Will Hindmarch is blogging about the development of the post-apocalyptic GUMSHOE game Razed, and Bill White is discussing New World, a game about colonisation, here.

This is your chance to give encouragement and feedback to the designers, and even do so some playtesting further down the line. Do drop by and leave a comment.

It’s nearly ready:

Bill White talking about the forthcoming “New World”

I am pulling together some ideas for a role-playing game to be called The New World. It will be a colonization game, but it will the antithesis of games like Civilization IV and those of its ilk, which read history as a story of constant technological progress and civil advancement. I’m going to borrow from places like Jared Diamond’s Collapse and recent ethnohistorical accounts of pre-Columbian and early post-contact America to write a game that’s about a “New World” that emerges at the intersection of multiple “Old Worlds,” European, African, and Native American. I’ll rely on the notion that, in the early days at least, many colonies failed, with survivors returning home or making new homes in native societies. I have this vision of the game playing out in five-year turns against a backdrop of societies on both sides of the Atlantic under different levels of stress of one sort or another, with your role-playing of significant moments for your character within that turn serving to exemplify, embody or instantiate (um, represent and resolve) the larger socio-political and economic changes.

So over the course of the game, your character can be shipwrecked, go native, return home, accompany an expedition back to the “New World,” and die in a massacre, and that will represent the trends in the larger narrative at hand–trends which don’t necessarily map on to teleological narratives of American history (e.g., Manifest Destiny), but which should be fun to explore.

We are running a PDF sale over on Steve Jackson Games digital store . You can get 15% off all GUMSHOE games. The sale ends on 1st March.

Get your GUMSHOE PDFs here.

We’ve given our website a facelift. As well as the new look, you will find details of our latest release for Trail of Cthulhu, The Armitage Files.

Take a look around and let us know what else you’d like to see on the website. We often announce new products, so keep checking back to see what’s coming out soon.

Courtesy of Jerome, there is now a  selection of Trail of Cthulhu wallpapers in the resource section of the website.

Armitage files is in layout. The cover:

Sarah has finished work on the documents for the Armitage Files, which look amazing.
Here is a sample:

ProFantasy and Pelgrane Press will be there at Dragonmeet on Saturday at Kensington Town Hall.

There’ll be special offers, games to play, new releases and Robin Laws will be available to sign books and chat.

Will you be there?

I’ve got five delightful new Pelgrane Press projects to announce.

Jason Morningstar, best known as creator of of the Shab-Al-Hiri Roach, is writing a Trail of Cthulhu adventure called The Black Drop.

Something slowly gathers strength beneath the frozen basalt of the remote Kerguelen archipelago – a monstrous thing once worshipped and then betrayed, a terrible god from the antediluvian past. It’s time has come again, and mysterious forces gather. Will they usher in its rebirth – or put an end to it forever?

Castle Bravo, a Purist Trail of Cthulhu adventure set in the Atomic Age, is being written by Bill White, who wrote the excellent Ganakagok. It is approaching playtestable form.

The Investigators are sailors and scientists deployed aboard the USS Bairoko to the South Pacific as part of Joint Task Force One to participate in a series of secret thermonuclear test shots in the Bikini atoll called Operation Castle. After the first detonation, the PCs will have more than just radiation to fear…

Bill is also designing a complete stand-alone game, code name New World, it is inspired in part by Jared Diamond’s work. The PC are in a colony at a crisis point and confront the combination of their cultural mores and limited resources in an alien environment.

Robin D Laws will be creating an SF iteration of GUMSHOE, as yet untitled.