A review of Mutant City Blues by Matthew Pook.

The Big Green Existential Menace has been good to me lately, so when the squamous hordes at the Flames Rising horror webzine sought me out for a contribution to their ongoing Cthulhu week, I could hardly decline. Pop on over for “Inmates”, a Trail of Cthulhu campaign frame that starts where the careers of many investigators ignominously end. And stay for the rest of the tentacled goodness, all week long.

—RDL

I’m off to GenCon next week, and am in intermittent email contact until the end of August, so Pelgrane is in holiday mode.

US and Canada mail orders will not ship out until 10th August; the rest of the world mail order will ship out as usual.

-Simon

Some early ideas for the Gaean Reach logo. Please let us know what you think.

Ok I promised that I would give out a preview of the Eternal Lies Suite.

Here is a piece from early in the game. It’s an ambient piece designed to be played as a loop during a specific scene and it introduces an important theme that will be heard throughout the suite.

Melancholy ambient theme by James Semple

The music in the suite varies from adventure through sentimental to horror. This is probably the most sentimental piece in there and although there’s an element of surreality, the theme feels familiar and comfortable.

Hopefully we’ll have a chance to give out more previews in the coming months. After all the suite will be around 70 minutes in total!

James

Learning that the implements used in Elvis Presley’s autopsy are up for public auction, the Ordo Veritatis dispatches a team to monitor the sale. Celebrity autopsy equipment has a habit of going missing, often in conjunction with a subsequent rash of inexplicable deaths.

A roving Esoterror cell seeks the implements but would rather steal them from the eventual buyer than expose themselves to openly bid. When the instruments are withdrawn from sale, the team and cell find themselves in a mad scramble to secure the items. The occult subversives need instruments to summon a Glitter Rat, a shape-shifting predator from the Outer Dark. Glitter Rats gain power from the desires of the celebrity-obsessed. They change form into a celebrity the victim wants to be with, approaches them, and finally feeds from them. The team must deactivate the cell, then hunt and kill the Glitter Rat they’ve released on an unsuspecting world.

– RDL

The latest issue of the Pelgrane Press webzine  is out now.

There were a few not unreasonably mutterings that Arkham Detective Tales did not contain any adventures set in Arkham.  There were also mumblings that the editing, credited to a certain Simon Rogers, was not up to our usual standards. We have taken steps to resolve this. First, Simon Rogers has been removed from editing duties.  Second, a new version is now available for download with typos fixed and an additional adventure set in Arkham.

Customers who bought from the Pelgrane Press webstore, rpgnow.com and IPR customers can download the new version from their order page. If you purchased from a retailer who is part of our PDF Preorder Program, you can ask your retailer.

If you purchased from another retailer (except an online discounter), please contact me with proof of purchase, and I’ll set you up with the new PDF.

We are looking for playtesters for a short campaign set in the UK in the 1930s following a global, Mythos-related disaster in the 1930s. I’ve played through this, and it’s great, and very different to any other Cthulhu adventure. It’s written by Graham Walmsley, who wrote The Dying of St Margarets and The Watchers in the Sky.

If you are interested, please email me simon@dyingearth.com, subject Cthulhu Apocalypse playtest, saying that you heard about the call on the Pelgrane Press website .

The ENnies polling booth is now open, and we ask that you consider us when placing your votes. For Best Cover Art, we have Jerome’s Rough Magicks cover, and for Best Adventure, The Armitage Files.

You can read reviews of Armitage Files here.

and here is Jerome’s cover in all its glory:

A detail:

Reviews from rpgnow.com

BOUH is our most critically acclaimed book, with it and its d20 cousin receiving a clean sweep of eight five star ratings on rpgnow.com.  Read the reviews of the d20 version (a subset of the GUMSHOE version) here and the GUMSHOE version here.

From the art and fiction to the abilities and motivations of the monsters, this is more a book of nightmares than of creatures. The sections on how to use this book present great advice, and the creatures here are disturbing and twisted enough to make even the players scared, to say nothing of their characters.

Excellent, atmospheric and very printer friendly. As a fan of gory, disturbing horror I can’t recommend this book highly enough. As a gamer, these monsters will show up in most of the sessions I run, and what higher review can I give this product than that?

LIKED : Great original monsters, in the vein of the best horror movies out there. Great art and an attractive, simple layout. Some of the best flavor text in gaming.… [read full review (5 out of 5 stars)]

This review on rpg.net gave five for style and four for substance, but the substance was marked down because of “the overstepping of too many boundaries is a bit problematic though and has to be taken into consideration thereby lessening the final score by a point.” You can’t ask for a better reivew in a horror product!

The black and white illustrations by Dave Allsop are brilliant and some make me want to stay away from the book when it gets dark.

This is the last of the introductions to the composers for the Eternal Lies suite.

My name is Yaiza Varona, I’m Spanish, born in Barcelone but lived most of my life in Tenerife,
Canary Islands. I am a musicologist and  composer.
When James Semple offered me the chance to be part of this project, even before he had finished to
fully explain what it was about, I knew I had to do it, because even with first words “Eternal lies”
sounded so interesting and because of the chance of working with all three such talented composers.
Writing music for a Roleplay game means for me to create a subtle musical background that can
help boost the play´s emotions and contribute to “taste” more effectively all the experiences that
shall bring with it. This, in a way, offers the composer the chance to share that same experience as
well, and in that respect it is absolutely useful all the information we are provided about the game.
My personal approach to the project tries to focus on translating the character´s feelings into sound.
The weariness, solitude, concern or responsability weight that can appear during the playing in the
different scenario possible can be conveyed musically in a way that becomes part of the game itself,
or at least that is what I intend to achieve.
It is a huge pleasure for me to be here. I am really excited to be part of this, and am enjoying the
project since the first minute.
Great emotions can be expected from “Eternal lies”, and I will try my very best to make the perfect
music for it.

Yaiza’s website is here, and you can listen to a sample of her music here.

This past weekend I was in beautiful Regina, Saskatchewan for a wedding. While the bride entertained hosted a girls night out for female out-of-town guests, I was paired with a conveniently rounded-up game group for a BBQ and an RPG session. As if I planned it that way, Skulduggery serves perfectly for this sort of one-time pick-up game. Its lighthearted tone, simple rules, fast character creation and emphasis on one-shot play all came through once again.

For the third time, I ran “If Space Permits”, the comedic space opera scenario set in a decadent far future. I’m now seeing another selling point from a GM’s point of view: thanks to a loose, player-driven  structure, the same scenario comes plays out very differently each time it’s run.

The scenario features a group of space traders attempting to corner the market on hallucinogenic jumpwine amid the chaotic bacchanal of an annual vine festival.

With the in-house group, a comedy of disasters ensued, with the final presentation to the Wine Council concluding in a hail of laser fire. When I ran it at Hammercon, crazy side action was the order of the day, and it was revealed that one of the crew members was being stalked by his killer clone. A high degree of player input reflected that group’s indie propensities. This last session was devoted to highly methodical scheming in pursuit of the collective goal.

Skulduggery scenarios throw a lot of balls into the air and encourage the GM to run with the ones the players choose to catch. If you design your own Skulduggery scenario, or use one from the book on groups unfamiliar with it, you’ll be able to run it a bunch of times and still be surprised by events as they unfold each time.

—RDL

A review of Watchers in the Sky, courtesy of Matthew Pook.

Robin discusses Skulduggery on The Game’s the Thing podcast.

The ENnie award nominations are in. Armitage Files has been nominated for best adventure, with Shadows over Filmland taking an honourable mention. And Jérome gets a richly deserved nod for his cover artwork on Rough Magicks. Last July in Page XX, Jérome let us into the secrets of his photomontage technique in creating this amazing piece of art.

I didn’t enter the books into specific categories, so I am not sure how they made their choices. Perhaps I should have placed Shadows more carefully (perhaps Best Setting, or Best Art , Interior)

Due to my cock-up over release dates, Mutant City Blues didn’t get the chance to be nominated this year or last.

Brennan Taylor gets a Best Writing nomination for How We Came to Live Here, a game which I had feared would slip under the radar. This will give it a much needed boost.

Jason Morningstar, who wrote The Black Drop for Pelgrane has demonstrated himself to be multi-talented with an art nomination for Escape from Tentacle City.

Cublicle 7 is festooned with nominations, including an amazing four for Best Product, and I tip them for a silver or gold in Best Product for Doctor Who, though they might have to wrangle their potential voters a little if they are feeling mercenary.

At this point it becomes a popularity contest, so the big publishers will probably take the metal, but it’s very pleasing to be nominated.

Ralf Schemmann produced this schematic map, a snap shot really, of the translight corridors connecting The Bleed, the “region” of space where the PCs – lasers – undertake their contracts in the Ashen Stars game.

From Ashen Stars:

Translight corridors are not fixed in space.  They orbit through the universe, just as the rest of the galaxy does, but at a fractionally variant rate. No two trips between points connected by a corridor takes exactly the same amount of time. Before embarking on any given journey, navigators must continually track and update the positioning of corridors.

A literal map of the various corridors, color-coded with their cluster identifications, would have to appear as a hologram, and change in real time. As of press time Pelgrane Press had yet to perfect the technology necessary to present such a map to its readers.

Still, Ralf with ProFantasy’s Cosmographer gave it his best shot!

Pelgrane Press acquire the rights to publish an RPGs based on the Dying Earth and Gaean Reach Books By Jack Vance.

LONDON, ENGLAND: Pelgrane Press Ltd, a UK-based company,  announced today that it has acquired the rights to produce games based on Jack Vance’s seminal Dying Earth stories and The Gaean Reach series.

Pelgrane Press publishes the Dying Earth RPG and supplements, and more recently the GUMSHOE series of roleplaying games, including the Ennie-award-winning Trail of Cthulhu.

“When the Dying Earth licensed expired last year, we ran a closing down sale, and this was so succesful it enabled us to renew the license, and branch out into Jack Vance’s science fiction settings,” says Simon Rogers, Managing Director of Pelgrane Press. ” The Gaean Reach series offers a galaxy full of exotic cultures, flawed characters and complex machinations. It combines the crafted dialogue of the Dying Earth with Vance’s deft way with mysteries – ideal fodder for roleplaying games.”

John Vance, son of the 93-year-old author, says, “My father and I are very pleased to see Pelgrane Press developing further game modules based on these signature Vance worlds, and we hope they provide many hours of enjoyment, both to his long-time fans and to gamers new to the works.”

Robin D Laws will write the core rules for the Gaean Reach with Jim Webster and Peter Freeman providing first an Encyclopedia, then setting material and supplements. Expect to see a series of releases based on the many regions of the Gaean Reach. The Dying Earth will be on sale again shortly, with new material by Ian Thomson and new issues of XPS.

Information
Jack Vance is the world’s greatest living Fantasy author. He wrote the DYING EARTH series of books over many years; the original volume “The Dying Earth” was released before Lord of the Rings. His loosely connected Gaean Reach fiction includes The Demon Princes series, Ports of Call and The Cadwal Chronicles.

Pelgrane Press is an award-winning RPG company established in 2000 and has published more than thirty books and rpg supplements, now translated into four languages.

Simon Rogers is the and owner of Pelgrane Press Ltd and co-owner of ProFantasy Software Ltd, creators of the Campaign Cartographer 3 map-making software for gamers.

As I discussed in Pelgrane Biz Part 1, it’s expensive and risky to print books by offset litho, even though the results are gratifying, and the rewards, if the sales are high enough, are excellent. But there is every chance that Trail of Cthulhu is a one-off success, and won’t be repeated.

That said, I really want to print Ashen Stars as a full colour smythe-sewnbook. The setting deserves the full colour treatment, and if you’ve seen the starship schematic and Jérome’s artwork, I hope you’ll agree the art warrants it, too. Also, I have high hopes for the game; both the setting and the system I think will have widespread appeal. I’ve just sent out the first  to the 32 GMs who have answered our questionnaire, for what will be our largest playtest ever.

Even so, it’s still just a hope. I don’t know how many copies I’m likely to sell. My solution is to sell as many as possible by pre-order, before the book is printed, supplying the PDF with the pre-order.  Now, retailers and distributors don’t like publishers doing pre-orders with PDFs, unless they can join in – but now we have the Retailer PDF Program open to any retailer who wants to join, and that removes my competitive advantage.

To make this work, I need to sell 200 copies by mail order in advance. This is a large barrier, but not insurmountable, and I am doing two stages of pre-order:

Pre-pre-order. After the first round of playtesting, I will open the pre-pre-order  – probably late in August. People who opt in at this stage will get a late draft of the game – some extra content, and their name in the credits with special thanks. As the game is updated, we’ll update the PDF. If we are not able to do a full colour hardback version, these people will still get a special version – perhaps a hardback where everyone else is a paperback, or some other special treat. The PDF in any case, when it’s released, will be in full colour. I suspect few retailers will take us up at this stage – this will be our loyal core of users.

Pre-order When the final version is ready and laid out, we’ll start the pre-order proper. There’ll be a brief window where we’ll ask people to respond with any typos (this worked well with the Skulduggery pre-order) and then get printing.

If I can get 200 mail order pre-orders, plus however many retail pre-orders, it will mean I can justify the realtively short and expensive full-colour print run, and be in with a good chance of selling through that run in two years. It will also mean I can produce more, better supplements, with new tech, deckplans, alien races and adventures.

My question to you is, what would be a good name for the pre-pre-order?

As an Ordo Veritatis team dedicated to uprooting the occult menace of the Esoterrorists, the PCs are dispatched to investigate a series of strange mailings. Prominent intellectuals suffering from life-threatening illnesses receive packages from an untraceable group called the Hope Bombers. They promise to pray for the health of the recipients, who tend to be outspoken atheists or icons of secularism. Soon after opening the packages, the targets succumb to their illnesses. As word of the Hope Bombers spreads through they media, prayer packages begin to arrive at the homes of perfectly healthy targets. Are they the next to go?

The team learns early on that the campaign springboards from the so-called STEP study. It determined that sufferers of potentially fatal medical conditions were more likely to die if they knew others were praying for them. Can the PCs track the cell responsible for these long distance murders by prayer, before the reality-bending effect of public panic turns it into a worldwide epidemic?

We’ve got 25 playtest groups who have jumped through the first hoop – answering a simply questionnaire. I haven’t had this level of participation since Trail of Cthulhu. Ashen Stars is very different to Trail, with starship combat, high-tech equipment, multiple races, the necessity of earning enough from contracts to stop your equipment falling apart and some very specific adventure creation advice. This all needs a thorough run-through, and then a second round.

The fun tech available in the game includes non-lethal disruption pistols with a variety of attachments which give a flavour of the game.  Poppers are one-shot defensive items which absorb a single disruptor blast; while a crick-cracker burns out multiple poppers. The stockholmer makes a person you knock unconcious cooperate with you. But here is my favourite:

Gun-Nanny

Cost: 1; buys one gun-nanny for each crew member, plus free replacements

The gun-nanny consists of a micro-camera connected to a chip running a sophisticated risk matrix algorithm. It activates when you switch your weapon to lethal mode. Whenever you aim at a target, it calculates the potential public relations risks of killing that target. If it determines the risk to be significant, it sends an unmistakeable chiming sound to your headset. The chime in effect asks the question, are you sure you want to do that?

In rules terms, the GM warns you before you fire that a kill would threaten your Reputation.

There’s an excellent thread on potential Skulduggery settings over on rpg.net. I’m going to chose my top three, and then put it to the vote. I’ll get the setting written up and post it free on the next Page XX.

Please post more setting suggestions here or on the rpg.net

Following on with the music blog, I’m going to let Mike Torr introduce himself…

I’m a composer with a broad spectrum of experience and influences.  A long history as a keyboard performer (and one-time double bass player) has taken me through a landscape of Electronica, Blues, Classical, Jazz, and Rock; via the usual grind of touring and recording with bands; and landed me on the shores of media music land.  Writing music is always an adventure, and I’m attracted to it because it feels like a back door into the human subconscious.  Perhaps I was a necromancer in a previous life…
I live and work in Southampton and I’ve known James for a few years.  He’s already written some great material for Eternal Lies and I’m going to be joining his team and helping him to express his ideas in a variety of ways.  With Marie-Anne and Yaiza on board, I’m in the company of a great group of talented and creative people, and I’m really looking forward to discovering where this is going to lead!

Dan Harms reviews The Black Drop

Overall, the Black Drop is a fantastic scenario and one of the strongest scenarios in the Trail line – which, in turn, makes it one of the strongest Cthulhoid RPG scenarios published in recent times.  As always, it’s worth getting even if you play Call of Cthulhu instead of Trail, so you can adapt it or take ideas for your own game.

The Black Drop is a one-shot adventure for Trail of Cthulhu written by Jason Morningstar, the award-winning designer of the Shab-al-Hiri Roach and Fiasco.

Something slowly gathers strength beneath the frozen basalt of the remote Kerguelen archipelago – a monstrous thing once worshipped and then betrayed, a terrible god from the antediluvian past. It’s time has come again, and mysterious forces gather.

Will the Investigators usher in its rebirth – or put an end to it forever?

Although it could swing toward the Pulp end of things, there’s plenty of windswept nihilism and reliably cosmic horror for any Purist. Adjusted by the Keeper to taste, it will work well for either style.

It features pregenerated characters and extentsive handouts.

I’ve looked over my business-related posts on my livejournal, and scoured them for predictions, to see where I have been optimistic and pessimistic.

30th Jan 2008

I said “I”m just nostalgically hoping for an enormous 5000-book hit with ToC.”

In this post, I was justifying the fact we  sell through distribution, primiarily that it enabled me to afford litho print runs of some books. At this stage, Esoterrorists had sold 1000 copies, and I had decided to print 2000-off of Trail of Cthulhu. Not exactly a prediction, but there we go. In seriousness I would have been happy to sell through the first print run. My total sales to date excluding PDFs and foreign issues of Trail are about 3750. I am very happy with that. PDFs bring this close to 5000. I started this chart and added a trendline when this post was made and I see no reason to change it, though recent data (and optimism) makes me hope it’s become linear. Note this is distributor sales only.

9th Jan 2009

I said “I suspect that the success of Trail was a one-off, but that 2009 will still be better than 2007, with the release of new Trail supplements by Robin and Ken, Mutant City Blues and other yet-to-be announced projects.”

In fact, I was slightly pessimistic here in terms of sales – 2009 was about the same as 2008. Sales have fallen back in 2010; Trail really was a one-off, though the totals of our non-Trail products still outperform the later Dying Earth years. I suspect 2010 will continue to be good but lower than 2008-9.

27th Jan 2009

I predicted that I would run out of stock of Trail in early 2011 – I still think that’s accurate.

I also said:

…our early adventures sell consistently between 30 and 35% of the total core book sales across all lines. Our later material (and I only have Dying Earth to go on) sell significantly less. I have reason to believe that Trail and Eso supplement percentages will hold up better than Dying Earth, and I think the Esoterror Fact Book will be the proof of the pudding. It could be that the percentage just naturally falls off with the age of the core book, though, and there’s nothing I can do about it. The super-sweet spot is to have sold enough of the core book that you can litho print your supplements. I’ve nearly reached it with Trail. I had to do that with the Screen, but whether I’ll sell them all I don’t know. Shadows Over Filmland is a bit of a gamble as a duotone hard back, but it had to be that for aesthetic reasons. I just hope the sales warrant it.

The Esoterror Factbook has sold about 28% of the total Esoterrorist sales; Stunning Eldritch Tales is at 34% – it could have been litho printed. The Screen is at 25%, and nearly sold through.

The problem is with Shadows over Filmland – I printed it at the same time as Mutant City Blues, and got 1500 copies of each for the price of 1200. It’s only sold  20% of Trail, and is flattening off a little. Similarly, sales of Mutant City Blues have been little worse than I’d hoped. Both continue to sell steadily, but break even is a long way off.

Some of this is to do with the fact that the price per word in expense is fixed, but the price per word recovered tends to be lower for larger books. I certainly mis-priced Shadows at $34.95. Hint – it’s a bargain.

So, overall, I was slightly optimistic.

My latest offset-printed book is Armitage Files, which has a much steeper trajectory than any Trail supplement so far, but for which I only have 3 month’s data. I’ll need a couple more months to decide if I can risk further litho print runs for Trail.

16th September 2009

I said:

• The continuing sales of Trail, and the total number of copies sold. mean the market for supplements is sufficient for me to do offset print runs.
• I took a risk with Shadows Over Filmland, doing it hard cover, and I think it will take about three years to sell through the print run.

The first statement needs clarification in light of Shadows (if you’ll excuse the expression) – if I’m doing, perfect bound short-ish books, then it’s still true I can do offest. For other books, it’s going to be tough to decide. So, slightly optimistic.

Shadows over Filmland sales are flatter now than it was at that time, so it may take four years to break even. Mutant City Blues, another two years, I think. This shows the relative sales of GUMSHOE print releases (sans Trail)

I love my offset-bound hardbacks, but it it is a hard-won love, except, of course for Trail.

But, I have a plan to keep up the printing quality for Ashen Stars, which I will reveal in part two…

Wanted: Playtesters for Ashen Stars (GUMSHOE Space)

System: This is a stand-alone game using the GUMSHOE system.

Who are the PCs: The PCs freelance law enforcement officers called lasers contracting their services to a central authority weakened by stellar war. They investigate kipdnappings, deliver cargoes, chase fugitives, collect debts, but they must keep careful track of their reputation, or miss out on future work.

Ashen Stars places its central characters in a conflict between altruism and selfishness. This is reflected in its setting, pitting the idealism of a fallen utopian order against the harsh realities of a post-war environment.

For 4-6 players. You do not need to be familiar with GUMSHOE to participate.

Feedback by 1st August.

Please email simon@dyingearth.com if you are interested.

A positive and detailed review of Hard Helix on Flames Rising.

Hard Helix is a great supplement. In pure written content, it’s a 5/5.

You saw Jérome’s rough sketch for the Durugh, one of the alien species in Ashen Stars.

This is a fleshed out version. What do you think?

In Ashen Stars (formerly GUMSHOE Space), every PC has a warpside role and a groundside role. Warpside, you can take on the role of pilot, gunner, erngineer, comms, stratco or medic, doubling up where necessary. During starship combat, each role has an important part to play and meaningful choices to make. As well as the usual sequence of maneuvers, feints, weapons and repair choices, players can choose special gambits highlighting their roles – the engineer can re-rout off line subsystems and the comms expert jam the opponent’s internal comms.

Players can spending points from their own pools,but also spend ship’s resources to improve their chances at every stage. This brings us to the ships schematic which I envisage being placed in the middle of the table stacked with tokens representing the ship’s pools.  As you snatch tokens to boost weapons fire or make emergency repairs, the ships resources deplete, and you might even find yourself depleting pools your fellow crew-members might need later.

This schematic is based on Ralf’s example map for Cosmographer described here.

A PDF is here.

Dan Harms reviews Castle Bravo.

This scenario is a a strong addition to the Trail line, and it will certainly make for a memorable evening of play.

Hi … I thought it apt to begin introducing the various composers who are working on the Eternal Lies suite.

Here is Marie-Anne Fischer in her own words…

I fell in love with composing music when in South Africa, after moving from my native Belgium.  Rhythms, beats and sounds of Africa stylised my music, some of which was used for television, wildlife documentaries, sport and corporate video.  Further colour was added during time spent in the USA.  I moved to the UK where I focused on composing music for media after completing a diploma course in the same. My main instruments are piano and violin.
I look forward to co-writing music for “Eternal Lies” and have already been exploring the range of possible emotions and ambient sounds that might accompany live role play. Composing can be solitary, so I welcome working alongside such talented friends and taking the opportunity to broaden my musical spectrum.

I’ll be introducing Mike and Yaiza in the coming weeks and hopefully I can bring a few of these musical types along to Dragonmeet in November.

I believe next week we will post up the first preview of the music!

cheers

James

Here is a five-minute rough by Jérome of a race called the durugh for GUMSHOE Space (or should I say Ashen Stars)?

The Durugh

Other species may instinctively recoil at your twisted features and hunched physiques, but you durugh certainly came in handy during the Mohilar War. Your ability to briefly phase between dimensional layers made your people ideal spies and infiltrators. A once-despised enemy of The Combine, your people initially threw in your lot with the Mohilar when war broke out. Your much-derided penchant for double-dealing proved indispensable when your martyred former king, Ukshqa, used his access to the Mohilar mothership to discover their genocidal plans for your race after the Combine was defeated. Thanks to the Bogey Condundrum, due credit for the defeat of the Mohilar has been taken away from you. Still, you are sure that the durugh were somehow instrumental to victory. Although a small faction of durugh want to go back to the old ways and fight the Combine, a new majority seeks peaceful union with it. Since then you have learned that the universal tolerance espoused by the Combine is more ideal than reality. The durugh were the primary foes of the Combine peoples for generations, and old perceptions die hard.

The war, and Ukshqa’s great sacrifice, worked great internal changes on durugh society. Its old hierarchical structure, based on a rigid class system and enforced by brutal punishment, has fallen by the wayside. Now all the classes can perform the dimension phase, making a police state impossible to maintain. Each durugh world has fallen into its own unique anarchy, some more benign than others. The future is wide open, assuming you don’t all backstab each other to death first.

Translation devices often render durugh speech as sibilant, high-pitched or whiny. They undermine even your most lofty expressions. Despite years of effort the technical breakthroughs needed to remedy this flaw remain elusive.

You range between 127 and 168 cm in height. Dense musculature and bone structure makes you heavier than a human of equal health and the same height. Your fingers are disproportionately long and thin, you thumbs thick and partially bifurcated. Durugh tend toward pale complexions and dark hair.

Durugh names sound, at least as rendered in English by translation devices, like a cross between Latin and Assyrian. Pick a name from the list in Appendix 1 (p. 286), or invent one that sounds similar to those.

Boosts: Decryption, Explosive Devices, History (Durugh), Downside, Negotiation; Filch, Preparedness, Surveillance, Infiltration

Suitable Drives: Altruism, Avenger, Chronicler, Comradeship, Entrepreneurial, Exploration, Faith, Footloose, Justice-Seeker, Nowhere Else To Go, Professionalism, Pursued, Programming, Role Model, Scientific Inquiry, Sexual Adventure, Something To Prove, Tech Hound

Unique Drives:Phase Rider

Species-Specific  Abilities: Phase

Cybernetic Compatibilities: Breadbox, Handgun, Interface Tranducer

Cybernetic Clashes: Aidkitter, Berserker, Episealant

Viroware Affinities: Aggravator, Peacepipe, Chameleon, Dominator, Mr. Grey, Snakehisser, Stiumulust, Scrambleface, Scrambleface Ultra

Viroware Susceptibilities:Grobig, Proprioception Booster, Tiresias

Here’s a quick update on the state of the Eternal Lies suite.

This has been a truly phenomenal week with a chance for composers and authors to finally bounce ideas of one another. I’ve been absolutely amazed by the exceptional ideas coming from Will and Jeff and I’m so pleased about their enthusiasm for having their adventure scored. This week we began looking at the various chapters and how they will be scored.

Without giving away too much here, we have come up with around five distinct musical themes each representing concepts within the campaign. Therefore, chapters will reference themes based on the relevance of the concepts at the time. We’ll also be using this idea for the various stings that are to be used for specific circumstances. For instance, this week I created the sting for when a character is … well let’s politely say ‘retired’ from the game for whatever reason. This sting is a piano version of a theme which in one sense represents failure but is really part of a bigger concept. Perhaps I’ve said too much already…

We also agreed to include a new piece specifically to be played when the group are sitting back and reviewing the information they’ve amassed. We felt this would be a useful piece of music for keepers. In fact we’ve really spent a lot of time looking at the utility of this music for a group playing a game. That whole aspect has been very important for keeping us focused. The music must serve the game.

I hope that I’ll get a chance to include samples of the music during these articles to whet appetites!

Next week I’m going to start introducing the wonderful composers working alongside me to create this enormous suite of music.

James

Bookhounds of London cover.

Please let me know what you think of this new rough – he’ll have a stake in the other hand.

Sasha Bilton is representing Pelgrane Press at GamesExpo! Please pay him a visit. I suspect there will be some GUMSHOE games run, and I’ll think of a special offer.

He says:

I’m very pleased to say I’ll be manning the Pelgrane Press stand at UK Games Expo in Birmingham on the 5th and 6th of June. I’ll actually be there on the 4th, setting up and stuff.

If you’re going, please do come by and say hello (or even let me run to the loo), we’re at 3a in the Green section.

Castle Bravo, Bill White’s PDF Atomic Age adventure for Trail of Cthulhu is out now from the Pelgrane Press store.

Skulduggery is available on pre-order – get the PDF now, and the printed version when it ships 1st July.

Bamboozle! Betray! Backstab!

Why go all the way to the dungeon for enemies, when the other players are sitting right next to you?

Skulduggery, the Roleplaying Game Of Verbal Fireworks & Sudden Reversals, brings fast and funny innovation to the exciting world of inter-player conflict!

Super-speedy character generation• gets your group skeeving and conniving in minutes. Just distribute component cards, trade, and you’re done.

Simple, and simply hilarious, rules• convert the eternal playground chant of “No you don’t!” “Oh, yes I do!” into a zingy action resolution system.

Turns your power-gamers into witticism machines • by rewarding the strategic use of pre-supplied punchlines.

Exploit others’ weaknesses• , while weaseling away from your own, as you grapple with an uproarious array of self-defeating temptations.

Unleashes• the updated rules of the acclaimed Dying Earth Roleplaying Game, bringing elegant finagling and oneupsmanship to any genre.

Revel• in the dark art of Machiavellian Game Mastering with copious guidance and devious advice.

Comes pre-loaded with four side-splitting, ready-to-play scenarios:

If Space Permits• : Amid a crazy bacchanal, interstellar traders compete to corner the market on hallucinogenic jumpwine.

Yes, Wing• : Hose your fellow cabinet secretaries in the most betray-o-riffic place on Earth: Washington, D.C.

Casting Call• : Sign-up sheets have gone up for this year’s high school musical. Let the viciousness commence!

Skulduggery & Crossbones• : You’re pirates. You’re trapped on a becalmed ship. Your captain just got his head bitten off by a shark. Go!

Status: Pre Order – buy the print version now from the Pelgrane Press store, and get the PDF version now and the print version when it ships.

Which is the best title for the forthcoming GUMSHOE Space?

What do you think of this cover idea for Night’s Black Agents?

Just to let people know that we are currently in the preparation phase of the Eternal Lies Suite project.

This means that right now we’re focusing on a variety of tasks: -

• Developing themes for the suite
• Dividing up the various tracks amongst the group
• Building a suitable orchestral template within the sequencer software

For the most we’re focusing on a fairly traditional ‘film orchestra’ sound, particularly focusing on the kind of sound used in the 1930s. We had considered using more of an old fashioned sound for the final mix but we have decided against it. The style of arrangements and melodies will have the appropriate sound but we’ll use a more modern mix.

We will also be using elements of non-orchestral music including both folk instruments and sound design elements. I hope to be able to give more definite examples of what we’re using in a later post.

James

• OgreCave review
• On the Shelf review
• Fast RPG Reviews review

I am looking for RPG publishing licensees to produce supplementary material for GUMSHOE rpg settings, excluding Trail of Cthulhu, but including Mutant City Blues, Esoterrorists, Fear Itself and some forthcoming settings.

If this is of interest, please email me (simon@dyingearth.com)

Cybes

You are a genetically and cybernetically altered being, originally from human stock. You are the results of super-soldier experimentation undertaken during the Mohilar War. In all likelihood, you served in the war. If not, you’ll need to explain why you didn’t, which you can either do immediately or reveal at an appropriate moment in the course of the series.

If you’re like most of your kind, you consider yourself a new species, homo amplius. About 70% of cybes fall into this category. Cybes of this persuasion seek to build their own settlements and cultures. If you count yourself among them, you envision a utopian cybe society based on the principles of self-determination, mutability of body and soul, and personal freedom. Attempts to found such societies have proven rocky so far. When outsiders point this out to you, you might reply that human societies you’re doing much better than homo sapiens was a single generation after it first evolved. Among fellow cybes you might be willing to admit that the tenuous social connections fostered by Cybe ideology make for volatile societies—especially when the innate aggression installed in your genes by Combine geneticists is taken into account. You are nonetheless determined to lay the foundations for a perfect society. Since the cybes intend to render themselves effectively immortal through additional modification, they’ll be living with the results of today’s political developments for centuries to come. If you’re a member of this dominant faction, you call yourself an amp or evolver.

About one in ten cybes consider themselves to still be human. They resent the notion that they might be anything else, reject political separatism, and seek full integration with human societies. Other cybes contemptuously refer to them as “vestigials”; they call themselves “integrationists” and label the so-called amps as “transers.”

Cybes can reprogram their abilities at will, at the cost of personality drift; see the Neural Rewiring ability, p. 53.

Translation devices render your speech patterns as slightly stilted and robotic. You may speak in a staccato rhythm or a montone, or avoid the use of contractions.

Cybes abandon their human names to affirm their identity as a separate species. Their names are metonyms: English words that reveal their (self-perceived) best qualities or capabilities. They may seem blunt or boastful to others. Older cybes append the vowel u to the English word, which stands for Unit. Younger cybes drop this convention. Pick a name from the sample list of on p. 273, or use it as inspiration for a similar name of your own invention.

Boosts: Culture (Cybe), Bullshit Detector, Virology

Suitable Drives: Altruism, Atonement, Avenger, Bleedism, Chronicler, Combinism, Comradeship, Derring-Do, Entrepreneurial, Exploration, Faith, Hotshot, Justice-Seeker, Nowhere Else To Go, Professionalism, Pursued, Programming, Role Model, Scientific Inquiry, Tech Hound

Unique Drives: Integrationist, Social Engineer

Species-Specific  Abilities: Enhancement Integration, Neural Rewiring

Cybernetic Compatibilities: All

Cybernetic Clashes: None

Viroware Affinities: All

Viroware Susceptibilities:None

To celebrate the result of the UK election, Graham Walmsley has written Hanging Parliament, a setting for Skulduggery.

Play six well-known politicians as they desperately horse-trade to gain power. It’s hastily cobbled together and it might not work. Still, we’re hoping something good comes out of it.

Ken Hite gives a detailed interview to Innsmouth Free Press, covering Trail of Cthulhu, Night’s Black Agents and why he would like to belong to the Great Race of Yith.

In the beginning…

As I’m about to undertake the creation of a suite of music for the upcoming Trail of Cthulhu supplement, Eternal Lies, I thought it best to first give everyone a quick introduction.
My name is James Semple. I’m a media composer who has written music for both film and videogames. I’m also a roleplayer and was one of the playtesters for Trail of Cthulhu. To date I’ve written two musical offerings for Pelgrane Press, Four Shadows (music for Trail of Cthulhu) and Dissonance (music for Esoterrorists). Primarily I’m a guitarist however most of the compositions are realised using industry-standard orchestral samples.

To assist me in the creation of this suite I will be assisted by three extremely talented composers: Marie-Anne Fischer, Mike Torr and Yaiza Varona. They will each be writing their own introductions in due course.

The Purpose of the Suite

Given that I’ve already written some roleplaying music I took a step back before approaching this new suite. Firstly I wanted to really look at what purpose the music was serving. Why write music for roleplaying? How might roleplaying music be used in a game?

Writing original music for a roleplaying game allows us an opportunity to create a sense of atmosphere specific to Eternal Lies. While there are other pieces of music out there that are appropriate for Trail of Cthulhu, they are often tied to other properties (such as films or videogames) and if they are recognisable they can distract the listener and pull them out of the game.

I thought a lot about how to use the music in a game and as a result I’ve broken the tracks down into different types.

Overture and Closing Titles

Music designed to open and close the suite. These are the most traditional tracks and more than anything else they are designed to impart a sense of atmosphere and set the scene for the game.

Ambient Tracks

These are tracks designed to be looped in the background while the game is playing. They make up the majority of the music within the suite. Each track is tied to a chapter or location within the campaign but works around the main themes presented in the overture. These tracks will be quite long (around 6 minutes each) and detailed enough to be looped continuously for many repeats.

Action Tracks

These are 2-minute loops designed to be used in tension moments during a game. Fights, car chases, perilous hazards or any kind of danger scene can be accompanied by these pieces of music.

Stingers

Often derived from the other music, these stingers are short pieces of music (usually less than 30 seconds) that can be played to signify a specific situation. For instance a brief sting can be used to pause the game for a break and another sting to resume the game. Following advice from Robin Laws I’ll be creating an ‘end of scene’ sting to let the players know it’s time to move on. Similarly I’ve created a tragic sting for when a character is retired.

In Summary

So this is who I am and what I’m planning to create. I’ll get into the detail of the actual types of music I’m creating in a later blog. I’d be very interested to get feedback as I go along.

cheers

James

A piece from Jérome from The Black Drop.

Will Hindmarch adds a new entry to his Razed journal, in which he discusses the nature of the apocalypse, and the characters dealing with it.

This rpg.net review is from veteran reviewer Lev Lafayette, who averages just over 3/3 on his reviews -  tough reviewer. He gives Trail a 4/4.

Jérome has nearly finished laying out Skulduggery, and it will be available for pre-order soon. Here is an illustration for Martial Arts.

Here is a component card from Yes, Wing, the political setting.

An illustration by Jérome for the forthcoming Castle Bravo.

Here is the result of the GUMSHOE setting competition.

It was a close run thing, with all three contenders being in the lead at one point. I must say, I was surprised at the result. Sam Friedman wins a $50 store voucher with his toon PI setting.

is the best GUMSHOE idea?
Selection		Votes
Hard-boiled investigators hunting down clones, droids and techno-criminals.	30%	68
Carpathian fiend stalks London’s misty alleyways, bloody Dartmoor murders are blamed on a spectral h	31%	71
Tales from Toon-Town: Who Framed Roger Rabbit meets Mutant City Blues in Sin City mixed with true-crime tales and a hint of Scooby Doo	40%	91
230 votes total

A new GUMSHOE Game from Kenneth Hite, author of Trail of Cthulhu.

The Cold War is over. Bush’s War is winding down.

You were a shadowy soldier in those fights, trained to move through the secret world: deniable and deadly.

Then you got out, or you got shut out, or you got burned out. You didn’t come in from the cold. Instead, you found your own entrances into Europe’s clandestine networks of power and crime. You did a few ops, and you asked even fewer questions. Who gave you that job in Prague? Who paid for your silence in that Swiss account? You told yourself it didn’t matter.

It turned out to matter a lot. Because it turned out you were working for vampires.

Vampires exist. What can they do? Who do they own? Where is safe? You don’t know those answers yet. So you’d better start asking questions. You have to trace the bloodsuckers’ operations, penetrate their networks, follow their trail, and target their weak points. Because if you don’t hunt them, they will hunt you. And they will kill you.

Or worse.

Night’s Black Agents brings the GUMSHOE engine to the spy thriller genre, combining the propulsive paranoia of movies like Ronin and The Bourne Identity with supernatural horror straight out of Bram Stoker. Investigation is crucial, but it never slows down the action, which explodes with expanded options for bone-crunching combat, high-tech tradecraft, and adrenaline-fueled chases.

Updating classic Gothic terrors for the postmodern age, Night’s Black Agents presents thoroughly modular monstrosity: GMs can build their own vampires, mashup their own minions, kitbash their own conspiracies to suit their personal sense of style and story. Rules options let you set the level of betrayal, grit, and action in your game. Riff from the worked examples or mix and match vampiric abilities, agendas, and assets for a completely custom sanguinary spy saga.

The included hook adventure gets the campaign going; the included city setting shows you what might be clotting in Marseilles’ veins even now. Rack silver bullets in your Glock, twist a UV bulb into your Maglite, and keep watching the mirrors … and pray you’ve got your vampire stories straight.

Designer’s blog entries.

An interview with the publisher.

Eternal Lies, the forthcoming mammoth campaign for Trail of Cthulhu will have a sound track album designed for use in actual play, created by James Semple and a team of other musicians.

James Semple, has produced music for GUMSHOE including four tracks for Esoterrorists (Dissonance) and four track for Trail of Cthulhu (Four Shadows )

James told me “I plan to produce an orchestral suite of music to truly capture the atmosphere of this huge globe-spanning adventure. The music will include themes, action pieces and ambient tracks to set the atmosphere throughout the game. The music will be written in the style of early Hollywood epics such as King Kong however it will also include a world music feel incorporating instruments and sounds of the various regions explored. In total there will be 60 minutes of high-quality music and to help me on this epic undertaking I will be utilising the exceptional talents of composers Marie-Anne Fischer, Mike Torr and Yaiza Varona.”

He’ll be blogging on this site as work progresses.

Thanks very much for the feedback on the previous cover. We have a new one, posted with some trepidation:

One of the settings for Skulduggery is Yes Wing. The PCs are cabinet secretaries or other high officials in the administration of recently elected US President Allard Bierce. Here, Hilary Wade illustrates one of the characters:

To build a character in Skulduggery, you select cards randomly from each of:

• Identity, including goal
• Style of persuasion
• Style of rebuff
• Relationships
• Resistances (to temptations)
• Tag lines

A slight “Yes Wing” spoiler follows.

For example in the case of this illustrations, the identity is Henry Doss, Secretary of Defense, and his goal is “Start a war”, allowing him to prove his unconventional theories about 21st century warfare. Here, his player makes an Impressive Success.

RetroPunk Publicações Ltda, a brand new Brazilian RPG outfit will be producing GUMSHOE system games in Portuguese. The owners are keen GUMSHOE players. They’ll be starting with Trail of  Cthulhu, have the option to produce other GUMSHOE system games and will even be publishing original material.

We now have licensees in French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, and I’m very fortunate that the books are all of a high standard, and their reports are on time.  From what I’ve seen, RetroPunk will keep up this tradition.

Voting is now closed.

In our last customer email, I asked for suggestions for new GUMSHOE settings. We had a lot of responses, and I narrowed these down. Vote for your favourite, and the winner will get a prize. Voting closes 19th April.

Review of Mutant City Blues on GameCryer a “top notch game from Pelgrane Press”

A very positive review of the Esoterror Factbook by Kingbeast (9/10)

“ I honestly think that this might be one of the best supplemental books that I have read for ANY setting…it is that good”

Pelgrane Press Ltd, the roleplaying game publisher, and Smite Works, the virtual tabletop developer, announced today that the Trail of Cthulhu roleplaying game ruleset will be released for use the Fantasy Grounds virtual online gaming table.

Said Doug Davison, president of SmiteWorks “We are very fortunate for the opportunity to work with Pelgrane Press.  It is fantastic to see their GUMSHOE system getting converted over for play in Fantasy Grounds.  It opens up a whole new set of role-play options with Trail of Cthulhu leading the way and their other GUMSHOE systems to follow.”

Simon Rogers, managing director of Pelgrane Press, said “I’m very impressed with Fantasy Grounds and the rulesets and advetnures which SmiteWorks has created for their partners. I am pleased that our customers will be able to enjoy playing our GUMSHOE games remotely, in an enviroment which fully supports the rules and aesthetics of our products.”

About Pelgrane Press Ltd
Pelgrane Press is an award-winning publisher of rolepalying games, including innovative Dying Earth RPG based on the works of Jack Vance, and the GUMSHOE investigative ruleset which is the basis of Trail of Cthulhu, Esoterrorists and Mutant City Blues. Find out more at our website.

About SmiteWorks
SmiteWorks USA, LLC is best known for producing the Fantasy Grounds II virtual tabletop application. There are currently more than 17,000 active licenses sold for Fantasy Grounds and there is a vibrant and active community at www.fantasygrounds.com . The Fantasy Grounds program provides a basic online role-playing framework, with both commercial and fan-made rulesets specific to a number of different role-playing games.

Check out the Fantasy Grounds website for more information.

So, what do you think?

We are looking for volunteers to test a browser-based GUMSHOE character generator. It works with Trail of Cthulhu and Esterrorists.

Please email simon@dyingearth.com, subject Character Generator if you are interested.

The RPG Countdown podcast is the network chart of rpg popularity, measuring weekly sales on One Book Shelf  (rpgnow.com and dtrpg.com). Rough Magicks and Trail of Cthulhu both have a second appearance in the charts, partly due to the very succesful 15% sale we had last week. Ken talks about both products. This is worth listening to because Ken is so self-effacing when talking about Trail, you might even think he was Canadian.

0:46 Rough Magicks

4:10 Trail of Cthulhu

Watchers in the Sky, the new Purist adventure from Graham Walmsley is out now on the Pelgrane Store.

A decade ago, a band of occult investigators battled against the summoning of an ancient and monstrous evil.

They failed.

Now, you must piece together what went wrong. Investigate ancient crypts, abandoned estates, and festering slums. Explore choked jungles and the crushed psyches of your predecessors. Follow in their footprints and make new ones of your own. This time, there won’t be another chance.

The world is yours to save… or lose

A massive new campaign for Trail of Cthulhu by Will Hindmarch and Jeff Tidball

Status: Planning

We are looking for playtesters for Ken Hite’s Book-Hounds of London. Please email me, simon@dyingearth.com, subject Book-hounds playtest if you’d like to participate.

Edit: Playtesting closed

All of our GUMSHOE PDF products are on sale over at rpgnow.com at a 15% discount until 19th March. Our average rating over 22 reviews is over 4 out of 5. So that’s Trail of Cthulhu, Mutant City Blues, Esoterrorists and Fear Itself. Get them while you can!

Will Hindmarch is blogging about the development of the post-apocalyptic GUMSHOE game Razed, and Bill White is discussing New World, a game about colonisation, here.

This is your chance to give encouragement and feedback to the designers, and even do so some playtesting further down the line. Do drop by and leave a comment.

It’s nearly ready:

Bill White talking about the forthcoming “New World”

I am pulling together some ideas for a role-playing game to be called The New World. It will be a colonization game, but it will the antithesis of games like Civilization IV and those of its ilk, which read history as a story of constant technological progress and civil advancement. I’m going to borrow from places like Jared Diamond’s Collapse and recent ethnohistorical accounts of pre-Columbian and early post-contact America to write a game that’s about a “New World” that emerges at the intersection of multiple “Old Worlds,” European, African, and Native American. I’ll rely on the notion that, in the early days at least, many colonies failed, with survivors returning home or making new homes in native societies. I have this vision of the game playing out in five-year turns against a backdrop of societies on both sides of the Atlantic under different levels of stress of one sort or another, with your role-playing of significant moments for your character within that turn serving to exemplify, embody or instantiate (um, represent and resolve) the larger socio-political and economic changes.

So over the course of the game, your character can be shipwrecked, go native, return home, accompany an expedition back to the “New World,” and die in a massacre, and that will represent the trends in the larger narrative at hand–trends which don’t necessarily map on to teleological narratives of American history (e.g., Manifest Destiny), but which should be fun to explore.

We are running a PDF sale over on Steve Jackson Games digital store . You can get 15% off all GUMSHOE games. The sale ends on 1st March.

Get your GUMSHOE PDFs here.

We’ve given our website a facelift. As well as the new look, you will find details of our latest release for Trail of Cthulhu, The Armitage Files.

Take a look around and let us know what else you’d like to see on the website. We often announce new products, so keep checking back to see what’s coming out soon.

Courtesy of Jerome, there is now a  selection of Trail of Cthulhu wallpapers in the resource section of the website.

Armitage files is in layout. The cover:

Sarah has finished work on the documents for the Armitage Files, which look amazing.
Here is a sample:

ProFantasy and Pelgrane Press will be there at Dragonmeet on Saturday at Kensington Town Hall.

There’ll be special offers, games to play, new releases and Robin Laws will be available to sign books and chat.

Will you be there?

I’ve got five delightful new Pelgrane Press projects to announce.

Jason Morningstar, best known as creator of of the Shab-Al-Hiri Roach, is writing a Trail of Cthulhu adventure called The Black Drop.

Something slowly gathers strength beneath the frozen basalt of the remote Kerguelen archipelago – a monstrous thing once worshipped and then betrayed, a terrible god from the antediluvian past. It’s time has come again, and mysterious forces gather. Will they usher in its rebirth – or put an end to it forever?

Castle Bravo, a Purist Trail of Cthulhu adventure set in the Atomic Age, is being written by Bill White, who wrote the excellent Ganakagok. It is approaching playtestable form.

The Investigators are sailors and scientists deployed aboard the USS Bairoko to the South Pacific as part of Joint Task Force One to participate in a series of secret thermonuclear test shots in the Bikini atoll called Operation Castle. After the first detonation, the PCs will have more than just radiation to fear…

Bill is also designing a complete stand-alone game, code name New World, it is inspired in part by Jared Diamond’s work. The PC are in a colony at a crisis point and confront the combination of their cultural mores and limited resources in an alien environment.

Robin D Laws will be creating an SF iteration of GUMSHOE, as yet untitled.