View from the Pelgrane Nest – Jack O Lantern Edition

In October, home of Halloween, we dedicate ourselves to horror and assuming new identities. In other words, the patron month of tabletop roleplaying has arrived. I don’t even have to wait until the Great Pelgrane leaves his nest to deliver the latest news from the press that bears his name, as he is happily carving pumpkins with his razor-sharp beak.

What news could be more seasonally appropriate than the arrival of the three print books from the Fear Itself: Shattered Veil campaign? The core game, Book of Unremitting Horror, and the Ocean Game have torn their way out of their shipping boxes to leapt into backers’ hands. Distributors have them and are shipping them to retailers. If your otherwise friendly favorite game store clerk has been reduced to febrile gibbering, you know what happened. Sever their connection with the Outer Dark by picking the books up at a brick and mortar, or obey Ordo Veritatis policy by ordering them from our web store.

Speaking of eldritch terrors from beyond, Trail of Cthulhu 2^nd Edition, the Enlightenment-era sourcebook Boundary of the Darkness, and revised scenario Kingsbury Horror have hit the print buying stage. Non-Euclidean link formatting issues in the core books require some attention for the consumer PDF, but that won’t delay printing.

Hamlet’s GM Screen, my book of actionable GM advice drawn from a beat-by-beat look at classic gaming table moments, has a print date at the end of October. It ships to pre-orderers first. They get the PDF now; conversion to EPUB is underway.

On the 13^th Age front, Rob Heinsoo has been prepping books for crowdfunding. Prophet of the Pyre goes into editing next week. Rob has been performing design cleanup on key chapters from Iconic Adversaries, with special attention given to the Archmage and Crusader chapters.

A first wave of scenarios for The Dreadful Hare, the Merryshire Detective Club anthology, have wrapped testing. Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, Kevin Kulp and I will then revise them based on the feedback provided to us by our intrepid testers.

Images for Cassilda’s Song continue to come in, courtesy of our friends at Shadowlands and their brilliant illustrator, Kisama. A fresh creepy, atmospheric set of images for The Wars segment of this epic campaign surfaced in our inboxes the other day and we are almost recovered from them.

Since it’s Halloween I feel compelled to announce a new horror project. Hunger Awakes fills a curiously open slot in our Trail of Cthulhu line. We have plenty of great scenario anthologies keyed to specific themes ranging from pulp adventure to 30s horror films, from detective thrills to global travel. What we lack is a series of baseline scenarios that can fit into any campaign, as your second to fifth adventures after you run the intro in the book. Fusing 30s history with Mythos investigation Hunger Awakes delivers the hallmarks of Trail.

Each takes inspiration from a historical event ripped from the annals of 1931.

In Dean Engelhardt’s The Hunger Awakes, the fear of starvation turns palpable in an Arkham neighborhood as the investigators sense a need for flesh that can’t be satiated.

The Electric Destiny of Francis Crowley (Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan): the investigators are on the scene when the crime spree of a 19-year old killer nicknamed Two Gun ends in a spectacular gun battle with police. Little do they expect to be drawn further into the case when the District Attorney finds a curious manuscript stashed among the baby-faced killer’s meager possessions.

The Light Over the Tracks (Heather Albano): Residents of Gurdon, Arkansas report a strange glow bobbing over the tracks of the Missouri-Pacific Railroad as they twist into a darkling wood. Is it the ghost of a murdered or decapitated brakeman? Now steeped in the ways of the Mythos, the investigators realize something much worse must be afoot.

The Face in the Billows (Jim McCarthy): as residents of Boise City, Oklahoma flee that new destructive force, the dust bowl, your investigators plunge toward its swirling heart, drawn by deathless vestiges of the snake cult.

The scenarios will go to playtest late in 2026.

That’s enough Halloween treats. Now for the terrifying trick: we have temporarily closed our webstore for customers outside the US and Canada as we switch to a new shipping company.

Projects not listed here remain in their previously mentioned stages of production. As always you can monitor the current status of all announced projects here.