Especially in autumn or winter I love to run horror games and what could be more blood-freezing than combining H.P. Lovecraft’s work with the cold war? I think I’ll pitch the idea to my players and if they show some interest, I’ll start working on that project as soon as I have enough free time.

The question that remains is what system shall I use. The simplest solution would probably be Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu. The system is easy enough and allows adventures from the 1890s to modern day with ease. Another possibility would be Realms of Cthulhu by Reality Blurs. Especially if the campaign should feature a good amount of action, it’s probably the best solution because it uses the Savage World rules. Last but not least Trail of Cthulhu by Pelgrane Press comes to mind. This game normally uses the 1930s as its setting, but as the adventure Castle Bravo has shown, it can be used for later centuries, too. Castle Bravo also combines the Mythos with atomic horror, so it can probably be used for inspiration, or even be run as part of said campaign.

Currently I think it would probably the best to set the campaign into the 1950s or 1960s. Most characters might have actually fought in WW2 and may even had their first encounter with the Mythos then. I also think that the McCarthy era in particular could form a great backdrop for such a campaign. Perhaps the players start as FBI agents following some leads on a group of Communists that are in fact cultists worshipping some Mythos entity.

I am not entirely sure about the details yet, but my plan is that things on Earth get increasingly worse during the campaign. Instead of stopping the coming apocalypse the player characters should be uncovering the events that lead to it. This is a big gamble. My players may actually hate it, because they can’t fight the inevitable. But in my opinion that’s what a combination of the Cthulhu Mythos and the cold war should be like. There’s no way out. The bombs will fall, Cthulhu will wake, humanity will be destroyed. But the way there can be quite exciting and even fun to play!

Related posts:

1. Review: Cthulhu Rising
2. Ia! Ia! Check out this great Realms of Cthulhu sale!
3. I AM CTHULHU!

A happy gamer!	Signed by the man himself!	This is definitely a good-looking book

As soon as I had some time to give the book a proper read, I’ll post a review here on Stargazer’s World. But since I am currently busy, busy, busy, this may take a while. But you can trust me when I tell you that Ashen Stars is well worth every penny! If you like the GUMSHOE system and Science Fiction, you’ll love this game!

Related posts:

1. Pre-pre order Ashen Stars now and get a lot of cool stuff at release!
2. Mass Effect and Ashen Stars – Could this work?
3. Freebie: Stars Without Number

1. Tomb of the Overfiend
   Weird West is definitely one of coolest old-school games ever conceived. It’s extremely rules-light, but contains a lot of weird west goodness. Recently Stuart Robertson, creator of that fine game, released a free one-page adventure based on an excellent map by Matt Jackson. And even if you’re not into Weird West you can easily use it for other old-school games as well.
2. Ashen Stars Theme Music
   James Semple who has done several soundtracks for Gumshoe games in the past, has composed a theme music for Robin D. Laws latest game, Ashen Stars. I really hope this is the first sign of a full Ashen Stars soundtrack to come. You can listen to the rather short theme tune here.
3. Barbarians of the Future
   You probably might already have heard about Barbarians of Lemuria, Simon Washbourne’s Sword & Sorcery RPG. While I haven’t tried the game yet, it’s among the games I have to give a try at least once. Some people actually call it one of the best RPGs of the genre. Obviously the system used in BoL can also be easily be used in other genres. There’s Jabberwocky Productions’ post-apocalyptic setting-expansion Barbarians of the Aftermath for example.
   A while back rpg.net forum member Maxwell Luther created a free PDF supplement for BoA that allows players and the GM to experience adventures in the grim-dark future of the Warhammer 40,000 universe (with the serial numbers filed off). If you are interested in both BoA and the WH40K universe, you should definitely give it a look. You can download the 42-paged PDF here.
4. Expedition RPG
   Fellow RPG blogger Dennis N. Santana has recently released an early playtest edition of his Expedition RPG. I haven’t had time to give it a closer look, but according to Shaun Welch’s playtest reports (part one & part two), he and his players not only had fun with the fast character creation system that allows truly unique character concepts, but also very much enjoyed the combat rules. From what I’ve seen Expedition contains a lot of interesting ideas that set the game apart from the majority of fantasy games. If you’re looking for something new, why don’t you give it a try. It’s free and obviously pretty polished for a game still in its alpha stage.

Related posts:

1. Weird West Roleplaying Game
2. “You are all travelling in a Stagecoach…” Weird West pre-gens
3. History of West End Games

I found it especially amazing that the creators of this game series also included a lot of background information on topics that don’t even have any impact on the games story. But that is what makes the Mass Effect setting so believable and deep.

In addition to that the game cleverly uses familiar science fiction tropes that help players to get into the story quickly without the need of long explanations. But instead of just presenting us with a overly clichéd universe, there are a lot of interesting twists that keep things fresh. I think you can tell that I love these games.

Recently I preordered Ashen Stars, the latest Gumshoe-powered roleplaying game written by Robin D. Laws. Like Mass Effect it’s a SF (or rather Space Opera) game that makes use of classic Space Opera tropes but cleverly combines them with more modern elements like cyberware and a more grim and gritty outlook.

The Gumshoe system was designed to support investigative campaigns and is surprisingly versatile. When I first read about a Gumshoe SF game I was wondering how an investigative Space Opera campaign could work. But it’s actually pretty easy. Just have a look at a random Star Trek episode: something mysterious is going on, the crew investigates, gets clues, there’s some combat or plot twist, the clues are put together and the mystery gets solved, end credits.

And when you think about it, the story in Mass Effect shares a lot of similarities with this. The protagonist Commander Shepard is on an investigation, trying to find out more about the mysterious Geth/Collectors, and the Reapers they are working for. There are a couple of plot twists and combats, but in the end the clues get put together, the Commander kicks some alien butt and the universe is once again saved.

I have to admit I haven’t read the Ashen Stars preorder PDF that thoroughly. It’s over 300 pages long and in its unlayouted form its not that easy on the eyes. But from what I’ve seen, almost everything needed should be there.

In my opinion the sapient species from Mass Effect should be the easiest to convert. Ashen Stars already contains some guidelines for playing Nonstandard Character Types that could be used to build turian, asari, quarian, salarian or krogan characters easily. Ashen Stars also has rules for starships and starship combat, in case you want this to play a mayor role in your campaign, too.

The only aspect of the Mass Effect universe that could pose some problem are the bionic and tech abilities. In Ashen Stars the Vas Mal species has some psi abilities, that are basically special skills. These could be used as a basis to create bionic and tech abilities, but that probably takes a creative GM.

So what do you think? Could a Gumshoe-powered game be a good fit for the Mass Effect universe or am I on a wrong trail here?

By the way, you still have the chance to preorder the special “Ashen Stars Stellar Nursery Edition”. If you’re a fan of Space Opera RPGs and if you have a soft spot for the Gumshoe system, you should at least consider grasping that opportunity, especially since you get a hardcover copy of the final game signed by Robin D. Laws himself plus some very nice extras for the regular price of the book. You can’t beat that.

Related posts:

1. Pre-pre order Ashen Stars now and get a lot of cool stuff at release!
2. Starblazer Adventures meets the Mass Effect Universe
3. Ashen Stars!

Ashen Stars is the latest game powered by Robin D. Laws’ GUMSHOE system. Ashen Stars is a gritty space opera game where the PCs are freelance law enforcers called lasers, who operate in a remote sector of space called the Bleed. Ashen Stars not only comes with a complete campaign setting, but also expands the GUMSHOE system with rules for alien species, space combat, cybernetic and viroware enhancements, to just name a few additions.

So, what’s the big deal with the pre-pre order now? It’s a special preorder deal that not only gets you the printed book and the PDF when it is released in August, but also some very special treats like immediate access to the game rules (albeit in a very simple PDF), your name in the credits, exclusive fiction and a signed and numbered copy on release. If you are a fan of Robin D. Laws works you just have to grasp that opportunity!

As you can imagine I already pre-preordered the game and got my simple prerelease PDF. Aside from a full-color cover and the character sheet in the back the 301-paged PDF is has not been layouted yet. But even though it doesn’t look that appealing, it’s a lot of fun to read. I leafed through it on my commute today and I enjoyed every minute of it. I can’t wait to hold the final book in my hands. Ashen Stars is a game that should appeal to all fans of GUMSHOE and the space opera genre.

By the way, this special pre-pre order phase should end later this month, so if you are interested in this deal, you should act fast. The pre-pre order is exclusive to the Pelgrane Press online store and the game sets you back £29.95 or $44.95 respectively (plus shipping of course).

Related posts:

1. Mass Effect and Ashen Stars – Could this work?
2. Ashen Stars!
3. First Look: Chthonian Stars

I am also a big fan of the GUMSHOE system. Robin D. Laws is one of my favorite game designers and in my opinion GUMSHOE is the perfect system for investigative campaigns of all kinds. So when I read that James Semple had created music for both Trail of Cthulhu and Esoterrorists I had to buy it immediately. Both Dissonance for Esoterrorists and Four Shadows for Trail are great soundtracks albeit a bit short.

But James Semple, his team (Marie-Anne Fischer, Mike Torr, and Yaiza Varona) and Pelgrane Press didn’t stop there. Recently they released the Eternal Lies Suite as soundtrack for the Eternal Lies campaign for Trail of Cthulhu. I haven’t had the chance to look at said campaign but I had to buy the soundtrack as soon as it became available at the Pelgrane Press online shop.

The soundtrack consists of 27 tracks of orchestrated music. Some of the tracks feature additional sound samples like wind, breathing, etc. but this never distracts from the beautiful music. I own a couple of soundtracks by Midnight Syndicate where the samples actually are quite distracting especially when used as background music. But this is not the case here.

The majority of the tracks are orchestral pieces like you would expect from a horror movie soundtrack. Especially the longer pieces work great as background music for any horror roleplaying game. The last few tracks on the soundtrack are obviously meant for special situations like chases, dangerous situations, and are aptly named "Run!”, “Danger”, “Tension” etc. But I think you could still use those in the background as well.

The soundtrack is available as download as well as on CD and is highly recommended not only for Trail but for any period horror game. According to the official product description the soundtrack was created in a way that you can loop it unobtrusively and the action tracks can be shuffled randomly but still blend seamlessly. I have to admit I haven’t tried that yet, but I will surely do so when I run my next horror game.

You can listen to a sample of the soundtrack here:
Download audio file (01%20Main%20Title%20Mastered%2024%20bit.mp3)

You can buy the Eternal Lies Suite as download or CD at the Pelgrane Press Store which sets you back $14.95 or $18.95 respectively. Alternatively the download version is available at DriveThruRPG as well.

Related posts:

1. Review: Into the Grey
2. Roleplaying music: “Age of Conan – Hyborian Adventures”
3. Roleplaying music: “Dead Space”

The Book of Unremitting Horror is a sourcebook for two GUMSHOE games by Pelgrane Press: The Esoterrorists and Fear Itself. I have to admit I haven’t read Fear Itself yet, but from what I understand both games are set into the same game universe. In this alternate version of our world, a group of loosely affiliated cultists try to rend the fabrics of our reality. In The Esoterrorists the players are skilled investigators, members of the Ordo Veritatis who investigate strange events and enforce the unwritten laws of civilization against the Esoterrorists while in Fear Itself the players are pretty much Average Joes.

TBoUH is a 221-paged softcover book which you can get directly from Pelgrane Press, your favorite game store or from DriveThruRPG. By the way, since Pelgrane Press is part of the Bits & Mortar initiative, you always get a free PDF copy of the book with the purchase of the softcover book!

On the first glance TBoUH looks like your typical monster handbook. But it actually isn’t. It’s more than that. One the one hand TBoUH describes a universe that are slightly different from the standard Esoterrorists world. In the standard Esoterrorists game some of the horrors presented in the book are just folkloric and don’t exist yet. In the World of Unremitting Horrors the world is truely haunted and all these creatures have existed for a long time.

The introduction contains not only some tips on how to use this book, but also a set of new rules for GUMSHOE. TBoUH adds Pathology as an investigative skill to The Esoterrorists, describes a few new monster abilities and adds Alcohol and Drug use rules for both supported games, to list a few of the changes.

The majority of the book contains multiple page long descriptions of the unremitting horrors mentioned in the book’s title. These are not just simple descriptions of monsters you can throw at your players, but detailed descriptions of horrific creatures, the clues they leave behind and what investigative skills can tell you about these horrors. These descriptions are mostly written in character (in form of diary entries or eye witness reports) and are quite graphic -nothing for the faint of heart! By the way, you shouldn’t read TBoUH when riding on the bus or train. You’ll definitely get some weird looks by the other passengers, because of the prominent black & white artwork in the interior of the book.

The quality of the writing in the “horrors” section of the book is extremely good. I have to admit some of the stories in there are very creepy and quite disturbing. That’s exactly what I am looking for in horror games. And while some of the horrors are clearly inspired by well-known monsters from mythology, superstition or pop culture, the majority is very fresh and unique. That’s the reason I won’t be discussing the horrors in detail in this review, because I don’t want to spoil anyone. But rest assured that you’ll get a lot of inspiration for your GUMSHOE campaigns.

The next section is about artifacts. Most of these artifacts are closely related with some of the horrors described in the section before, and provide the GM with additional hooks to use in his campaign. Perhaps the players get hold of one of the artifacts that then leads them to uncover a murderous cult. Or they are tasked with the apprehension of the artifact. In another case one of the artifacts may actually a red herring, put there by the GM to lead the players astray. As with the monstrous creatures in this book, the artifacts are quite unique and can be used easily in both supported games.

The next section contains a two-paged description of the aforementioned differences between the Esoterrorists world and the World of Unremitting Horror. This section also provides guidelines on how you can use both artifacts and monsters in your campaign.

The Book Of Unremitting Horror concludes with ten scenario outlines and two pre-made scenarios for your GUMSHOE campaign. The scenario outlines are a couple of paragraphs each which a creative GM can flesh out into fully-fledged adventures.

The both adventures Crook’s End and The Final Case are fully fledged out adventures for both Esoterrorists and Fear Itself. Both are designed in a way that they can be easily adopted to suit your campaign. Even though The Final Case is set into contemporary London, a GM should have no trouble moving the action to any other modern city. Both adventures also contain a lot of tips on how to run them. There are also some guidelines on how to run non-linear games in GUMSHOE.

In my option The Book of Unremitting Horror is a must-have for any GM interested in running horror campaigns, regardless if he/she is using a GUMSHOE game or not. Because of the rules-light nature of the GUMSHOE system and the fact that TBoUH mainly contains fluff, it should pose no problem to convert the creatures to any game system used. If you play any d20 System game, you can also pick up the d20 version of this book, which is also available from Pelgrane. The horrors presented in the book are a welcome change from standard horror fare and can be used to turn any Esoterrorists campaign to eleven!

Thanks to Simon Rogers from Pelgrane Press for providing me with a review copy.

Related posts:

1. Ask The Readers: What are your thoughts on the GUMSHOE system?
2. Review: Eternal Lies Suite
3. GUMSHOE Sale on RPGNow

There are two bundles, an RPG bundle worth $724.46 which you receive for a $25 donation. There are some great digital books in that bundle, from Icons, to Dragon Warriors, Don’t Rest Your Head, Exalted 2^nd Edition, Fear Itself, Open Game Table: The Anthology of Roleplaying Game Blogs vol. 2, Spycraft 2.0, and many, many more (including some fine Pathfinder RPG supplements)!

This is for a good cause and you get some excellent gaming materials. There is also the comic book bundle worth $173.91 you receive for a $10 donation. I have not read the comics, but there are some gaming PDFs in there, like Dark Champions and Mutants & masterminds 2^nd edition.

I got mine this afternoon and I’m still downloading and perusing all the gaming goodness. I encourage you to find it in your heart (and pockets) to donate. It’s a worthy cause, with loot! As I write this post gamers have donated $9,500, we are a generous folk, I know we can do more.

Have a great day!

Related posts:

1. Ia! Ia! Check out this great Realms of Cthulhu sale!
2. A helping hand for Christchurch!
3. Oldies but goodies! Some great digital game supplements for the New Year…

So, what is Skulduggery all about? Its a roleplaying game which plunges players into situations where they have to prevail by guile and persuasion, not brute force. The settings included allow GMs and players to create tales of modern politics and bureaucracy, the age of piracy, the high school drama club and interstellar trade. The preorder sets you back $22.95.

And while you are at the Pelgrane Press store check out their other products as well. The new Trail of Cthulhu adventure Castle Bravo for example costs $4.95 only! This is definitely a steal.

Related posts:

1. Dresden Files RPG: Preorder Is Go!
2. Dragon Age RPG Set 1 is available for preorder
3. Quick reminder: OPEN GAME TABLE available for preorder at amazon.com

The success of the event was overwhelming. We had 6,298 page views last week and Cody from “Kingdom of Geeks” joined us and wrote several Mythos-related posts as well. Perhaps we should have these themed weeks more often!

But now let’s have a look at the contributions to the “Lovecraftian Week”. I want to start with Cody’s posts here:

• My Favorite Cthulhu Mythos and Cthulhu Mythos Inspired Adventures
• The Great Old Ones are Everywhere!
• Through The Eyes of the Cthulhu Mythos: Mothman

But he haven’t been lazy over here at Stargazer’s World, either, so without further ado, behold our contributions:

• Lazy Friday Video Post: The Adventures of Lil Cthulhu
• Lovecraft, how do I love thee? Let me count with my tentacles… – My Top 5 Favorite Lovecraftian Stories
• Lazy Thursday Video Post: PSA for Cthulhu
• Review: The Armitage Files
• Lovecraftian posts from the archives
• The Mythos is Everywhere
• Review: Realms of Cthulhu
• Old McWhateley had a cult… Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fhtagn! – My Top 5 Lovecraftian gaming products
• I AM CTHULHU!
• H.P. Lovecraft and his works

While the "Lovecraftian Week" is technically over, I’ve heard that my friend Roberto has still one unpublished post on the topic up his sleeves. Stay tuned, it will go live when the stars are right again!

Related posts:

1. Lovecraftian posts from the archives
2. The Stars Are Right!
3. Old McWhateley had a cult… Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fhtagn! – My Top 5 Lovecraftian gaming products

Basically the book provides you with all the tools needed to improvise a whole investigative campaign. Investigative campaign and improvisation? Isn’t that usually contradictory? According to Robin D. Laws it isn’t. And so I gave the review copy I was provided by Pelgrane Press’ Simon Rogers (Thanks again, Simon!) a thorough read to find out, if that claim was true.

The book starts with an introductions that provides the Keeper with some information on what it’s about and how to use it. The files mentioned in the book’s title are ten documents written in the handwriting of Dr. Henry Armitage, . One after the other they mysteriously arrive amidst the effects of his colleagues, but Dr. Armitage has no recollection of ever writing them. And they describe events leading to an apocalypse.

These ten files are provided as handouts in the back of the book that can be copied and given to the players. Alas the documents included in the book are not full-color, but owners of the book can download the full-color versions of the files from the Pelgrane Press site. The handwritten documents contain the clues that should spark the investigator’s curiosity and should enable them to prevent the apocalyptic events hinted at in the files.

The first section of the book describe how the Keeper can use these props to run the campaign and how you can use improvisation in a GUMSHOE system game. The advice given can easily applied to any GUMSHOE game (like Esoterrorists or Mutant City Blues) or even any other roleplaying game. In my humble opinion this already warrants the purchase of this book.

The second part of “The Armitage Files” contains descriptions of people, organisations, places and tomes that may play a role in your campaign.  The character write-ups are fully modular, so the Keeper can pick and choose his version of any given character, it’s even possible to reuse them. Each character write-up also contains short scenes that can be used if the character is either sinister, innocous or stalwart. The same character can very well be either an innocent, totally oblivious of the unspeakable horrors that threaten mankinds existance or he can be an agent of the Elder Gods himself.

The 42 characters can probably be reused in other campaigns as well, which is another big plus in my book. The descriptions of organizations and places basically follow the same format. Organizations can be either stalwart or sinister and there are neutral and sinister descriptions for each location listed.

The chapter about tomes and magic expands on the tomes that are already listed in the main rulebook and can – like the other parts of the book – be reused for other campaigns as well.

Last but not least the book also contains several sample spines that give the Keeper some hints on how the story could unfold. In one case even an example of play is given that should provide the Keeper with a deeper insight on how he can use the material from the book to create a Trail of Cthulhu scenario on the fly.

In a way “The Armitage Files” is much more than a simple campaign setting that provides Keepers with a script for several connected adventures. It’s rather a toolbox that enables any Keeper to not only run an epic campaign focused on the ten mysterious documents but also provides him with an enormous amount of material usuable in any Trail of Cthulhu game and good advice on how to run a game by reacting on the player’s actions instead of following a predetermined script.

“The Armitage Files” is definitely a book anyone interested in running Trail of Cthulhu should own, especially if you want to try something new. But it proves – without a shadow of doubt – that it’s possible to improvise an investigative games if you are open to follow the advice given in the book.

Related posts:

1. News from the Dresden Files RPG
2. Dresden Files RPG: Nevermore
3. The Dresden Files RPG now available at RPGNow!

All the posts listed here are either about some Cthulhu game product, give advice how to improve your Cthulhu gameplay experience or just fool around with the Mythos. Nobody was harmed during the creation of this post.

Reviews

• Review: CthulhuTech Damnation View
• CthulhuTech Quickstart
• My experiences with “Trail of Cthulhu”
• Review: Lovecraftian Tales from the Table
• CthulhuTech
• The HPLHS Props & Fonts CD

Advice

• Torso Murders
• Instant Soundtrack for your Cthulhu campaign
• The end is nigh!
• Horror Improved!

Odds & Ends

• Lazy Easter Monday Video Post: Elder Sign
• “Blog of a new RPGer” interview
• Lazy Friday Video Post: The Whisperer in Darkness
• A Study in Emerald
• Creepy!
• Spreading some random madness
• A Colder War

I hope I didn’t miss anything! I don’t want to fight those pesky Mythos creatures anytime soon.

Related posts:

1. Lovecraftian Week: Roundup post
2. CthulhuTech Quickstart
3. The Stars Are Right!

Hopefully it will be equal parts nostalgia and mini-review; I’ll try to include some gaming tidbits or ideas that can be of use to you. So without further ado gentle reader here we go…

5. Call of Cthulhu RPG (3^rd Edition): This was my first Call of Cthulhu product. Well that’s not technically true, since it wasn’t mine. In the late 80’s when we were starting to play role-playing game we didn’t have money to buy every game and each person got the game that they wanted to run; we often mail ordered games together to save on shipping and handling. I don’t remember what I ordered that particular time, but my friend Luis ordered the Call of Cthulhu 3^rd edition Boxed Set and became our official Cthulhu Keeper.

Boxed Sets have a special place in my heart. There is some sort of magic to opening that box and taking out all the different components. I remember that after Luis read the booklets, I got to read the Investigator’s Book with its red cover and the profile of the pensive man. Inside the sparsely illustrated book I got my introduction to Lovecraft and the Call of Cthulhu game. Although I must admit that upon first reading the book there were some details that confused me (for some reason the Resistance Table was hard for me to understand, but I was a pretty green gamer back then). The sample Harvey Walters’ character sheet and the one page example of play at the end of the booklet fired up my imagination and creativity.

Another thing that got me was the reading lists. By this time I knew who H.P Lovecraft was, but I was YET to read any of his works. After playing the game I became obsessed with reading the mythos stories and thus began a long love affair with Lovecraft and works inspired by his writings.

Years later my friend Luis moved and couldn’t take all his gaming books and I inherited his Call of Cthulhu boxed set. It’s still in my collection; the box has almost all the original components: The Investigator’s Book, The Keeper’s Book, the Sourcebook for the 1920s, character sheets and a map of the world. Only missing are the dice and the cardstock investigator figures.

But I got something better, copies of our old characters! The Keeper used to keep our character sheets (ironic I know) and when I opened the box I found some of the old character sheets we played with. I don’t think these are the very first character we used, but these were some of the first investigators we played. I’ve collected those character sheets into one PDF file, Including a copy of my character Rupert Edgard “Iggy” McNuggart, historian and antiquarian; for anyone interested in seeing what we played back then around 1995. Be aware we created these characters using the 3^rd edition rules, and excuse any mistakes made, we were all eager teenagers back then.

I have later editions of Call of Cthulhu in my collection, even the Basic Role-Playing game system I first experienced in Call of Cthulhu, but nothing compares to the thrill I got from the boxed set!

4. Cthulhupunk: The Cthulhupunk book is a GURPS sourcebook for playing Lovecraftian adventures in a cyberpunk world. Although the book is out of print (according to the Steve Jackson website) you can still get copies out there on the Internet. Later editions of the book have a nicer cover, but my copy from 1995 is graced with the art of Albert Slark, showing a cyborg stalked by a Hound of Tindalos. While I’ve seen other pieces by Albert Slark and love some of them, let’s say this is not one of those pieces. Despite the horrid cover, this is one excellent book.

By 1995 I was better versed in the Lovecraftian mythos. I had read the stories and played games set in the 1920s and modern times, but here was a thrilling idea, Lovecraftian adventures in a cyberpunk setting. Besides my love for the mythos I also brought the book because of the author, Chris W. McCubbin. I am a big fan of his work and back then he wrote one of my favorite columns in White Wolf Magazine, Out of the Parent’s Basement. So when I saw the book I snatched it up! I love GURPS sourcebooks, even if I rarely play the game, and this book did not disappoint.

The layout and art are excellent, set the tone of the book most effectively and are of exceptional quality. The first chapter, an overview of the Cthulhu Mythos is a clear and concise presentation, ideal to introduce the uninitiated to the concepts. I particularly like the timeline. The second chapter, the Cthulhu World, presented the dark future where the game is set. The distant time of 2045!

Fifteen years after it was written the future story of our world is badly outdated. The Commonwealth of Independent States that came into existence after the fall of the Soviet Union, and must have seemed so important back then, is given greater geopolitical importance that it had in our world and their dissolution is a harbinger of dark times in the game’s timeline. Still it is amazing some of the things the author predicted that echo real life events, devastating hurricanes, pandemics, the stock market collapse, and drug wars. Our world is not quiet the one portrayed in the book but it certainly has elements in place.

The Bestiary and Investigator chapters are GURPS specific and may not be as useful for gamers not using the system but the creature write up are informative and the weird science devices are imaginative and dark. The Cultist and the Adventure Seed chapters are chock full of ideas for adventure set in this setting.

Here is MY adventure seed idea for Cthulhupunk: I’ve always wanted to run a Cthulhupunk adventure where the players are hired by a music company executive to “procure” the sheet music to a particular piece. The executive claims the composer is an eccentric who still writes music in paper and although he was paid for his work he refuses to relinquish it. If the players investigate the composer was very popular and successful until he worked on a particularly disastrous production that was generally panned by the critics and ignored by the fans. Further investigation reveals the composer worked with sounds recorded by American historian Rupert Edgard McNuggart during an Antarctic expedition in the early 20^th century. The sheet music is actually part of a ritual to awaken or call terrible things from beyond our world. What will the characters do? That’s just an idea…

I think Savage Worlds would be a great fit for a Cthulhupunk campaign, and there is already a Savage Wolds Cthulhu book, Realms of Cthulhu. But if you want to do the conversion yourself there are documents out on the internet to help you. You can also see some sample NPCs at the Steve Jackson Games website to wet your appetite for the book.

3. Cthulhu by Gaslight: Of all the books on my list this is the last one I got. Surprising since Victorian England is one of my favorite time periods, but nevertheless I did not get this book until some years ago. It includes a great overview of the times, politics, timeline, travel, even clothing and fashion, details for creating Investigators for this time period and a great series of adventures. While I don’t usually run pre-made adventures, the adventures in the book contain many great ideas and details for adventures set in a period not everybody is familiar with. The map of London and the color plates are up to usual Chaosium standards. A great book overall.

I can’t wait for the publication of Space 1889 Red Sands, which Michael reviewed some weeks ago, so I can mix my love for Space 1889 with the Cthulhu mythos. Imagine discovering a temple to the Great Old Ones in Mars, protected by degenerate High Martians, or perhaps a Mi-Go settlement. The possibilities! However I’m not the first person to suggest this.  There is an article in heliograph.com about exactly this idea.

Even if you don’t want to mix your horror and your retro sci-fi there are many adventuring opportunities in Cthulhu by Gaslight regardless of the system you use.  Here is another Adventure Seed Idea: I love the spirit of exploration of the age, with so many opportunities to discover the secret places long forgotten or hidden away. The characters begin in London where the family of a friend lost in exotic places asks the characters for their help. They find a map hidden among his papers and must fight the cultists who want to recover the map, followed by a mad dash across the world to reach the location before the cultists. What awaits there? This could be played as a pulpish adventure or a dark and dangerous tale in the vein of Lovecraft’s stories.

This book is an excellent source of information for the period, whether you play Call of Cthulhu or not. Highly recommend!

2. Call of Cthulhu d20: If you’ve read any of my previous posts this must come as NO surprise. I’m a big D20 fan and the possibility of playing Call of Cthulhu with the D20 rule set just tickled my fancy. Granted the nature of the system results in a different gaming feel. Investigators in the D20 version are more resilient, but the author, Monte Cook, did a great job of capturing the feel of the mythos and paring down some aspects to make the characters feel like normal people, not super characters of other d20 games.

I like how the heroes play, in some ways more than I like how D20 Modern characters work. They used the Insanity mechanic from Call of Cthulhu, a great idea since I think it’s one of the strengths of the Chaosium game. Through numeric and mechanical formulas it emulates how the characters lose their minds. If you have players that love role-playing it gives them an idea of how to play this. For the more mechanically minded there is the real fear of the ever shrinking Sanity. A very elegant mechanic indeed!

There is also the fact that the mythos creatures in the book can be used in other D20 games. Now I had the stats so my D&D character could conceivably fight Cthulhu. Ask my players, they will tell you there is always some Lovecraftian feel to my games, no matter the genre or the system.

Although the book is out of print there are resources out there for the enterprising GM. Yog-Sothoth.com has D20 conversions for various adventures, including the famous Masks of Nyarlathotep. There is even an online character generator. The characters in the PDF earlier in the post were actually rolled up to play Masks of Nyarlathotep. Imagine the D20 characters finding the journal, or letters from a long dead family member and how it draws them into the adventure… Call of Cthulhu D20 may be dead but definitely not forgotten!

1. Deities and Demigods, the Cthulhu Mythos: This was my very first contact with the Cthulhu Mythos! I had just begun playing D&D some months before when a neighbor had a garage sale. To my surprise and delight he had been a D&D player and was selling his collection. I purchased an early edition of Deities and Demigods for $10, one that included the Melnibonean Mythos and of course the Cthulhu Mythos.

The Erol Otus art captured my imagination; here were horrific creatures, pools of eyes and mouths, Cthulhu with its horrific stare. I read and re-read that chapter, but I never unleashed any of the more powerful creatures upon my unsuspecting players, some deep ones perhaps. I did roll the dice when they mentioned the name Hastur to see if the Unnamable One appeared. There was a 25% chance… Alas, he never did!

If you can get your hands on a copy I believe the Cthulhu Mythos as they appeared in Deities and Demigos would be great for old school games out there such as the Basic Fantasy Role Paying Game or OSRIC.

This first contact with things Lovecraftian began my long descent into the Lovecraftian world. It piqued my interest as well as that of some of my friends, it led to us playing Call of Cthulhu and my voracious reading of all things Lovecraft. This interest continues, I believe I’ve read most of what Lovecraft wrote and many of the stories inspired by the Mythos.

As a final note, I realize some of my Top 5 choices may seem a little dated (hey I’m not denying my age) and I may have missed some of the newer Cthulhu themed games out there. Some like Cthulhutech and Trail of Cthulhu I am yet to read and I am looking forward to the Realms of Cthulhu for Savage Worlds I already ordered (hey writing this had some effect on my wallet!). But I know my good friend Michael is a fan of the first two and has written about them before so even if they are not on the list I know they are well represented.

Well that’s all for now, the first Top 5 list is done!

What are your favorite Lovecraftian gaming products?

Related posts:

1. Lovecraftian Week: Roundup post
2. Review: Cthulhu Rising
3. Lovecraftian posts from the archives

Call of Cthulhu is probably the best known roleplaying game based on H.P. Lovecrafts works, but in the recent years several games inspired by the Cthulhu mythos has been released. Take Cthulhutech for example which is a clever mix between the supernatural horror and the mecha genre. Another pretty recent game set into Lovecraft’s world is Ken Hite’s Trail of Cthulhu which makes use of the GUMSHOE system.

And even in some Fantasy game that are don’t refer to the Cthulhu mythos directly, influences of Lovecraft’s work can be found. Green Ronin’s Freeport is an example of a setting that contains cults, gods and creatures clearly influenced from the Cthulhu mythos.

So, stay tuned for some Lovecraftian goodness each day here at Stargazer’s World! And if you want to join the fun, just write something fitting the theme on your own blog, link back to this post and leave a comment here. It’s like some mini blog carnival this way. And feel free to use the logo I created (The Cthulhu artwork was created by DeviantArt user The-First-Magelord and was used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License) for that purpose.

Now there’s only one thing to add: “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”

Related posts:

1. Lovecraftian Week: Roundup post
2. First Look: Chthonian Stars
3. Review: Cthulhu Rising

Especially in investigative scenarios failing certain skill rolls can be a show-stopper. When you don’t find the necessary clues you can’t solve the mystery. Of course, a good GM might find ways around this, by offering alternative ways for the players to get their hands on the needed clues or he may fudge a few dice rolls, to get them closer to their goals, but that’s not always possible nor desired. Robin Laws solved a lot of these problems with his GUMSHOE system, in which investigative abilities always deliver the wanted result. When there’s a clue and you have the right skill, you find it. While this works perfectly in Trail of Cthulhu and other GUMSHOE games, I wouldn’t want to run every game using the GUMSHOE rules.

The easiest way to overcome the problem with failure is by always letting the players succeed but if the roll failed add some complications. Imagine a character is trying to climb a wall. He makes a Climb skill check and fails. In most games that means the character slipped, fell and takes some falling damage. Ouch. I still remember when I lost a character fifteen minutes into the game. That’s definitely no fun! An alternative is to let the character succeed at climbing the wall but add some complications. The climb may simply take longer, or the character may be extremely exhausted when he reaches the top. Both outcomes may or may not influence the scene(s) after the failed climb roll.

Another example: a character wants to open a locked safe to get to some important documents inside (which are needed to advance the story). He fails his roll. Instead of letting the action fail completely, the GM could decide that the character succeeded at opening the safe but triggered an alarm. This method allows the GM to keep the story running without making it too easy or too uninteresting for the players. Failing a skill roll does not mean failure but just adds complications which make things more interesting.

A GM who wants to give more narrative control to the players may even consider allowing the players to describe how they failed or what complications they now have to face. Of course the GM should always have the right to veto, since this can be easily abused. But if done the right way this will not only make your game more interesting but also empower your players by giving them more control over their characters actions.

Related posts:

1. Secret dice rolls
2. Happy New Year
3. Gears: Skills

All of our GUMSHOE PDF products are on sale over at rpgnow.com at a 15% discount until 19th March. Our average rating over 22 reviews is over 4 out of 5. So that’s Trail of Cthulhu, Mutant City Blues, Esoterrorists and Fear Itself. Get them while you can!

I just LOVE the GUMSHOE System, and so I took the opportunity to get the Esoterror Fact Book for just $12.71! If you haven’t done so, you should at least consider getting the core rulebooks for Esoterrorists, Trail of Cthulhu and Mutant City Blues. They are definitely worth it!

Related posts:

1. Ask The Readers: What are your thoughts on the GUMSHOE system?
2. Another sale at RPGNow
3. Annual GM’s Day Sale at RPGNow

The Trail of Cthulhu introductory adventure which you can find in the back of the book is actually based on a real series of crimes that have been committed in Cleveland. After I’ve run the first half of the adventure I then decided to get the book that Ken Hite obviously used for research on the case.

The book called “TORSO – The Story of Eliot Ness and the Search for a Psychopathic Killer” by Steven Nickel is recommended reading for everyone interested in running this adventure. Not only does it give you additional background information on the US in the 1930s, Cleveland and the case itself, but the information about the persons working on the case, the suspects and the victims might help you to flesh out the NPCs. The middle section of the book even contains a few photographs that would make perfect handouts for your game. If I ever run the adventure again for a different group, I will probably create a file consisting of the handouts contained in the ToC rule book, the photos from the Steven Nickel book and some mock-up newspaper clippings.

I have to admit that I regret not having bought “TORSO” earlier since my descriptions of some persons and places is quite different from the real deal, so I can’t use the photos anymore (at least not without contradicting myself).

I’ve also found a great high quality map of Cleveland especially created for the adventure which contains photos, handwritten notes and more. You can download the full 4 MByte version of the map here. I don’t think printing it on a regular printer might do the trick, but if you find a copy shop that can do prints in DIN A3 (or a similar format) the results should be much better. The map is very detailed and will help the players to get a better feeling of the area where the murderer dumped his victims, which has some significance to the plot.

Related posts:

1. Please show me your homemade GM screens! (Update)
2. Please show me your homemade GM screens!
3. My experiences with “Trail of Cthulhu”

We had a lot of fun and even though I never ran any Gumshoe system game before, it went without a hitch. Alas my players didn’t manage to solve the mystery of the "”torso murders” before we decided to call it a day, but they are all eager to find out who killed all that people and what causes these strange phenomena in the slums of Cleveland.

And not having to make any checks on investigative skills really is a godsend. Playing with almost no skill checks all evening felt a little weird in the beginning, but it actually worked quite well. After a few hours into the adventure we really didn’t think much about it, it felt just natural to us.

There even was a short fight when the investigators defended themselves against one of the suspects. The combat rules in the Gumshoe system are very simplistic but serve their purpose well. And because of the simplistic nature of the combat rules, combat didn’t feel detached from the rest of the game at all. I wouldn’t use the Gumshoe system for any combat-heavy game but it works well in the given setting.

The adventure I am running, “Kingsbury Horror”, is from the back of the core rulebook and a perfect introduction to both the setting and the game. It features a lot of weird phenomenon but it’s actually not a full-blown Mythos story, so the GM can use it to ease the players into the setting. What really makes the story of the “Kingsbury Horror” so disturbing is the fact, that the premise of the adventure is based on a true crime.

Ok, it’s after 4am right now, and I really should go to to bed, so I think I will conclude my post about my experiences with ToC now. If you have any questions to ask or thoughts of your own to share, feel free to do so in the comments below.

Related posts:

1. My experiences with Fudge
2. Review: Cthulhu Rising
3. The Cold War and the Cthulhu Mythos

This is actually the first time I am running a game using the GUMSHOE rules and I wondering how it will turn out. Aside from being pretty rules-light, you don’t need to roll on investigative abilities in that system. All clue-gathering skills succeed automatically. Which removes the old problem that the players have a hard time solving the mystery, because of one or two failed skill checks while gathering information.

If you want to learn more about the GUMSHOE system, you definitely should check out the interview I did with Robin D. Laws in September.

I will now return to my preparations of tonight’s New Year’s Eve party. Take care and have a happy new year 2010!

Related posts:

1. Happy New Year
2. New Year’s Gaming Resolutions
3. New Year, New Game

Of course this doesn’t work in every game. I am currently running a Savage Worlds game using the Rippers plot point campaign. And if you ask me, SW is perfect for the lazy GM, especially when you use it to run any of the plot point campaigns. In most cases you sit down at the table, read the next plot point description and the rest is done by hand waving.

You have to be thinking on your feet all the time, making up NPCs on the spot and coming up with encounters on the spot is vital for the lazy GM. And alas this doesn’t work in every game. You should never try to run an investigative game that way. It just doesn’t work. Ok, if you have read every murder mystery novel on the planet you may be able to pull it off, but in most cases it’s near impossible to be successfully lazy when investigative games are concerned.

But especially when you and your players favor action over complicated stories, you can easily have a lot of fun without hours of preparation. And being a lazy GM although helps you in well-prepared games or when you are running and commercial module. When things go awry, you can always rely on your improvisation skills, that you have trained while being the lazy GM, to save the day.

There’s even a reason why being a lazy GM can also improve your game. Some GMs tend to meticulously plan their adventures which may lead to the focus being shifted from the players and their characters to the background story and the NPCs. If you don’t plan ahead you usually rely on your players to drive the action while you improvise on the spot.

Recently my group asked me to run “Trail of Cthulhu” on New Year’s Eve. I fear I will have to do some preparation for this session after all. As I wrote before, it’s extremely hard to pull off a great investigative game without some preparation. But in the long run I will probably always be a lazy GM.

Related posts:

1. Am I getting old or just lazy?
2. Confessions of a Gamer: In the Beginning
3. Confessions of a Gamer: Dungeon Mastering

Please note: The intervierw was done by email and I added the photos afterwards. So the photos don’t convey Robin’s emotions while answering those questions. It’s just me fooling around with his profile pictures from his Lifejournal account. The photos are used with his permission.

Stargazer: Thanks again for answering a few questions for me and my readers. Some time ago I stumbled upon the GUMSHOE system in general and Esoterrorists in particular. The GUMSHOE system has been designed with investigative scenarios in mind. When did you first have the idea to create a roleplaying game especially for that kind of play?

Robin: Simon Rogers of Pelgrane Press commissioned me to create a rules system that would rethink investigative roleplaying from the ground up. He’d been frustrated in the past by the dead ends that tend to crop up in investigative games and wanted a system that would remove these roadblocks. I started by examining the problem of the failed information-gathering roll that stops the plot, but we wound up with a mechanism that changes much more than just that one classic dilemma. From that simple change evolved a streamlined investigative engine allowing for a focus on clue interpretation over clue gathering. The result are games that more closely emulate mystery stories, from Lovecraftian probings into truths best left unlearned, to TV police procedurals.

Stargazer: And why was a special system for this genre necessary?

Investigative roleplaying has always been one of the major structural forms of roleplaying, but is comparatively under-served compared to the action-adventure gaming that forms the basis of almost all other RPGs, no matter what their exterior genre trappings might be. Inspectres did a great and innovative job in the cooperative storytelling arena, where the entire group collaborates to create the mystery as the game develops. But it seemed like there was still creative room left to explore the more traditional mystery game, where the GM has a predetermined solution and the players piece together the clues to work toward it.

The basic idea behind the game could have been conveyed in a number of ways. I could have written it as a magazine article, as a chunk of rules text for an existing rules set, or as a blog post. All of these choices, however, would ignore the process through which ideas enter the collective gamer consciousness and become part of the established corpus of techniques. To do that, you need a new rules set to garner sustained attention and spotlight your defining idea. That gets hundreds and thousands of gamers to grapple with the concept you’re working to convey, rather than the dozens or hundreds you’d get otherwise.

Once it’s injected into the bloodstream of gaming in this way, your strand of conceptual DNA can then become a permanent part of various GMs’ play styles, and travel from there into other games. A previous example of the same phenomenon would be the way that Feng Shui encouraged players to describe elements of the physical environment and incorporate them into their fight descriptions. In 2009 this sounds like an incredibly minor step toward the shared narrative control that now runs through so many indie designs. At the time it came as an exciting revelation to many GMs, and changed the way they played their other games, too.

So while on a design level, you could easily bolt on the basic concept of GUMSHOE to any existing traditional investigative game, the reception dynamics that determine which ideas get taken up and which ones vanish decreed that it should be presented as the core of its own specialized game system.

Similarly, it’s a simple fact of RPG marketing that you can sell more copies of a product that appears as a core game than you can as a supplement or modification to something else.

The gamer soul is torn when a new game appears. The uber-gamer wants to buy new games, yet does not want to buy new games. Who wants to spend more money on more stuff? None of us, yet at the same time all of us. This sales resistance is understandable, and fuels the online reception to new products as they appear. You have to expect a certain segment of the audience to ask if your game really needs to exist. RPGs are entertainment products; none of them need to exist. The ultimate proof in the pudding is not whether folks question a game’s existence, but whether enough of them buy it, dig it, and keep playing it. And fortunately we’ve reached a point where GUMSHOE has acquired a self-sustaining base of players who see why the game warrants its independent existence and are happy to keep on playing it.

Stargazer: At least for me the name GUMSHOE conjures up images of hardboiled ’40s detectives wearing trenchcoats and fedoras, but no game using this system is actually set into this genre. Was this intentional or are you considering writing a game inspired by the “hardboiled detective genre”?

Robin: We needed a snappy, one-word name that instantly conveys the core idea behind not just the first game, but the system, and GUMSHOE seemed instantly to be the right choice. It was the first name I came up with and we never considered another one.

The hardboiled detective is one of many sub-genres of straight-up mystery that could easily be done with GUMSHOE. A Sherlock Holmes game is another obvious choice. Because they’re medieval history buffs, lots of gamers enjoy Ellis Peters’ Cadfael books,. Thanks to Lindsey Davis, the Roman empire is also an appealing setting for mystery that in its own toga-clad way recalls the classic tropes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.

The question then becomes whether we could sell enough copies to justify doing any of these settings. Traditionally gamers play historical RPGs only if you add a fantastical element to them, whether it’s magic or SF gear or Cthulhoid horrors. You see this logic at work in Mutant City Blues, which takes the modern police procedural and makes it interesting to our audience by grafting super-powers onto it. The smaller base of players who want a straight police procedural can then take the book, ignore the super stuff, and they’re set to go.

On those grounds, it may be that something like Gareth Hanrahan’s Trail Of Cthulhu supplement, Arkham Detective Tales, is as close as we can come to a straight-up hardboiled game.

Sherlock Holmes might be doable as a crossover out of the gaming scene because of the large Holmesian collectors’ market.

(The interview continues after this break…)

Stargazer: While reading reviews of Esoterrorists on the internet, I’ve noticed that a lot of people are skeptical that the GUMSHOE system is needed, because a good GM can always avoid that the game stalls when the players miss important clues. How would you counter these arguments?

Robin: Even a GM has never run into the failed roll issue or doesn’t see it as a problem will still find plenty to check out in GUMSHOE. It changes the flow and structure of investigative play in a way that many groups will find fresh and exciting. By giving the players lots of information, it speeds sessions and alters their focus. Play revolves not around the question of whether you find information, but what you do with it. This allows us to create more detailed scenarios that more closely replicate the feel of mystery shows and movies. Although you can convert scenarios from other systems to GUMSHOE and vice versa, adventures made for GUMSHOE have their own distinct feeling, and work differently in play. The game does much more than correct this particular glitch.

That said…

After having written GUMSHOE, I’m even more certain that its core idea is needed, because now people approach me at conventions to share horror stories of games that stalled on them for precisely the reason you mention. At Gen Con a player came up to the Pelgrane booth to share his experience in a game he was in just hours before. It was a fantasy game, and the GM had set up the entire adventure so that it started with a Perception roll. Everyone blew the check. The party was unable to take the necessary action to start the story. So the GM just sat there flummoxed, without a fallback plan. Suffering ensued for all.

I guess you could say that this was a bad GM, but I don’t see it that way. He was using the rules of his game as they are written. As the rules of almost all traditional RPGs with information-gathering skills are written. If being a good GM requires you to know by a process of osmosis to ignore what many, many rule books explicitly or implicitly tell you to do, it’s a miracle that we have any good GMs at all. My job as an RPG game designer is to increase the pool of skilled GMs, and to decrease the length of the learning curve you have to undergo to become one. If it is true that this technique has always been a part of our unwritten oral lore, it’s about time that it got written down and recognized.

But of course I’d argue that it hasn’t been part of our unwritten oral lore. What happens in the vast majority of these cases is not the GUMSHOE way. The GM doesn’t provides the information automatically. He allows the players to roll, because that’s what the rules suggest. The vast majority of GMs and players do what the rules tell them to. When the players then blow the roll, the GM frantically improvises for five to twenty minutes to come up with some other way to get them the information they need to move forward. Then, after wasting all that time, frustrating the players, and making them feel that their characters are incompetent, they finally get permission to advance the plot. Which they should have had all along.

What GUMSHOE really does in practice is eliminate those blocks of useless and annoying workaround. You can then fill that time with a more detailed and involved mystery, shifting investigative play from the question of whether you gather the information to what you do with it.

Stargazer: Or they argue that the same can happen in Esoterrorists when a General Skill roll fails.

Robin: In instances where a General Skill use is necessary to move forward in the story, the rules advise you to pick the most appropriate of the following techniques:

• Require a spend from the character’s ability pool, rather than calling for a roll.
• Frame the roll so that it determines how costly the success will be, rather than whether the character succeeds or fails.

Stargazer: What can be done if the players lack an important Investigative Skill?

Robin: Character generation works to ensure that every skill appears in every group of PCs.

Stargazer: Especially in a horror game I like when the rules take the back seat. From what I’ve seen so far the GUMSHOE rules succeed at achieving that in most cases, but especially when Investigational Skills are concerned I fear that players may be tempted to just list their skills instead of describing what their characters do. What can GMs and players do to avoid that?

Robin: This is a common misconception that we didn’t anticipate, and that frankly I’m still puzzled by. The process by which you describe what you’re doing in a scene and what skills you use is no different in GUMSHOE than in any other investigative game. You don’t go into a Call of Cthulhu scene and simply start barking out the names of your skills from your character sheet, and you don’t do it in GUMSHOE either. The only difference is that in GUMSHOE you skip the part where you roll. You go straight to the bit where the GM tells you what you’ve found. Players still have to describe what they’re doing to gather the information.

Traditional game:

GM: At the bottom of the creaking wooden steps, you nearly trip over a desiccated human corpse.

Player: How recently dead is it?

GM: You’re using your Medicine skill?

Player: Yeah.

GM: Okay, make a check.

Player [rolls]: I succeed.

GM: It’s been down here for decades, you reckon.

GUMSHOE version:

GM: At the bottom of the creaking wooden steps, you nearly trip over a desiccated human corpse.

Player: How recently dead is it?

GM: You have Medicine, right?

Player: Yeah.

GM: It’s been down here for decades, you reckon.

In neither case do you get this:

GM: You walk down the creaking wooden steps.

Player: Medicine! Bureaucracy! Oral History! Physics! Theology!

There’s nothing about GUMSHOE that in practice inspires players to do this ridiculous thing. Why don’t they? Because it’s ridiculous.

In some cases a clue will be immediately apparent to a GUMSHOE character who has a given skill, but that’s even more seamless here than in a traditional investigative game.

Traditional game:

GM: Opening the trap door, you see a gigantic crypt under the farmhouse basement. Who has Architecture?

Player: I do.

GM: Roll it.

Player [rolls]: I succeed.

GM: Curiously, the chamber shows all the stylistic elements of the crypt beneath a 10^th century Romanesque cathedral.

GUMSHOE:

GM: Opening the trap door, you see a gigantic crypt under the farmhouse basement. [looks on his cheat sheet to see who has Architecture] McWhorter, you see that it has all the stylistic elements of a crypt from a 10^th century Romanesque cathedral.

Of course, the two traditional examples above could also go as follows:

GM: At the bottom of the creaking wooden steps, you nearly trip over a desiccated human corpse.

Player: How recently dead is it?

GM: You’re using your Medicine skill?

Player: Yeah.

GM: Okay, make a check.

Player [rolls]: I fail.

GM: [shrugs] It’s hard to tell.

Traditional game:

GM: Opening the trap door, you see a gigantic crypt under the farmhouse basement. Who has Architecture?

Player: I do.

GM: Roll it.

Player [rolls]: I fail.

GM: Never mind.

Are either of these outcomes interesting? Nope. Then why allow them?

Stargazer: As I understand it, scenarios for the GUMSHOE system require a lot of preparation by the GM. Especially GMs with a job, family and perhaps even kids usually prefer games that can be played with short prep times. What can be done to run a GUMSHOE game with minor prep time aside from relying on commercial scenarios?

Robin: One of the unavoidable, intrinsic facts about investigative scenarios (aside from those where the group improvises an answer, Inspectres-style) is that story plotting is hard, and mystery plotting is even harder. You have to work out what the adversaries originally did and how they did it, which establishes the mystery in the first place. (I call this the backplot.) Then you have to work out how the heroes uncover the mystery. So you have to plot in two directions, and it has to make sense, because the players are applying their sense of logic to it — in a more ruthlessly engaged way than the passive consumers of a novel or TV show.

Another challenge unique to gaming is the need for multiple routes to the solution of the mystery. The players must move the plot forward rather than being led through it.

Creating a backplot and multiple potential forward plots, and having them withstand logical scrutiny is just plain tough. That’s why adventures for investigative games sell well, when adventures for other games tend not to. To create your own fun adventure for an action-oriented game, you just have to work out some fight scenes and then find a way to string them together. Mysteries are way harder and always will be.

That said, an upcoming product does address this problem. It’s my upcoming Trail of Cthulhu sourcebook, The Armitage Files. It shows you how to improvise suitable mystery stories on the fly, using elements found in a series of mysterious handouts available to the players. You could equally well use these techniques with The Esoterrorists, using as source elements either sections of The Esoterror Fact Book, or a collection of disturbing real-life news clippings. We got really great playtest feedback from the groups who tried this. The questions they raised helped us enormously as we beefed up even further the advice on improvisation techniques as they relate to mystery plotting.

Stargazer: Kenneth Hite’s “Trail of Cthulhu” is another game using the rules you created. How much where you involved in the creation of that game? And can you tell us about the changes made to the system?

Robin: The core rules text in that book is largely by me, adapted from its appearance in The Esoterrorists and Fear Itself. I also acted as a consultant on that project, advising Ken as needed.

The most obvious adjustment to the game lies in the ability list, so we get classic Call Of Cthulhu abilities like Library Use and lose the more modern ones, to mesh with the game’s 1930s setting. Occupations are adapted from CoC. They package together a list of appropriate abilities with an archetypal identity, like dilettante or private investigator. Ken bent the Drives from Fear Itself, which ensure that the PCs behave like characters in the horror genre, to his squamous Lovecraftian ends.

The slickest new wrinkle, which I admit I had to be talked into at first, is the division of the characters’ mental health into Stability (which appears in the other games, too) and Sanity. The first measures your ability to function rationally in the world. The second shows your exposure to the shattering existential truths of the mythos. So you can be highly functional in a practical sense and still want to sacrifice helpless victims to the dread god Azazoth. This finally explains, in rules terms, your archetypal evil cultists, who are cunning and self-protective but at the same time dangerous psychopaths.

Stargazer: During my research for this interview I discovered that there’s actually a soundtrack for both “Trail of Cthulhu” and “Esoterrorists” by James Semple. When I run roleplaying games I usually use background music to set the mood. This is especially effective in horror games. Do you use music as a GM, too, and if so, what kind of music would you recommend for Esoterrorists?

Robin: I have a folder full of ominous music I use for modern horror games, which I play on random. Horror movie soundtracks, along with the occasional bit of atonal modernist classical music, go a long way to freaking players out on a subliminal level. Certain electronica tracks are also suitably unnerving.

My favorites are Ennio Morricone’s horror soundtracks from the sixties and seventies. Look for Gothic Dramas (Drammi Gotici); An Ennio Morricone – Dario Argento Trilogy; and the later Stendhal Syndrome.

Other soundtracks from the classic era of Italian horror by Goblin or Stelvio Cipriani also fit the bill.

The tomandandy soundtrack to The Mothman Prophecies soundtrack is also worth the trouble to track down.

Stargazer: Before coming to some other subjects, can you please tell us what your further plans regarding the GUMSHOE system are? Will there be more Esoterrorist supplements in the future?

Robin: Pelgrane Press honcho Simon Rogers is the one who makes the tough decisions as to the degrees of support each of the GUMSHOE lines can justify. Trail Of Cthulhu is the best selling line; the others require harder thinking. The Esoterrorists is continuing to pick up steam even now, and I think The Esoterror Fact Book did better than expected. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Simon commission the occasional scenario for it, perhaps as PDF-only products.

Stargazer: Can you give us some details on “Fear Itself” and “Mutant City Blues”? What’s the main difference between Esoterrorists and Fear Itself for example?

Robin: In The Esoterrorists, you’re a competent agent up against sinister occult forces and their sophisticated, conspiratorial human minions. It’s horror adventure following the same structure as Supernatural, Fringe, or The X-Files, with a dash of Tom Clancy or John Le Carre thrown in for good measure.

Fear Itself is more typical horror, where ordinary people face (and flee from) serial killers, abominations from the outer dark, and sundry supernatural threats. It’s what you’d use to evoke The Ring, The Grudge, Nightmare On Elm Street, or Jennifer’s Body.

Stargazer: How do the mutant powers in Mutant City Blues work?

Robin: For the superhero genre to mesh with procedural mystery, all of the superpowers have to be explicable and predictable. You can’t do a proper locked room mystery in the Marvel or DC universes, because there are too many wacky possibilities for what might have happened. There’s super-science, magic, mutant powers, and a ton of other power sources to account for. Every hero and villain’s power works differently.

So in MCB, you have a world where all the powers come from the same source—an unexplained mutation event that took place ten years earlier. One per cent of the world’s population now has a mutant power. The original event happened long enough ago that science, including forensic science, has nailed down the limitations of the various powers. Everyone capable of spitting acid or crawling walls does it in exactly the same way.

Also, all of the powers appear in a set order in the altered genome. A map of these powers called the Quade Diagram appears both as a world and a game artifact. In the world, the PCs, members of the Heightened Crime Investigative Unit of your chosen city, carry around a laminated card bearing a copy of the diagram. If powers are far apart on the diagram, they’re very unlikely to be possessed by the same character. So if your crime scene shows signs of mutant webbing and that a light blast was used, you know you’re dealing with at least two separate perpetrators, because those powers are too far apart on the diagram to appear in a single individual.

In the game, you use the Quade Diagram during character creation, as you choose your character’s mutant powers. You start at any point on the chart. Powers adjacent to one you already possess cost the fewest build points. Some connections between powers are more tenuous than others and cost more to bridge. It also costs you to skip a power. Sometimes as you connect powers you may pick up a defect, a latent propensity for a disorder that may become serious and possibly hamper your police career as you suffer stress on the job. For example, if you choose both Telekinesis and Force Field, you may develop a form of late-onset autism during play. This is MCB’s equivalent of the spiral into madness you get in horror games. Here it provides a basis for the sorts of personal storylines you see in TV cop dramas.

The powers are either treated as general or investigative abilities. You buy pools of points with them, and these limit what you can do with them and how often. The investigative abilities are always alternate or optional means to information. Unlike the standard investigative abilities, the scenario designer can’t assume that any given mutant information gathering power is available to every group, so no core clue can depend solely on one of them.

Stargazer: Aside from GUMSHOE you have created quite a few games and supplements during your career. Recently you co-authored the D&D 4th Edition Dungeon Masters Guide 2 and your “Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering” is pretty much required reading for any serious GM. Can you tell us a bit about your other works and what has been your favorite project so far?

Robin: I’ve been working as a full-time freelance writer since 1992, and in that time have written many hobby game products as well as six novels, various short stories, and even a few comic books. By dint of its gigantic market share, any project I do for Dungeons and Dragons snares a much wider audience than anything else. The Robin’s Laws book has had a surprisingly strong influence and following over the years, and I was pleased to be able to fold some of its insights into the roleplaying mothership while working on the 3^rd edition Dungeon Masters Guide II. Some of these ideas were picked up by James Wyatt as he wrote the first 4E DMG, which gets us back to the point about injecting ideas into the bloodstream of gaming.

My contributions to the 4E DMG2 include more advanced techniques for GMs ready to experiment with with collaborative input into their ongoing storytelling. I’ve been bowled over by the positive reaction to them within the D&D community.

Asking a prolific creator to pick a favorite project is like asking a parent to point out his best kid. Sometimes the less-known items, like Rune, the video-game inspired game of competitive Viking mayhem, exert an influence on other designers. Others capture the gamer imagination, like Feng Shui, the game inspired by Hong Kong action movies.

Right now I’m very happy to see GUMSHOE taking off. I’m also extremely proud of the freshly released HeroQuest 2. It’s now a generic game and not solely devoted to Greg Stafford’s classic Glorantha setting. It sets out to help GMs tell stories using the same rhythms, devices and decision-making trees employed by authors and screenwriters, while at the same time remaining true to the linear, collective nature of the roleplaying form. The new version, from Moon Design, is what the game was always meant to be, improved not only by a greater focus on its core intentions, but also years of hindsight.

Stargazer: Back in the day, what was the first RPG you ever played and what made you enter the “industry”?

Robin: I first played D&D at the age of 13 or 14 after discovering the blue box version in a tourist trap gift shop while on family holiday. Within months we were on to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, with me as the DM.

Even before that, I always saw myself as a writer. However, I never considered roleplaying as a market for my work until many years later. I wound up falling into it by happenstance, basically. While in university, I started up a play-by-mail game by leaving handbills up around campus. Through that I struck up a correspondence with Spike Y. Jones, who is now a freelance editor. He was a participant in an APA (amateur press association) called Alarums & Excursions, and inveigled me into contributing. For those unfamiliar with the APA concept, it was a mimeographed fanzine that had a sort of pre-Internet forum vibe to it. Contributors would append to their primary content comments on each other’s past entries, with a month’s time delay in between.

Through A&E, I wound up corresponding with Jonathan Tweet when he and Mark Rein*Hagen were setting up their first company, Lion Rampant. Eventually, at a time when Jonathan had set aside his professional gaming ambitions, I mailed him some world background material for his home campaign, which was inspired in part by an A&E article I’d written positing a William S. Burroughs RPG. This game, which he intentionally created to be unpublishable, was inevitably published, as Over the Edge. The material I’d casually mailed to him appeared in the book essentially verbatim. At about the same time, Steve Jackson contacted me out of the blue to see if I wanted to turn the bizarre tribal horror-fantasy game I was describing in A&E into a GURPS supplement. Conceived without regard to its commercial appeal, it became the legendarily strange GURPS Fantasy II: Adventures In the Madlands.

Because the game industry was and is small, other publishers heard that I might be worth working with. They sought me out and before I knew it, writing gaming material became my job, as it remains today.

Stargazer: I am sure a lot of people are very interested to read your answer on this question: When can we expect the next installment of your “See Page XX” column and are there plans to release more of your column articles in a similar format as the first 24 columns (which are available on RPGNow)?

Robin: I write See Page XX, but Simon is the scheduling guru. New issues tend to coincide with Pelgrane Press news and releases and have been more frequent of late. I’m happy to know that someone enjoyed the columns as PDF collections. It’s Simon’s call, but I’d be glad to see the PDF anthologies continue.

Thanks again to Robin D. Laws for taking his time to answer a few questions for me! And I also have to thank Simon Rogers for helping me organizing this interview! Thank you, guys!

Related posts:

1. Microlite Interview with Robin Stacey
2. Ask The Readers: What are your thoughts on the GUMSHOE system?
3. Happy New Year

Both games are using the GUMSHOE system, that focuses on investigative scenarios.

There are two kinds of skills in Gumshoe: Investigative Skills and General Skills. General Skills work much like skills in any other system. When you perform an action, you roll the dice and the result tells you if you have succeeded or not. Investigative skills never fail. When you have the right skills and if you can put them to proper use in a given scene you get the clues. Aside from that, Gumshoe is a pretty standard rules-light roleplaying system, but the automatic successes for Investigative Skills is what sets it apart.

I have to admit this sounds pretty interesting on paper but alas I haven’t been able to try Esoterrorists or Trail of Cthulhu out yet. So, I am asking my players if anyone has already played any GUMSHOE game and if he or she could share the experience with us. Does the system work as advertised? Or does the system make clue gathering too easy?

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1. GUMSHOE Sale on RPGNow
2. Happy New Year
3. [German RPGs] 1w6 – Ein Würfel System

Especially fall and winter are perfect seasons for horror campaigns. The days are getting shorter, the shadows are growing longer, it’s cold and uncomfortable outside and oustide activities become less and less attractive. Usually when you try to run horror campaigns in summer and spring you encounter several problems. For one it’s usually easier to pull off a horror atmosphere when it’s dark outside. Most people have fear in the dark or at least feel slightly uncomfortable which definitely helps to set the mood. I also noticed that people are usually more willing to get into the right mood for horror when it’s cold and rainy outside. Your mileage may vary of course.

There are a few games I am considering right now. I am already running a Rippers campaign for quite some time now, but it’s not as horror-laden as I wished, but that’s something I can easily change. But my players are currently happy with the campaign’s style right now, so I consider offering them to run a second/alternative campaign over the fall/winter months.

As an alternative I could run a horror solo game with my girlfriend as I planned a long time ago. Alas this plan never left the development stage, but since the "stars are right” this idea may see the light of day (or the darkness of night) after all.

One of my all-time favorite horro games is Call of Cthulhu. Most of you are probably familiar with the works of H.P. Lovecraft, so I don’t have to go into details about the setting here. Especially on a rainy winters day nothing is more fun than to fighting a losing battle against old gods, aliens and insanity. This time I am actually considering purchasing one of the classic CoC campaigns. I have run self-written Call of Cthulhu adventures before, but I just don’t have enough time to properly research, write and prepare an epic Lovecraftian horror campaign right now. So just using a tested campaign may be the best way to go.

Instead of using the Call of Cthulhu rules by Chaosium I actually consider using Trail of Cthulhu, which is using the Gumshoe system. The Gumshoe system was created for campaigns where the focus is on investigations and less on combat. And that is exactly what I am usually aiming for in any horror game. Pelgrane Press’ another horror roleplaying game Esoterrorists could be an alternative to classic Lovecraftian horror. As Trail of Cthulhu it uses the Gumshoe system, but this time the players have actually a chance to make it through the campaign alive (and somewhat sane).

Especially if your players are well versed in the Cthulhu mythos, Esoterrorists could be a welcome change. Instead of “just another Byakhee” or “not Nyarlathotep” again, they are confronted with new and original adversaries. Esoterrorists also allows you to run a campaign reminiscent of the X-Files, with federal agents investigating all kinds of mysterious events all over the United States (or wherever you want to set your campaign). If you haven’t done so, you should at least leaf through the book in your local game store. There are already a couple of supplements and adventures available including a full-blown campaign and even a soundtrack!

If you want some more action in your horror game, I would have a look at Hunter: The Vigil or its predecessor Hunter: The Reckoning. I recently acquired a copy of the latter in a garage sale and I enjoyed reading it very much, but from what I’ve heard, Hunter: The Vigil is a better game in all respects. First and foremost the updated World of Darkness rules are in my opinion many times better than the old ones.
The new setting in Hunter: The Vigil finally allows players to play real humans. In Hunter: The Reckoning the player characters had special abilities which made them just another kind of monsters. The updated setting of Hunter: The Vigil allows for a three-tiered game, where GM and players decided which power-level they prefer. Especially a tier 1 game could be a great basis for a horror campaign.

Ok, you’ve decided you want to run a horror game, you’ve chosen one of the many available settings and perhaps you have even prepared a campaign. Now you really should think about music and props. In my opinion both may not be vital for a good horror game experience, but if used right, they can contribute a lot.

As I’ve pointed out in many posts before, music can help to set the mood. And especially in a horror game mood is everything. Horror movie soundtracks usually work pretty well. I have also used candles for lighting in horror games in the past which usually works great. But beware candles on the game table can be a distraction, too. So, if your players are playing with candles wax instead of focussing on the game you should consider using electrical light instead.

If you ask me, handouts are a must in any investigative game. If the players find a newspaper article, a scrap of paper in the clenched fist of a dead man or some strange runes on the wall of an desecrated church, make sure you have an appropriate handout ready. If you have any artistic skill, a sketch of the monster they encounter or perhaps even a small statue may be pretty cool.

I believe these tips should help you jumpstart your horror campaign. As always I am keen on hearing from you. What horror roleplaying game is your favorite? And what do you use to set the mood? Please post your thoughts in the comments below!

Related posts:

1. Horror Improved!
2. Lovecraftian posts from the archives
3. The Cold War and the Cthulhu Mythos