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You'd think, right? I actually wrote a blog post about it here talking about it. The trick was realizing the Investigative ability spends are nothing more than nuggets of exciting narrative control, and then using those to make a combat system that feels fun and epic.

I think he just hit 100,000 words! AND did something awful to Dranko. again. sniff

I'm really excited that @multiplexer's and my Swords of the Serpentine made the list. It's everything I love about fantasy gaming, which is to say a whole mess of fantasy politics, Morale-based combat where you can defeat someone without ever stabbing them, and a rich fantasy city full of...

Yay, Swords of the Serpentine is on there! That's my GUMSHOE swords & sorcery fantasy RPG with Emily Dresner (@multiplexer). Considering that just yesterday I finished and sent in the final manuscript, I couldn't be more excited about this...

I <3 D&D - I just finished one ten-year-old 5e campaign, and another one is still going. That said, I fell for GUMSHOE hard about five or six years ago. First it was the space game Ashen Stars, then the super-spy game Night's Black Agents, then I wrote TimeWatch for time travel (and hacked it...

Me too! Playtest is attracting really nice attention; I think we have over 100 groups signed up at this point, which is way more than I could have asked for. It'll be fun to see their feedback. I'm so used to running it, we need to see what happens when you it's handed over to other GMs.

Not to hijack, but you'll appreciate this. :)

And we are LIVE: Swords of the Serpentine is a sword & sorcery game of investigation, heroism, sly politics and bloody savagery, set in a fantasy city rife with skullduggery and death. The rules adapt the GUMSHOE investigative roleplaying system to create a fantasy RPG with a focus on...

I was just coming on to say this exact thing. I ran into my old one last week!

Are you reading Sagiro's novels? They're so good! https://www.amazon.com/Dorian-Hart/e/B01ACSX8OO

It is! And the best thing I've written, I think. I got to vastly expand and define Eversink, craft some super-fun rules (death curses! Social combat! True names! Freeform sorcery! Prophecy! Ridiculous luck!), and tie everything together. Playtest will hit early next week. I wanted to name it...

Same game, more refinement. You'll be happy. :)

I know, right? I loved 3e (possibly inappropriately, if you know what I mean, and I think you do), and 5e is a joy. I'm seriously irked that I've really just run the game instead of played it. We just finished a 10 year campaign that had started in 4e. That said, I had to dodge this question...

The biggest change is in combat. It's no secret that the weakest part of GUMSHOE pre-Night's Black Agents is that combat wasn't as exciting or cinematic as it maybe could have been. The numbers were too small. For swords and sorcery, you want glorious, cinematic combats. You want Conan chopping...

Thanks! Been working on this for two years or so, ever since I thought "there's just no way to hack TimeWatch into Swords & Sorcery" and then I realized that of course there was. It's probably the best thing I've written, so I'm excited about it.

Hey, I wrote another game! We're kicking off playtesting for a swords & sorcery GUMSHOE game by Emily Dresner (Dungeonomics author Multiplexer) and myself, and I wanted to to give interested folks a heads up. Details on what the game consists of and what's different about it can be found in the...

I sucked so badly. Oh my goodness. And that was fine, because I just needed practice. For me, that was running about 300 RPGA games for strangers during the mid-90s. It was a great chance to figure out what I loved about my GMing style, and what needed some work. No one is ever going to figure...

Rules start from the same base, but how they're implemented is quite different. There's a bunch of shared abilities -- how you interact with others -- and then each class has 4 unique investigative abilities that really power what they can do as heroes. You can even mix and match those, if you...

I am just stupidly excited about this game. It plays to everything I love most about fantasy and gaming. From my perspective, the most important part of the design process was getting the combat system to feel right. Cinematic combat isn't traditionally GUMSHOE's strength, so I needed a...