Author Archives: Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan

Images of Unremitting Horrors

    (*** As a warning before you read on – some of these images are quite disturbing. They’re all entirely computer-generated, but still… they’re uncanny. ***)     I’ve been keeping an eye on neural nets and automated generation of content, in the manner of a fisherman keeping an eye on a storm front […]

Unseen Icons

My usual advice for handling iconic benefits in 13th Age is to push as much of the work as possible onto the players. The GM has enough to do running the game and playing all the monsters and non-player characters without adding the burden of working a random number of iconic associations into the storyline. […]

District Knowledges in Mutant City Blues

District Knowledges, used in the Station Duty campaign frame in The Esoterrorists and in Cthulhu City, are a special set of investigative abilities designed for use in games where a particular city is of paramount importance – and the city’s right there in the title in Mutant City Blues! The districts in your Mutant City […]

New Mutant Crimes

The advent of some mutant abilities has created whole new categories of criminality, while other powers are covered by existing laws. It’s still aggravated assault with a deadly weapon if you threaten someone with a sharp blade, even if you grew that blade yourself using your Natural Weapons ability. Some of the more obscure legal […]

General Kits for Aftermath & This Is Normal Now

Both Paris and The Wars feature General Kits: prepackaged sets of General Ability scores, so a player can just grab a General Kit, pair it with an Investigative Kit, and quickly come up with a character’s ability ratings. The other two settings, Aftermath and This Is Normal Now don’t include General Kits, on the assumption […]

The Zone Jaune

The Zone Jaune is a region in north-eastern Europe that was deemed “inhospitable to human life” in the wake of the Continental War. The widespread deployment of Carcosan ‘yellow science’, not to mention conventional artillery and chemical weapons, rendered the region – some 2,000 square kilometres of forest and former farmland – utterly hostile and […]

A Cthulhu Almanac

April 30th rolls ‘round again, season of doors and frightful manifestations. You may know it as Walpurgisnacht, the Witches’ Sabbath – at least according to poor Walter Gilman, the ill-fated protagonist of Dreams in the Witch House. Now he was praying because the Witches’ Sabbath was drawing near. May-Eve was Walpurgis-Night, when hell’s blackest evil […]

Interpersonal Reality Hacks

(For context, see the Reality Hacking rules) Interpersonal Hacks The Truth Will Out (Bullshit Detector): The target of this hack become violently, explosively ill should they attempt to utter a lie. If the victim’s lucky, it’s just vomiting. The hack’s effects last for a few minutes. Carbon Ghost (Bureaucracy): Given a set of personal documents […]

Technical Reality Hacks

(For context, see the Reality Hacking rules) Technical Hacks See The Membrane (Astronomy): This hack enables the Agent to judge local Membrane conditions by observing the stars. The Agent can tell how strong the Membrane is, and the safest direction back to ‘normal’ reality. Magic Bullet (Ballistics): Activate this hack after missing with a Firearms […]

Reality Hacks for the Esoterrorists

The Ordo Veritatis works to thwart the ghastly schemes of the Esoterrorists, who seek to undermine humanity’s sense of a rational, secure universe by playing on our fears and paranoias until reality collapses and the Membrane protecting us from the forces of the Outer Dark is forever torn. The Esoterrorists believe that destroying the Membrane […]

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