Tag Archives: Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan

Trail of Cthulhu – Clues on the Fly

The nature of Trail lends itself to carefully planned, highly detailed adventures. The investigators analyse each clue, each location and object in forensic detail, deploying their highly specialised investigative abilities to ferret out the tell-tale clue.  Trail scenarios support this by providing lots of suggested nuggets of information the players can pick up. However, the […]

Scenario Checklists

When preparing to run a pre-written scenario, processing all the information can be overwhelming. A good scenario, after all, includes lots of alternate scenes, optional encounters, plots and subplots. (While your humble scenario writer tries to make everything as clear as possible, the scenario also needs to be entertaining to read, detailed enough to be […]

The Book of Sandboxes II

I’ve talked before about adapting the Engine of the Ages from The Book of Ages into a collaborative tool for building sandboxes – but my favourite sandbox is the weird fantasy city. So, let’s talk about collaboratively building weird fantasy settlements. To recap the basics of the Engine of the Ages (for the full version, […]

Cutting to the Chase in Borellus

The Borellus Connection’s designed as a relatively linear set of adventures. The player characters have a supervisor (Boiler o’Riordan, aka CARSTAIRS) who gives them assignments; these assignments are all part of DELTA GREEN’s ongoing investigation into the Unione Corse’s ties to the Unnatural. The campaign can be played as a series of missions of the […]

New Occupations for Trail 2e

In Episode 621 of Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff, at the request of beloved Patreon backer Ryan McCelland, Ken and Robin brainstorm some extra Trail occupations. As they’ve done the fun bit of coming up with the concepts, it falls to Gar to do the numbers bit. Explorer Also works for guide, big game […]

Pushes vs Spends on Trail

A few backers have asked why Trail 2nd Edition sticks to the old GUMSHOE method of having point Spends for each individual investigative ability, instead of switching to the Pushes used in the Yellow King/GUMSHOE One-2-One and Mutant City Blues. There’s no standalone GUMSHOE rules engine – each game takes the precepts and techniques and […]

Santa Claus Is Coming For You

Bottom Line Up Front: Santa Claus is Dracula. Oh, you want proof? Let’s briefly look at the life of St. Nicholas. (Start with Earth, says Ken. Start with Wikipedia, says I.) Nicholas of Myra, aka Nicholas the Wonderworker – and, as we all know, Dracula was a sorcerer as well as a vampire. He was […]

Shires Out!

In a hole in the ground… they found a body.  I know! Here we are, in the middle of the beautiful, bucolic Riding, with its neat hedgerows and picturesque taverns and delightful crumpet shops and little village greens, and we’ve got a murder to solve! It’d be unthinkable if this wasn’t the third murder this […]

Trust in the Ocean Game

BTravern over on the Pelgrane discord asks if we’re using the Trust mechanics from Night’s Black Agents in the Ocean Game. It’s an excellent idea, since the Ocean Game’s a contest between players and only one person’s going to reach Briny Heaven – but they have to work together until then. So, while the Trust rules […]

Let It Hide!

There’s a gameplay principle articulated in Burning Wheel called Let It Ride. The idea is that in most situations, when a player scores a success on a test, the player doesn’t need to roll again unless circumstances change. For example, the player’s called to make an Athletics test to climb a cliff in the face […]

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