View From the Pelgrane’s Nest – March 2023

First off, a massive THANK YOU to our Patreon backers, Charles Paradis, Peter Nix, Bryan, Clark Olson-Smith, Jim McCarthy, Emma Marlow, Craig Maloney, Vivienne Dunstan, Phil LaDouceur, Michael Knowles, S. Go, P. Troilus, Michael Maneval, ScottKey, Michael Bowman, Todd W Crone and Andreas Meier!

NEW RELEASE: Message in a Bottle

In early 2021, GUMSHOE designers Robin D. Laws, Kenneth Hite, and Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan came together for an online mystery scenario design workshop using The Yellow King Roleplaying Game as a framing mechanism. (ICYMI, you can watch that workshop on our YouTube channel). Gareth, as is his wont, agreed to write up the adventure the three co-designed during the workshop, and Message in a Bottle is the result of that write-up.

Message in a Bottle is a one-shot adventure for the This Is Normal Now setting for The Yellow King RPG. The health of the player characters’ old friend, Preston Price, has degenerated, due to a singularly-focused obsession. His concerned wife Rosa asks the PCs to investigate, leading them to a trail of cryptic messages in absinthe bottles. This PDF adventure is available now.

Gen Con RPG submission deadline looms!

It was Saturday March 11th, but we can still add late submissions – the earlier you can get us the details, the better! If you’re interested in running Pelgrane Press games at Gen Con, email us (gamemasters@pelgranepress.com) today! (All the details are in this post).

VTT update

13th Age is the kind of game that really benefits from the mechanics and visualisation tools provided by virtual tabletops (VTTs). Ellen Abolt’s been working hard behind the scenes to give Toolkit 13, the fan-created 13th Age content on Foundry VTT, the bump it needed to gain “offical” status, and it’s finally ready to go! She breaks down the details in her announcement post, which you can read here.

13th Age Community icons art

We love when people play our games, but we’re particularly thrilled when our community is so enthusiastic and excited about our games that they want to create their own content for them! The 13th Age third-party publishing community is particularly active, and Tim Baker of Escalation fanzine, has kindly put together a short explanatory post about the icons the third-party community voted to serve as the Community Icons, available as Open Game Content under the OGL, and the new illustrations we’ve commissioned for them.

Speaking of art…

Some of the Pelgrane team have been playing around with AI art generators since they first appeared on the scene a few years back. We’ve used various platforms to illustrate website articles, but I think it’s fair to say that the output made a significant leap with the release of MidJourney, DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. There’s been a lot of debate online about the ethics of AI art, as well as within our little Nest here. After some discussion, we’ve made the decision to use Stable Diffusion-generated art for Legions of Carcosa: The Yellow King RPG Bestiary, because that style of uncanny, reality-tweaked, not-quite-right art is a perfect fit for the off-ness of the Carcosan influence. Robin has a thoughtful and nuanced take on our reasoning behind this experiment in this post.