Hi All,

I have made a special thread as making a quality CoC section will require a fair amount of discussion. I have listed every product I am aware of in a new gallery layout. As you can see we only have 17 products listed out of over 200 hundred (and I suspect there are many more).

I will eventually put them in the Auction Tracker, once the items and editions are fully clarified.

I only have a few Cthulhu items and am not an expert. So as I mentioned in the main thread, it would be great if anyone could jump in and start preparing item pages. Alternatively, send me your scans and item descriptions and I can do it ([email protected]). Just a reminder, scans must be your own and cannot be just taken from the web.

So initial questions:

http://wiki.acaeum.com/wiki/Gallery:Call_of_Cthulhu

Is my list pretty much complete? Or is there a lot missing?

Is there any point having the first gallery of CoC editions? Is there much variation between covers? Which of the items listed should be included in the gallery?

Is the breakdown for Chaosium supplements by decade sensible?

Any other suggestions on the initial format?

Someone mentioned foreign editions. I would normally put these on the same page as the original item. See, for example, http://wiki.acaeum.com/wiki/Dreamlands . If there is a French edition, I would simply put a box below for the French edition on the same page.

For French items, it would be interesting especially for specific French items (i.e. products that were not a translation of English items). There is a few of these. I will make a list and email it to you. I will provide scans.
I guess that German CoC has a lot of German exclusive titles as well. IIRC, Italian and Spanish products too.

For all the products that are only a translation, I am not sure it is necessary to add them on the wiki. Don't you think?

I am with Ralph on the idea to split items by year and titles for each manufacturer.


I just looked quickly to the list, and I am wondering if "goodies" have to be included. For example, I bought from Mars the Character Creation software program released by Hero Games. For a CoC collector, it is (I think) an interesting item that has to be listed. But, in the case, where is the "limit"?

xRalphx wrote:For the Core rules gallery, perhaps organize it per edition. Then it would be similar as the supplements. From example there's quite a few releases of Dreamlands. I guess they will all be put under the same entry. In that way for example there could be a Cthulhu 1st edition entry, which then houses both prints and even the Designer Edition as far as I'm concerned.

That seems sensible. I'll start by adding version sub-headings to the core rules page.

xRalphx wrote:I saw that you included a number of monographs. If these are to be included you're missing a number of items. Also there's a number of publishers which weren't mentioned. Goodman Games has a few Cthulhu modules, Miskatonic River Press has a couple of releases as well.

Yes. I was quite sure I would miss some items, so let me know what I have missed. Or feel free to add them. Thanks for jumping in - email me any time with questions on editing.

TheHistorian wrote:I'll go through this and send you some notes about editions and printings.  I can provide notes on just about everything, but my scanner is nearly worthless.  Do pics work?

Great. Thanks. Yes. Pics work. It is possible to edit just about any picture file into a decent 200k jpg file using IrfanView

TheHistorian wrote:One area that I skip completely is anything in the Cute-thulhu mindset.  It really has no relation to the core game.

I agree! (and I'll scrap Pokethulhu!)

TheHistorian wrote:Foreign editions?  Maybe.  Do other spots in the wiki bother with that?

Yes. As I mentioned above, there's no limit really to what we can post. But I agree it is not a priority and we can leave out the translated items for now.

TheHistorian wrote:Sorting by decade will be a little challenging.  For one example, there are six versions of Dreamlands, scattered over every decade the game has been published.  How would that work?  Would there be a link from each decade to the same Dreamlands page?

MediaWiki is a very flexible format and we can make many cross-references. We would put all versions of Dreamlands on the 'Dreamlands' page. Each of the galleries could have the appropriate version based on the date it was released and all would link back to the same Dreamlands page.

TheHistorian wrote:And we could get into variations.  How about the period where there were POD reissues of some books?  I don't believe there is a complete list out there of these.  They're an inferior product, based on print quality, but is it useful to note them anyway?

I agree we should try and get important items on first and discuss the merit of posting more obscure items later. The ultimate goal of the wiki is to get descriptions of items that don't just copy the text on the back and to add some of the useful collector's notes that have accumulated on the Acaeum forums over the years!!!

TheHistorian wrote:I think my point is that there is a TON of stuff for a game that has been around continually for 30 years.  We may want to try to define the scope before diving in.

Let me know what you think of the initial galleries. Should we include all of those items? Is it a good starting point?

Me personally, I'd add the fiction. Pagan also releases fiction in ltd editions so that would interesting I think.

lokiwookie wrote:I think we should add related items. Why? Because Yog-Sothoth already has a database and the Acaeum Wiki should bring something that we cannot find in another place. Most of CoC fans/collectors are HPL fans as well and collect a lot of Cthulhu/HPL related items. This will be very interesting to find a website where to find all that. For instance, the HPL tarot, Chaos in Campus (a Lovecraftian tales game), The Occult Lovecraft, etc.

The Y-S database is outdated, incomplete, and at times inaccurate.  So just fixing that up will be an improvement.

I don't have a problem expanding into the related items, but that's a huge expansion.  I hope you have all that stuff, because I sure don't.  I draw the line at CoC.

TheHistorian wrote:
The Y-S database is outdated, incomplete, and at times inaccurate.  So just fixing that up will be an improvement..

I'm curious. Which bits are inaccurate?

To be honest I suspect the RPGGeek DB has outstripped a lot of things at the moment, including the RPG.net index.

We're evaluating the YSDC DB at the moment. I suspect It will all end up Wikified!

PaulofCthulhu wrote:
To be honest I suspect the RPGGeek DB has outstripped a lot of things at the moment, including the RPG.net index.

We're evaluating the YSDC DB at the moment. I suspect It will all end up Wikified!

Yes RPGGeek is interesting. I recall when they launched the guy starting it came here and asked up all to join. The response here was pretty sour as many of us have been working on RPG info sites for a long time. It was essentially a much larger commercial site coming to us an saying "Hey, why don't you join us and give us all your hard work for free."

But I see they got 4,000 new members last year! Our Wiki has about 50 members. About 30 of those have contributed and only about a dozen are regulars.

Anyway, I guess for those of us that maintain the smaller sites, it is an extension of our hobby. The Acaeum has long been my favourite place to hang out, and working on the Wiki is relaxing and fun.