GUMSHOE is a system for designing and playing investigative roleplaying games and adventures, emulating stories where investigators uncover a series of clues, and interpret them to solve a mystery. In a GUMSHOE game, the player characters discover something which triggers their investigation, and then the Game Moderator (GM) narrates them through a number of scenes, […]
During the Kickstarter for The Yellow King Roleplaying Game, I laid out one method of serving Shock and Injury cards to players electronically, as image files sent to a mobile-enabled platform. At that time, I recommended using Google Photos for this purpose. Belatedly I realize that there was a better way to do it, using […]
In the latest episode of their ineluctably sly podcast, Ken and Robin talk pulling switcheroos on players, the Chicago film fest, GUMSHOE 101, and the Easter Rising.
NPC followers of icons like the Priestess, Emperor, and Archmage aren’t usually monsters—but that doesn’t stop player characters from wanting to fight them! Icon Followers will focus on playable monster-stats for human and humanoid NPCs of the Dragon Empire. Want stats for a city guard, gladiator, traveling priest, bardic college student, or Imperial Legionnaire? Icon Followers […]
In the latest episode of their unswervingly faithful podcast, Ken and Robin talk game fickleness, Steve Kenson, and this year’s raid on Powell’s Books Portland.
Roleplaying games are fascinatingly mediated. In almost every other storytelling medium, the audience perceives the action directly. They see the actors on the stage or screen, the characters in the computer game, the voices in the radio play. In prose, true, the author can play tricks with an unreliable narrator or writing in a very […]
Late autumn is upon us, and it’s the season to curl up in front of a roaring fire with a good book. New books in autumnal green and brown are the limited edition versions of The Fall of DELTA GREEN and the 13th Age Bestiary 2, available in the webstore this month, alongside a compendium of […]
Hallowe’en is sadly over, but this month, it’s our printers who’ve been largely horrifying me, with tales of a 10% increase in paper prices. This has generated some hair-raising quotes for our upcoming books, specifically impacting the printing of The Yellow King RPG. Kickstarter backers will be unaffected, but it may make the final book collection […]
The 13th Age core book tells us little about the Queen’s Wood, where the Elf Queen rules: it’s a sprawling elven wood, largely empty now, whose trees have leaves that are “a riot of silver and gold and green and indigo.” In the lengthy description of the elven Court of Stars in 13 True Ways, we learn […]
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A column about roleplaying by Robin D. Laws This is the second in a series of four columns demonstrating what a full arc of The Yellow King Roleplaying Game might look like, with events from my own game as an example. In The Wars, the players leave behind the roles of Belle Epoque art students, […]