Tag Archives: Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan

GUMSHOE Whodunnits: A Bunch of Suspects

The classic murder mystery: a bunch of eccentrics gather, often at a remote house or other confined location, and then – thump! One of them’s murdered. In most roleplaying scenarios, red herrings aren’t needed. The classic advice is that the players create enough confusion as they maraud and blunder towards a conclusion that adding distractions […]

Secret Spells of Hekte

Sorcery, of course, is forbidden in the Empire of Hekte, one of the key lands in The Paragon Blade. They will not forget the horrors and evils unleashed by the demonologists of the Hellbound Empire. Only Imperial bondsmages, carefully monitored and suitably restrained, are allowed work magic under the watchful eyes of the Bureau of […]

GUMSHOE Whodunnits: One Little Clue

It’s a staple of the detective genre that the heroic investigator picks up on some tiny clue, some inconsistency that unravels an otherwise perfect crime. They spot that only one dinner guest could have passed through the kitchen in the two-minute window to poison the bride’s champagne glass, or that the mystery turns on whose […]

Night’s Black Agents: Odd Jobs

The Agents in Night’s Black Agents are burned spies, out of favour with their former agencies, banished into the cold – but even a broken spy has uses. Smiley got called back from retirement all the time; unsanctioned operations call for unsanctioned assets. What sort of unofficial intel ops might your Agents get involved in […]

The Vroomfondel Technique

Player input into a game is a wonderful and multifaceted thing. It’s not just that it takes some of the burden of creativity off the GM (“I don’t know, you tell me who your character knows that’s an expert on Etruscan demonology”), it also gives the players a sense of investment and ownership, and gives […]

The Plain People of Gaming: eight questions for adventure design

It’s been a while since I’ve written one of these Page XX pieces. In the intervening months, I’ve been working on a whole host of different adventures, ranging from classic Cthulhu mythos to epic fantasy to political drama to different flavours of weirdness. As part of the process of adventure writing, there are ten questions […]

13 Quick Iconic Plots

The first time I played 13th Age, lo these many years ago, Rob used the 13th Age Convention Demo, which shows off the improv-friendly flexibility of the game by letting the players pick One Unique Things and Icon Relationships, and then putting together a quick combat encounter based on those Icons. Here are thirteen really […]

Paddling around with temporary pools

Some GUMSHOE scenarios give players the opportunity to pick up small temporary pools. In Trail, for example, reading the collected letters of a crazed physicist might give a 2-point temporary pool that can be spent on Occult, Physics or Astronomy. The players can use these points as they would regular points from their character sheets. […]

Four Schemes of the Cult of the Devourer

The Cult of the Devourer, as seen in Eyes of the Stone Thief, are the descendants of enemies of the Emperor. They were exiled from the Dragon Empire, and ended up riding along in a living dungeon that they intended to one day turn into a weapon against the ‘usurpers’. The cult’s original goal of […]

Expanded Rituals

Ritual Magic permits a spell caster to turn one of their prepared spells into an improvised plot-bending miracle. All they need to do is have the Ritual Casting feat,  sacrifice one of their available spells, and make a skill check. The rules and Difficulty Class are simple and largely in the purview of the Gamemaster […]

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