YSDC Wiki Reborn: An Essential TTRPG Resource Rescued
We are THRILLED to announce today the rescue and re-hosting of the extensive Lovecraftian TTRPG reference wiki formerly hosted at Yog-Sothoth dot com (YSDC). This vast repository, built up by hundreds of users over several decades, was thought lost when the operators of YSDC made the hard decision to close the site in early 2026.
The newly hosted URL for the wiki is: yogwiki.cthulhueternal.com
The resurrection of the YSDC Wiki from its Essential Saltes has been a huge joint effort between a consortium of small-press Lovecraftian TTRPG publishers: us, Sentinel Hill Press, and Shoggoth dot net. Some of the folks who ran technical support for YSDC — in particular the ever-amazing Tyler Hudak — were also instrumental in making the rescue of this important reference and historical archive a possibility.
For now, the re-hosted Wiki is a read-only reference resource, however we will be working hard to open it up to ongoing community contributions later in the year.
Some Historical Context
If you are a long-time player of Lovecraftian TTRPGs, you will probably already know a lot of the story of YSDC and how its community helped spawn a whole generation of games, actual play recordings, and small-press publishers. For everyone else, here’s a capsule summary.
Founded in 1998, YSDC was created in an era where online discussion was primarily email mailing lists and simple discussion forums. It was an era before social media, and even before most companies had their own websites. The creation of a free community for the discussion of Lovecraftian games — in particular the popular Call of Cthulhu TTRPG — was a welcome development for a great many gamers. The forums gave players and GMs their first opportunity to interact directly with the writers of many of the scenarios and campaigns they had been reading for years.
The late 1990s was an era when the TTRPG industry as a whole was in a major slump — a few years earlier, collectible card games had rocketed to the gaming public’s attention and taken over the majority of gamers’ spending. Companies like Chaosium were trying to adapt to this challenge (mostly by launching their own collectible card games, many of which ended up losing money), but the financial situation was bleak. During this time YSDC played a crucial role at keeping Lovecraftian TTRPGing alive, fostering a large and active community of folks who were sharing tips and advice on how to run games, even at times when the output of new material dried to a trickle. Some might say that this lifeline is a major part of how Chaosium survived through those lean times.
One of the great benefits of old-school Internet forums is that they promote longer and more thoughtful debate (quite different to the transactional sound-bite formats of modern social media). YSDC in particular hosted a considerable amount of erudite discussion, some of which shaped future products and even entire game-lines. Early in the life of the forum consideration was given to taking the fruits of this collective discussion and preserving it for future reference — one mechanism for that was via the YSDC wiki. From small beginnings, it grew into a vast and sprawling reference encyclopedia, mostly cataloguing the details of games, campaigns, and scenarios that have been published across the four decades that Lovecraftian TTRPGs have existed.
While initially supportive of YSDC and its community, relations were not always smooth between the site and Chaosium (especially in the era prior to the creation of many well-supported alternatives to Call of Cthulhu). Things became especially problematic after the original Chaosium was declared functionally bankrupt in 2015 and its name and assets were bought out by a group of RuneQuest enthusiasts who had some very different ideas about how online discussions should be ‘managed’.
At the same time, changing patterns of Internet usage — in particular the rise to prevalence of short-form social media — meant that traffic to sites like YSDC radically declined over time. This, coupled with a vastly growth in the volume of security and spam-filtering challenges led to the site going private in 2019. Even despite becoming a “walled garden”, YSDC patrons remained a loyal community … and many people still used the YSDC Wiki as a key reference tool to track down obscure details about publications or adventures. When the YSDC operators announced the permanent closure of the site at the start of 2026, those folks voiced concerns that this important reference and historical resource might be lost forever.
With this new resurrection of the YogWiki as a free public resource, we hope the community’s need for a reliable wiki reference for all-things Lovecraftian TTRPG will continue to be met, and that a new generation of gamers might benefit from the work of earlier hands.