The Yellow King RPG Has Arrived

Robin D. Laws’ The Yellow King has landed on DriveThruRPG for an eye-watering $54.95. For that you get a lot of content -- four books totaling over 700 pages, a GM screen, a bonus adventure, two card decks, and even a music album!



It's a GUMSHOE-powered game inspired by Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow, a book of macabre supernatural short stories, which was one of Lovecraft's influences. Lovecraft himself used elements of the book (and the stage play), and in Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu RPG the King in Yellow is an avatar of Hastur.

This RPG contains four setting books (the core rules are in the first). In one players are American art students investigating vampires and aliens in Paris; in the next, the players are soldiers in Europe 1947 on an eerie, shifting battlefield; the third has them in 2017 America after a civil war; and the last portrays the modern day permeated by supernatural beings.

Oh, there's a teaser trailer!

 

[Von Ether]

This looks sooo cool. It's like getting a whole series of RPGs in one go.

 

[Dr. Bull]

Robin D. Laws is an excellent author. I probably have 10 different publications on my shelves that he wrote. I have another 20 publications that he co-authored.

HOWEVER, I am getting exhausted from the page count of recent publications (not just his... almost all rpg companies seem to equate page count with quality). Page count does NOT equal quality. (I have not read Robin's most recent publication, so I cannot comment on the quality of this publication.)

I've recently read an <unnamed> source book that could have been half as long with an equal level of content. I could list them, but I don't want to be unfair.

700 pages?

"Brevity is the soul of wit."
- William Shakespeare

 

[TrippyHippy]

I had it - it’s currently with another of my group who likes Gumshoe, and we’ll see how the game goes when he runs it.

Exceptional production standards, with properly bound books, good quality paper and a wrap-around case, that is all quite sturdy. It’s built to last.

For me personally, I was left wondering what I was going to do with it. The four settings are linked, but not in an intuitively sequential way. The system is simple enough - especially if you’ve played Gumshoe before.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

Is $55 for 4 PDFs totalling over 700 pages eye watering by today’s standards? I think I’ve paid that much or more for similar amounts of digital content.

I’m not sure I’ll be buying it, but that’s due to not having enough time to play the RPGs I already own, rather than because I’m not interested in it.

 

[Morrus]

Is $55 for 4 PDFs totalling over 700 pages eye watering by today’s standards? I think I’ve paid that much or more for similar amounts of digital content.

The sentence immediately following it is an important half of that thought

 

[eyeheartawk]

Robin D. Laws’ The Yellow King has landed on DriveThruRPG for an eye-watering $54.95. For that you get a lot of content -- four books totaling over 700 pages, a GM screen, a bonus adventure, two card decks, and even a music album!

All that content for $55, neat!

So, how's that $100 Invisible Sun PDF looking now?

 

[Morrus]

All that content for $55, neat!

So, how's that $100 Invisible Sun PDF looking now?

Dunno? I haven’t got it.

 

[eyeheartawk]

Sorry, didn't mean you specifically. Just general question.

 

[Jer]

I was a Kickstarter backer for this and finally with my gaming group playing weekly now during the lockdown we might actually get an opportunity to try it out.

BTW - Pelgrane has posted all of their Free RPG Day PDFs on their website as a "Donate What You Want" to Doctors Without Borders bundle. The last one includes "The Doors to Heaven" - a Yellow King scenario set in the first era the books describe (Paris during the Belle Epoque) that has pregens and enough of the rules to run the scenario, so if you want a peek at the QuickShock Gumshoe rules and an idea of the kind of game it is there's an opportunity.

Pay What You Want for Free (RPG Day) adventures

(They also have multiple 13th Age scenarios and a number of different other Gumshoe offerings in there, so even if you're not so interested in Yellow King there might be something else worth throwing a few bucks to Doctors Without Borders for...)