In this TTRPG developer essay, FlamesRising.com contributor Monica Valentinelli sits down with Rob Heinsoo, the developer of 13th Age Second Edition from Pelgrane Press. The new edition was successfully crowdfunded, and you can pre-order 13th Age Second Edition on Backerkit. 13th Age first debuted in 2013. Now, over ten years later, you’re providing a second […]

The book has been written.
The book has been read.
Now it rewrites you.
Across time it spreads, creating dread new realities.
And you’re in all of them.

The Yellow King RPG is an innovative new GUMSHOE core game written and designed by GUMSHOE creator Robin D. Laws. YKRPG takes you on a brain-bending spiral through multiple selves and timelines.

Inspired by Robert W. Chambers’ influential cycle of short stories, The Yellow King RPG pits the characters against the reality-altering horror of The King in Yellow. This suppressed play, once read, invites madness. Or a visit from its titular character, an alien ruler intent on invading and remolding our world into a colony of their planet, Carcosa.

Face Madness and Corruption… Alone!

Langston Wright is an African-American war veteran and scholar in WW2-era Washington, DC. Vivian Sinclair is The New York Herald’s most determined scoop-hound in 1930s NYC. And Dex Raymond is a hard-boiled private detective with a nose for trouble in 1930s Los Angeles.

Each is a lone investigator, equipped with smarts, fists, and just maybe a code of honor, uncovering their town’s secret truths. But what happens when you scratch the veneer of human malfeasance to reveal an eternal evil—the malign, cosmic indifference of HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos?

What hope has a humble adventurer when faced with a fight against Cthulhu himself? No matter; the true swordsperson cares only for the bite of steel against flesh, whether that flesh be eldritch or more conventional.

So, grab your khukuri knife, your iklwa spear, or a legendary blade and journey with us from ancient Rome to feudal Japan, from the Dreamlands to lands there are no names for in any of the tongues of men.

If you have any doubts, inside this tome you can consult some of Lovecraftiana’s hottest voices, be they seasoned veterans or hot-blooded new recruits… Hope be damned. Glory awaits!

We’re continuing our series of 2016 in Review guest blog posts with one of Flames Rising’s oldest friends in the RPG business, Pelgrane Press! This year was quite busy for Pelgrane and Cat Tobin is here to tell us all about it. Not only that, they are running a special sale on every title they released in 2016, for a limited time you can save 16% on PDFs at the Flames Rising Shop!

2016 has been a tumultuous year all around the globe, and these giant waves of change have even reached the dizzying heights of the Pelgrane’s Nest.

Early in the year, our focus was on 13th Age, with new releases including the popular GM’s Screen and Resource Guide, the first of our collection of Battle Scenes (High Magic and Low Cunning: Battle Scenes for Five Icons, and accompanying Map Folio in its full-colour glory) and the second volume of the 13th Age Monthly subscription product. We also released some adventures for Trail of Cthulhu (The Many Deaths of Edward Bigsby), and Night’s Black Agents (The Dubai Reckoning).

History isn’t written by the victors. It’s written by the people with the time machines.

In the TimeWatch RPG, your band of TimeWatch agents defend the timestream from radioactive cockroaches, psychic velociraptors, and human meddlers. Go back in time to help yourself in a fight, thwart your foes by targeting their ancestors, or gain a vital clue by checking a scroll out from the Library of Alexandria. But watch out for paradoxes that may erase you from existence… or worse.

If you’ve ever dreamed of going on world-changing adventures from the age of the dinosaurs to the end of the universe, the TimeWatch RPG is for you!

Trail of Cthulhu: The Many Deaths of Edward Bigsby

The flamboyant artist Edward Bigsby pays a call to the Investigators on the recommendation of a mutual friend, but dies horrifically before he can tell them what he needs. Soon afterward, the police question the PCs – another corpse matching Bisgby’s description has been found, with their address in his coat pocket. It does not end there; dead Bigsbys are being found all over London.

Follow the trail of Bigsbys through the bohemian streets of crime-filled 1930s Soho, dodging Chinese triads, Dope Kings, and the Metropolitan Police force to find out once and for all who Edward Bigsby is, and why he keeps dying.

A Man Without A Past Cipher is a monk: a master of the Deadly Arts, able to dismantle enemies using his bare hands. He is immune to lies, and can see volumes of information in the smallest detail. Unfortunately, that’s all he knows. His real name, his history – all stolen by an unknown foe. […]

Celebrate Friday the 13th with a sale on all 13th Age RPG eBooks and Soundtracks from Pelgrane Press!

13th Age combines the best parts of traditional d20-rolling fantasy gaming with new story-focused rules, designed so you can run the kind of game you most want to play with your group. Created by Rob Heinsoo and Jonathan Tweet, 13th Age gives you all the tools you need to make unique characters who are immediately embedded in the setting in important ways; quickly prepare adventures based on the PCs’ backgrounds and goals; create your own monsters; fight exciting battles; and focus on what’s always been cool and fun about fantasy adventure gaming!

Presenting an epic improvised campaign for Night’s Black Agents Roleplaying Game. Do your Agents have what it takes to face the Lord of the Undead himself?

The Dracula Dossier follows in the fully improvisational path of the award-winning The Armitage Files campaign. Players follow up leads in the margins of Dracula Unredacted, a rare edition of Bram Stoker’s masterpiece that reveals the terrifying truth behind the fiction. They’ll chase down the real characters from Stoker’s novel, their descendants in the present, and the British agents caught in the backblast.

The magic of bestiaries, or dictionaries of mythological creatures, has been captivating the human imagination since ancient times.

Now, Stone Skin Press brings a fresh take on these compendiums of the fantastic with its latest anthology—Gods, Memes and Monsters. Featuring over sixty authors, this stunning international volume offers entries and short stories that range from the horrific to the humorous. The bestiary shed lights on familiar beasts that are coping in our modern era, including gorgons, minotaurs, and mantichores. It also introduces newly discovered creatures such as meme mosquitoes, trashsquatches, and urbantelopes that are thriving in the cyber age.

Soldiers of Pen and Ink is a Trail of Cthulhu campaign set in the dark heart of the Spanish Civil War

A comrade is lost. Enemies surround you, and your fellow soliders cannot be trusted. Can you rescue your friend while retaining your sanity?

Madrid, 1936. The Investigators have come to Spain to shoot a documentary on the war sympathetic to the Republican cause, but find themselves trapped in the Siege of Madrid. One of their team goes missing, and their literary colleagues say it’s pointless – even dangerous – to ask what happened to him.

In a war of competing ideologies, unorthodoxy can merit the death penalty, even amongst those opposing Fascism, but is this Communist oppression or something more sinister?

A new edition of Stoker’s novel that tells the real story; and an improvised spy thriller campaign for Night’s Black Agents RPG.

Two Books. One Mission.

Dracula is not a novel. It’s the censored version of Bram Stoker’s after-action report of the failed British Intelligence attempt to recruit a vampire in 1894. Kenneth Hite has restored the deleted sections, inserting annotations and clues left by three generations of MI6 analysts. This is Dracula Unredacted.

The more you discover, the more the Mythos infects your mind. Your friends cannot be trusted, your knowledge means nothing, and everything you hold dear turns to dust.

The Final Revelation collects for the first time the four sanity-destroying Purist adventures for Trail of Cthulhu written by award winning RPG writer Graham Walmsley. With a framing scenario by Scott Dorward, The Final Revelation gives your Investigators the opportunity to play through a Purist campaign set in the United Kingdom of the 1930s where there is no escape, no comfort and no salvation when faced with the Mythos. Your Investigators are powerless and insignificant; your only choices death, insanity or a quiet life with a shattered mind.

The 13th Age Bestiary introduces all-new creatures for the 13th Age roleplaying game, plus surprising takes on some of your favorite monsters. It includes the fun and flexible mechanics you expect from 13th Age – and it makes every monster an adventure in its own right, with story hooks, icon relationships, customisable campaign elements and more advice on building exciting battles.

Because we made it so easy to create your own monsters in 13th Age, we had to make the creatures in this book truly amazing; so we designed cool and unexpected mechanics for each creature that bring something truly new to the game, and story options that can serve as the starting point for a single adventure or an entire campaign.

Every so often I get something to review that I have no idea what I’m getting myself into. Getting a copy of Eternal Lies campaign book for the Trail of Cthuhlu RPG (from Pelgrane Press) to review was one of those times. I’ve played Trail of Cthulhu once or twice at gaming cons, I’m familiar with several Cthulhu based games, and I love adventure/campaign sourcebooks in general so I thought this would be a quick and easy review. However, I was simply shocked when I opened up the PDF file for the first time to discover that Eternal Lies has a four hundred page count!

How could this be? As I understood it, Eternal Lies is a sourcebook for only one complete campaign. I’ve seen campaign books half this size with several adventures in it, but nothing this large before. How can this book be 400 pages? And all 400 pages for one campaign? The audacity! The immensity! The madness! The size, and there for the incredible scope that this adventure must be was suddenly daunting.

Don’t embrace the darkness. Fear it.

The Gothic is the most enduring literary tradition in history, but in recent years friendly ghosts and vegetarian vampires threaten its foundations. The New Gothic is a collection of short stories which revisits the core archetypes of the Gothic – the rambling, secret-filled building, the stranger seeking answers, the black-hearted tyrant – and reminds us not to embrace, but to fear the darkness. A dozen tales of terror fill this anthology including an original, never-before-seen story from the godfather of modern horror, Ramsey Campbell.

Flames Rising is pleased to present a selection of excerpts from this collection.

Don’t embrace the darkness. Fear it.

The Gothic is the most enduring literary tradition in history, but in recent years friendly ghosts and vegetarian vampires threaten its foundations.

The New Gothic is a collection of short stories which revisits the core archetypes of the Gothic – the rambling, secret-filled building, the stranger seeking answers, the black-hearted tyrant – and reminds us not to embrace, but to fear the darkness.

A dozen tales of terror fill this anthology including an original, never-before-seen story from the godfather of modern horror, Ramsey Campbell.

You’ve got a time machine, high-powered weapons and a whole lot of history to save. Welcome to TimeWatch!

The air smells like death, and 100,000 rotted skulls are piled up in a mountain before you. “I think this is where 13th century Paris used to be,” you say. “The mongols never stopped at the gates of Vienna. No wonder history changed; they’re still riding across Europe and pretty much destroying every city who doesn’t submit.”

Your partner draws her pistol, checks the historical record on her holographic tether, and frowns. “Looks like the Khan never died of alcoholism,” she says, “Let’s find whoever decided to save his life. We head back five years to Karakorum, in 1241?” You nod and fire up your autochron. Purple chronal energy snaps into shape around you, and once again you’re whirling through time, headed back to save history and the future of humanity.

With all the Conspiracies, the intrigue, the danger, it’s hard to know what exactly is and isn’t on your side. When every shadow from the back alleys of Bucharest to the back benches of the parliament could hide an inhuman enemy, it’s hard to tell what solid ground you can stand on. What can you depend on? Can you make a difference? Trust no one and nothing except the silver bullets in your Glock. To make a difference, aim true.

Even then, sometimes that first shot isn’t a killer. Sometimes you need a double tap.

Night’s Black Agents: Double Tap is available now in PDF format at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop!