News, See Page XX
See Page XX – June 2025
See Page XX: The Pelgrane Press webzine
June 2025 Edition
VIEW FROM PELGRANE’S NEST JULY 2025: Robin D. Laws’ July “View from the Pelgrane’s Nest” marks his first column as Creative Director, packed with production updates on titles from 13th Age 2E and Page Turners to Ken Hite’s Outside Entities, new GUMSHOE Labs projects, and more in-progress books across the Pelgrane line.
SWORDS OF THE SERPENTINE AS HIGH FANTASY: Kevin Kulp supplies optional rules to shift SotS into full high fantasy, adding new professions, divine miracles, and support for non-human heroes.
SEE PAGE XX: TAKE THE BALL: Robin D. Laws urges players to “take the ball” in any RPG session by spotting the current focus, picking it up, and actively advancing the story instead of letting play stall or drift.
SEE PAGE XX: CRITICAL SUCCESSES IN GUMSHOE: Robin D. Laws proposes a “save” option for GUMSHOE that converts surplus points from an over-powered success into a reserve the group can later spend to salvage another risky roll.
MASKS OF THE AFTERNOON: Robin D. Laws offers a Yellow King RPG scenario hook where university students, after an intro cinema course, experience Carcosan psychic displacements tied to haunting visions of the King in Yellow within classic experimental films.
THIS MONTH’S PREVIEW
Page Turners Preview: Constraints in Page Turners
Page Turners, the forthcoming game of dramatic interaction for one player and one GM, enables you to create a story that feels like a novel or a play. To help get you there, each scenario provides Constraints, a set of ground rules both participants absorb in advance. These storytelling guide rails ensure that you jointly create a reasonably coherent narrative that feels right for the genre and theme. They rarely tell you specifically what happens. Instead they mostly show what you should steer clear from to avoid disappointment when you reach the story’s conclusion.
In Store!
Hamlet’s Hit Points
Hamlet’s Hit Points presents a toolkit that helps make storytelling in any RPG easier and more fun by classifying story beats and letting you track their ups and downs from hope to fear and back.
ORDER NOW!Beating The Story
The most compelling stories move us emotionally. Up and down, between hope and fear, in ways we don’t always expect—but that you can harness as a writer, editor, and critic. This book shows you how to track, map, and understand the rhythm of a story. Whether you’re writing or rewriting, editing a manuscript or dismantling your favorite television episode, Beating the Story helps you understand how stories get hammered into shape.
ORDER NOW!
Friendly Local Game Store
Build the Store Your Community Deserves
Tabletop gaming is on the rise. If you love games like Catan, Magic: The Gathering, or Dungeons & Dragons; like the sound of being your own boss; and are willing to dive deep into what it takes to build a successful business, then this is a book for you.
ORDER NOWThe Bones: Us and Our Dice
The Bones gathers writing about fandom and family—about gamers, camaraderie, and memories— and ties them together where they meet: our dice. These are essays and anecdotes about the ways dice make us crazy, about the stakes we play for and the thrill we get from not knowing what the next roll will bring.
ORDER NOW!
Things We Think About Games
Will Hindmarch and Jeff Tidball think a lot about games. At their commentary website, Gameplaywright.net, they think out loud about what it means to play games, make games, sell games, and love games. They are gamers.
Here, with fellow game designers and notable game players, they think out loud on paper in the first Gameplaywright book.
ORDER NOWThe White Box Essays
The White Box is a learning, planning, and prototyping tool for tabletop game designers.
The White Box Essays is a book of 25 essays on game design and production. It covers subjects like where to find a great concept, how to use randomness, what to ask playtesters, whether you should self-publish, how to crowdfund wisely, and what to do at game conventions.
ORDER NOW!
Threat Profiles
This sourcebook for Night’s Black Agents does for vampires and their ilk what Hideous Creatures did for the Cthulhu Mythos, offering a ravening pack of new monsters as well as reinterpretations and variants of existing horrors to catch even experienced Agents off guard. Each threat’s write-up gives potential clues and investigative vectors, as well as a sample lair, potential minions, a Conspiramid node or three – and Vampyramid responses and tactics. Status: Being written.
Page Turners
First Edition is the game of personal storytelling for one player and one GM. Incorporating new rules by GUMSHOE One-2-One and DramaSystem designer Robin D. Laws, First Edition features an accessible framework for creating compelling solo protagonist narratives. STATUS: In Layout.
Cassilda’s Song
A massive scenario series by Robin D. Laws for The Yellow King Roleplaying Game, which spans all four of its core sequences.Its overarching plot turns on a contest between the two daughters of the King in Yellow, Cassilda and Camilla, who race with one another to destroy the timelines, winning the favor of their pallid father. Camilla seeks a cataclysm of blood and fire. Cassilda intends to dissolve reality into hallucinatory delirium. STATUS: Art is being commissioned.
A Poison Tree
A campaign for Trail of Cthulhu, a generational saga that spans the globe and 350 years of history as the players take on different roles across five chapters and three interludes. The campaign culminates in world-changing events in the present day, as the players correlate all of their findings, and decide on the destiny of humanity itself!A Poison Tree was originally conceived and written by Matthew Sanderson, Paul Fricker and Scott Dorward, and has been developed and updated by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan. STATUS: First draft manuscript done and in editing.
Boundary of the Darkness
The Lunar Society are a dining club of natural philosophers, industrialists, and radical intellectuals, the embodiment of the Enlightenment. They have wealth, knowledge, and principles. Simultaneously, members of the Bluestockings Society, who meet to discuss art, literature, and politics, have—in their most secret meetings—formed Friends of Blue, a private organisation set up to protect the world from the devastating knowledge of the Mythos. Boundary of the Darkness is an 18th century campaign frame for Trail of Cthulhu by Phil Masters and Sarah Saltiel. STATUS: In Playtest
Pillars Built On Sand
A ruthless cabal of power brokers and hidden cultists schemes to undermine Eversink’s divine blessing, its river-fed trade, and its promise that anyone can rise, shaking the city’s future to the mud beneath its canals. The campaign offers five tightly linked Swords of the Serpentine scenarios you can run in sequence for a full arc or lift as standalone adventures. STATUS: In Playtest
Crowdfunding News
Fear Itself: Shattered Veil Edition
We successfully funded a Gamefound campaign for Fear Itself: Shattered Veil Edition, featuring a hardback cover, improved art, and The Ocean Game expansion. Late pledges available!
Eternal Lies Reprint Crowdfunding
We’re excited to announce plans for a crowdfunding campaign to reprint Eternal Lies! This edition will feature exciting improvements, which we’ll reveal soon. While no exact date is set, we’re aiming for late August or early September. Stay tuned for more details!
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