Looks like Swords of the Serpentine playtesting will be a go.

Shoot me an email or reply here if you’re interested in signing up for a video gaming session.  It’ll probably be on a weekend night, and everything has to be done before February 28th.  Also: the files are proprietary, so they will NOT be given out except as part of the actual Swords of the Serpentine playtest process. I’ve had a good relationship with Pelgrane Press in the past, not least because I take this stricture seriously.

Hope to hear from enough of you folks soon!

Moe Lane

PS: I don’t expect any of my readers are the sort to pirate the files, but better safe than sorry.  Also: Emily Dresner from the old In Nomine days co-wrote this book, and I’d rather cut off my left pinkie finger than have to explain what happened.

The Two GUMSHOE Bundles of Holding.

Bundle of GUMSHOE and GUMSHOE 2, respectively: I have all of the games except Mutant City Blues, and the ones that I have are excellent.  Night’s Black Agents is Vampire Espionage; Ashen Stars is Gritty Reboot Sci-Fi Television Series; Fear Itself is Modern Horror Movie Investigations; the various adventures are obviously Adventures; and Ken Writes About Stuff is …Stuff That Ken Hite Writes About, and it was always worth reading. I’d recommend it for the KWAS alone, if you don’t have them; the rest just makes the Bundle of Holdings more of a bargain.

I would pay money to get GUMSHOE The Prisoner. #evilpelgrane

Really and truly.  I’d pay cash money to get that supplement. So guess how I voted in this Evil GUMSHOE poll?

Hey, if you backed the Timewatch RPG Kickstarter…

…the digital files have dropped. Check your email account. The physical books are at the printers, so they should be toodling along at a near-future point.

Timewatch, for those who don’t remember, is a time travel RPG using GUMSHOE rules. It’s finally coming out, which is nice, because I’ve been looking forward to it. There’s a couple of things that I’d like to write for that particular game line…

Interesting article on using GUMSHOE in D&D.

Interesting discussion here on how to incorporate GUMSHOE’s investigative …sorry, but ‘paradigm’ really does seem to be the best word to use – into a D&D game.  Basically, the idea behind GUMSHOE is that you don’t need to roll dice to get a vital clue: you just have to have the relevant investigative skill. It’s explicitly designed to avoid a situation where the GM and PCs are left staring at each other helplessly because nobody made a critical skill roll, thus causing the adventure to freeze up until the GM finds some way to justify giving his players a relevant clue. It happens to everybody, so it’s nice to have a system that eliminates the problem.

The only quibble I have about porting the idea over to a game like D&D is this: one of the things that GUMSHOE also does is make sure that a party has at least one player who has all the investigative skills. This requires a certain amount of coordination between the PCs, not to mention everybody seeing everybody else’s character sheets. Some campaigns may not be so cool about that sort of thing.

Still, the idea of porting into your game a system that’s designed explicitly to let you run investigative scenarios is definitely something to consider…

Hmm. GUMSHOE One-2-One RPG rules.

Well, THIS looks interesting:

…although I didn’t come to that conclusion until I saw this bit at the main page:

Can’t find an entire game group who can play when you can?
Want an intense head-to-head gaming experience?
Play face to face.
Or take advantage of its superb fit with virtual tabletops to play online.

Bolding mine. Yeah, that sounds like it’d be a handy tool to have. I look forward to seeing the published version.

Hmm. “The RPG Geek One Sheet GUMSHOE Contest.”

I should do this.

As with many things in life, the shorter the better. And with the RPG Geek One Sheet GUMSHOE Contest you’ll have the chance to show off your investigative adventure design skills by submitting a scenario that will be contained on only one sheet of paper, or two pages if you prefer.

I even have an adventure idea for Ashen Stars.  Deadline’s July 18th, for those who are interested.