The Culture: Cutting Out The Corporate Gatekeepers, Part Three (#CallofCthulhu)

Catalyst isn't the only also-ran with a poz problem borne of long-festering shitlib infections.

The company that kept H.P. Lovecraft from the Memory Hole also has this issue, one that's enveloped the latest edition of Call of Cthulhu

As with BattleTech and Dungeons & Dragons, the remedy is simple:

BUY USED!

Failing that, Captain Harlock will find you all the PDFs you will need to play the game and if none somehow exist then someone will have rewritten the manual sufficiently to get buy until either someone else finishes that job or you can get a rulebook.

Yes, COC will fulfill all your Horror needs. Survival? Sorted. Slasher? Sorted. Supernatural? Sorted. Weird? Super-sorted. The rules for Lovecraftian adventure mysteries are surprising in the flexibility of their application without altering a thing.

Are there other options? Sure. Will they be anywhere near as easy to get up and running as COC? No. Furthermore, some experience with COC will make Runequest, Elric!/Stormbringer, and Pendragon easier sells due to familiar systems and mechanics.

And you get the best benefits of having a game based on an outside property: a body of settled material to draw from whose canon is closed and no longer developed.

You can even have H.P.'s cat as an NPC and no one will care.

And you can be cheeky and do weird crossovers, in honor of the shared stuff H.P. and Howard swapped between them. (Seriously, go read Worms of the Earth and Kings of the Night.)

You thought D&D was easy to keep the corpos out? This is as easy as breathing. Use any edition's rulebook from v5.5 or earlier and GO! Everything else can be had online, and the dice you use for D&D are used here.