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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
A Column about roleplaying by Robin D. Laws Many moons ago I encountered a phenomenon I later termed an unrule. A rule, as goes without saying, is text the designer includes into a game to explain how it is played. An unrule is text you have to include to prevent players from making a mistaken […]
Some players find damage dealing in baseline GUMSHOE emotionally unsatisfying. This becomes an issue especially when they’ve spent a lot of points, or gotten a high die roll, only to roll low on the damage die, plinking the opponent for a miserable 1 or 2 points of Health. Rolling high to hit and then minimum […]
A column about roleplaying by Robin D. Laws GUMSHOE core games present the GM with a default scenario structure you can use when creating your own mysteries to challenge your players. By following it you can ensure that the investigators have at least one, and preferably many, routes to solve the adventure’s key question, whether […]
The 1920 murder of Joseph Bowne Elwell asks the question: who would want to kill a womanizing bridge expert and gambler with interests in the worlds of horse racing and Wall Street speculation? When hacked from the history books as a Trail of Cthulhu scenario premise, we can answer the question with a Lovecraftian spin. […]
