Horror: it’s venturing into the darkness, alone

It’s been an interesting few weeks for Cthulhu Reborn. In the wake of our recent call for readers to give us their thoughts on the future direction of our (humble) publishing efforts, we have been inundated with insightful and useful comments. We have also had some lengthy conversations with Chaosium, to better understand their new policies and practices around commercial licensees for Call of Cthulhu.  Because a few people have asked us what, if anything, we’ve decided  based on all this information I feel it’s only fair to explain a bit about the path we’ve chosen and some of the reasoning behind it.

The short version is: although Cthulhu Reborn has been offered a commercial license by Chaosium to produce Call of Cthulhu products, we have decided NOT to take up that offer and instead to continue producing independent Lovecraft-related (and d100-related) games and supplements.

“Padlock in Despair” by jpnavarro@DeviantArt

The reasons behind this decision are complicated, and in some ways unique to the particular (community-oriented) focus we have always intended for Cthulhu Reborn. Our core values of openness, sharing, and not-for-profit publication are not especially compatible with Chaosium’s new licensing arrangement. In particular, Chaosium’s position on Intellectual Property and their practices of centrally “orchestrating” the types of products/settings which licensees are allowed to produce, don’t mesh well with those values. For us, signing up to a commercial Chaosium license (or even their “small publisher” license) would mean a move away from our independence and community focus … and we firmly believe those two things are what have allowed us to create cool and interesting products. As such we’d rather stay “outsiders” and retain the freedom to make the things our readers love.

“St Scarecrow” by Mattbarley@DeviantArt

Obviously, this decision will have some impacts on the way in which we produce Lovecraftian gaming materials. We will be posting more in the coming weeks about specific plans (including the future direction of Convicts & Cthulhu, which we are keen to continue and grow). But, essentially our strategy moving forward will be to divide our efforts into creating two types of product:

1. Smaller, free PDF titles which can be published under Chaosium’s “fan material policy”. These smaller PDFs can include game statistics for Call of Cthulhu, 7th Edition but realistically most won’t be much larger than our free Ticket of Leave PDFs.
2. Larger print titles and PDF books which provide resources for Lovecraftian RPGs but don’t include explicit Call of Cthulhu content — these may be either generic (systemless) books, or make use of openly licensed Lovecraftian RPG systems (e.g., Cthulhu Dark, or the d100-compatible Renaissance system from the wonderful Cakebread & Walton).

Wherever it is feasible for us to link products of these two different types together we will do so, since we believe that each can enhance and support the other.

We realise that changes to the way we publish Lovecraftian material might not be to every Cthulhu Reborn reader’s tastes … and we apologise in advance to anyone who feels that our chosen direction has made our future titles less relevant to their game, or harder to use. Overall, we think that this will be a positive move for Cthulhu Reborn since it will open up a lot of opportunities to pursue interesting and quirky Mythos ideas that have been rattling around in our heads for a long time but never had an avenue to escape into the world.

“Strangers” by Aticum@DeviantArt

Finally, we would like to offer sincere thanks to Chaosium who have been very generous in spending time explaining their licensing arrangements to us. Despite not ultimately signing up to their commercial offer, Cthulhu Reborn certainly appreciate their generosity and professionalism. We remain huge fans of Chaosium as a company, and fans of the Call of Cthulhu game. We strongly encourage Cthulhu Reborn readers to continue to support Chaosium by purchasing their fine products wherever they can. We hope that you’ll also continue to support us by picking up some of our free (and eventually commercial) future products as well.

Watch the Skies! Watch the Seas! Great Cthulhu is rising!

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