Sandy Petersen’s Call of Cthulhu is one of my longtime favorite RPGs. I started running it back in 1992, with Faith No More’s Angel Dust as the soundtrack. I have since accumulated a gigantic pile of sourcebooks. All of them, barring some minuscule variations and reprints, in fact. My love
for the game runs that deep.

This is the 1982 printing of the first edition rules (the only difference from the 1981 printing being a skinnier box and some rules errata in the back cover). For the price of admission, you get of the Cthulhu-fronted rulebook, the blimpy 1920s Sourcebook, some standees, a world map decorated with tentacles and a booklet of character sheets. There’s also a copy of
Chaosium’s newbie-aimed booklet Basic Roleplaying.  

Early Chaosium products didn’t have the multitudes of art that TSR publications of the era had, but Gene Day delivers some classics, including the box art, all pictured here. Also, I dig the brown ink they used to print the text and illustrations – very warm and welcoming, considering this
is a game about cosmic horrors beyond human comprehension.