Giving Out Clues This is an excerpt from the most recent version of GUMSHOE – The Esoterrorists 2nd Edition. It is GM-facing advice on the most central element of the game – how the characters interact with the scene in the game’s fiction, and how the players and GM use GUMSHOE to handle the delivery […]
Category Archives: Esoterrorists
Ordo Veritatis statisticians have shown a significant increase in Outer Dark manifestations during election campaigns. Politicians’ frequent resort to the psychology of fear to arouse passion in their constituencies increases the supply of that most demon-friendly of emotions. This syndrome most affects partisans, who during this period pay greater attention to views they vehemently disagree […]
Thank you as always for gathering on short notice. I trust you found your travel arrangements satisfactory. Two nights ago local police officers patrolling the city’s entertainment district found a corpse in an alleyway. Due to its condition our contacts within the force referred the case to us. The body is that of an as […]
Antioch, CA, a city of about 100,000 in the San Francisco Bay area. Mr. Verity meets the team in a sleepy old-fashioned coffee shop catering to truck drivers and retirees. He lays out your next assignment as follows: “A local medical doctor and hobbyist paranormal investigator named Randy Harb has been raising awareness of a […]
Deliver Us From Evil belongs to a cinematic category well-known to roleplayers: the movie that doesn’t really pay off, but serves as a strong mood and tone reference for a game. Specifically, it comes as close as anything in the DVD racks to conveying the feel of The Esoterrorists. In this entry in the based-on-supposedly-real-life-story […]
Page XX A Column about Roleplaying by Robin D. Laws When we of the Pelgrane-Industrial Complex write and test GUMSHOE scenarios, we take care to avoid short circuits—moments that, early in play, could conceivably allow the investigators to abruptly move to the end of the story. The dissatisfactions of short-circuiting are various. The players miss […]
Field assignments as Ordo Veritatis operatives tend toward the short-lived. Confrontations with the beings of the Outer Dark erode mental stability over time. The organization does its best to monitor the readiness of its agents before sending them out on missions. When possible it pulls members who are no longer fit for duty into support […]
kafka’s shining review of Albion’s Ransom: Little Girl Lost & Albion’s Ransom: Worm of Sixty Winters is available in full at rpg.net 10/10: “this is British horror at its best.” “The Esoterrorists picks up where Cthulhu games sometimes leave off in creating a truly horrific experience without getting into gore and staying true to the cosmic horror […]
[REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] You are receiving this memo as an Ordo Veritatis field agent certified to perform the forensic duties of a medical examiner. At your earliest convenience, please access, through the amended usual protocols, the research paper entitled “The Neurological Implications and Structural Alterations Associated with Outer Dark Entity Involvement” (Catalogue #90UODS9) by Dr. […]
New creature for The Esoterrorists The membrane between this world and the Outer Dark is everywhere. Even inside your computer. That’s where seepers break through. They sense the particular stink of paranoia and latent aggression stoked on the Internet’s blackest shoals. When you drink in conspiracy theory or wallow in mythologies of victimhood, they wriggle […]