Here's the good news. There's no need to assume the worst, or that this is a missed opportunity. Part of the magic of doing reprints is that we are not bound by the laws of space and time (or any other constraints) to make these exactly as the originals. I don't know how much you have read about the Kickstarter in the details. One thing I have said a few times is that these are remastered and have BONUS content. The best example of how we have done this with a previous set of classic material is for the RuneQuest Classics, where we sprinkled into many of the books extras like magazine articles, background material, and similar. We're doing the same with the Call of Cthulhu Classics. It just so happened that we did a thorough comparison of the first and second editions (basically the rulebook and the 1920s sourcebook). We ended up taking what was cut from the first edition (a modest number of pages) and we are adding that info back into these remastered versions.
TLDR: That Previous Experience material from the first edition Sourcebook for the 1920s is some of the bonus material in the Classics version. This isn't an either/or situation. We have the option of doing both.
Lastly, who says we will never do a PDF and print on demand version of the first edition rulebook? We did that with the RQ Classics...
Unfortunately the previous experience rules are not totally compatible with the 2e rules. They reference skill categories that are not listed anywhere (were probably dropped for 2e) and based on the example on pg. 16 the default levels for skills were different in some cases. Tried to create some chracters using the method yesterday and ran into these issues. Any chance of getting clarifications for a 40 year old product? 😄
Launching this Friday, July 2: The Call of Cthulhu Classic Kickstarter
in Call of Cthulhu
Posted · Edited by Wyrmfelt
Typo fix
Unfortunately the previous experience rules are not totally compatible with the 2e rules. They reference skill categories that are not listed anywhere (were probably dropped for 2e) and based on the example on pg. 16 the default levels for skills were different in some cases. Tried to create some chracters using the method yesterday and ran into these issues. Any chance of getting clarifications for a 40 year old product? 😄