If you are anything like us, you have a bookshelf (or several) overflowing with Lovecraftian D100 scenarios from decades of books created by many different publishers. How cool would it be to be able to play ANY of those scenarios using a modern game engine like Cthulhu Eternal?
To help you realise that dream, we’ve created this 16-page free guide that summarizes all that we have learned from hand-converting dozens of different D100 scenarios (mostly Call of Cthulhu, various editions) for our own games and books.
While we would normally have placed this up as a free download on DriveThruRPG, we have noticed that Chaosium have been recently making baseless Copyright allegations in various places that have resulted in products being unilaterally pulled by DTRPG without right of reply. We are a tiny operation who doesn’t have the resources that Chaosium have to leverage platforms, so it is better to simply post our free content here.
We hope that these notes will be useful to folks who enjoy our streamlined and modern game mechanics but still yearn to play some of those classics from Cthulhu’s back-catalogue. You really can have the best of both worlds! Please do get in touch if you go ahead and create larger-scale conversions of old books (we’d like to know, and others might too).
Big news from us today about the original for Cthulhu Eternal SRDs (Jazz, Modern, Victorian, Cold War). In response to many requests since these came out 4 years ago, we have decided to release formatted & illustrated versions of these rulesets and also make them available as softcover print books.
So … why this change?
When we first created Cthulhu Eternal the idea was to make free but feature-complete rulesets that anybody could use. Our team spent hours writing them (adapting wonderful OGL rules for Arc Dream’s awesome Delta Green RPG) but without a budget to pay for art or layout, the Free-Open-Source version was just text. Given that we are effectively giving these rulebooks away at no cost (unless you want to donate something), it was the best we could do at that time.
The text SRDs have been awesome in allowing us and others to make things that simply couldn’t be released under other licensed “walled gardens” like Chaosium’s Miskatonic Repository.
But over and over people comment: “we love your rules, they’re an improvement on what we usually play … but text-only? … it’s kind of hard to read”. And: “having free PDF rules are awesome, but isn’t there a print option so I can have a reference when playing face-to-face?”
Late last year — having received a modest cash injection from a super-successful Bundle of Holding promotion in October — we decided to do something more with these rulebooks. And today we’re delighted to announce the release of the first fruits from that project: the “illustrated editions” of the Jazz Age, Victorian, Modern, and Cold War SRDs.
What is an “illustrated SRD?” you ask … well it’s basically the identical text as the normal SRD but with professional formatting and B&W interior (stock) artwork. It’s probably easier to show rather than tell:
While going through the process of revisiting these original SRDs we also took the opportunity to bring them all into line with optional rules that we have added in later versions of the rules and also to rewrite everything to conform to our new house style for pronouns (we’ve abandoned things like “he or she” in favour the the gender-neutral “they”)
For the modern, Victorian, and Cold War SRDs we also added some minor new content:
Modern: Hacking & Cyber Warfare guidelines
Cold War: optional Martial Arts skill and combat options
Victorian: optional Spiritualism powers and rituals.
Of course having beautiful layouts also allows for softcover print versions.
Rather than make these versions separate products on DTRPG, we’ve simply added the PDF illustrated SRD versions as updates to the original PWYW products on DTRPG, making them free downloads for anyone who’s already nabbed the SRD. If you’ve already got the old SRDs in your DTRPG bookshelf, just go back and the new files should be added. If you don’t already own them, these pages will allow you to nab them:
The print versions — which can also be ordered via the links above — aren’t free, but hopefully affordable to anybody who wants a shiny softcover book.
We hope that by releasing these illustrated versions of our four most popular rulebooks we hope that it will make it easier for folks to play Cthulhu Eternal … and also encourage game designers to release material which works with (or adapts) our free/open rules.
We’re excited to announce the release of yet another ruleset for the Cthulhu Eternal System, this one catering specifically to games set in the “Elizabethan” or “Tudor” times (or any time from 1550 to 1650).
As with all of our System Reference Documents, this 115 page rulebook is available right now on DriveThruRPG as a Pay-What-You-Want title, meaning you can nab it for free of you wish (it’s ok with us). Or you can chip in a little to help us create still more cool Lovecraftian stuff.
The Elizabethan Era ruleset is supported by some spiffing Elizabethan character sheet designs:
We know there are other great Elizabethan RPGs out there (especially Just Crunch’s awesome Dee Sanction RPG, an indie fave), but this fills a hole in our range of rulesets. Plus I guess you could mix the two, perhaps using our rules to run the Dee scenarios using a D100 engine? Or vice versa.
We’re really excited to have reached the significant milestones of having a DOZEN different flavours of Cthulhu Eternal out in the wild … and believe it or not, we still have a few more in the works. We are looking forward to seeing what our fine community of clever game designers will do with this setting.
So, “Game On!” we say (or maybe some Elizabethan equivalent, which probably uses the phrases “prithee”, “cunning plan” or “Banquo’s Ghost” somewhere in there).
A bit of an 🫤 update from us, explaining some recent deletions from our DriveThruRPG catalogue.
Earlier today we made the hard decision to de-list about 20 of our oldest free & PWYW titles off DriveThru, not because we wanted to but because of rumblings from Chaosium/Moon Design.
To explain: we have been publishing Lovecraftian gaming stuff since 2011. Many of our earliest PDFs were published either before the original Chaosium went bankrupt (the name and IP purchased by Moon Design), or shortly afterwards. At that time, folks like us were told existing arrangements would be grandfathered for all releases that pre-dated new licensing arrangements that came into effect in 2017 or 2018.
Imagine our surprise today when we are told that a Chaosium/Moon rep posted on a public Discord server casting shade on our old (grandfathered) titles, PDFs which have been on sale for 7-9 years. The assertion in the Discord post is Cthulhu Reborn in breach of current licensing rules and thus shouldn’t be able to continue mentioning CoC in those grandfathered product listings.
Because these titles only earn us cents per year, and we are not interested in getting into a fight with a larger publisher, we have simply decided to delete all these products from our Drivethru catalogue . These constitute most of the pre-2022 scenario PDFs we released — every adventure that had Call of Cthulhu statistics. (Note that although these products are deleted from DTRPG, they are all still accessible in the downloads section here on the blog)
Affected titles: Convicts & Cthulhu Tickets of Leave 1-16, Porphyry & Asphodel and Deadwave.
Though we’re sad to delete these titles, it’s proven to us we made the right decision in building our OWN open game system for everything we’ve made post 2022. If it’s not open you can’t rely on it.
We hope to re-work the various Convicts & Cthulhu adventures for our new standalone C&C game (in fact ToL #12 is already converted and available for free in our Convicts & Cthulhu Quickstart).
For anybody disappointed by the loss of these DTRPG titles, we apologise sincerely.
As most people here would know, back in 2020 we released the APOCTHULHU RPG. Now, as the sands of 2025 drain from the hourglass — and the sixth year of the Apocalypse beckons — we’ve released our first new APOCTHULHU scenario for ages … Jo Kreil’s tale of Post-Apocalypse Australia, “Wilderland”.
This scenario has been sitting on our hard drive for quite a while (for various reasons). First commissioned from Jo as part of a project to create a bunch of Lovecraftian-themed adventures set in different periods of Australian history, it was the original spark that led to APOCTHULHU in the first place. So it is kind of poetic to finally be releasing it, converted and prettied up, for that very game.
“Wilderland” is set 20 years after the day when “the stars came right” and Cthulhu Mythos forces reclaimed our planet. Humanity limps on; in a survivor township near Canberra a strange discovery offers a glimmer of hope. A clue about a vast repository of ancient knowledge hidden beneath the sands. But following that lead takes a group of Post-Apocalypse survivors from the (relative) safety of their settlement near Canberra … all the way into the harsh desert interiors of the Australian continent. And the horrors — both Mythos and human — that now lurk in that most inhospitable of locales.
As this is our last release for 2025, we’d like to thank everyone who follows us here on the blog. We will be back next year with more horrible things, but in the meantime … stay safe.
Well, that time of the year has arrived again. That time when we look back and say … dammit all those things we wanted to publish really DID take a long time to wrangle and bring out, didn’t they? Isn’t there some way we can quickly finish off a few projects to at least have a vaguely respectable number of publications for the year?
Turns out … with the appropriate motivation … we HAVE been able to finish up three print-on-demand titles and get them out before Christmas. Cthulhu be praised, it is a Yithmas miracle.
So, what have we released?
First up, we have released a print version of the Eldritch Horizon Quickstart, something that many people asked us about when we launched the PDF early back in October. Since then it’s been downloaded something like 700 or 800 times, so hopefully somebody is also interested in having a print copy to put on their gaming shelves. The POD is available right now. We’re pretty happy with how the colour print turned out (see the photos below).
Secondly, we wanted to continue the tradition we started last year of taking a pair of our most popular PDF scenarios and putting them into print as a tête bêche flipbook (a format where half the book is printed upside down, creating two “front covers” and you can flip the book either way and read the corresponding adventure). In the end we made TWO of them.
We have long admired the writing of William Adcock, and were fortunate enough to convince him to write two 1920s scenarios for us set in unusual locations. “The Bitter Jungle” is an adventure set in a plantation in central America, while “Thunder God’s Curse” is a hunt for a missing adventurer/prospector in 1920s Arizona. Both are wonderful one-shot adventures, and putting them into a vintage style flipbook seemed a perfect fit. The resulting colour POD book is available on DTRPG now; and as before we were delighted with the finished product (pix below).
Not content with just one flipbook, we also decided to take our two main Victorian (Gaslight) era scenarios and combine them similarly. This involved taking an older scenario — Geoff Gillan’s “The Machine King” and brushing it up to work with the Cthulhu Eternal rules, and combining it (flipwise) with the Yellow King/Oscar Wilde adventure “Starlight on the Gutter”. While we did make a very VERY limited print run of “The Machine King” back in 2014, this POD (colour interior for “Starlight”, B&W for “Machine King”) is otherwise the first time we’ve made these available to grace your bookshelf. The flipbook version is available right now on DTRPG … and yes, of course we have photos 🙂
We mentioned a while back that our original plan to release Convicts & Cthulhu as our big Halloween celebration had been usurped somewhat by an even bigger announcement. Today we can (finally) reveal what that is.
Cthulhu Eternal has been picked by the good folks at Bundle of Holding to be one of the big showcase bundle-promos for their Halloween 2025 festival-of-all-things-horror-related. The bundle is a fantastic way to scoop up PDFs of a whole bunch of the Cthulhu Eternal scenarios, at a greatly reduced price. Right now the deal is something like 75% off …
You can read all about the two different tiers of the bundles and what is in each (there’s a full set of our SRDs, which are free usually anyway, but handy to anyone who has nabbed all those adventures), here: https://bundleofholding.com/presents/CthulhuReborn
If you’re familiar with the Bundle of Holding format (which we’ve been lucky enough to be featured in once before), you will know how it works. The lower tier — which in this offer collects the Jazz-Age Miskatonic Mysteries PDF adventures, the SRDs, and the PDF version of the Book of Yog-Sothothery — is a fixed price (US $9.95), while the higher tier has a floating price based on what everyone else has paid so far. Those threshold prices always slowly creep up, making it slightly better to get in early …
The deal, however, will be active for the next three weeks. Hopefully this will help us get the Cthulhu Eternal message out to a wider audience of gamers, and maybe even get some people trying the CE rules at their gaming table or VTT …
So, the original plan was to release the core rulebook for Convicts & Cthulhu — the culmination of our biggest publishing project for the year — on Halloween. That would have been cool, but … well we don’t have the patience to wait. So we’ve decided to release it today instead.
This new rulebook is a fully standalone D100-based game that doesn’t need any other rulebook to play (unlike the previous Convicts supplements we released which relied on you owning Call of Cthulhu). The new book is 312 pages and available in PDF or chunky hardcover. To give you an idea of what the latter is like, here are a few pix of our proof copy:
An obvious question folks have posed is … if I already have all the older Convicts stuff, do I need this new version? The picture below gives some idea of the contents of the new book and how it is divided up. Of its 300 pages, about 100 is given over to rules — that is all the game mechanic stuff that wasn’t required for the CoC version, but is what makes this a standalone game. Of the 200 pages remaining about 30 pages is given over the the sample adventure and story seeds — two elements that are substantially the same as the previous edition. The remaining 170pp, though, are heavily updated or brand new from the older material.
As a guide, the 2016 Convicts & Cthulhu sourcebook was 96 pages (including scenario). The non-rules part of this book is 200 … so lots of new content, pretty much expanding on every aspect of the setting and Mythos parts.
We hope you’ll at least consider giving this new version a try — heck, if you even give the free Quickstart (see previous post) a spin, we would consider that you’re doing us a favour. As a micro-publisher, we have zero budget for promoting these releases — we mostly do it for the love of it. So if you like what we’ve done, please consider telling other gamers you know that it exists …
If you were interested in picking up a softcover print copy of the Convicts & Cthulhu Quickstart … we have just made a POD option available on its DTRPG page.
The PDF version of the Quickstart will always remain a free download (to help people see what the game is all about, and gauge our production value etc), but if you love having physical books at your gaming table … this one does look quite attractive in real life.
Er … by that I mean we are delighted to announce the release today of the totally-free ($0) Quickstart for our new iteration of the standalone Convicts & Cthulhu RPG.
The Convicts & Cthulhu Quickstart is a 70pp book, complete with rules, Protagonists, and a full adventure. Right now it is available only as a PDF, but will be available in softcover print when the full Convicts & Cthulhu RPG launches on October 31.
One side-effect of us rebooting the Convicts & Cthulhu line is that the old 2016 sourebook (which contains statistics for the Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition RPG) will be removed from sale. If you want to grab it — in print or PDF — you’ll have until October 31.
Our current plan is to release the full Convicts & Cthulhu core Rulebook on October 31. It is a 312-page book, and will be available as a hardcover print title for those that like physical books. It is approximately 3x the size of our earlier C&C setting book, expanded in literally every aspect.
Cover of the Convicts & Cthulhu Core Rulebook
Watch this space for more exciting announcements in the coming weeks (well, probably just one announcement when the book goes live, since we’re not all that fond of the endless hyping that seems to be the norm for book launches).
Cthulhu Reborn 