View from the Pelgrane’s Nest July 2025

Hey everybody, it’s writer and game designer Robin D. Laws. Now that I am also Creative Director here at Pelgrane Press custody of this column has been turned over to me. This is my first time stepping into the Pelgrane’s nest and I have to confess to feeling somewhat overwhelmed. The miscellaneous bones and bits of undigested hair strewn about its twig and straw flooring provide a constant reminder of the nest’s original and continuing inhabitant, the Great Pelgrane. He long ago gave up reading this web zine so I can confess to you that he is the one team member I have yet to fully integrate into my new work flow. I don’t know whether it’s his ancient pterosaur stabbing beak, his awful leathery wings, or the eloquence with which he shoots down perfectly good ideas, but he remains a test of my diplomatic skills. He’s even infiltrated my Zoom background.

At any rate, he’s slipped out for a moment to hunt for prey, leaving me time to get you up to date on our upcoming various titles and where they are in the freshly energized production pipeline.

First of all we have some exciting new books in the brainstorming and writing stages. As part of an effort to not have titles hanging in the ether for years, we’re going to wait longer before announcing them to you. We’ll be sure to trumpet them as they emerge from the mist into more solid form.

We can however announce a new Trail of Cthulhu book from Ken, Outside Entities. This bite-sized sourcebook (meaning that it will try to bite you; be careful about that we don’t have cosmic entity insurance) covers deities and creatures created by Lovecraft’s heirs with the inimitable Hitean verve you have come to depend on.

In the teaser department, we are well underway on the first title in our GUMSHOE Labs sub-line. GUMSHOE Labs becomes our home for designs that pull our core investigative system into new, cutting-edge shapes. We’ll let the extremely talented designer behind this title announce it, and himself, very soon. He might be strumming a guitar while he does it.

Our biggest scheduling milestone this month is that 13^th Age 2^nd Edition has completed layout and is headed to print. Designer and project lead Rob Heinsoo has heroically wrangled all aspects of this intensive, detail-rich project, earning several levels and at least one talking sword along the way. It is already helping him write notes for his famous black book. Publisher and previous nest occupant Cat Tobin is working with the printer to tune all the dials and twist all the knobs. Or maybe fix up the high-res PDFs; that’s not my department.

Page Turners, my game of dramatic interaction for one player and one GM, featuring scenarios by Wade Rockett, Sarah Saltiel, Ruth Tillman, is deep in the layout phase, as masterminded by the brilliant Jen McLeary.

Paragon Blade, Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan’s magical, mighty-thewed application of GUMSHOE One-2-One to the high fantasy genre, has completed main layout, leaving only such essential finishing touches as appendices and indexing.

Our friends at Shadowlands have turned in their creepy, high-impact layout for Gar’s Ocean Game campaign frame for Fear Itself. Once you see it, it will really get its hooks into you. Or if not you, the player characters.

Cassilda’s Song, my blockbuster mega-campaign for The Yellow King Roleplaying Game, is now in the illustration stage, with the Shadowlands art crew joining familiar YKRPG stalwart Dean Engelhardt and his masterfully detourned documents to make this as beautiful to look at as it will be heavy to heft in one hand.

Boundary of the Darkness, the breathlessly anticipated pair of Trail of Cthulhu campaign frames set in 1770s England from Philip Masters and Sarah Saltiel, has just wrapped playtesting and will be moving on to revisions based on that feedback. Its illustrations are already rolling in.

Gar’s twisty, spectacular Swords of the Serpentine campaign Pillars Built on Sand is now playtesting.

On the writing front, I have reached the revision pass stage on Hamlet’s GM Screen. The first book in the Gameplaywright line to debut in its new Pelgrane era, it follows up on the number one request from readers of Hamlet’s Hit Points, for directly actionable techniques applying its beat analysis system to hallmark moments at the gaming table.

Among my first acts as Creative Director was to demand more, more, more, of Gar’s work-in-progress, still untitled halfling sleuth GUMSHOE game. I’ve played it and it’s a pure delight of undiluted Hanrahanitude. He is hard at work expanding it to full core book size, with a scenario anthology hard on its unshod footsteps.

I look forward to updating you on the progress of the above, and letting the beans spill on other titles now in their early stages, in the months to come. But now I have to vacate the nest. I hear the Great Pelgrane flapping his way back here, and I hate to watch monstrous figureheads eat.