Doing the Reading The three Agents meet in an inn. Well, a country pub – the Suicide’s Rest, just outside Whitby, where Hopkins has arranged to meet them. As soon as they arrive in town, they can tell something’s wrong. There’s a bad energy in the air (Streetwise); too many spooky figures lurking in alleyways, […]
Author Archives: Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan
Weekend at Dracula’s At Gaelcon, I ran five sessions of the Dracula Dossier campaign in the longcon format. I’m not the first to try cramming the monster into a weekend: Steve Ellis blazed the trail there. This article is half convention report, and half general advice for those brave souls who want to try following […]
Fear Itself 2nd Edition introduces the concept of an Escape Pool (p. 70), a set of rules for fleeing a horrific situation instead of following the trail of clues into the darkness. It’s a simple idea – the player characters build up a pool of points by discovering clues, spending investigative ability points, and passing […]
GUMSHOE is the rules engine used in many of Evil Pelgrane’s products, from The Esoterrorists to Trail of Cthulhu to our newest (evil) release, Timewatch. (GUMSHOE is capitalised because it’s an acronym – Generic Universal Mechanic Serving Henchmen Of Evil Why else would it be all-caps?). It’s 10 years old this year, so let’s take […]
A Dispatch From Cthulhu City. Cults are a major part of Cthulhu City. The setting mashes Arkham, Dunwich, Innsmouth and Kingport together with the Mythos’ other great cities – the City of the Elder Things, the City of Pillars, Carcosa, Pnakatos, Rlyeh, the Marvellous Sunset City of the Dreamland – and each of those cities […]
The streets here are a concrete labyrinth. I try to go one block east, towards the ocean, and find myself crossing another bridge over the grey waters of the Miskatonic, and I’m back on the north side of the city, climbing up towards the civic monstrosity that squats atop Sentinel Hill. Transport Police, their faces […]
Dracula Unredacted is many things. Weighty, certainly. Terrifying, possibly. (Brilliant, modestly.) Welcoming – not necessarily . Now, you may be blessed with players who are already avid Dracula fans, or players who are salivating at the thought of all that delicious cross-referencing and speculating, in which case they’ll happily devour the World’s Biggest Campaign Handout and ask […]
The revised edition of Fear Itself offers a toolkit approach to building campaigns. Let’s use that toolkit to build that hoary staple of the horror roleplaying genre – a zombie apocalypse. One-shot zombie games tend to be extended exercises of combat-and-running (brainless, or braaaaiiins-full fun, so to speak), so let’s tackle the more interesting question […]
Most roleplaying games have some sort of diminishing resource that limits the player character’s ability to keep going. The commonest example are hit points and similar measures of health – if you’re running low on hit points, you need to stop and heal up. F20 games like 13th Age also treat some of your characters’ […]
Many years ago – the fabled year of 2003, or so – I wrote a largely forgotten book called OGL Horror for Mongoose Publishing. It was designed to be a toolkit for running modern-day horror games, using (somewhat awkwardly) the d20 system. As it was based on the Open Gaming Licence, Pelgrane was able to […]