View from the Pelgrane’s Nest – Summer is Gaming Season Edition

The Great Pelgrane just flapped away, wearing his sunglasses and exhibitor’s badge, so it’s safe to talk to you again.

As a Torontonian I’m used to sudden shifts from winter to summer, so I shouldn’t be surprised to see that it’s convention season already. Cat, Gar, Ibrahim, and Ken C have returned from an ever-expanding Games Expo UK re-energized and excited to have met the people who play our games.

Although with the hobby’s explosive growth, summer is no longer the only season for game conventions, it remains the one where the largest numbers of tabletoppers assemble at the biggest events. As everyone polishes off their dice and orders their rpg-themed T-shirts, we’re happy that we’ll have brand new games and products to heap before them wherever we exhibit.

Paragon Blade flew off the table at Games Expo and can be picked up from our web store or a discerning retailer near you. Fantasy master Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan gives one GM and one player all they need to launch intense, thrilling sword and sorcery adventures using the GUMSHOE One-2-One system. Find your trusty companion, remember to pack your archaic artifact, and use your heroic prowess to solve mysteries in a realm of magic and danger.

Also available from all outlets, Page Turners does interpersonal drama for one player and one GM. The game design, by yours truly, follows in Hillfolk’s footsteps to build character-driven narratives driven by strong protagonists. Scenarios by Wade Rockett, Sarah “Sam” Saltiel, Ruth Tillman and myself run the gamut from screwball comedy to Jane Austen wit, from doomed vampire romance to intergenerational robot civilization-building.

If you haven’t snagged it yet, you’ll also want to treat yourself to 13^th Age Second Edition. Available in the combined 13th Age Second Edition Slipcase or separately as the 13^th Age Heroes’ Handbook and 13^th Age Game Master’s Guide. Rob Heinsoo and Jonathan Tweet have made their streamlined and imaginative take on F20 gaming even more of both in this gorgeous new version.

By the time convention season is over we’ll have more books to pile onto our table in the notional or actual exhibit hall.

The three books of the Fear Itself: Shattered Veil Edition are in the print buying stage. New viscerally visual versions of the Fear Itself core game and The Book of Unremitting Horror are joined by Gar’s horrific liminal horror campaign, The Ocean Game.

Speaking of Gar, campaigns, and going to print, we’re giving his Swords of the Serpentine book Pillars Built on Sand a few tweaks inspired by feedback from the alpha PDF release before the presses roll. Intrigue, mayhem, fighting pits, a masked vigilante and the wedding of the year all await you in this journey into swashbuckling mystery, pulled off with the usual Hanrahan panache.

Hamlet’s GM Screen, my book of beat-by-beat actionable GM advice, a follow-up to the perennially popular Hamlet’s Hit Points, is also in print buying and will release in our web store in July. It grants the most common request from readers of HHP, for specific advice on bringing its storytelling insight to the gaming table. From session zero to the total party kill, emotional moments lie behind every tabletop event, and this book maps them out for you.

Trail of Cthulhu 2^nd Edition needs to clear the very last of its layout hurdles before Cat sends PDFs to backers and places its print order. Chief among these is its character sheet. Once we have that we’ll also be able to move on the last element needed to fully wrap Philip Masters’ and Sarah “Sam” Saltiel’s Enlightenment-era sourcebook, Boundary of the Darkness. The digital-0nly revised version of The Kingsbury Horror adventure is also in last stage layout.

Not part of the Trail 2E package, but in production alongside these items, Outside Entities, Kenneth Hite’s book of obscure and outsider gods and monsters, is also in the last blandishment stage of layout.

All of the art is now in for Merryshire Detective Club, Gar’s delightful game of halfling sleuthing and cozy murder. We’re busy prepping it for its imminent crowdfunding campaign, including a preview document showcasing its graphic design. I’m running my own Merryshire campaign right now and having a blast, laying the groundwork for a few contributions from me to its accompanying scenario anthology, The Dreadful Hare. Fellow halfling enthusiast Kevin Kulp has also jumped in and is already running in-house tests of his scenario for that book.

Fresh from its recent Kickstarter, Ballad Hunters has all of its needed elements in hand and is in layout.

Our friends at Shadowlands continue to turn in evocative full-page illustrations for Cassilda’s Song, my Yellow King mega-campaign. They just wrapped the Paris book and I can’t wait to see what bizarre horrors they deliver for The Wars.

When I signed on as Creative Director a little more than a year ago I made several vows to the implacable gods of tabletop. I’ve already mentioned the main one: to shorten the gap between product announcements and publication by waiting until projects are well underway before talking about them.

Now we’ve reached the point where I’m willing to make some new announcements.

You’ll have noticed the first of these if you’re closely watching our playtesting calls. GMs often ask us which of our scenarios work best as one-shots, leading me to think that an untapped demand exists for adventures to run at cons or as pick up games. I’m testing this with a series of one-shot anthologies. The first of these is Sudden Frights, a scenario anthology for Fear Itself, a simple iteration of GUMSHOE amply suited for convention play. Each scenario comes with its own tailored set of pregenerated characters and a blurb for you to cut and paste into the sign-up platform. All of the scenarios are written, some have been playtested and revised, and others are in playtest now. Writer / designers Emily Cambias, Carlos Gabae, Thomas Pugh, Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, and Tristan Zimmerman take on a wide range of terror sub-genres, from installation horror to the Gothic.

Another ambitious new project has now hopped stages columns from writing to ready for playtest. It’s a new game by me, and by ambitious I mean “extremely challenging to figure out and even tougher to execute.” Meeting overwhelming demand, our first GUMSHOE solo game is now on the production schedule! The Untitled Solo Yellow King Project falls in the middle of the spectrum between old school chosen-adventure and new school journaling prompter. You play an art student in 1895 drawn by your concern for a classmate into a Carcosan conspiracy, adding the emotional throughline to a classic occult mystery in the Robert W. Chambers mold. Not to give too much away, but it looks like this:

(At first I wrote Untitled Yellow King Solo Project, but that sounds too much like the Pallid One has finally broken away from his bandmates to turn in his long-gestating prog rock album.)

Having spilled those black star beans, it’s time to pick up the spyglass and peer into the distant Oubliette of the Wyrm, where toils 13^th Age auteur Rob Heinsoo. Let’s see what he has to report:

 

Ready now, a two-hour freeform adventure, available here on the Pelgrane site. This 15-page adventure gives the GM tools to respond to what the players create for their heroes’ backgrounds and uniques. The freeform adventure uses 2^nd level pre-generated characters that are also available on the 13^th Age resource pages.

There will be more 2^nd level pre-gens up soon, notably when we have finished the starter set’s 1^st level heroes and bump them all up a level! The starter set character sheets aren’t just normal sheets with the stats added. They provide mechanically simple heroes with fully described powers and spells and even some choices. As a sample of the approach, here’s Miguel Friginal’s current version of the 1^st level dwarf barbarian sheet.

The 13^th Age Starter Set rules are finished except for pieces that intersect with the new character sheets and components that aren’t settled yet. I’ve mostly-finished a post-playtest revision of the starter adventure, though it also requires finishing touches like math adjustments and maps.

Meanwhile on the Bestiary 3: Icon Followers project, May was Priestess Month. Steven Warzeha drafted monster-style writeups of around 50 NPCs devoted to the speaker for the gods of light.

Finally, Gareth’s Prophet of the Pyre passed a milestone. It’s now through development, ready for editing, and has begun its art process, starting with a cover painted entirely by Lee Moyer. Lee often paints over other artists’ pencils but this time he’s doing it himself. I think his cover-rough is astonishing but he made me promise not to show it off yet.

We thank Rob as always for his updates, delivered under the constant gaze of an allegedly benevolent draconic entity notorious for dishing out demerit points for the tiniest infraction.

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

 

Hamlet’s GM Screen cover illustration by Will Hindmarch

Mordiggian from Outside Entities by Rei Zerñan T. Penaflor

Natural Historian from Merryshire Detective Club by Jennifer S. Lange