It’s a rare and exciting day when we’re releasing TWO brand new Cthulhu Eternal titles.
“The Blight” is an awesome Jazz Age scenario by Gary Sumpter, set in New Mexico – available now as a PDF in our “Beyond the Miskatonic” series. Written by Gary Sumpter (one of the titans of Cthulhu gaming’s 1990s golden age), this adventure is set in New Mexico and it explores a history of Apache displacement and Spanish colonization. It’s a slightly unusual adventure in that while it has some connection to the Cthulhu Mythos, that connection is relatively slight and it would easily be possible to run this adventure as a straight horror tale (if you so wished).
Our other newbie is a print title (our sixth flipbook, can you believe it?) collecting three of our most popular scenarios: Chad Bowser’s excellent “Red in Tooth & Claw”, Jo Kreil’s Cold War adventure “Fathoms Below” & Paul StJohn Mackintosh’s chilly WW1 short “The White War”. The loose thematic thread linking these scenarios is “war and the military”. The first deals with the crew of a WW1 submarine shipwrecked on one of the most bizarre tropical islands imaginable. The second is also a submarine tale, but more concerned with an expedition to find the lost Atlantis … or at least the version alluded to in HPL’s short story “The Temple”. Finally, “The White War” is a short WW1 adventure set in the freezing Italian Alps — it was previously a free scenario download we put out for Christmas (and it has proven one of our most popular downloads).
The new flipbook is available as a softcover print-on-demand book on DriveThruRPG — if you nab it, you can get all the PDFs and digital goodies for each of the three scenarios thrown in for free.
And because everybody is curious about what the print titles look like “in the mortified flesh”, here are some (phone-quality) photos we took of the new “Red In Tooth & Claw” + “Fathoms Below” + “White War” flipbook.
We recently released a new Medieval scenario for Cthulhu Eternal. It’s a genre crossover that weirdly never seems to get as much attention as it probably deserves.
Today we’re excited to release a softcover print book collecting that new adventure (The Priory) PLUS a previous medieval scenario (Lord of Nombrecht). 100 pages of medieval Cthulhu madness, available in print right now via DriveThruRPG.
This book is our fifth tête-bêche print scenario book (a format where two halves of a book are printed in opposite orientations, making a flip book with two front covers). We really like this format for bringing together two adventures into a more substantial printed title — plus it lets us use BOTH of the covers we commissioned for the original PDF adventures. If you haven’t checked out our other tête-bêche scenario books, you can see the whole collection via this link.
We’re thrilled to announce the PDF release of our second Medieval scenario for Cthulhu Eternal, “The Priory”. Written by Chad Bowser this thoroughly-researched historical horror is set in England just after the Norman Conquest (or more precisely during the period of civil war now known as The Anarchy, when a crisis of royal succession in 1135 set Norman England ablaze with chaos and strife).
Nightgenga! Rats! Scuccas! and a whole priory filled with monks of dire reputation. What’s not to love?
Chad’s name should be well known to lovers of historical Lovecraftian RPGs. With Andi Newton he created the Cthulhu Invictus (Classical Rome) setting for Call of Cthulhu & he was the driving force in rebooting Chaosium’s “Cthulhu Dark Ages”, relocating its default setting to feudal England.
If you’ve ever wondered what Chaosium’s Dark Ages line COULD have looked like (if they had decided to supported it), this adventure gives you a unique glimpse … we are hoping to be able to convince Chad to write more adventures for this interesting Medieval setting.
The titular Priory featured in this adventure has a very special place in the HPL canon. Located near the Welsh border, the Exham Priory of 1137 is home to a peculiar order of monks. Some 800 years later, an American industrialist inherits the place … and so begins “The Rats in the Walls”.
BTW, while this scenario is currently only available in PDF, we do have short-term plans to create a print version. We’re thinking of combining it with our previous Medieval scenario (The Lord of Nombrecht) to make a bumper 100-page flip-book of Medieval Mayhem across England and the Holy Roman Empire. Fun for everyone …
Today we released our thirteenth SRD ruleset for Cthulhu Eternal, supporting games in the “Age of Al-Azrad” (roughly 500 CE to 1000 CE, slotting between our Classical SRD and the Medieval SRD).
This new SRD is available for download via DTRPG right now! As always it is free/Pay-What-You-Want and released as 100% open content under the OGL.
With this new release, we now have 13 versions of the Cthulhu Eternal ruleset out in the wild — with a few more still in development. The choice of settings for your next Lovecraftian game is starting to look a lot broader …
We are THRILLED to announce today the rescue and re-hosting of the extensive Lovecraftian TTRPG reference wiki formerly hosted at Yog-Sothoth dot com (YSDC). This vast repository, built up by hundreds of users over several decades, was thought lost when the operators of YSDC made the hard decision to close the site in early 2026.
The resurrection of the YSDC Wiki from its Essential Saltes has been a huge joint effort between a consortium of small-press Lovecraftian TTRPG publishers: us, Sentinel Hill Press, and Shoggoth dot net. Some of the folks who ran technical support for YSDC — in particular the ever-amazing Tyler Hudak — were also instrumental in making the rescue of this important reference and historical archive a possibility.
For now, the re-hosted Wiki is a read-only reference resource, however we will be working hard to open it up to ongoing community contributions later in the year.
Some Historical Context
If you are a long-time player of Lovecraftian TTRPGs, you will probably already know a lot of the story of YSDC and how its community helped spawn a whole generation of games, actual play recordings, and small-press publishers. For everyone else, here’s a capsule summary.
Founded in 1998, YSDC was created in an era where online discussion was primarily email mailing lists and simple discussion forums. It was an era before social media, and even before most companies had their own websites. The creation of a free community for the discussion of Lovecraftian games — in particular the popular Call of Cthulhu TTRPG — was a welcome development for a great many gamers. The forums gave players and GMs their first opportunity to interact directly with the writers of many of the scenarios and campaigns they had been reading for years.
The late 1990s was an era when the TTRPG industry as a whole was in a major slump — a few years earlier, collectible card games had rocketed to the gaming public’s attention and taken over the majority of gamers’ spending. Companies like Chaosium were trying to adapt to this challenge (mostly by launching their own collectible card games, many of which ended up losing money), but the financial situation was bleak. During this time YSDC played a crucial role at keeping Lovecraftian TTRPGing alive, fostering a large and active community of folks who were sharing tips and advice on how to run games, even at times when the output of new material dried to a trickle. Some might say that this lifeline is a major part of how Chaosium survived through those lean times.
One of the great benefits of old-school Internet forums is that they promote longer and more thoughtful debate (quite different to the transactional sound-bite formats of modern social media). YSDC in particular hosted a considerable amount of erudite discussion, some of which shaped future products and even entire game-lines. Early in the life of the forum consideration was given to taking the fruits of this collective discussion and preserving it for future reference — one mechanism for that was via the YSDC wiki. From small beginnings, it grew into a vast and sprawling reference encyclopedia, mostly cataloguing the details of games, campaigns, and scenarios that have been published across the four decades that Lovecraftian TTRPGs have existed.
While initially supportive of YSDC and its community, relations were not always smooth between the site and Chaosium (especially in the era prior to the creation of many well-supported alternatives to Call of Cthulhu). Things became especially problematic after the original Chaosium was declared functionally bankrupt in 2015 and its name and assets were bought out by a group of RuneQuest enthusiasts who had some very different ideas about how online discussions should be ‘managed’.
At the same time, changing patterns of Internet usage — in particular the rise to prevalence of short-form social media — meant that traffic to sites like YSDC radically declined over time. This, coupled with a vastly growth in the volume of security and spam-filtering challenges led to the site going private in 2019. Even despite becoming a “walled garden”, YSDC patrons remained a loyal community … and many people still used the YSDC Wiki as a key reference tool to track down obscure details about publications or adventures. When the YSDC operators announced the permanent closure of the site at the start of 2026, those folks voiced concerns that this important reference and historical resource might be lost forever.
With this new resurrection of the YogWiki as a free public resource, we hope the community’s need for a reliable wiki reference for all-things Lovecraftian TTRPG will continue to be met, and that a new generation of gamers might benefit from the work of earlier hands.
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.
Cthulhu Reborn 
