Northern Kentucky Law Review. 41 (1). Archived from the original (PDF) on October 10, 2015.

16. ^ Faragher, John Mack; et al. (2005). Out of Many: A History of the American People (Revised Printing (4th Ed) ed.). Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice Hall. p. 388. ISBN 0131951300.

17. ^ "Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857) Excerpts From Majority and Dissenting Opinions". Bill of Rights Institute.

18. ^ Don E. Fehrenbacher (1978/2001), The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics, reprint, New York: Oxford, Part 3, "Consequences and Echoes", Chapter 18, "The Judges Judged", p. 441; unpublished opinion, transcript in Carl B. Swisher Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

19. ^ Address to the United States Senate on May 7, 1860, reprinted as Appendix F to Davis, Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1880).

20. Rehnquist, William. ^ "A Random Thought on the Segregation Cases" Archived 2008-09-21 at the Wayback Machine

21. ^ Carey, Patrick W. (April 2002). "Political Atheism: Dred Scott, Roger Brooke Taney, and Orestes A. Brownson". The Catholic Historical Review. The Catholic University of America Press. 88 (2): 207-229. doi:10.1353/cat.2002.0072. ISSN 1534-0708. S2CID 153950640.

22. ^ Arenson, Adam (2010), "Dred Scott versus the Dred Scott Case", The Dred Scott Case: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Race and Law, Ohio University Press, p. 36, ISBN 978-0821419120

23. ^ Patrick, Robert (August 18, 2015). "St. Louis judges want sculpture to honor slaves who sought freedom here". stltoday.com. Attendees get their first look after the unveiling of the new Dred and Harriet Scott statue on the grounds of the Old Courthouse in downtown St. Louis on Friday, June 8, 2012.

Arenson, Adam (2010). "Dred Scott Versus the Dred Scott Case". In Konig, David Thomas; Finkelman, Paul; Bracey, Christopher Alan (eds.). The Dred Scott Case: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Race and Law. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. ISBN 978-0821419120.

Chemerinsky, Erwin (2019). Constitutional Law: Principles and Policies (6th ed.). New York: Wolters Kluwer. ISBN 978-1454895749.

Ehrlich, Walter (1968). "Was the Dred Scott Case Valid?". The Journal of American History. 55 (2): 256-265. doi:10.2307/1899556. JSTOR 1899556.

Finkelman, Paul (2007). "Scott v. Sandford: The Court's Most Dreadful Case and How it Changed History" (PDF). Chicago-Kent Law Review. 82 (3): 3-48.

Hughes, Charles Evans (1936) [1928]. The Supreme Court of the United States. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0231085670.

McCloskey, Robert G. (2010). The American Supreme Court. Revised by Sanford Levinson (5th ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0226556864.

Nowak, John E.; Rotunda, Ronald D. (2012). Treatise on Constitutional Law: Substance and Procedure (5th ed.). Eagan, MN: West Thomson/Reuters. OCLC 798148265.

Vishneski, John S. (1988). "What the Court Decided in Dred Scott v. Sandford". American Journal of Legal History. 32 (4): 373-390. doi:10.2307/845743. JSTOR 845743.

Allen, Austin. Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court 1837-1857. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2006.

Dennis-Jonathan Mann & Kai P. Purnhagen: The Nature of Union Citizenship between Autonomy and Dependency on (Member) State Citizenship - A Comparative Analysis of the Rottmann Ruling, or: How to Avoid a European Dred Scott Decision?, in: 29:3 Wisconsin International Law Journal (WILJ), (Fall 2011), pp. 484-533 (PDF).

Fehrenbacher, Don E., The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics. New York: Oxford (1978) [winner of Pulitzer Prize for History].

Fehrenbacher, Don E. Slavery, Law, and Politics: The Dred Scott Case in Historical Perspective (1981) [abridged version of The Dred Scott Case].

Finkelman, Paul. Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation's Highest Court. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2018. Review

Konig, David Thomas, Paul Finkelman, and Christopher Alan Bracey, eds. The Dred Scott Case: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Race and Law (Ohio University Press; 2010) 272 pages; essays by scholars on the history of the case and its afterlife in American law and society.

Potter, David M. The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (1976) pp. 267-96.

VanderVelde, Lea. Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery's Frontier (Oxford University Press, 2009) 480 pp.

Swain, Gwenyth (2004). Dred and Harriet Scott: A Family's Struggle for Freedom. Saint Paul, MN: Borealis Books. ISBN 978-0873514828.

Tushnet, Mark (2008). I Dissent: Great Opposing Opinions in Landmark Supreme Court Cases. Boston: Beacon Press. pp. 31-44. ISBN 978-0807000366.

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Texts on Wikisource:

Text of Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857) is available from:Cornell Findlaw Justia Library of Congress OpenJurist Oyez (oral argument audio)

The Dred Scott decision. Opinion of Chief Justice Taney, with an introduction by Dr. J. H. Van Evrie. Also, an appendix, containing an essay on the natural history of the prognathous race of mankind, originally written for the New York Day-book, by Dr. S. A. Cartwright, of New Orleans. New York: Van Evrie, Horton & Co. 1863.

Primary documents and bibliography about the Dred Scott case, from the Library of Congress

"Dred Scott decision", Encyclopædia Britannica 2006. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 17 December 2006. www.yowebsite.com

Gregory J. Wallance, "Dred Scott Decision: The Lawsuit That Started The Civil War", History.net, originally in Civil War Times Magazine, March/April 2006

Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, National Park Service

Infography about the Dred Scott Case

The Dred Scott Case Collection, Washington University in St. Louis

Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice

Dred Scott case articles from William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper The Liberator

"Supreme Court Landmark Case Dred Scott v. Sandford" from C-SPAN's Landmark Cases: Historic Supreme Court Decisions

Report of the Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States and the Opinions of the Judges Thereof, in the Case of Dred Scott Versus John F.A. Sandford. December Term, 1856 via Google Books

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Dred Scott v. Sandford , 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that held the U.S. Constitution did not extend American citizenship to people of black African descent, and thus they could not enjoy the rights and privileges the Constitution conferred upon American citizens.

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The Widow's Son in the Windshield

The Widow's Son in the Windshield is the first episode and season premiere of the third season of Bones.

Three teens are in a car on the highway. As they go under a bridge something is dropped from it, bounces off the top of a dump truck in front of them, and smashes into the teens' car. It's a human skull.

Camille Saroyan and Temperance Brennan are questioning Clark Edison, a possible replacement for Zack Addy. Cam seems pleased, but Brennan is obviously upset about the whole thing. Edison asks if they need him at the crime scene, and Brennan tells him they'll let him know. Cam tells Edison that he's doing fine, but he's certain he's not impressing Dr. Brennan.

At the crime scene, Seeley Booth and Brennan argue as they approach the car. Booth accuses her of not wanting to come out to the field anymore, and Brennan defends herself saying that with Zack gone, she has a lot of work at the lab. Booth tells her that she's not even bothering to correct his scientific mistakes, and Brennan just asks him what she's doing there. Booth points to the inside of the car, where the skull is still embedded in the windshield.

Booth brings over a witness, who might not be too credible, as the car reeks of weed, but he claims he's sober. Brennan begins weaving different possible scenarios until Booth points to an overpass bridge. Brennan wonders who'd drop a skull from up there in the first place.

Angela and Hodgins meet with Doug Doyley, the private investigator who's looking for Angela's "husband." The marriage certificate she has is no use, as the man signed it with an X. Doyley asks for a description, photographs, and other witnesses, but all Angela can come up with is that the guy was tall, muscular, and black, and that his name MIGHT have a B in it...or maybe a K...and she offers to make a sketch.

Brennan calls up Booth, who seems delighted, as she hasn't called him in weeks. She tells him of her finding as he walks towards his SUV eating a sandwich. He gets some of her scientific jargon right ("I know what scoring means") but completely messes up on the important part. Brennan is reaching for a way to explain it to Booth, and Cam finally breaks in to tell him that the teeth that did the damage were human. Brennan sums it up by saying the victim's face was chewed up by a cannibal. Booth stops chewing the sandwich he was eating and throws it away.

Booth and Caroline are trying to figure out where the dump truck came from, hoping to find the remaining body there. Back at the lab, Brennan and Edison have discovered a distinctive bone characteristic in the skull that will help them identify the body. Angela comes in to tell them that Booth is bringing in huge amounts of bone chips from the landfill and threatening to bring back more. Brennan walks out and Angela follows her, accusing her of not wanting to hire Edison. Brennan sticks to her line of not having made up her mind yet. Angela tells her that she's just stalling to not go into the field with Booth, and she tells Brennan it's because she's running away from the repercussions of having been left with him in front of an altar, and all its symbolism. Brennan denies understanding what Angela is talking about. Angela tells them they'll talk about it later, when Brennan is ready to face the truth.

Booth arrives at the lab as Brennan and Edison are going over the bone chips, and he asks Brennan to join him in the field. She excuses herself once more, claiming that there's a lot of work to do, and Edison offers to do it by himself. Brennan tells him it's too much work for one person, and Edison is about to disagree when he catches the look on her face. Booth catches it too and asks the young man if it's true. Edison bows out claiming they're putting him in a very awkward position. Booth leaves, telling Edison that Zack would have told him.

Later that day, Booth and Cam are having drinks, and he's complaining about the whole situation. Cam asks him if he's feeling guilty about something, and he tells her he's still feeling bad for having arrested Brennan's father. He justifies his actions by telling Cam he asked Brennan if she was okay with it, but Cam tells him no one is that rational, and something like that is sure to cause some stress on any relationship. Booth complains Cam is not helping him, and she tells him next time he wants sympathy, not to ask a close friend.

The skull is identified as Gavin Nichols, violin virtuoso, missing for a month. Booth and Brennan start exchanging theories, and Booth mentions once more how symbiotic they can be when they work together. Brennan ignores him again, and he asks her to join him for the interrogation. She tells him she can't as she found some grit on the skull. Booth gets upset and tells her that's Hodgins' job. Brennan tells Booth she needs to supervise it. Cam tells Booth to take Angela instead.

Booth interrogates Gavin's girlfriend while Angela looks at the pictures the girl brought with her. Booth cannot find anything suspicious and is about to let her go when Angela points out to a specific picture. Angela guesses the girlfriend looked sad in it because she knew Gavin was going to die, but Booth figures out it's because he was having an affair on the side. His hunch pays off: Gavin was having an affair with the wife of the Deputy Director of the Secret Service.

Hodgins identifies the grit and tells Brennan it's very rare and can only be found in the D.C. area in a couple of very specific buildings. He also tells Brennan to forget about replacing Zack and just try to find someone to help them out.

When interrogated, Mrs. Sumner admits to having an affair with Gavin and that her husband knew about it. They give Booth and Caroline video proof, and after viewing it, Booth agrees they didn't kill the boy. He just charges the husband with voyeurism.

Booth comes looking for Brennan, saying they found the place where the murder probably took place, and he asks her again, to go with him. She claims to have work to do, but this time Cam nicely orders her to go, since it could very well be the place where ritualistic killings have taken place. They go to an abandoned bank that has an underground sealed vault.

They get the door open and find an almost museum-like collection inside. Booth finds a ticking device on the inside of the door and throws Brennan to the floor, covering her with his body. Brennan tells him it's a communication device and not a bomb. They continue searching the vault and find a silver skeleton with several real bones replacing different parts.

Upon further investigation, they find more gnawed-on bones, Gavin's violin, and an altar made with the same material they found in the skull. Angela tells them the whole setting is medieval, probably Spanish - Calabrian. Hodgins goes off telling them about the Order of Alcantara, part of the Illuminati sect, but they cut him off. Caroline wonders if this is a serial killer they're looking for and agrees to have the whole thing shipped to the Jeffersonian.

Doyley tells Angela and Hodgins that the "priest" who married Angela died in a tsunami and that the island is now deserted. Angela tells him she was drunk and can't remember anything, not even enough for a sketch. Doyley leaves, hoping to find an Australian ship that was docked there that day.

Booth arrives at the lab to find everyone working on the findings inside the vault and tells Brennan that now everyone is helping her. The rest of the squints tell him it'll take months to sort through all the stuff, and Booth accuses them of enabling someone with a mental condition. Brennan stops talking and points behind him: Zack just walked in. The whole squad runs down to greet him, and he tells them he wants to get back to work right away. Booth tells Edison that it was nice meeting him as he figures out he's not getting the job.

Zack analyzes the skull and finds a strange scraping which leads Brennan to believe it was done by a diamond inset on a tooth. She tells Booth of the finding and asks to join him for interrogation. Booth is surprised but happy about her change of attitude.

They interrogate Jason, a young man who was doing community service by keeping the old bank clean. They tell him that they know he's guilty because of his diamond tooth. Brennan asks him to bite on a piece of wax to get an imprint, then Jason starts telling them about the taste of human flesh.

Zack can't go to sleep due to the time zone difference and has been working on the bones they found. He's found out they belong to six different people. Cam asks him why they sent him back from Iraq, and Zack tells her he never managed to fit in.

Doyle shows Angela and Hodgins a picture of some of the Australian sailors and she recognizes one of them: a fairly huge guy. He also found out his name and his nationality and a possible location. Doyle tells them that if they wait 3 years they can declare him dead, but neither Angela nor Hodgins wants to wait, so they ask Doyle to keep searching.

Booth and Brennan go back to the lab, responding to Zack's urgent call, and find him resting on top of an autopsy table. Brennan looks at his findings and tells Booth they have a second cannibal...probably the one who got Jason involved in the first place. They go to jail wanting to talk to Jason. While they wait to see him, they argue as to why Brennan is mad at Booth. It all boils down to Booth letting Zack go to Iraq. Booth tells Brennan that the young genius needed to leave the nest and that she did the same type of thing once.

The jail deputy leads them to Jason's cell, where they find him stabbed and placed in the same position as the silver skeleton. They ask Hodgins for his input and he tells them that the position is known as " pharmakós " or scapegoat, and that the Freemasons referred to it as "The Widow's Son." Cam's points out that Gavin's father died when he was 12 years old.

The whole team is left with more questions than answers as they reach the conclusion that there is a killer loose out there, and, as Hodgins points out, they "might end getting themselves killed".

Sitting on a bench outside, Booth tries to get Brennan to take the hot coffee he brought her, while she rambles on about the case. He stops her from drinking the hot coffee by putting his hand over the cup right as she is about to drink, inadvertently pressing her lips onto his hand, and she says thank you. Booth wants to know if they are solid, and Brennan thinks he is just talking about her and him, but he says that it is the whole team. They are the center of the team, and he wants to know if they will hold. She says, yeah, they will hold, and puts her hand out to shake his hand.

Main Cast Edit

Guest Cast Edit

Featured Music Edit

"Gethsemane (I Only Want to Say)" - Michael Crawford

"See The World" - Gomez

Booth: I mean, how hard can it be to replace one weirdo squint?

Cam: I'd hire Clark, but it's not my call.

Booth: No, no, it is! I mean, you've given Bones enough time, just hire the guy!

Cam: Usually when you get all blustery, it's 'cause you think something's your fault.

Booth: Yeah well, you know, I did arrest her father for murder, she could be having trouble with that.

Cam: Exposing a parent to the death penalty can have a chilling effect on a partnership.

Booth: Well, look, I asked Bones if that was a problem, she said no.

Cam: Well, I gotta wonder if deep down anybody is that rational.

Booth: You're not reassuring here, Camille.

Cam: If you're looking for reassurance, find someone who's not such a good friend, Seeley.

Doug Doyley: So your husband signed his name to the marriage license with an 'X'?

Angela: Yeah.

Doug Doyley: So you married a guy without knowing his name.

Angela: It was Fiji, okay. I was on vacation.

Boy: I was driving behind a dump truck, and that came flying off the back.

Brennan: Do you think the rest of the skeleton is still in the truck?

Boy: No.

Brennan: Why?

Boy: It didn't come flying out, if came flying off. It bounced.

Booth: Oh, a bouncing skull.

Brennan: Or perhaps you thought that because you were under the influence of tetrahydrocannabinol.

Boy: What?

Booth: Weed

Brennan: How did this skull get here?

Booth: Ask our eyewitness. (runs off to get a teenage boy) Let's go buddy. (brings the boy over to Brennan)

Boy: I am not high.

Brennan: Neither am I, why is he telling me that?

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The Widow's Son in the Windshield is the first episode and season premiere of the third season of Bones. Three teens are in a car on the highway. As they go under a bridge something is dropped from it, bounces off the top of a dump truck in front of them, and smashes into the teens' car.

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Misc

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DeviantArt is the world's largest online social community for artists and art enthusiasts, allowing people to connect through the creation and sharing of art.

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Environments

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DeviantArt is the world's largest online social community for artists and art enthusiasts, allowing people to connect through the creation and sharing of art.

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Environments

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
DeviantArt is the world's largest online social community for artists and art enthusiasts, allowing people to connect through the creation and sharing of art.

# data[].attributes.body
Environments

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
DeviantArt is the world's largest online social community for artists and art enthusiasts, allowing people to connect through the creation and sharing of art.

# data[].attributes.body
Environments

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
DeviantArt is the world's largest online social community for artists and art enthusiasts, allowing people to connect through the creation and sharing of art.

# data[].attributes.body
Environments

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
DeviantArt is the world's largest online social community for artists and art enthusiasts, allowing people to connect through the creation and sharing of art.

# data[].attributes.body
Environments

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
DeviantArt is the world's largest online social community for artists and art enthusiasts, allowing people to connect through the creation and sharing of art.

# data[].attributes.body
Environments

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DeviantArt is the world's largest online social community for artists and art enthusiasts, allowing people to connect through the creation and sharing of art.

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Misc

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Commissions and Freelance Works by PeterPrime on DeviantArt

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DeviantArt is the world's largest online social community for artists and art enthusiasts, allowing people to connect through the creation and sharing of art.

# data[].attributes.body
Environments

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
DeviantArt is the world's largest online social community for artists and art enthusiasts, allowing people to connect through the creation and sharing of art.

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A collection of adjustments to the original game form fans ranging from tables and items to characters and new rules (Note to Self don't forget about all the rulebooks you also have)

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Consider contacting and converting art to black and white to put into the book?

Desaturise and invert if dark?

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The Swan Song crew seem to have hit a certain level of notoriety with most major factions. They’re targets, and these psychos want a piece of that action. 1d4+1 of them are probably working together—for now. Each listed with their personal spacecraft. 50% chance they heard of the Swan Song crew from Jared Crane (of "Who the fuck is Jared Crane?" fame)

Lord Duke Jessup, of The Tiny Dancer. Dispossessed Asan noble, a proper “southern gentleman” now seeking to regain his fortune through bounty hunting. Once held a wealth of stock in Sunbeam Multi-(now Omni) stellar, but was cheated out of it by his then-fiancé, Lord Zechariah Blunt, days before the company’s merger.

Mr. Mercy and Ms. Nightmare, of The Reasons Unknown. Ex-soldiers dishonorably discharged from the Pfotenhauer Society for cowardice and cruelty, respectively. He’s a technical genius who prefers staying behind the scenes; she’s a bloodthirsty and sadistic monster on the battlefield. He loves her beyond reason and she quite often forgets he exists.

Capt. Hellebore Vickers, of The Soft Option. Freewheeling and ruthless space mercenary who is as untrustworthy as she is charming. Is herself wanted by many factions, and seeks to appease her pursuers—or at least defer their rage—by taking out their bigger targets for them. (Think a female Higgs)

Antero Archer, of The Fulminate Blade. Dashing Andonian rogue who claims to have escaped a Cultural Defense Prison, but he is a simple refugee who survived the Fall of Andoni at the cost of his loved ones. Uses loud and flashy attacks to announce his presence, possibly representing a deathwish. His heart is not truly in hunting, and can be persuaded to let his targets escape.

Emiko “Empress” Takahashi, of The Mikado. Veteran Onintzan mercenary enhanced with cybertech and pretech anagathics, which render her nearly ageless. Employs a cult-like support staff who wear gold robes, strange (New Wave-y) makeup, and carry monoblade throwing axes. Seeks to earn riches to keep her comfortable in her “Waking Afterlife”.

Erebus Lung, of The Splinter of the Mind’s Eye. A serene and contemplative Majidi mercenary whose skin is near black with a dense web of esoteric symbols tattooed all over his body. Certain symbols glow orange or yellow with nanites when Lung is in combat or otherwise physically/mentally stressed. (Nanite tattoos from OtherDust)

Renato Martel, of The Slow Hand. Vinayan trophy hunter and salesman who will auction off his captives’ possessions. Covetous of material goods, the rarer and older the better. Uses some antique weapons in combat. Captures and sales fund his severe Blue Fever addiction. The whites of his eyes are a shade of electric blue.

Olga “Fury” Furyenko, of The Wounded Pride. A former astro-miner and part-time Highbeam Pirate who lost her sister Ilsa when their dome habitat was destroyed. Dedicated her life to hunting down criminals. Suffers from mild Stendahl’s Syndrome when beholding a destroyed enemy. (But does she know the Swan Song killed her sis many episodes ago?)

Fatima Muassar-Longpre (“FML”), of The Damage Done. A meek and intelligent Hoveydan psychic who has the worst luck—ship problems, weapons malfunctions, and such—but desperately wants to be a bounty hunter. Her metapsionics are not that useful in themselves, but she leans on using psitech. After constant practice her TK is beginning to improve.

(Agent) Perkins, of The Lady Vanishes. Clean-cut and well-spoken man who claims to work for a charitable organization. In truth a wayward Perimeter Agent who keeps a portfolio of pet projects, financing them with murder-for-hire. Particularly despises psychics after a traumatic childhood encounter, and has a cranial device implanted to block their intrusion.

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A list of example stories that are adaptable and entire world adventures.

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Chronicles of Riddick
Warhammer 40K
Farscape (Tropes)
Blade Runner
Charlie Hebdo freespeech
Edgar Allan Poe
British and Irish Writers Adam's