I was about to write up an article about the weird, quasi-Venician city of Tyros Ashem in the upcoming Paragon Blade setting, but we’ve also got the weird quasi-Venician city of Eversink in Swords of the Serpentine, and the less-Venician-but-even-weirder city of Drakkenhall in 13th Age (doge? No, no, Dragon), which triggered two thoughts in […]
Author Archives: Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan
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Various Pelgranes have written mini-posts inspired by a different filtered image of a mysterious man in a suit of nails. Gareth’s contribution is a scenario hook for Fear Itself. We received a request to reset your password. If this wasn’t you, you can safely ignore this email. If this wasn’t you… What if it was? […]
Of all GUMSHOE abilities, perhaps the most confusing is Forensic Etymology. Wait, no, it’s Bullshit Detector. Or Assess Honesty in the more genteel environs of Trail, or Liar’s Tell in Swords. The tell-when-they’re-lying ability. The customary use of Bullshit Detector is to confirm when a witness is being truthful so the investigators don’t need to […]
The classic murder mystery: a bunch of eccentrics gather, often at a remote house or other confined location, and then – thump! One of them’s murdered. In most roleplaying scenarios, red herrings aren’t needed. The classic advice is that the players create enough confusion as they maraud and blunder towards a conclusion that adding distractions […]
Sorcery, of course, is forbidden in the Empire of Hekte, one of the key lands in The Paragon Blade. They will not forget the horrors and evils unleashed by the demonologists of the Hellbound Empire. Only Imperial bondsmages, carefully monitored and suitably restrained, are allowed work magic under the watchful eyes of the Bureau of […]
It’s a staple of the detective genre that the heroic investigator picks up on some tiny clue, some inconsistency that unravels an otherwise perfect crime. They spot that only one dinner guest could have passed through the kitchen in the two-minute window to poison the bride’s champagne glass, or that the mystery turns on whose […]
The Agents in Night’s Black Agents are burned spies, out of favour with their former agencies, banished into the cold – but even a broken spy has uses. Smiley got called back from retirement all the time; unsanctioned operations call for unsanctioned assets. What sort of unofficial intel ops might your Agents get involved in […]
Player input into a game is a wonderful and multifaceted thing. It’s not just that it takes some of the burden of creativity off the GM (“I don’t know, you tell me who your character knows that’s an expert on Etruscan demonology”), it also gives the players a sense of investment and ownership, and gives […]
Window People Don’t think of it as a window. Call it a frame of reference. A portal. A discontinuity. We are not you. The Window People are seen only tangentially. You’ve seen them from a moving train, glimpsed them while driving, out of the corner of your eye. Strange almost-people, ungainly and spindly, doing strange […]
It’s been a while since I’ve written one of these Page XX pieces. In the intervening months, I’ve been working on a whole host of different adventures, ranging from classic Cthulhu mythos to epic fantasy to political drama to different flavours of weirdness. As part of the process of adventure writing, there are ten questions […]