Miskatonic Repository Review – Electrum Best Sellers

Are you a Keeper looking for new scenarios and story elements? A player looking for something mysterious to spark a character idea? Is your group looking for eerie ideas to use in your game? The Miskatonic Repository is where you can find —and create —self-published material for the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game. 

-Chaosium

The Miskatonic Repository provides a trove of resources, scenarios, and, most importantly, a thriving creative community, for Call of Cthulhu enthusiasts. Since its launch in 2018, this partnership with DriveThruRPG allows independent creators to self-publish their materials for the classic investigative TTRPG. By 2024, the Miskatonic Repository hit a milestone of 150,000 titles sold. Thanks to information provided by Community Ambassador Nick Brooke about the English-language best-sellers, we are looking at the Miskatonic Repository’s current Electrum, Gold, Platinum, and Mithral scenarios in a series of posts. There are currently over 1,400 Call of Cthulhu community content titles (969 English-language) for sale on DriveThruRPG through the Miskatonic Repository. 

Nearly ten percent of these English-language titles are Electrum Best Sellers with 96 total at the time of this post. To qualify for Electrum Best Seller status a title must sell between 251 and 500 copies. Of these Electrum Sellers, 71 titles are scenarios with the remainder being supplements, map packs, and handouts (We will return to a broader discussion of non-scenario Miskatonic Repository content at a later date)

At the bottom of this article, you will find an alphabetical list of the Electrum scenarios and their authors with links to DriveThruRPG. Let’s take a look at some of the key statistics. 

These scenarios have spent an average of 1161 days on the Miskatonic Repository with a median of 1062 days. The current shortest dwell time is 334 days for The Art of Hygge, while the longest-tenured scenario is Isle of Madness, released in December 2017. 

Like Gold, most scenarios (45) are written by an author with a single Electrum-selling title, but Electrum contains some familiar names. The most represented Electum-selling author is Allan Carey with his successful Seeds of Terror series. Alex Guillotte and Ian Christensen appear three times on the list with their Grindhouse collaborations. TA Newman has three Electrum-selling titles, including his holiday-themed Secret Santa and Be My Valentine. Polish powerhouse Zgrozy offers three English-bestselling titles by Marek Golonka with a fourth, The Vernissage, by Michał Gralak. Six authors have notched two Electrum-sellers, including a pair of early scenarios by Heinrich Moore, as well as works by William Adock, Danial Carroll, Braydon Fiveash, Jade Griffin, and Matt Puccio. Overall, nearly 37% of Electrum titles were produced by an author who appears more than once on the Electrum-selling list. 

The average number of pages is 35 with a median page number of 32. The shortest Electrum-selling scenario (by page count) is The Kirkwood Farmhouse Massacre with ten pages, and fifteen additional scenarios range from 11 to 19 pages. A single pamphlet scenario, The Cabin in the Woods by Fabio Silvo, is also on the list.  Unlike the Gold sellers, none of the current Electrum scenarios break the 100-page mark, but 14 scenarios contain over 50 pages of content. The lengthiest scenario is TA Newman’s Be My Valentine with 88 pages with cost per page running 5 cents. 

The average cost per page of the Electrum-sellers is 13 cents with a median of 11 cents. Both of these values are just two cents higher compared to the Gold-sellers. Philip G. Orth’s 57-page Crepid Fornication is a steal for under a dollar and just 2 cents per page. It’s set in 1928 Hamburg, Germany, and worth checking out if you’re basing a campaign out of Berlin. 

As for setting breakdown, there are 36 Classic era scenarios—just slightly more than half.  There are 11 Modern scenarios. Thanks to the Grindhouse and Fiveash’s Heartless in Loveland, 70s & 80s scenarios rank third with four entries. The number of Pulp entries increases relative to Gold, but still remains a marked minority with three total, including the Pulp Gaslight scenario, The Big-Game Hunt. There are also three non-pulp 1930s scenarios (Bad Tidings, The Castle of Greed, and The Antediluvians). There are two entries for Cthulhu Invictus (A Balance of Blood, Ravishing Beauty), Down Darker Trails (A Murder at Heck’s Peak, Yig’s Teeth), Dark Ages (The Raid, A Colour in a Dark Age) and the 90s (Unremembered, The Art of Hygge). The space setting has two entries in the near (Moonglow) and farther future (The Titan Incident). There are single entries for Atomic Age (The Oxford Articles), the American Colonial-era (We Are All Savages), and World War II (A Light in the Darkness). Excluding The Big-Game Hunt, there is a single Gaslight entry, Tears of a Clown.

There are two scenarios set at Miskatonic University. The first is a 1920s solitary investigator module from Jon Hook, Spark of Life. The second is Safe Spaces by Rina Haenze set in the modern era. The Room with No Doors by M.T. Black is an Arkham-specific scenario. Dream House by Evan Perlman is inspired by the Sandy Petersen classic The Haunting. Cat’s Cradle by Ruined Relic Games is billed as a standalone sequel to The Haunting.

As mentioned previously, TA Newman brings two holiday-specific scenarios. Brendan Lahey’s The Sins of the Father is a Modern Christmas scenario with layout by Alex Guillotte. 

Many of these scenarios have appeared on actual play podcasts or streams, such as Michael Diamond’s Time of the Serpent, which opened The Old Ways’ Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign. Miskatonic Playhouse is a great place to find Miskatonic Repository content, including actual plays of The Antediluvians, The Prisoner’s Dilemma, and Secret Santa. You can find actual plays featuring scenarios by Braydon Fiveash and Phaedra Florou on The Stars Are Right podcast. I encourage authors, podcasters, and streamers to please drop links to additional actual plays of their favorite Elecrum-selling scenarios in the comments.