# Pulp Cthulhu tags: #game/rpg/pulp-cthulhu ![[Pulp Cthulhu (cover).jpg|600]] **Pulp Cthulhu** is the official dial that lets **[[Call of Cthulhu]]** run in two-fisted, action-hero register: "two-fisted action and adventure against the Mythos." Where the parent game sells creeping dread and fragile investigators, this supplement hands you the other half of the 1930s — the heroes who punch cultists, outfly the thing from the void, and tell the universe exactly where it can stick its existential dread. It's the same Mythos, pointed firmly away from the horror movie and toward the Saturday-matinee serial. ## Setting **Pulp Cthulhu** doesn't build a new world — it re-tunes the one **Call of Cthulhu** already lives in, tilting the fiction from Lovecraft's creeping doom toward the pulps that ran alongside it: *Weird Tales*, the two-fisted adventure magazines, the heroics that treated the Mythos as a problem to be solved with a fedora, a revolver, and sheer nerve. Investigators become **pulp heroes** — bigger-than-life types with names like "the Adventurer" and "the Two-Fisted Scientist" — who still run into the same Great Old Ones, cults, and cosmic indifference, but shrug it off a little longer and punch back a lot harder. The underlying world is unchanged; the attitude is the whole point. ## Mechanics **Pulp Cthulhu** layers a hero system onto the **Call of Cthulhu** 7th edition core rather than replacing it. - **Pulp Archetypes** — character classes in all but name: the Adventurer, the Criminal, the Dilettante, the Egghead, the Explorer, the Hard-Boiled, the Hunter, the Mystic, the Professor, the Pugilist, the Two-Fisted Scientist, the Veteran, and so on. Each archetype carries its own package of pulp skills and aptitudes, so character creation gets a recognizable hero's build on top of the usual occupation and skill points. - **Pulp Talents** — the marquee addition. Heroes get a pool of special abilities — extra attacks, insane dodges, bursts of action — bought and spent as discrete talents, which is what lets a pulp hero take on things that would flatten a normal investigator. - **A tougher hero** — pulp investigators are sturdier and more forgiving than standard ones, with more room before the Mythos breaks them. - **The Pulp / Purist dial** — the famous tonal lever. The book lets a Keeper slide the game between **Pulp** (heroic, survivable, cinematic) and **Purist** (normal **Call of Cthulhu** grimness), explicitly framing the two as a dial rather than a hard mode — the same idea **[[Trail of Cthulhu]]** runs through its own Purist-vs-Pulp axis. The point isn't to make the Mythos less scary; it's to make dying to it feel like a choice instead of a foregone conclusion. ## Editions - **1st Edition (2016)** — the original pulp supplement, written by **Mike Mason** with Bligh, Lowder, Tidball, White, Fricker, Baur, Sanderson, and Kramer (and Scott Dorward), for **Call of Cthulhu** 7th edition. *In the library.* - **2nd Edition (2020)** — the revised printing carried by the current Chaosium PDF. The 7th-edition pulp rules remain the line's canonical two-fisted treatment. ## References - [Pulp Cthulhu — Chaosium](https://www.chaosium.com/pulp-cthulhu/) - [Pulp Cthulhu — DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/206186/Pulp-Cthulhu)