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 […]
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 […]
by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan Love is eternal… if you’re an alien monstrosity from beyond all sane conceptions of space and time, an undying horror that seethes and defies our pitiful understandings of entropy and existence. For the rest of us, love’s a brief candle, a momentary delusion to distract us from the horror of existence, our […]
After nearly a century of supernatural tyranny, the Castaigne regime has fallen. Your player characters fought in the underground Struggle, then emerged from the shadows with grenades and rocket launchers to bring about the Overthrow. The gates to Carcosa have been closed. But not all the horrors that kept the Empire in place have been […]
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 […]
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 […]
A column about roleplaying By Robin D. Laws Work on the Yellow King Roleplaying Game has been chugging along since the Kickstarter closed in July. A master document containing the elements of Absinthe in Carcosa is now in the hands of hand-out artist extraordinaire Dean Engelhardt. In the months ahead he’ll be transforming them into […]
In a previous post I laid out the basics of Shock and Injury cards in The Yellow King Roleplaying Game (now on Kickstarter.) Let’s now dive in a bit more detail into the way certain of the cards evoke the sense of a multi-step recovery. Like anything in GUMSHOE, they emulate the way things work […]
As those who’ve read the preview draft of the Yellow King Roleplaying Game (available to all backers of its Kickstarter) already know, its iteration of GUMSHOE takes a new approach to the emotional and physical wounds horror characters suffer in the course of their exploits. When something debilitating happens to your character you receive Shock […]
