Category Archives: General

The Zalozhniphone Quatrefaction

Big Bloody Spoilers for both The Zalozhniy Quartet and The Persephone Extraction in this article. Don’t read if you’re a Night’s Black Agents player. Here, have some deliberate disinformation so you don’t accidentally read anything important.   DRACULA’S BEHIND EVERYTHING   EDOM STANDS FOR ENGLISH DEFENDERS OF MAGIC   YOU ARE UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF […]

Stone Skin Press – Anthologies of New Fiction

  Stone Skin Press is our fiction imprint, set up because of Simon Rogers’ enthusiasm for genre-crossing writing from writers like Michael Chabon, Iain Banks, Margaret Atwood, Ursula Le Guin and Adam Marek. Its goal – to mine the wealth of talented writers, both mainstream and genre, who enjoy writing to a challenging brief. Stone […]

That Wide-Screen Underworld Feel

Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan writes game books meant to be turned into wide-screen adventures. Book of the Underworld goes one better: the sunbearer golems who march an endless path through the four warring Kingdoms of the Mechanical Sun aren’t just made for cinema, they’d also work splendidly as the subject of a area-control and route-carving wargame! In […]

Gaming for Kids

I’ve been running impromptu games for my two boys since they were four or five (they’re now seven), and I’ve been thinking about a GUMSHOE Kids framework that I’m going to develop as a priority now. In the meantime, though, I’m aware that there are suddenly a lot of people working from home with kids […]

Murder by Checklist

One of the Things I Always Say is that a GUMSHOE investigative ability list is basically a list of questions the players can ask the GM – but it’s also a useful list of questions to ask yourself when writing an adventure. Certainly, when I initially conceive of an adventure, I’ll come up with three […]

Clues vs. Leads

The core concept of GUMSHOE can be simply stated (or shouted from the rooftops) as “it’s always more fun when the players get the clue”. One could argue, though, that it’s sometimes more accurate to say that the players always get the lead. A lead is a clue that leads in to another scene. Leads […]

FINEST EFFECTS: Military Escorts

The BORELLUS CONNECTION manuscript was too nightmarish and vast to be constrained by any binding our printer could conceive; therefore, we were obliged to remove some material from the book. It’s preserved here as a series of Page XX articles. As Orne’s mysterious correspondent in Philadelphia warned us, “no Part must be missing if the finest Effects are […]

How to Tell If You’re a Blocker (and How to Stop Yourself)

Because most RPG play advice goes to GMs, we tend to focus on them as the source of possible roadblocks in a session’s pacing. However, although in most game systems players lack the narrative control of GMs, they can also throw wrenches into the machinery of any plot. I’m not just talking about moments when […]

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