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 […]
Category Archives: Gumshoe
GUMSHOE general category
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 […]
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 […]
I’ve been binge-watching last year’s seasons of “Arrow” and “The Flash.” One moment both shows frequently resort to, in keeping with their balance of superhero action and emotive interactions, is the inspirational exhortation. One character, the figure everyone else needs to save the day, succumbs to doubt. Another cast member then breaks the self-doubter from […]
GUMSHOE is a hybrid system. On the one side are the fundamentally GUMSHOE investigation abilities. These allow you to get information without a random test to see if you find the book in the library, or decode the encrypted document. They also allow special benefits, which can interact with the other side of GUMSHOE – […]