Call of Cthulhu must burn! China orders printers to incinerate RPG game.

You have to give it to indie RPG publisher, Sons of the Singularity, they sure know how to come up with new difficulties when successfully crowd-sourcing a new Call of Cthulhu scenario.

In SoS’s case, they – along with half the rest of the Western publishing industry – sent their RPG out to China to be printed and returned in a container ship.

Nothing unusual, there. Almost every print book in Waterstones and many monthly magazines in WH Smith are off-shored to the oh-so-reasonably priced reaches of China.

Unfortunately for Sons of the Singularity, this particular Call of Cthulhu scenario was called The Sassoon Files.

Here’s it’s blurb …

Intrigue and Horror in the Pearl of the Orient! The Sassoon Files will be a set of scenarios and campaign resources for Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition and GUMSHOE role-playing games (RPGs) set in historical 1920s Shanghai; an international city of intrigue, espionage, style and violence.

Oh dear. Referencing pre-Communist China in a 1930s horror game? Nope. The Chinese censors ordered the entire blinking print-run burnt at the stake (well, at the rear of the factory) before it could be exported back to the West.

Here’s what SoS had to say, “We have suffered an unfortunate and unexpected setback with the off-set print run. On March 20th 2019, the Chinese government ordered the destruction of our books. Although the printer returned our deposit, we need to find another printer and this will result in a delay in fulfilment. We are committed to completing the print run and fulfilment.”

I hope the same thing doesn’t happen to my next book, ‘Why China is Totalitarian, and why Totalitarian societies always implode in the end.’

What could possibly go wrong?