Just in case there’s anyone reading who doesn’t know what a mood board is: it’s basically a collage of images, words, and reference points, used by designers to work up a “feel” for a new project, before they start on actual designs.

I like to use something like them for LARP settings, and I’ve been making notes what I want to reach for with the next game.  I would call them “influences”, but with LARP, everyone brings their own influences in in all sorts of ways, so I find it helpful to think of them as a mood board for the game, rather than influences.  A given NPC might have very specific influences, but the setting has a wider board, if that makes sense?

My previous board had lots of British Children’s television of the 70s and early 80s, fused with paganism, a dash of The Archers, and all the usual supernatural nonsense, and a lot of creepy folk songs and hauntological electronica.  Funnily enough, about six months after I started I was running the game, Scarfolk Council launched, and I instantly recognised it as basically, a hit of the pure stuff.  Taking everything I was aiming at, and turning the creepy-and-weird dial up to the maximum setting.  That gives you the general idea.

So now I’m kind of feeling my way towards I want to do with the next one.  I’m thinking that lots of brutalism, chrome, concrete, a post-war aesthetic, the British modernism of the 50s, would suit – effectively, the stuff we’d think of as retro-futures these days.  Soundtrack to be ambient industrial, lots of heavy machine sounds, clanking and empty spaces.  At the moment, my stalling point is I can’t find the missing pop-culture/fiction link to fuse it with and make it accessible.  Although to be honest given the largely blank looks I got when I went on about the Cosmic Importance of Nigel Kneale, Children of the Stones, The Stone Tape and so on, it’s as much about making them accessible to me – defining an approach to the aesthetics – as it is about giving people an obvious touchstone.

I’m looking for a strain of supernatural fiction that I can fuse with all this concrete and brutalism.  Wondering about Lovecraft, wondering about splatterpunk, finding them both a bit extreme.  Anyone got any clever ideas?  I have just read the latest Dresden Files, but while I do very much enjoy them they’re kind of so generic Urban Fantasy as to be useless in marking out a tone.

Non-supernatural, I’m thinking of something like The Sandbaggers, and its descendant, Queen and Country, and similar, but honestly, they’ve got a similar 70s aesthetic to the one I mentally had last time, so I’m instinctively pulling back.

So, here’s your chance to recommend me fiction.  I’m looking for good supernatural/horror fiction set in 1940s (post-war)/1950s Britain.  Film, TV, radio, book, comic, it doesn’t matter, it just needs to be of the period.  Go!