by Emily Cambias This Spiritualism-inspired adventure is best played with Trail of Cthulhu groups that include a Parapsychologist or Medium. Introduction New England, December, 1930. Mrs. Allsopp is a wealthy widow and avid Spiritualist. She’s hosted the medium Lewis Thrush in her home for eight months and holds regular séances with him. Everyone who attends […]
Tag Archives: GUMSHOE
Although the rules don’t call for it, some GUMSHOE groups add a narrative wrinkle to the spending of pool points from general abilities. They call on players to justify why they’re spending the number of points they’ve chosen to add to their die rolls. “I really want to get over this fence so I’m going […]
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 […]
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 […]
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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A column about roleplaying by Robin D. Laws A recent observation I’m adding to my Things I Always Say file is that when players worry about a scenario being railroaded or linear, what they really mean is not that it lacked choices or branch points, but that they didn’t get to Do Their Thing. Many […]
Of all GUMSHOE abilities, perhaps the most confusing is Forensic Etymology. Wait, no, it’s Bullshit Detector. Or Assess Honesty in the more genteel environs of Trail, or Liar’s Tell in Swords. The tell-when-they’re-lying ability. The customary use of Bullshit Detector is to confirm when a witness is being truthful so the investigators don’t need to […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]