Some players find damage dealing in baseline GUMSHOE emotionally unsatisfying. This becomes an issue especially when they’ve spent a lot of points, or gotten a high die roll, only to roll low on the damage die, plinking the opponent for a miserable 1 or 2 points of Health. Rolling high to hit and then minimum […]
Category Archives: Gumshoe
GUMSHOE general category
GUMSHOE is a system for designing investigative roleplaying games and adventures, emulating stories where investigators uncover a series of clues, and interpret them to solve a mystery. In GUMSHOE, the players always get the clues they need to move the narrative forward. Character Creation In a GUMSHOE game, you create player characters (PCs) by choosing […]
GenCon’s come and gone, and we picked up a pleasing number of new GUMSHOE customers. Some of them came to the booth with something in mind (“do you guys do that Dracula game?” or “hey, is that the two-player Cthulhu game?” or even “hey, is this the Green Ronin booth?”), but others wanted to try GUMSHOE, but […]
Since the first outbreak in 1905, the city of Great Arkham has struggled to contain the spread of an unusually virulent and dangerous form of typhoid. All vehicles leaving the city must be inspected by the transport police. These officers wear heavy gas masks and protective clothing to minimise their exposure to the toxic disinfectant […]
Cthulhu Confidential and other upcoming One-2-One games recommend using physical cards (or the digital equivalent) in play. Giving a player something to hold onto has several benefits. It’s a reminder. In a multiplayer game, key plot elements get discussed endlessly at the game as players speculate about what’s going on, how they rid themselves of […]
One of the suggested campaign frames in Cthulhu City casts the investigators as journalists on Newspaper Row, working for one of Great Arkham’s competing newspapers. Let’s borrow a page (yellowed, and a little stained) from Bookhounds of London and look at the mechanics of playing a journalist. Newspaper Credit Rating Each newspaper has a Credit […]
The Armitage Files is Robin D Laws’ groundbreaking adventure of improvised Mythos investigation. Cthulhu Confidential is Robin D Laws’ groundbreaking game of solo Mythos investigation. Putting two groundbreaking products together is hazardous for Gamemasters. You run the risk of collapsing the ground beneath you. However, the risk can be worth it: improvised play supports the […]
There are a lot of books in the pipeline right now, but none of them are quite cooked yet, so here’s a little bit of whimsy before the cannon of self-promotion is brought to bear on this space. As you know, Bob, Icons are a lovely little mechanic from 13th Age that model the player […]
Cthulhu City is written, if not finished, and the final book is overstuffed with Mythos gribbles and haunted architecture. There are so many cults and sorcerers lurking in there, not to mention weird Yithian machines, that I had to remove certain blasphemous tomes and cryptic relics to the virtual pages of page XX. Consider these […]
Investigate Mythos Mysteries in 1920s NYC’s Harlem Renaissance! From Chris Spivey, one of the writers of Pelgrane Press’s Cthulhu Confidential and the upcoming Out of the Woods, comes Harlem Unbound, an RPG sourcebook for GUMSHOE and Call of Cthulhu, published by Darker Hue Studios and written by Chris Spivey, one of the writers of Cthulhu Confidential and the upcoming […]