You might want to consider porting in the madness meters from Unknown Armies (shouldn't be too hard to pirate if that's your deal) if you're going to do the role not roll playing thing, as it stands the sanity rules in vanilla CoC are essentially mental HP (except they tend not to heal very fast, if ever). This should be simple as the CoC rules are very transparent (pretty much percentiles for everything) and easy to learn and change, which is one of their best aspects.
Also, if the rules as presented are too simple for you, lots of other games have been developed from the basic ruleset, which is called Basic Roleplaying (BRP). The 'big gold book' is a generic version of the rules that came out recently (just called Basic Roleplaying: The Chaosium System or some shit), it has lots of optional stuff in there you can use, but probably the best iteration is Mongoose Runequest II (soon to be re-released as 'Legend' by Mongoose, and the original designers are going to spruce it up and release it as Runequest 6 - don't ask - under a different imprint), which has a great combat system and lots of Codexian stuff like locational damage and blah blah blah. It's heavily weighted towards medieval/etc. melee combat though, so be prepared to make fairly extensive house rules for fisticuffs and gun combat if you decide to go down that route.
Oh, and if you're going to get a hard copy, avoid the 6th edition, it's a fucking ugly book. Generally the only real changes between editions are skill lists and new monsters and shit like that. I have the 2nd edition box set and the 6th edition book and the main differences are:
'Major wound' rules
More monsters + pictures of the monsters
On that note, more art in general
Different picture on the cover
Probably new spells?
I think the descriptions of the disorders and stuff are based more closely on what's in the APA book, or something, and there's more of them
Equipment lists and background info on eras other than the 1920s (1890s and 1990s)
Incredibly muddy layout, ugh
Personally I'd try and find 5.5, shouold be basically the same shit as 6th but with the old clean/boring layout and fonts.
Delta Green is cool. The only genuinely useful thing it has in there, other than the setting shit, is a revamped gun damage chart which seems more congruent with actual ballistics data. Well alright I don't know much about guns myself, but I do know that a .50AE isn't immensely more powerful than a .44 magnum like it is in the base game. Seriously though, if Lovecraft + X-Files doesn't appeal, you can safely skip this.
There are other settings too, by the way. Skip Cthulhu Invictus if you want a Roman game, and get BRP Rome instead. Cthulhu Dark Ages is cool, but if you want a Nordic game specifically I'd get the Mongoose Runequest Vikings book instead (p. sure it's by the same guy who did BRP Rome actually, seal of fucking quality) and use that along with the base rules. My favourite is probably
Cthulhu Rising, which is basically CoC aboard the Nostromo.
http://www.chaosium.com/
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Oh, wow. Can the game really come to a halt like that? I heard that it is somewhat a more linear game, but can't the GM do something about it and alter the course when things go awry?
