A column on roleplaying by Robin D. Laws Your Mutant City Blues characters may spend their on-stage time putting down major cases with an extra-human slant. But just like their TV procedural counterparts, we see them only when they’re working the interesting cases. We can assume that they investigate plenty of routine cases between episodes. […]
Tag Archives: GUMSHOE
…or, When Your Car Battery Goes Dead Outside the Jorgamundr’s Lair, It Ain’t No Coincidence A Column on Roleplaying by Robin D. Laws Your assignments for the Ordo Veritatis take you into zones where the membrane between our reality and the terrifying realm of the Outer Dark nears the breaking point. In such places you […]
In The Zalozhniy Quartet, there’s a scene (not really a spoiler) where the PCs are outmatched and are ‘supposed’ to flee, leading into a tense chase. Expecting player characters to take a particular action is always hazardous design – you can set up a situation where there’s only one valid route for the PCs to […]
GUMSHOE is a game system that privileges bite-size morsels of neat-sounding knowledge. Ideally creepy neat-sounding knowledge, handed out in such a way as to imply a whole universe of such things just beyond the players’ horizon. It’s as though Robin invented it thinking solely of me. Even before Trail of Cthulhu, I liked to make […]
Playtest feedback for Dreamhounds of Paris, the upcoming Trail of Cthulhu campaign sourcebook in which you play the major figures of the surrealist movement wreaking –psychic-revolutionary havoc in Lovecraft’s eerie fantasy realm, is in. Participants should pat themselves on the bat for a collectively great job. They’ve turned in detailed, thoughtful responses that will make […]
In the various mystery sub-genres, suspects shadow, spy upon and track the detectives at least as often as the investigators stake them out. Yet roleplayers react to being watched with less sang froid than do their fictional counterparts. Like imprisonment, enemy surveillance falls into the category of plot elements that players resist, because they seem […]
See P. XX A column on roleplaying by Robin D. Laws With Kevin Kulp’s TimeWatch RPG blasting through Kickstarter as only a chronoton can, you may be asking yourself if you can put time travel in other GUMSHOE games. We at Pelgrane are not in the business of telling you not what not to do […]
With the dying of the year, it’s time to read “The Festival” and to think of 2014. In this space, specifically, about the next year’s Ken Writes About Stuff installments. To get the good, or rather the known, stuff out of the way: January 2014: GUMSHOE Zoom: Mind Control. This is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful […]
As a result of the Hillfolk Kickstarter, GUMSHOE is now available under the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution Unported License. The document is a reference for game designers, and is not tuned to teach the game, or provide a playable game experience. If you’re looking for a playable game, seek out such Pelgrane Press titles as […]
In the celluloid-addled latest edition of their star-studded podcast, Ken and Robin talk Toronto film fest, GUMSHOE tips, and the Oklahoma Azathoth monument.