Search Results for: Ashen Stars

Bast

22
Apr

In his essay “Something About Cats,” H.P. Lovecraft asks, “What fully civilised soul but would eagerly serve as high priest of Bast?” And indeed, what soul would not, in any civilization, from Ulthar to England to the Dragon Empire to outer space?

She Who Scratches, the Lady of the Ointment Jar, the great cat-goddess of nighted Khem comes alive in all her varied forms: as a Trail of Cthulhu titan (complete with her monstrous Brood of Bubastis), mysterious Ashen Stars entity, TimeWatch cult leader, and 13th Age Icon. Read further that you may join the souls Bast plays with, the many souls pricked by She Who Scratches. Good kitty!

Bast is the eleventh installment of the third Ken Writes About Stuff subscription.

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Ken Writes About Stuff Volume 3

22
Apr

KWAS logo_300_white

Mythos monsters, occult conspiracies, alchemical mysteries and more! KWAS Vol. 3 collects 13 supplements by master Lovecraftian writer and GUMSHOE guru Kenneth Hite.

In the ENnie-award winning Ken Writes About Stuff series, Kenneth Hite turns his considerable writing talents and encyclopedic knowledge of game design, history, the occult and all things Mythos to bear on new topics. From hideous creatures to GUMSHOE innovations, from Moon Dust Men to martial arts, Ken illuminates the dark corners of the genre with 4000-word supplements.

Each PDF includes a deep delve into some deeply weird topic, plus crunchy bits for your GUMSHOE game. If you’re a fan of Suppressed Transmissions, Trail of Cthulhu, Night’s Black Agents, The Nazi Occult or Day After Ragnarok, KWAS is a must-have.

KWAS Vol. 3 features:

  • Hideous Creatures: Tcho-Tcho. “The nastiest people who ever lived … and whatever it is they were doing, they weren’t going to let a stranger in on it.” Do you really want to know what the Tcho-Tcho know? Too late.
  • The Spear of Destiny. Is it the Spear that pierced Christ’s side, or the Spear of Odin? Does it grant true kingship or invincibility? Who has borne it through the millennia, and who seeks its true whereabouts now? This issue pierces the legend to reach the truth — and then makes the legend invincible. Plus, a look at the Spear for NIGHT’S BLACK AGENTS, THE ESOTERRORISTS, TRAIL OF CTHULHU, and TIMEWATCH.
  • Hideous Creatures: Great Race of Yith. “As mental barriers wore down, I beheld great masses of thin vapour in various parts of the building and in the streets below. These steadily grew more solid and distinct, till at last I could trace their monstrous outlines with uncomfortable ease.” From unguessable aliens to cone-shaped librarians to beetle-conquerors, the Great Race of Yith takes many forms. Learn to recognize them, before they take yours!
  • Mutant City Spies. Ten years after the ghost flu hit, the world is changed — but the secret world stays the same. Enemies of your country still plot, terrorists still scheme — but now they might have superpowers. An espionage-specops frame for Mutant City Blues takes the super fights into the shadows.
  • Hideous Creatures: Wendigo. ” In spite of his exceeding mental perturbation, Simpson struggled hard to detect its nature, and define it …” Cannibal spirit or arctic ogre? Wind-walking demigod or folie a faim? Hunt the Wendigo down — or up into the skies, where mad auroras roll.
  • Hideous Creatures: Hunting Horror. “I see it—coming here—hell-wind—titan blur—black wings—Yog-Sothoth save me—the three-lobed burning eye. . . .” Avatar or servitor, this winged and coiling horror haunts the dark and hunts those who seek it out. Shine a little light on this most shadowy of creatures!

 

KWAS 3 Covers

 

  • Moon Dust Men: MAJESTIC Overwatch. The Moon Dust Men are the tip of the spear. MAJESTIC-12 aims it. Manage the global war against the aliens with this new GUMSHOE subsystem. Do you build retro-engineered Aurora craft, or bioroids to fight on the Moon? Do you launch satellite screens or dig in anti-saucer lasers? You decide where the black budget goes — and who it goes after.
  • Moon Dust Men: Galileo Uplift. To fight aliens, one must use the alien. Take it apart, reverse-engineer it, rebuild it, turn it into armor and sensors and weapons and aircraft good enough to win a war against an enemy from the stars. Tech and gear for your high-powered MOON DUST MEN game, powered by a new GUMSHOE “tech tree” subystem for bootstrapping invention and development.
  • Las Vegas 1968 takes you to Sin City in the heyday of Howard Hughes and the Rat Pack, the mob and the Mormons, the fear and the loathing. Everything’s for sale and nothing’s for certain, except the house wins. Featuring happening hooks for vampire conspiracies, esoterrorism, and FALL OF DELTA GREEN Mythos machinations!
  • Alchemy Chemistry or magic? Madness or miracles? Poison or power? Blend all those elements — and more — with Alchemy, the latest Zoom in on a historical magic system for GUMSHOE gaming. Operating at every level from the base dungeon-crawl to the Awakened Working, this magic system gives you the secrets of matter — and maybe a touch of mercury poisoning.
  • Bast. “What fully civilised soul but would eagerly serve as high priest of Bast?” She Who Scratches, the Lady of the Ointment Jar, the great cat-goddess of nighted Khem comes alive in all her varied forms: as a Trail of Cthulhu titan (complete with her monstrous Brood of Bubastis), mysterious Ashen Stars entity, TimeWatch cult leader, and 13th Age Icon. Good kitty!
  • Unspeakable Cults: The Starry Wisdom. In our final issue of the year, we give the Hideous Creatures treatment not to one beast but to a whole cult — the “disliked and unorthodox Starry Wisdom sect.” Vile rites and terrifying symbolism unfold to shadow your Trail of Cthulhu game, along with alternate takes, investigative leads, possible echoes, and sinister scenario seeds.
  • BONUS ISSUE – Foul Congeries 3 once more opens the books on Lovecraftian monsters that have never taken stat-block form before in any game, including the Gaseous Wraith, the Raktajihva, and Y’m-bhi!

Volume 1 of Ken Writes About Stuff is available here, and volume 2 here.

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Xeno-Archaeology!

22
Apr

Xeno-Archaeology!

“No other ancient city on Mars had been laid out in that manner; and the strange, many-terraced buttresses of the thick walls, like the stairways of forgotten Anakim, were peculiar to the prehistoric race that had built Yoh-Vombis.”

From the Face on Mars to Precursor artifacts orbiting dead quasars, the mysteries of space aren’t all astrophysical. For some answers, you have to dig. Ruins — of cities, starships, and planets — hold danger and horror, riches and knowledge. What a lost species or a cunning GM can build, bold exo-archaeologists and their players can uncover.

Xeno-Archaeology! includes new Ashen Stars content, like

  • New assignments, like Digger and Radar
  • New crew packages, Lingos, Gravers, and Derecks
  • New ships, like the Sherlock, and the Alexandria
  • New tech
  • New Active RFPs

Praise for Ken Writes About Stuff,

“The content of KWAS is top-notch, as one would expect from a RPG luminary like Kenneth Hite” –Daniel D.

“ brief injection of Hite-ian awesome … they’re just about the right length to digest in a single sitting, and full of amazing ideas that will make anyone’s game into a flavourful occult gumbo” – Bill Templeton

Xeno-Archaeology! is the fifth installment of the second Ken Writes About Stuff subscription available to buy in the webstore now.

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GUMSHOE Zoom: Mind Control

22
Apr

GUMSHOE Zoom: Mind Control

You are growing very interested.

This is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful GUMSHOE Zoom I’ve ever known in my life. Presenting detailed rules for brainwashing, memetics, telecontrol, and brain hacking, and for gear from the Microwave Auditory Effect gun to subliminal flashers to tinfoil hats, it brings the fight inside your head.

The GUMSHOE Zoom: Mind Control is intended to model the sorts of stories in which mind control – and especially the contest in and over human minds – takes center stage. This might be a single novel such as George du Maurier’s Trilby or Dan Simmons’ Carrion Comfort, or a film like Scanners, Push, Inception, Videodrome, or Invaders from Mars. Mind control is a powerful, core trope in science fiction, fantasy, and horror; specific aliens, wizards, or monsters might use these rules even if the player characters aren’t psionic. Individual mind-controllers might be malevolent, like Dracula or Rasputin, or heroic, like Dr. Xavier or Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Hite introduces the Mental Battlefield system, presenting a single mind as the battlespace. With this system, the host mind struggles against the invading mind (or minds) through the Superego, Ego, and the Id. Full GUMSHOE statistics included.

It’s usable in any GUMSHOE setting, and includes styles for Trail of Cthulhu, Ashen Stars, Gaean Reach, Fear Itself, Night’s Black Agents and Esoterrorists.

Praise for Ken Writes About Stuff:

“The content of KWAS is top-notch, as one would expect from a RPG luminary like Kenneth Hite” – Daniel D.

“ brief injection of Hite-ian awesome … they’re just about the right length to digest in a single sitting, and full of amazing ideas that will make anyone’s game into a flavourful occult gumbo” – Bill Templeton

GUMSHOE Zoom: Mind Control is the tenth installment of Ken Writes About Stuff Volume 1.

What is a GUMSHOE Zoom?

Not everything can support a game of its own, or even a big sourcebook. For those things, we present the GUMSHOE Zoom, a sort of supplement focused on a key game mechanic and its possible applications. In general, Zooms are interesting potential hacks, or intriguing adaptations of the main rules. Some apply to one specific topic or sub-sub-genre. Others cross all manner of GUMSHOE turf; you can slot them in and adapt them to tales of Cthulhuoid investigation, mean superpowered streets, or alien colonies alike.

Zooms are experimental. That does mean that they haven’t been playtested, necessarily. (If something in here is really really broken – and it’s not, as this ain’t our first rodeo – we’ll fix it in post.) But that also means we encourage you to experiment with them. Changing the cost, or prerequisites, or point effect, or other mechanical parameters of a given Zoom changes how often it shows up and how much drama it drives. The dials are in your hands.

Zooms will change the focus of your play if you use them. Putting a mechanic on the table puts it into your game. Adding a Zoom means more actions, possibly even more scenes, using those rules. Since the Zoom mechanics are intended to encourage specific actions or flavors, to force a card in your storytelling hand, they aren’t “balanced” against “normal” actions or rules. In general, if you don’t want to see more of it, don’t Zoom in on it.

Zooms are optional rules. You can and should ignore them if you don’t want them, or change them at will. After all, if a given Zoom turns out to be crucial to an upcoming GUMSHOE game, we’ll change it to fit that specific genre or form of storytelling.

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Moon Dust Men

22
Apr

President Eisenhower established Project Moon Dust in 1953 to locate, contain, and coordinate everything known about the alien presence on Earth. The public-relations and open-source arm of Moon Dust was called Project Blue Book. Blue Book ended its work in 1970. It is 1978. Your work never ends. This GUMSHOE campaign frame, Moon Dust Men, can be a sci-fi, conspiracy, or horror game – it’s up to you to find the truth.

Moon Dust Men includes new abilities (Ufology), new skills (Remote Viewing, Psionics), aliens (Greys, Nommo), and cryptids (chupacabra, Mothman). This campaign frame introduces Backslash Points, a rule-variant for the “weird science” genre typified by The X-Files or Fringe.

A Moon Dust team comprises three to six personnel, usually including a linguist, a technician, and a combat ops specialist. All are airborne, or at least jump, qualified – UFOs don’t always crash near roads or landing strips. The Air Force attempts to cross-train team members in the skills of the others to ensure a team functional capability despite any casualties that may be incurred in their employment.

Ken includes sprinkles of moon dust campaign frames for Ashen Stars, Esoterrorists, Fear Itself, Mutant City Blues, Night’s Black Agents, and Trail of Cthulhu.

Praise for Moon Dust Men:

“In under a dozen pages, Moon Dust Men provides you with an interesting set-up, character variations, extraterrestrials, weird monsters, and sneaky Russians – all easily layered over any version of the Gumshoe system you happen to have lying around. Whether you want to run an interesting one-shot, tweak your current setting to include conspiracies and aliens, or try for a whole campaign, this supplement gives you enough to get going. For little more than a tall brewed coffee from a High Street coffee chain, you have all the prerequisites for mysterious adventures fighting insidious Greys and our ubiquitous reptilian underlords.” – Paul Baldowski

Moon Dust Men is the sixth installment of Ken Writes About Stuff Volume 1.

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GUMSHOE Zoom: Martial Arts

22
Apr

From Muay Thai’s ruthless “eight-point” technique, to swift and deadly Aikido, or plain-old pugilism, GUMSHOE Zoom: Martial Arts features new rules and options for any GUMSHOE setting. This Zoom includes nine styles of martial arts, both armed and unarmed, rules for customization, and The Way Of The GUMSHOE.

GUMSHOE Zoom: Martial Arts is intended to model the sorts of stories in which martial arts combat takes center stage in at least one scene. In addition to straight martial-arts films like Enter the Dragon or Ong-Bak, you can see such martial arts foregrounding in hybrid thrillers such as Raid: Redemption, The Matrix, or Haywire, or even as a set piece in a “straight” spy thriller like The Bourne Supremacy.

It’s usable in any GUMSHOE setting, and includes styles for Trail of Cthulhu, Ashen Stars, Night’s Black Agents and Esoterrorists.

GUMSHOE Zoom: Martial Arts is the second installment of Ken Writes About Stuff Volume 1.

Praise for Ken Writes About Stuff:

“The content of KWAS is top-notch, as one would expect from a RPG luminary like Kenneth Hite” – Daniel D.

“A brief injection of Hite-ian awesome … they’re just about the right length to digest in a single sitting, and full of amazing ideas that will make anyone’s game into a flavourful occult gumbo” – Bill Templeton

 

What is a GUMSHOE Zoom?

Not everything can support a game of its own, or even a big sourcebook. For those things, we present the GUMSHOE Zoom, a sort of supplement focused on a key game mechanic and its possible applications. In general, Zooms are interesting potential hacks, or intriguing adaptations of the main rules. Some apply to one specific topic or sub-sub-genre. Others cross all manner of GUMSHOE turf; you can slot them in and adapt them to tales of Cthulhuoid investigation, mean superpowered streets, or alien colonies alike.

Zooms are experimental. That does mean that they haven’t been playtested, necessarily. (If something in here is really really broken – and it’s not, as this ain’t our first rodeo – we’ll fix it in post.) But that also means we encourage you to experiment with them. Changing the cost, or prerequisites, or point effect, or other mechanical parameters of a given Zoom changes how often it shows up and how much drama it drives. The dials are in your hands.

Zooms will change the focus of your play if you use them. Putting a mechanic on the table puts it into your game. Adding a Zoom means more actions, possibly even more scenes, using those rules. Since the Zoom mechanics are intended to encourage specific actions or flavors, to force a card in your storytelling hand, they aren’t “balanced” against “normal” actions or rules. In general, if you don’t want to see more of it, don’t Zoom in on it.

Zooms are optional rules. You can and should ignore them if you don’t want them, or change them at will. After all, if a given Zoom turns out to be crucial to an upcoming GUMSHOE game, we’ll change it to fit that specific genre or form of storytelling.

Continue reading →

All We Have Forgotten

22
Apr

All We Have Forgotten is music for Ashen Stars by James Semple, Marie-Anne Fischer and Yaiza Varona, the talent behind the chilling Eternal Lies Suite.

All We Have Forgotten contains 10 original tracks and 4 stings, short bursts of music to mark the end of a scene. The tracks are supplied as MP3s so can be quickly loaded onto any player to add that extra dimension and atmosphere to your game.

The music has been designed to be used with Ashen Stars but can, of course, be used with any sci-fi game.

You can listen to a sample here –

[audio:http://site.pelgranepress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Ashen%20Stars.mp3]
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Lorefinder

20
Apr

 

Where Mystery Meets Adventure

Lorefinder puts you in the role of a brave adventurer in search of forbidden secrets and lost treasures. Uncover strange cults, solve baffling murders, or delve into the deepest dungeons and face their denizens – and, if you are both clever and lucky, return to tell the tale. Your fate is in your hands!

Lorefinder merges the action-oriented fantasy rules of The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game with the streamlined investigative focus of Robin D Law’s GUMSHOE (The Esoterrorists, Trail of Cthulhu, Ashen Stars). Bad luck might get you killed, but it won’t stop you finding the information you need to move ahead.

For GMs, there are concise, well-honed guidelines on creating mysteries for The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.

The Lorefinder supplement contains:

  • An adaptation of the GUMSHOE investigative rules for fantasy adventuring
  • Character creation and conversion guidelines for use with Pathfinder
  • Drives to bring you into the heart of the adventure
  • New skills, spells and feats
  • Guides for designing mysteries and campaigns
  • At Slaughter Field, a sample Lorefinder scenario

Lorefinder will forever change the way you run The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.

See the complete reviews to date here.

Read an interview with Gareth here.

Download a PDF of the 2-page character sheet.

Do I recommend the book? Yes, absolutely! The brief book provides an excellent paradigm for regulating information in a fantasy RPG. Even if you follow that paradigm within the core Pathfinder rules (with skill checks), GUMSHOE is an excellent model and will enrich your game. The advice on divinations and “clues” in combat are also excellent. –Vestige, RPG Geek

2012 ENnies Silver award winner

Silver Award Winner for Best Rules in the 2012 ENnie awards

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Dead Rock Seven

20
Apr

Some mysteries, you really don’t want to solve. If the thing at the centre of the labyrinth starts hunting you, you’ll wish you’d never started searching in the first place. Some truths are buried for a reason.

The sound of claws on metal grew louder. Something scraped at the outside of the sealed hatch.

‘This is impossible. They’re dead.’

They weren’t. We were.

Dead Rock Seven is a collection of four adventures for Ashen Stars from acclaimed writer Gareth Hanrahan (Arkham Detective Tales, Brief Cases, Invasive Procedures). Over the course of these adventures, the lasers are hired to deal with problems as diverse as murders on an old asteroid mine, missing executives on a pleasure planet, and threats to the security of an interstellar cooking contest. You can run these adventures as one-shots, as individual episodes in your own series, or in sequence as a self-contained mini-series.

  • The Pleasure Bringers brings the characters to the pleasure world of Andarta, searching for a missing executive who has disappeared into the seedy underworld. In the course of their investigations, the characters discover the bizarre fate of their quarry, and must decide the fate of an entire race.
  • Dead Rock Seven – Something is killing workers in an exhausted mine on asteroid SIS-45546. If the lasers’ suspicions are correct, this heralds the return of a deadly foe once thought defeated.
  • Period of Tyranny – A terrorist attack on a passenger liner draws the lasers into the tumultuous politics of the synthculture of Pioneer, where the darkest period of Earth history is repeating itself.
  • The Anaitis Ingredient – The lasers are hired to provide security for a high-profile cooking contest on the Anaitis-17 space station. The station is attacked from within and without by fanatic Restreamers, who intend to trigger a temporal event that will rewrite history.

Review Highlights

See the complete reviews to date here.

Dead Rock Seven again demonstrates Pelgrane’s superior skills aptitude with design by creating a truly beautiful product. It brings over some the same similar layout, font and formatting used in the Ashen Stars core book- with but with a small number of modifications. Those slight adjustments are critical as they instantly position the GM to the sequence they need for running each scenario/adventure.

If you think that a mystery adventure has to follow a fairly straight line, these cases will disabuse you of that notion. Hanrahan’s put together an excellent collection that shows off the many different kinds of missions which could be taken on in the Ashen Stars universe.

Nominated for Best Adventure in the 2012 ENnies

 

 

People who bought this also bought Accretion Disk and The Justice Trade.

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The Justice Trade

20
Apr

Now the war’s over, and you and your crew of freelance effectuators patrol the edge of civilized space, trying to pay the bills while you keep the peace.

But the competition in this line is fierce, and sometimes you have to cut corners — which makes you wonder if justice bought and paid for is any justice at all…

The Justice Trade contains three adventures for Ashen Stars – The Justice Trade, Terra Nova and Tartarus – written by Leonard Balsera, author of Profane Miracles and co-author of the smash hit Dresden Files; GUMSHOE designer and gaming luminary Robin D. Laws, and Bill White, author of The Big Hoodoo. It also includes a bonus twenty-minute demo game by Kevin Kulp to introduce players to the world of Ashen Stars.

The Justice Trade

When the PCs answer a distress call from the planet Cabochon, they become embroiled in the political machinations of two powerful figures who each seek to shape the future of the Bleed. Will they choose to do good and make the Bleed a better place – or to do well for themselves?

Tartarus

In a devastatingly hostile environment,  hard-bitten lasers – who know enough not to touch the gooey stuff or take off their helmets in an untested biosphere – investigate the demise of a survey crew doomed by the above mistakes.

Terra Nova

The Terra Nova, last of the great luxury liners from the Combine’s heyday, is dead, a victim of disaster now drifting in the space between worlds. The last of the survivors clutch desperately to life, waiting for rescue. All but one; who waits only for a chance to finish the job, uncovering a secret which the Terra Nova has kept hidden for decades.

Stowaway

A twenty-minute demo, which is a great introduction to Ashen Stars and includes six pre-generated characters.

People who bought this also bought Accretion Disk and Dead Rock Seven.

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