On the 13th of November, Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu celebrated its 30th birthday. 30 years of sanity reducing adventures in a world based on the stories of HP Lovecraft.

It all started with this box right here, Call of Cthulhu’s 1st edition Boxed Set

The above is my copy which is still in its original shrinkwrap.

For its 30th anniversary, Chaosium decided to release a limited edition version of the current ruleset. Below some pictures of the book. Seeing some numbers on the forums, I would estimate about 3000 copies were printed of this book.

 

Basically the book looks exactly the same as the 20th anniversary edition. The only differences are the cover, the paper thickness, and a greyscale print instead of the sepiastyle print of the 20th anniversary edition.

Now we’ll take a look at the French version.

This is just an incredibly beautiful book and you might think : “Well, the French went all-out for this limited edition”. Wrong. This is the regular version of the book. I repeat. This is not a limited edition. This is what new Call of Cthulhu players and dungeon masters get in their hands in France. Even the English speaking Call of Cthulhu community is going wild over this book, even to the point where they’d prefer to buy this book instead of a new rules incarnation of Chaosium.

I really hope Chaosium draws a valuable lesson from this. Books can be made attractive and they will sell. The Call of Cthulhu community have always envied the German books, now they can envy the French edition as well and soon a gorgeous Spanish edition will be added to that list.

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