As I once more turn my hopeful eye upon The Dracula Dossier, digging back into things vampiric and espionagical, it occurs to me that it might be fun to wonder just who we talk about when we talk about Dracula. In The Dracula Dossier, every player knows going in that the Big Bad up on […]
Author Archives: Kenneth Hite
[Editorial Note: We’re trying out formats for city writeup PDFs, between this and next month’s Ken Writes About Stuff on Mumbai. Let us know in the comments how you’d like to see our city PDFs look going forward. This one, for example, resembles a more detailed version of the “Quick and Dirty” writeup from […]
Simon says I need to have grabbier headlines on these posts, so I went a little Buzzfeed up there. Hope you like it. The Call of Cthulhu 6th Edition corebook contains 38 monsters. I’m not including the Great Old Ones, Outer Gods, or such, just monsters. When you add in the similar creatures, races, servitor […]
by Jonathan Turner We’ve all been there — facing down a vampire and scraping the bottom of the ability pool for points. Next time you’re stuck for just the right moment of badass for that Night’s Black Agents refresh maneuver, use one of these and bask in the approbation of your fellow gamers along with […]
One of the chiefest joys of roleplaying is the joy of taking an iconic hero or monster and re-skinning it in the light of your own campaign. I’ve put Frankenstein’s monster on stage in two or three games, recast Batman as a people’s antihero in an alternate Soviet Union, and made demigods of Aaron Burr […]
As I begin planning future Ken Writes About Stuff pieces, a number of solid GUMSHOE campaign frames occur to me. Longer than the frames in the corebooks, but not super complex, such settings make good KWAS PDFs. They might not support a whole book (although then again they might, if sales of the basic PDF […]
I gotta say, it’s a good thing I already wrote GUMSHOE rules for expeditions. Because now I’m not surprised when everything takes longer and seems harder than it did when we planned this thing. Mythos Expeditions has, like its namesake, run into its share of excitement along the way. Promising paths had to be neglected, […]
Right at this moment, I am developing three books to still the ominous caws of the Pelgrane: Double Tap, Mythos Expeditions, and the 13th Age Bestiary. I am in the process of building the unredacted edition of Dracula that will become the core of the Dracula Dossier. (I just got ahold of a copy of Bram […]
[Edit: If you are super-sad your favourite monster has been missed out, post in the comments – SJR] Much to my surprise and delight, my last few weeks have been consumed neither by vampires nor by Elder Things, but rather by a whole horde of monsters. And like I need to tell you, dealing with […]
Pop quiz, hotshot: a mysterious figure tosses a grenade at you. How much damage do you take? In GUMSHOE, it depends on who’s throwing the grenade. A cultist of Hastur? Point-blank grenade damage in Trail of Cthulhu is +3. Right there, one table, look it up, bang. Or rather, boom. A vampiric henchman, or a […]