View From the Pelgrane’s Nest – April 2024

I’m delighted to start off with a shout-out to our  estimable Patreon backers! Thanks to Peter, Bryan, Clark, Jim, Emma, Craig, Phil, Bryant, P. Troilus, Michael M, ScottKey, Michael B, Andreas, Ranting John, Samwise, Michael H, Andy, Mark R, Daniel F, Jiří K, heartdoc32, Marcus, and Cena!!

NEW RELEASE: The Ocean Game pre-order

Way, way back in the mists of time, Dave Allsop, the author of our not-content-warning’ed-enough Book of Unremitting Horror, wrote up some text about the Ocean Game which is horrifying, out there, and perfect Fear Itself material. We’ve been trying to work out how best to use this text ever since, and as we were preparing the second edition of Fear Itself, we decided to do an adventure collection that incorporated it.

Regular readers will know that we published Fear Itself 2e in 2016, so it’s been a while in the hatchery, but it’s finally on pre-order. The Ocean Game is setting material for Fear Itself, in which the PCs become Players of the Ocean Game, exploring a nightmare world of monsters and psychological torment. As well as providing all the background material you need to include Ocean Game horror in your Fear Itself or even The Esoterrorists campaign, it also includes new creatures of unremitting horror, new antagonists, new factions of the hidden world, and four scenarios, which can be used as the basis for an Ocean Game campaign, or you can use three of them as stand-alone Fear Itself adventures.

Stop press: The amazing Dean Englehardt, the handout genius behind the print Hawkins Papers, is on board to create a Trenker Diary, which will be a bonus PDF download available at around the same time as the print book is done. I’m both excited and scared to see it! (I said this about Your Dead Eyes My Mirror last month, and I’ll repeat it for this – The Ocean Game won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, and contains explicit depictions of violence and other content that some players may find disturbing, so use your safety tools, GMs!)

WORK IN PROGRESS UPDATE: 13th Age Second Edition

This month is going to be 13th April! There’s so much going on behind the scenes. Rob has now finalised Lee’s cover art, and we’ve got a preview document ready to be shared! Over on DriveThruRPG, we’ve launched the Roll20 VTT version of Wade Rockett’s excellent intro adventure, Crown of Axis (which you can pick up in a special bundle with the core book, the PDF, and the Quickstart Rules here. And if that tempts you to pick up a print copy as well, we’re offering a massive 50% off the 13th Age core book. Watch out for more big announcements about Second Edition, and the Kickstarter in May, coming in the next few weeks!

WORK IN PROGRESS UPDATE: Mutant City Blues becomes part of the GUMSHOE Community

The GUMSHOE Community program over on DriveThruRPG has seen a bunch of exciting new content for Ashen Stars, The Esoterrorists, Fear Itself, and TimeWatch. We intended to add Mutant City Blues to that line-up once we’d finished 2nd Edition, but we never got around to it. We’ve now rectified that, and as I type, our good friends at DTRPG are updating our documents to reflect the fact that Mutant City Blues is now included in the list of products you can unleash your creativity on in the playground of Community Content. You can download the layout files and some art assets for our GUMSHOE Community games here, and check out the guidelines and GUMSHOE writing style advice from Robin D. Laws here.

CONVENTIONS: Shadowcon 2024 – Barcelona

Next weekend, from April 12th to 14th, Shadowcon 2024 – the convention run by our estimable Spanish translatorsof The Esoterrorists and the Dracula Dossier, Shadowlands – will be taking place in Barcelona’s Palau Requesens. This is exciting enough but this year, the convention’s guests features not one; not two, but THREE Pelgrane Press writers – Robin D. Laws, Kenneth Hite, and Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan. So you better believe I’m packing my suitcase and heading over, too! The venue looks stunning, our boys are entertaining AF, and Barcelona is an amazing city, so this is one for your diaries!

Until next time,