Now that I’ve got a Gods & Monsters page set up on both Facebook and Google+, I’m going to start using them: every Monday I’m going to upload some free media from Wikimedia Commons or elsewhere that has inspired some part of Gods & Monsters. And every Friday I will upload a map, flier, cover image, or document graphic for an existing or soon-to-be-published Gods & Monsters adventure book or rulebook.

This week focuses on the circus! Circus posters from the 1800s were amazing collections of strange and arcane language. Traveling circuses have fired our imaginations for probably as long as they’ve existed, perhaps culminating in Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes^•.

My upcoming Coriandrome Circus adventure pulls heavily from all of these things. But the circus flier I made for the adventure pulls almost directly from several real circuses; some of the strangest things on it are not my imagination: the 42 flaming truths, for example, really were advertised as part of the Sells Brothers’ Millionaire Confederation of Stupendous Railroad Shows. Later they merged with another circus to become Adam Forepaugh & Sells Brothers Enormous Shows Combined (later still, just Forepaugh & Sells Brothers). They have some of the most amazing poster copy, and I stole from them shamelessly to make the Coriandrome Road Show flier that I’ve just posted to Facebook and Google+.

It will of course also be part of the resources file when I make the full adventure public.