In the shadow of empires, an epic saga of ambition and desire! Only 100 copies of this faux-leatherbound limited edition Hillfolk exist. 50 are available to customers in the U.S. and Canada, and 50 are available to customers outside the U.S. and Canada. The books are faux leather with foil, and each one includes a sticky-backed bookplate signed […]
Tag Archives: robin d laws
18
Jun
Jun
Esoterrorists aren’t known for their long-range thinking. The sorts who join this loosely affiliated conspiracy of sadists, power-seekers and maniacs don’t want to wait generations to enjoy the fruits of their demon-summoning labors. Members of a cell headquartered in Silicon Valley learned of an effort to create software that will one day be able to […]
A column about roleplaying by Robin D. Laws Pelgrane co-publisher Simon Rogers has been thinking about Mutant City Blues lately, and maybe someday he’ll tell you about that. In the meantime, he asked me how you might play the game for a duo of enhanced police detectives, in true buddy cop fashion. Here’s a […]
16
May
May
A creature for The Esoterrorists The Outer Dark Entities known as sheeple slip through thin spots in the membrane caused by the belief that a dangerous contaminant or source of disease exists nearby. They enter our reality only in rural areas where domestic livestock roam. Sheeple feed on the fatal terror of farm animals. Cows, […]
02
May
May
A column about roleplaying by Robin D. Laws The Yellow King Roleplaying Game rules debut a new iteration of GUMSHOE, which we’re calling QuickShock GUMSHOE. The name combines two of the features of the new rules set: combats take way takes less time than in standard GUMSHOE mental setbacks a character may suffer in the […]
16
Apr
Apr
A steady improvement curve for heroes makes sense in certain roleplaying genres. Fighting foes, getting stuff from them, and becoming increasingly powerful is not incidental to F20—it’s the core activity. The journey of a D&D character from first to twentieth level mirrors that of Conan as he progresses from scruffy barbarian to implacable king. Improvement […]
04
Apr
Apr
A column about roleplaying by Robin D. Laws Since investigative roleplaying first burst from its sunken atoll and called itself Call of Cthulhu, mystery solving and horror have always been linked in the gamer mind. As a result, when Simon first asked me to design a system for investigative play, it made sense to debut […]
The Internet has certainly jacked up standards for what a GM is supposed to improvise these days. My home group’s Yellow King Roleplaying Game series has now progressed to the final sequence, the contemporary reality horror of This is Normal Now. Accordingly, a recent session found several characters wearing Urchins, Fitbit-like devices that can’t be […]
01
Mar
Mar
A column about roleplaying by Robin D. Laws Previously on See Page XX, I talked about the difficulties we occasionally hear about when GMs who have trained themselves to say “no” come to the GUMSHOE system with those assumptions in mind. This time I’d like to look at how early roleplaying culture took on that […]
When the cold war sputtered to a close, Esoterrorists let the stoking of nuclear anxiety recede into the background in favor of newer and fresher means of increasing ambient panic. These days Esoterror operatives, eagerly scanning the news for fresh inspiration, suffer from a glut of possibility. So many causes of psychic disequilibrium, so little […]