Page XX A Column about Roleplaying by Robin D. Laws Clue-gathering in GUMSHOE differs from previous investigative games in one very minor way. Its central tweak isn’t even an extra step to the process players may already be familiar with. GUMSHOE removes a step from the standard approach. Anyone who’s played nearly any trad RPG […]
Category Archives: Gumshoe
GUMSHOE general category
Even if you’re not using the 13th Age rules, these ten icons demarcate and imply the Otherworld setting. (And you can plug Icons into, say, GUMSHOE or the game system of your choice with ease – Ken did it for Night’s Black Agents here). Player characters in Otherworld are assumed to start off in ignorance […]
Improvising With GUMSHOE by Steve Dempsey This article discusses an improvised variant of the GUMSHOE rules. It can be just as easily used for Fear Itself, Esoterrorists, or any other GUMSHOE game. Most games of GUMSHOE are played using a scenario that the GM has written. Not only does she introduce each scene and play […]
This toy version of GUMSHOE introduces you to the basic concepts of the system which powers Trail of Cthulhu, Esoterrorists and Night’s Black Agents. Note, I’m not a game designer (whatever wikipedia says), and this version of GUMSHOE really is just for demonstration purposes. GUMSHOE was designed to power games which feature some investigative elements. […]
In The Dracula Dossier, one of my favorite campaign frames — inserted at Simon’s insistence, and written mostly by Gareth — is “Unto the Fourth Generation,” in which you play the whole saga of Operation Edom from 1894 to 1940 to 1977 to now. That’s right, you begin as the original 1894 heroic band — the cast […]
Ignoring the vagaries of its publishing history, Pierton’s Night Jungle makes a great setting for gaming. If you just want to tell stories in the mode of the Kalamane Cycle, where heroic fantasy heroes battle monsters and weird sorcery, then you can just grab a copy of 13th Age and wait until next month when […]
For a minimal prep game, I use a potted version of the suggestions in the Trail book, that is, work backwards from the Horrible Truth to the Hook. I’ll do this now on the fly. Horrible Truth Professor Legato is a puppet controlled by Mi-Go. He is performing sinister experiments on paid subjects. The Mi-Go […]
GUMSHOE doesn’t care. It doesn’t care whether a clue is easy to interpret, like a matchbook with a phone number on it, or as hard the Van Gaal code. It doesn’t care what a clue is; a physical object, a realisation, an NPC’s throw-away comment or a simple signpost. It doesn’t care where it is […]
A GUMSHOE core clue can be seen as a key, giving the PCs access to a door, behind which more of the story waits. With the key, they can interact with, change, master, and adjust that story. Sometimes a core clue can be a literal key. Literal for the characters, that is, and imagined by […]
See P. XX A column on roleplaying by Robin D. Laws The surrealist films your player characters help to create as the Dreamhounds of Paris one day wind up on YouTube. The ones fit for human observation, at any rate. In 1928, expat American photographer and painter Man Ray and French poet Robert Desnos […]