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Modern Operatives Occupation Kits 1–6 are officially live.

When I started this project, the goal was simple: give modern Cthulhu and pulp horror games sharper, more grounded roles than “generic investigator with a gun.” Over the last few posts I’ve talked about why the kits exist, the design principles behind them, and how they’re built to support play at the table. Now they’re out in the world, ready for you to drop straight into your campaigns.

Kits 1–6 cover contemporary roles that naturally collide with mythos-scale trouble: people who work in violence, information, surveillance, security, and secrets. Each kit comes with a Pulp Lens to frame the role, multiple Career Paths to aim it at different campaign styles, and play support sections that make the page useful long after character creation. The idea is that picking an occupation isn’t just flavor—it’s a decision about the kind of modern pulp story you’re going to tell.

If you’ve been following this series, you already know the three pillars that shaped these kits: tone, hooks, and tools. Tone gives each occupation a clear pulp angle; hooks bring institutions, relationships, and obligations along for the ride; tools keep the page relevant once the dice are on the table. Seeing those pieces come together in a finished PDF has been satisfying, and I’m excited to see what you do with them.

So if you’re planning a black-ops horror campaign, a media-driven investigation, a street-level occult game, or a modern conspiracy that slowly opens into full mythos danger, Kits 1–6 are built to slot right in. They’re there to give your players sharper roles and your Keeper notebook more to work with than a handful of job titles.

Thank you for reading along as I unpacked the design. Now it’s your turn to take these occupations into the field and see what kind of trouble they get into.

Find it on DriveThruRPG!

Modern jobs are messy. People arrive in the same role from very different directions, carrying different loyalties, skills, and baggage. I wanted the kits to acknowledge that without turning every occupation into a full class system.

That’s why each occupation comes with Career Paths.

A path is a way of saying, “Here’s one angle on this occupation, and here’s the kind of story it points toward.” It isn’t a branching tree of feats; it’s a set of thematic channels. When you pick one, you’re choosing a particular mix of institutions, relationships, and pressures.

Designing paths meant thinking about breadth, clarity, and Keeper value. Breadth, because a single role should support more than one kind of character: a tech specialist might be corporate, freelance, buried in law enforcement, or part of a darker network. Clarity, because each path needs a strong identity, not just a different shopping list. Keeper value, because every path should hand the Keeper at least one institution or faction they can spotlight.

The paths stay focused on those goals. They give players a way to steer their role toward a particular kind of modern pulp while telling Keepers what kind of spotlight to prepare.

Once play begins, the rest of the page takes over: skills, talents, archetype pairings, gear prompts, and Keeper hooks.

Skills and talents are chosen with the Pulp Lens in mind. They aren’t trying to cover every possible checkbox. They’re there to reinforce how this character approaches problems and where the cracks show when things go wrong. If you can look at a kit and immediately see how that role would try to solve a scene, that section is doing its job.

Archetype pairings are there to make Pulp Cthulhu character creation faster. Instead of staring at a long list of options, you can glance at the kit and see which archetypes naturally pair with this occupation. It nudges you toward combinations that hit genre tone quickly without locking you in.

Gear is handled as prompts, not exhaustive lists. In modern pulp, the gear that matters is the stuff that changes how a scene plays. The kits highlight the kinds of equipment and access that make this role feel distinct, rather than cataloguing every possible item.

The Keeper hooks are where the kit becomes a prep engine. These short prompts suggest ways to frame complications, introduce threats, stress relationships, and show how institutions react to the character. They’re written so you can read them while planning and immediately get ideas for scenes.

Taken together, Career Paths and Play Support turn an occupation into something you keep using. Choosing a kit shapes the campaign; the page stays relevant while you play.

And that’s really the point of Kits 1–6. They’re not just six pages of character options. They’re six ways of saying, “This is what modern mythos play can look like”—with enough structure under each role that your table can actually live inside those stories.

Find out more at Applegarth Games!

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Keith

Once I knew I wanted sharper roles, the next question was: what makes an occupation worth a whole page? It’s easy to write a paragraph of flavor about a job. It’s harder to build a toolkit that keeps paying off once dice are on the table.

I ended up with three design pillars for every kit: tone, hooks, and tools.

Tone is the immediate pulp impression. If you only read the opening of a kit, you should know what kind of story this role belongs in. Is this someone who kicks doors in, someone who drags secrets into the light, someone who navigates institutions, someone who breaks systems from the inside? The kits are written to make that clear and usable, not buried.

Hooks are campaign gravity. Each occupation needed to bring relationships, institutions, and obligations with it. Who pays them? Who watches them? Who hates them? What do they owe, and to whom? If a kit doesn’t suggest recurring NPCs and factions, it’s not finished. The point is to make it easy for Keepers to say, “If someone picks this, here are three things I can start building the campaign around.”

The piece where tone and hooks come together is the Pulp Lens—the opening block of each kit. A bare job title doesn’t tell you enough. “Journalist” could be dozens of people; “special forces veteran” can mean several different careers and politics. The Pulp Lens is where the occupation stops being generic and becomes a specific kind of pulp protagonist.

When I write that lens, I ask:

• What kind of story is this role built for?
• How does this person naturally collide with the mythos?
• What does a typical day look like before anything weird happens?

Then I layer in pressures: bosses who expect results, sources who demand favors, institutions that will suffer if the truth gets out, enemies who don’t want this character near the truth. That’s what turns the lens from biography into pulp.

Practically, the Pulp Lens exists to do three things:

• Give the player a quick way to “see” their character before they pick anything else.
• Give the Keeper a ready‑made introduction for this role on‑screen.
• Suggest at least one way the mythos can kick down the door of this person’s everyday life.

The rest of each kit deepens that promise. Tone and hooks start in the Pulp Lens; everything else on the page is there to keep that promise session after session.

Find out more at Applegarth Games!

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Keith