Can’t find the specific issue of Ken Writes About Stuff you’re looking for, or keen to make sure you’ve got all the GUMSHOE Zooms? Here’s the complete list of all the individual issues, which you can buy in the webstore. Alchemy. (Volume 3) Chemistry or magic? Madness or miracles? Poison or power? Blend all those elements […]
I ran two Trail of Cthulhu sessions over the weekend (a stealth proof-of-concept of a possible upcoming setting). At a three or four hour convention game, the pressure of time means every scene has to count. There’s little time for backtracking or encounters that don’t go anywhere, and that pressure’s compounded if you’ve got a […]
by Ian Chilvers Download Ian’s 13th Age encounter manager here. A lot of my time used in the preparation of 13th Age sessions is in the creation of encounters. Particularly in the specifics of balancing (or deliberate unbalancing) of encounters to a party’s level. 13th Age has a reasonably simple method for calculating an encounter’s […]
There is so much GUMSHOE goodness coming up this year in this, our tenth anniversary, that I offer a short retrospective later. But January is a 13th Age month, and we kick off the year with a bunch of new 13th Age releases. Rakshashas & Reavers is the first issue of the new 13th Age Monthly […]
The weather’s been miserable for the last few weeks, so I’ve been cheering myself up with virtual holidays in the sunny foreign climes of the Dragon Empire, going through the maps of the first of our Battle Scenes book, High Magic & Low Cunning: Battle Scenes for Five Icons, and its accompanying map folio, which […]
In the latest episode of their highly adaptable podcast, Ken and Robin talk humans in F20, Chicago newspaper wars, setting licensing and Tom Driberg.
The Icon Riffs series offers inspiration for adventure design and improvisation at the table. The ideas presented aren’t numbered, because numbered lists imply a certain consistency between results. These lists are evocative rather than consistent. They’re also not thorough. This isn’t an attempt to list all the things that could be associated with the icons. There are huge numbers […]
When Mutant City Blues came out, examples of super powered police procedural TV shows were hard to come by. Back then we had to imagine a hybrid of those two genres. With examples now popping up on network and streaming TV, you kids today have it easy! “The Flash” comes closest to the structure envisioned […]
“Knowledge was knowledge a hundred thousand years ago, when our especial forbears were shambling about Asia as speechless semi-apes!” — H.P. Lovecraft, “The Last Test” It’s a new year, and time for the “Call of Chicago” column to seamlessly shift from endless iterations of Stuff We Left Out of The Dracula Dossier to endless iterations […]