View from the Pelgrane’s Nest – Grab Your Blade Edition

As the saying goes, April showers bring long-awaited May releases. Proving that this month is Paragon Blade. Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan’s high fantasy GUMSHOE One-2-One casts a lone player character into the evil-scarred remnants of the Hellbound Empire. Play a rugged barbarian, secret user of magic, or shadow-dwelling thief. Investigate conspiratorial wizards, tussle with monstrous foes, and engage in arcane intrigue. Rely on your trusty companion, your relic of terrible power, and your own brains and sinews. Combine the intensity of head to head play with the classic tropes of the genre that started the roleplaying form, all with the GRH flair you know and love.

The curtain has just fallen on the Ballad Hunters Kickstarter. Defying the usual pattern, to the accompaniment of guitars and upraised voices, it caught a late-breaking tail wind, whooshing past a passel of stretch goals. If you couldn’t take part in the campaign, you can still jump on board now that it has moved to Backerkit. Folk songs are coming dangerously to life on the gritty side of the Regency era, and only your intrepid Investigators can use their magical compasses to combat the strange supernatural outbreak. Check it out to see how brilliant designer Tristan Zimmerman bends GUMSHOE into an intriguing and unexpected shape.

With our production stream unjamming, we now have the high-class problem of keeping focus on multiple games that have come out in quick succession. Page Turners, my game of dramatic interaction for one player and one GM, arrived in retail last month. Create powerfully emotional or uproarious narratives that feel like novels, plays, and films featuring a single protagonist, playing scenarios by Wade Rockett, Sarah “Sam” Saltiel, Ruth Tillman, and yours truly. Genres and references range from Jane Austen to F. Scott Fitzgerald, from doomed vampire love to behind the music drama in the L.A. punk scene.

For fast-moving, story-forward trad thrills, 13^th Age Second Edition, can also be found in retail and the Pelgrane webstore. Acquire it separately as the 13^th Age Game Master’s Guide and 13^th Age Heroes’ Handbook, or combine them with the convenient and gorgeous 13th Age Second Edition Slipcase. See below for what’s cooking behind the scenes.

The three books that make up the Fear Itself: Shattered Veil Edition package have reached the print buying stage. As she lines up printers in the US and Europe, Cat has been performing last minute tweaks on the layout. I presume that she will warn the nice folks working the presses to avert their gaze from the Outer Dark, neither encountering the awful entities in The Book of Unremitting Horror or getting pulled into the Ocean Game, as featured in Gar’s mind-bending book of linked scenarios.

2026 has become the year of Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, both here and in his ever-growing fiction career. His Swords of the Serpentine campaign, Pillars Built on Sand, is fully laid out and the next in the queue for printing. Get ready to track a masked vigilante, survive a fighting arena, and attend a wedding that can’t possibly end in a titanic confrontation. We’ve just opened the pre-order, which will get you the PDF immediately.

Another book, also fully laid out and ready for its trip to the printers, nips studiously at its heels. Hamlet’s GM Screen, my sequel to Hamlet’s Hit Points, acts on the demand most readers had of that book by providing actionable GM advice arising from moment-by-moment breakdown of classic ttrpg interactions. Up your game by mastering the emotional beats that power everything from session zero to scenario openings to the shocking surprises of a total party kill.

We continue our push to assemble Trail of Cthulhu 2^nd Edition. The maps are all in, as are the illustrations. A last few layout elements, including refinement of the character sheet, remain. Ken has descended into the page reference mines to create indexes for both volumes, making sure all tomes and nameless blasphemies have been correlated with their page numbers. When the character sheet is locked down we can complete its counterpart for Boundary of the Darkness, the Georgian England Enlightenment-era sourcebook by Phil Masters and Sarah “Sam” Saltiel. Then we’ll be printer ready on it as well.

Although not part of the crowdfunded package, we’re prepping Outside Entities, Kenneth Hite’s book of extra weird Mythos gods and monsters, as part of the process. It continues to enjoy its status as our most ahead-of-schedule book.

We’re reopening playtests for two scenarios for Sudden Frights, a collection of one-shot scenarios for Fear Itself. “Milk Teeth” by Emily Cambias confronts its teen heroes with a thirsty spirit of vengeance. Gar’s “Faust Blood” puts a parasitic cultist spin on the classic endangered campers trope. Help us with either or both by following the instructions on the call for testers.

On the 13^th Age front, Rob Heinsoo continues to focus on the Starter Set and the Bestiary 3: Icon Followers book. I sent a message to the oubliette where the Great Gold Wyrm keeps him toiling, and was rewarded with a cover reveal. Take it away, Rob:

Most progress this month was on the 13^th Age Starter Set and Bestiary 3: Icon Followers. A couple months ago we ran a poll asking who should be on the cover of Bestiary 3 and now we’ve got the results, as penciled by Aaron McConnell and painted by Lee Moyer! The bulette clan berserker on the right is pretty much as initially conceived, but the other cover creatures enjoyed some character development. The ‘three-headed dragonic sorcerer’ didn’t pass muster with Lee, who knows that humanoids with too many heads look worse and worse. So I kept the three heads but made two of them into ectoplasmic spirits—one head with shoulders, three heads for spellcasting! On his own, Aaron took the ‘hedge wizard in a flying rocking chair’ concept and up-gunned her into what will prove to be an emancipated cat-familiar of the original hedge wizard, still in the Archmage chapter but a tier or two higher up the stats. And grounding the composition, it’s the Imperial tax golem, which went from a critter that looked too much like an imperial walker to something that’s a lot more like a four-legged armored truck.

As always, for updates on the entire announced production stream, head over to our status page, updated as news comes in.

Cursed Ruby from Paragon Blade by Chris Malidore

Logging Camp from Pillars Built on Sand by Rich Longmore

13^th Age Bestiary Cover by Aaron McConnell and Lee Moyer