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Miskatonic Repository Catalogue - final update, 31 December 2022


Nick Brooke

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The Miskatonic Repository Catalogue is an Excel 365 spreadsheet listing almost a thousand titles available from Chaosium’s community content web store for Call of Cthulhu. Based on the information authors make available on DriveThruRPG product pages, it summarises the setting and time periods for each scenario, analyses price per page, links to two review sites and identifies best-sellers and titles that are available in print or foreign-language versions.

Please note: there is no “added value” beyond what you could get by reading 970 product descriptions for yourself, hunting for online reviews and then deciding what to buy. If you have ever been frustrated searching nearly five years’ output on DriveThruRPG, and wished that there was an easier way to find scenarios your group can use, this comprehensive catalogue might be just what you need.

Yours for just $1.00. Final update to 31-Dec-2022. This product will no longer be updated.

Miskatonic Image.png

Edited by Nick Brooke
Final update to 31-Dec-2022
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You've been a busy boy!

I am sure that this will be useful for Call of Cthulhu fans.

We have had something similar for Jonstown Compendium for a while and it has proven really useful for both authors and Customers, as it shows ratings and other information that is not always that easily accessible.

Nick - You probably need a little helper to do the work of going through all the titles and extracting information to update, as doing this for hundreds of titles might be a lot of work.

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Simon Phipp - Caldmore Chameleon - Wallowing in my elitism since 1982. Many Systems, One Family. Just a fanboy. 

www.soltakss.com/index.html

Jonstown Compendium author. Find my contributions here

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3 hours ago, soltakss said:

You've been a busy boy!

I am sure that this will be useful for Call of Cthulhu fans.

We have had something similar for Jonstown Compendium for a while and it has proven really useful for both authors and Customers, as it shows ratings and other information that is not always that easily accessible.

Nick - You probably need a little helper to do the work of going through all the titles and extracting information to update, as doing this for hundreds of titles might be a lot of work.

I wouldn't want anyone to get the wrong impression: this Catalogue has been designed to take far less effort to maintain than my index to the Jonstown Compendium. It's just a big fat spreadsheet with filters and hyperlinks, listing and analysing over 340 titles, and (as it says in the accompanying notes) the ratings info "is a snapshot that was taken when the catalogue was put together, and may never be updated."

I am waiting on tenterhooks to see if anyone who's bought my Catalogue likes it enough to give it a good rating or favourable review. That's how I can judge whether a significant number of people will want updates. (It's early days, yet)

If your Miskatonic Repository title gets a shiny new medal and you'd like me to update the Catalogue, please email me. I probably won't notice if you don't.

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Thanks, Mike! Check out columns J (Setting) and K (Time) of the spreadsheet.

I agree it'd be nice to tie this more closely to published CoC7e setting books - at one point I thought of listing a scenario's setting as "Invictus" rather than "Roman Italia / Ancient," but that one turned out to be a one-off (NB: there are also scenarios in New Kingdom Egypt and Armenia).

Off the top of your head, do you know if many Miskatonic Repository scenarios or play aids are written specifically for Pulp Cthulhu? (There's the Pulp Cthulhu Damage Insert -- oh, what a giveaway! -- but is there anything else?). I'm entirely dependent on what authors write in their (English-language) product descriptions... and it didn't seem to come up that much. Half a dozen scenarios are set in the 1930s (quick filter on Time), but that isn't a reliable shibboleth for Pulp vs. Classic Cthulhu.

 

  

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1 hour ago, Nick Brooke said:

It's just a big fat spreadsheet with filters and hyperlinks, listing and analysing over 340 titles, and (as it says in the accompanying notes) the ratings info "is a snapshot that was taken when the catalogue was put together, and may never be updated."

I have just downloaded it, even though I don't play Call of Cthulhu or buy CoC supplements.

Is there any reason why it is 60Mb in size? It doesn't look as though it has any hidden sheets, as far as I can tell, or any complex macros, again as far as I can tell. 

By the way, I am not knocking the size, just curious.

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Simon Phipp - Caldmore Chameleon - Wallowing in my elitism since 1982. Many Systems, One Family. Just a fanboy. 

www.soltakss.com/index.html

Jonstown Compendium author. Find my contributions here

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Here's the Pulp Cthulhu content I found on the Miskatonic Repository with some amateur Googlework:

  • The Big-Game Hunt (Pulp X Gaslight)
  • Magnis Lepta
  • Isle of Madness
  • CoC 7e & Pulp NPC Sheets
  • Pulp Cthulhu Damage Insert

Simon, it may be bloated by all the hyperlinks, I'm honestly not sure. Or possibly it's the Korean and Japanese fonts: who knows how that stuff works? There are definitely no hidden sheets or complex macros: what you see is what you get.

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Aha! For non-Euclidean and blasphemous reasons, the spreadsheet had decided it needed to include more than One Million Rows, which is plainly ridiculous. I'm uploading a new, much slimmer version now.

@Mike M, there's a new "Pulp?" column M you can filter on to find your Pulp! content.

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So, what can you do with the Miskatonic Repository Catalogue?

Well, just by playing with filters you can quickly identify all the best-selling titles on the store: 116 titles have sold more than 50 copies (filter column H for Copper medals or above), of which 80 are available in English (column B: English language); 45 of those have sold more than 100 copies (column H again: Silver or above). If you want to find stuff lots of readers have enjoyed, that's an easy way to do it: the regularly-updated "Hottest" list on DriveThruRPG is biased towards recent and higher-priced releases (I'm told "Hotness" equals total sales revenue divided by days on sale), but the spreadsheet puts older and cheaper titles back into consideration.

You can find scenarios set in the right era for your game. If you're running a Cthulhu Dark Ages campaign, it's useful to know that three scenarios could fit the bill (filter for Dark Ages and Viking Era on column K, Time). Or use geography as well -- there are a dozen English-language (column B ) scenarios (column O) set in 1920s or non-specific (column K) Arkham, Bangor, Boston, Lovecraft Country, Massachusetts, Miskatonic U and New England (column J).

Or if you're looking for content in your own language, filter on column B to find what's out there: the Repository holds 84 Korean, 34 Polish, 6 Italian 4 Spanish, 4 French, 3 Japanese and one Turkish title, as well as 209 written in English.

Just a few ideas to get you started...

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First review, from Gus:

 

Quote

 

A useful tool to speed-up checks on the kind of products offered in the repository, much better than the website's search, IMO. The setting and time information of scenarios is the most useful for me, but other interesting data are offered too. Hope it gets enough support to be updated in the future.  

 

 

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Another review, from Simon P:

Quote

 This is a very useful tool, well presented and full of information. Nick did something similar as a PDF for the Jonstown Compendium, but I think that the Excel Spreadsheet works better. as this is a spreadsheet, it is easy to filter by various categories, so you can see what free Miskatonic Repository items there are, what are the best sellers, which are for the era you are playing, which had the most 5-star reviews in and much more.

If Nick manages to keep it updated then it would be an excellent resource for new supplements.

I wasn't keen on the colour coding for Price per Page, but it had the values as well, so I could use those.

It only costs a dollar, so if you like Call of Cthulhu and want to support fan supplements, why wouldn't you buy this?

New version uploaded: I've added hyperlinks to all the reviews of Miskatonic Repository products on the Reviews from R'lyeh and Rolling Boxcars websites. 

Edited by Nick Brooke
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  • 1 month later...

The Miskatonic Repository Catalogue has been updated to include all the most recent releases, and now includes more than 370 titles. If you bought it earlier, the new version is in your DriveThruRPG Library, or else log in and visit the product page for a direct download: LINK.

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  • 3 weeks later...

The Miskatonic Repository Catalogue has been updated to include all the most recent releases, and now includes 385 titles. If you bought it earlier, the new version is in your DriveThruRPG Library, or else log in and visit the product page for a direct download: LINK.

I shared this pivot table analysis just now on Facebook: leaving aside stuff which is undefined (or Korean, therefore opaque to me), the Miskatonic Repository now has more than a hundred scenarios set in the classic 1920s era (with a dozen or so more in specific years of that decade), 39 Modern (plus some distinctively 1970s / 80s / 90s / 00s experiences), 6 Gaslight (plus a handful in specific years of the 19th century), 4 from the Edo Period and 3 from the Sengoku Period, 4 in the Near Future (plus one from the distant 24th Century), 4 Viking Era (plus one Dark Ages), 3 Ancient (Egypt, Italia, Armenia), and a smattering from the Old West. Plus lots of oddities and one-offs.

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  • Nick Brooke changed the title to Miskatonic Repository Catalogue - updated 31 January 2021

The Miskatonic Repository Catalogue has been updated to include all the most recent releases, and now includes 409 titles. If you bought it earlier, the new version is in your DriveThruRPG Library, or else log in and visit the product page for a direct download: LINK.

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  • Nick Brooke changed the title to Miskatonic Repository Catalogue - updated 2 March 2021

Another month, another update: the Miskatonic Repository Catalogue now includes 418 titles. 

Edited by Nick Brooke
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Another review, from Aaron S:

Quote

I've been very impressed by the reliability of the updates. It adds that much more utility!

With the GM’s Day Sale at DriveThruRPG running for the whole of next week, what better time to pick up the Catalogue (usually a dollar, currently 10% off) and find some cosmic horror bargains among the Call of Cthulhu community content?

tiny.cc/miskatonicrepository

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  • 3 weeks later...

I honestly don't mind - I advertise whenever it's going cheap, and I could opt out of participating in site-wide sales if I wanted to.

Thank you for your feedback!

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  • Nick Brooke changed the title to Miskatonic Repository Catalogue - updated 9 April 2021

Hey, you're welcome. Please consider leaving a rating or even a short comment/review on DriveThruRPG if you find my Catalogue useful -- doing that helps reassure potential customers it's actually worth buying, and motivates me to keep the updates coming. 

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  • Nick Brooke changed the title to Miskatonic Repository Catalogue - updated 26 April 2021

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