View from the Pelgrane’s Nest – October 2025

A chill pervades the air here in Toronto, but our production pipeline is hot, hot, hot with fresh developments. Projects moving closer to you this month come swinging swords, waggling tentacles, or creeping their way through cozy parlors on sturdy, fur-topped feet.

In our biggest bit of news, 13^th Age 2^nd Edition print copies are currently shipping to our warehouses. On the electronic front, Cat has been wrangling its PDFs. As I write this, she is finalizing the files. By the time you read it, they may already be in Kickstarter backers’ bookshelves at the Pelgrane webstore.

Two other books have moved to print buying and will soon be rolling off presses:

• Page Turners, my game of interpersonal drama for one player and one GM, with scenarios by yours truly, Sarah “Sam” Saltiel, Wade Rocket and Ruth Tillman.

• Paragon Blade, Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan’s epic fantasy GUMSHOE One-2-One game, also for one player and one GM, in which your hero of skill and insight travels with trusty companion and wields an ancient artefact, solving the riddles of a broken world.

In its ongoing bid to establish a record speed between proposal and publication, Kenneth Hite’s Outside Entities, a sourcebook of gods and creatures too weird for the core Trail of Cthulhu 2^nd Edition, has been edited, with interior illustrations flooding in. Gasp now at M. Wayne Miller’s hissing, alien cover.

If you guessed that this depicts a Yakubian, you are either a master of Mythos minutiae, Ken, a victim of mind cube possession, or some combination of the three.

Gar’s Pillars Built on Sand campaign for Swords of the Serpentine is now undergoing art direction. Its playtest attracted a staggering throng of stalwart feedback providers. Gar has incorporated their experiences at the table into a revised draft, which is now on my desk, in all of its decadent, labyrinthine majesty.

Tristan Zimmerman’s, Ballad Hunters, the GUMSHOE Labs game of a Regency-era struggle against an eerie phenomenon bringing folk songs to life, is likewise in art direction, with a quarter of its illustrations already in.

Those eagerly awaiting Gar’s Merryshire Detective Club will be pleased to hear that he has turned in his latest draft. This allows us to move it to playtesting at the beginning of 2026. It also frees him up to continue the game’s adventure anthology, The Dreadful Hare.

Speaking of writing, I have started a new project myself. We haven’t announced it yet, so all I can say is that I’m about a quarter of the way through the first draft, it takes me back to the haunted streets of 1895 Paris, and involves new design work for a type of roleplaying game Pelgrane hasn’t done before.

The above list covers only titles that shifted columns on my production map. Plenty of others bubble away in the background as our writers, illustrators, graphic designers, editors and publisher do their work.

Now if you’ll excuse me I have to check to see if a crocodile priest is menacing my inbox.

(Late breaking spoiler: my inbox did have a menacing crocodile priest in it.)