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 […]
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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. […]
A column about roleplaying by Robin D. Laws Having appeared on GM advice panels for lots of years, I’m always on the alert for changes in the types of questions audience members put forward. These can vary quite a bit depending on the convention. An expensive destination show like Gen Con, or one directed to […]
Here’s an expanded use for the Sense Trouble ability one of my players, Chris Huth, sold me on recently. The basic principle can apply to any GUMSHOE game that includes this general ability. We’ve reached the Aftermath sequence of our Yellow King Roleplaying Game playtest. In its alternate 2017, landlines remain the basic telephonic technology. […]
No one celebrates Halloween in 1895 Paris, the first sequence of the reality-spanning Yellow King Roleplaying Game. Observance of that holiday won’t start until sometime in the 20s or 30s in the United States. However, the proximity of All Soul’s Day may provoke an uptick in the ghostly activity triggered by the publication of a […]