Summer weather has made a surprise appearance up here in the land of the silverbirch. And that means it’s time once again for the feature that really draws you to a site for a publisher of tabletop roleplaying games—cocktail recipes. Let’s return to the favorite color of our favorite grim-visaged, reality-bending monarch with… The Yellow […]
Tag Archives: robin d laws
In response to our scenario design workshop, we were asked to delve a bit further into the distinction between core and alternate scenes in a GUMSHOE adventure. TL;DR: Make sure there’s one path through a GUMSHOE scenario. Those are your core scenes. Add more paths. Those are your alternate scenes. A Core Scene provides one […]
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Apr
Apr
A column about roleplaying by Robin D. Laws Last time we started laying out a loose episode structure for your Yellow King Roleplaying Game Paris sequence. Start there for episodes 1 through 7. Episode 8: Visit from Home Follow a time-honored serialized storytelling convention, bringing in a relative who drops into Paris to complicate an […]
A Scenario Hook for Ashen Stars The lasers pick up a contract for what appears to be a simple rescue mission. The massive freighter Never Given has lost faster-than-light capability and has become lodged in a translight corridor. Characters with Astronomy or Forensic Engineering want to hear that last bit again. Lodged in a translight […]
Recently on the Pelgrane Press Twitch channel, game designers and writers Robin D. Laws, Kenneth Hite and Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan walked through the process of designing a scenario for The Yellow King RPG. If you missed it on Twitch, catch it over on our YouTube channel now!
In this story hook for preteen weird investigation in Fear Itself, excitement over Mars exploration turns to alien terror in a sleepy small town. The young protagonists assemble when assigned to a group class presentation about the latest NASA rover mission to Mars. They establish their group dynamic while poring through images on the NASA […]
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Feb
Feb
The paintings of the Russian-born French artist Jean Béraud (1849-1935) offer a trove of inspiring images for the Paris sequence of your Yellow King game. Straddling the warring Impressionist and Academic camps, he specialized in scenes of everyday life and worked during and beyond the game’s 1895 setting. Like the action of a typical scenario, […]
A column about roleplaying by Robin D. Laws Most writers, whatever form they favor, fade into obscurity after their deaths. That goes triple for playwrights. The number of stage writers whose works are still produced in the English-speaking world is very spare. And only a handful of those wrote originally in other languages: chiefly […]
A column about roleplaying by Robin D. Laws Now that lots of you have had the chance to check it out, either in its original run on Twitch or now on YouTube, I thought you might enjoy a look behind the scenes at my process for preparing and running “Mr. Wilde’s Wild Halloween.” These notes […]
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Jan
Jan
Along with many other historical figures of 1895 Paris, characters in The Yellow King Roleplaying Game can meet Alphonse Bertillon, who pioneered both the scientific and pseudoscientific strains of criminal forensics. He appears in the Paris book; we also discuss him in this episode of Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff. The mug shot remains […]