Search Results for: the black drop

See Page XX: Sketching Out Your Yellow King: This Is Normal Now Series (Part Two)

This wraps up the series outline from a previous installment of See P. XX. Cult Activity A friend or loved one joins the Temple of Hali, willingly embracing the new unreality as more vivid and exciting than boring old regular life. Can the team dig up a sinister truth that will release this person from […]

A Taxonomy of Investigations

GUMSHOE, as we always say, is the game system where you always find a clue. If you’ve got the right Investigative Ability, you get the information. When designing scenarios, however, it’s useful to divide those pieces of information into different categories. My usual mental breakdown (building on the Clue vs Lead division) Leads: A piece […]

I Know A Guy – Integrating Player-Generated Characters Into Adventures

Several GUMSHOE games offer the players the power to retroactively add contacts and allies into the story. Night’s Black Agents has the Network ability, there’s Correspondents in Trail of Cthulhu, and the GM might offer a contact for an Investigative spend or push. Some tips on using such characters: Start with the scenario If you’re […]

The Dracula Addenda (1) – Sailor and Spelunker

Having completed our selection of New Legacies, here are some extra individuals for your Dracula Dossier campaigns… Sailor Name: Olaf Frydenlund Possible Role: HGD Shipping Employee Description: Tall, Nordic, chapped skin from exposure. Innocent: Frydenlund’s a sailor, from a long line of sailors. There’s sea-salt in his blood, and he’s got a restless soul. He’s […]

Call of Chicago: Meet The Beetle

“As he replied to my mocking allusion to the beetle by echoing my own words, he vanished, — or, rather, I saw him taking a different shape before my eyes. His loose draperies all fell off him, and, as they were in the very act of falling, there issued, or there seemed to issue out […]

You’ve Heard Of Elf On The Shelf…

(Author’s Note: Sometimes you have stupid ideas. Sometimes, an idea is so stupid that it develops its own gravity well, dragging you down into it even though you are quite aware that it is monumentally stupid. Enjoy the fruits of said stupidity. That said, putting stupid constraints on yourself can be a useful way to […]

New Legacies (2)

(My apologies for the long delay between installments. I’d intended to post this and the other pieces in the series in early 2020. I wonder what could possibly have distracted me in, oh, say around March of that year.) The Dracula Dossier Director’s Handbook (DH) covers the present-day Legacies of the main members of the […]

View From the Pelgrane’s Nest – July 2021

As a company with tentacles in many countries, we’re taking comfort from the fact that the vaccines are, indeed, finally rolling out around the world. Our USAian Pelgranistas were the first to be vaccinated, followed by our some of our UKians. Us Irish Pelgranes are about to get our second shots, but the new Delta […]

See P. XX: Sketching Out Your Yellow King: Paris Sequence (Part 2)

A column about roleplaying by Robin D. Laws Last time we started laying out a loose episode structure for your Yellow King Roleplaying Game Paris sequence. Start there for episodes 1 through 7. Episode 8: Visit from Home Follow a time-honored serialized storytelling convention, bringing in a relative who drops into Paris to complicate an […]

The GM Screen of Narcissus

I ran a 13th Age one-shot for some wonderful authors as a part of the online TBRCon (check out the full set of panels), and the fact that it was recorded gives a chance to talk about one of the most important but most ephemeral aspects of rpg play – gamemastering decisions. As a GM, […]

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