What to get?

[pheanox]

I'm fairly new to the Call of Cthulhu system and was wondering which add ons to the ruleset people here suggest you purchase for a fairly basic but somewhat robust platform for running the game on Fantasy Grounds? I only have the core rules at the moment. There are so many different add ons its a bit confusing. Do I need the Investigators Handbook? How important are the Grimoire and Field Guide? I appreciate any advice/thoughts based on your all's experience.

[RLacey]

You can certainly play with just the core rules, though I have since bought a bunch of other bits...

The Investigator's Handbook is useful if you have people rolling characters on a frequent basis, as it has the full Occupations table in it (which makes character generation a lot easier). It's also nice to be able to let your players have access to all of the rules (not that any of mine ever look at it...).

I have the Grimoire, but it's pretty non-essential. I like it for flavour, and just being able to drag and drop spells onto a character sheet when a player learns one, but unless you're writing scenarios from scratch it's not something that gets opened much in my experince.

The Field Guide is fairly limited. I have a PDF copy of it, and have never really felt the need to make use of it in FG. It's a set of monster descriptions and pictures - again, it might add some flavour, but I suspect that if someone converted the Malleus Monstorum books that Chaosium recently released then those would be a much better bet!

Pulp Cthulhu is worth getting if you want to play pulp games, as it makes adjustments to the ruleset and character sheet (and comes with a natty theme).

If you're converting scenarios into the game, you might also want to think about the 6th edition ruleset. I use this when typing in pre-7th edition scenarios, as I can then load them into a 7th edition campaign and have it do all the stats conversion for me. But I have no idea if anyone else does it that way!

TL;DR - I'd grab the Investigator's Handbook +/- Pulp Cthulhu. The others get a lot less use.

[pheanox]

This was really useful, thank you.