In late October 2018, with Halloween looming like a crouched beast, we concluded the year’s “October Horrors” sequence with the Bundle of Tentacles 5, our fifth annual (well, mostly) collection of scenarios for Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu RPG inspired by H. P. Lovecraft‘s Cthulhu Mythos. This all-new offer featured big collections from Stygian Fox Publishing and Arc Dream Publishing, plus the Black Armada story game Lovecraftesque.

There were four titles in our Starter Collection (retail value $50) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks: the Stygian Fox modern-day scenario collection The Things We Leave Behind (plus its 104-page collection of play aids, The Mark of Evil) and its modern magic supplement The Book of Contemporary Magical Things; Arc Dream’s Old Ones Rising (reprinting four issues of the seminal Mythos magazine The Unspeakable Oath); and for fun we threw in the free Dicegeeks reprint of the 1894 Cambridge University lecture on Libraries in the Medieval and Renaissance Periods, a fact-filled resource for Keepers and gamemasters who prize authentic historical detail. (You can also download this free ebook from Project Gutenberg.)

Those who paid more than the threshold (average) price also got our entire Bonus Collection with three more titles worth an additional $48:

• Lovecraftesque (Black Armada): No gamemaster needed for this no-prep storytelling game where the players generate all-new horrors in a slow-building suspense tale.
• Fear’s Sharp Little Needles (Stygian Fox): A star-studded collection of 26 short scenarios for one-shot investigations and convention games.
• Hudson & Brand, Inquiry Agents of the Obscure (Stygian Fox): Your Cthulhu by Gaslight player characters inherit this Victorian-era consulting detective agency. Includes the free play aids A Lens of Darkness, Spirits of London, and The Thirteen.

Ten percent of each payment (after gateway fees) went to a highly Mythos-appropriate charity, American Veterans Archaeological Recovery, a nonprofit that rehabilitates disabled military veterans through goal-oriented, team-centered excavations with a community of archaeological researchers. AVAR CEO Steven Humphreys says, “We don’t find many cursed artifacts (some…), but doing this stuff gets about as close as most of us really want to be to the type of adventures we create in roleplaying games.”