Ken Writes About Stuff – All Individual Issues

Can’t find the specific issue of Ken Writes About Stuff you’re looking for, or keen to make sure you’ve got all the GUMSHOE Zooms? Here’s the complete list of all the individual issues, which you can buy in the webstore.

  • Alchemy. (Volume 3) Chemistry or magic? Madness or miracles? Poison or power? Blend all those elements — and more — with Alchemy, the latest Zoom in on a historical magic system for GUMSHOE gaming. Operating at every level from the base dungeon-crawl to the Awakened Working, this magic system gives you the secrets of matter — and maybe a touch of mercury poisoning. Add to basket
  • Bast. (Volume 3) “What fully civilised soul but would eagerly serve as high priest of Bast?” She Who Scratches, the Lady of the Ointment Jar, the great cat-goddess of nighted Khem comes alive in all her varied forms: as a Trail of Cthulhu titan (complete with her monstrous Brood of Bubastis), mysterious Ashen Stars entity, TimeWatch cult leader, and 13th Age Icon. Good kitty!
  • Die Glocke. (Volume 1) According to the legend, in 1944 the SS built a mysterious device deep in a Silesian mine shaft. Its bell-like shape gave it the nickname “die Glocke,” or “the Bell,” but the purpose of “Project Lantern-Bearer” remains a mystery to this day. Was it a time machine? A zero-point energy generator? A gateway to another world? Die Glocke cuts through the legend to the truth — and then piles on a bunch more legend. Plus, a look at “die Glocke” as a Night’s Black Agents node, a Trail of Cthulhu seed, or an Esoterrorist black site.
  • GUMSHOE Zoom: Goëtia. (Volume 2Bifrons. Glasya-Labolas. Marchosias. Names to conjure with – literally! This GUMSHOE Zoom takes you inside the pentacle and introduces you to the hierarchy of Hell. Historical European demon-summoning magic  just got easier and more realistic. Um … yay?
  • GUMSHOE Zoom: Martial Arts. (Volume 1) From Muay Thai’s ruthless “eight-point” technique, to swift and deadly Aikido, or plain-old pugilism, this Zoom features new rules and options for any GUMSHOE setting. This Zoom includes nine styles of martial arts, both armed and unarmed, rules for customization, and The Way Of The GUMSHOE.
  • GUMSHOE Zoom: Mind Control. (Volume 1) You are growing very interested. This is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful GUMSHOE Zoom I’ve ever known in my life. Presenting detailed rules for brainwashing, memetics, telecontrol, and brain hacking, and for gear from the Microwave Auditory Effect gun to subliminal flashers to tinfoil hats, it brings the fight inside your head
  • GUMSHOE Zoom: Voodoo 1: Magic. (Volume 2The first of a new series of GUMSHOE Zooms looking at historical magic traditions — and giving you the tools and rules to evoke these puissant powers in your own game! This first issue in a two-issue series examines sympathetic magic and zombies, and Zooms in on the Afro-Caribbean magical-religious complex encompassing Vodoun, Candomble, Santeria, Obeah, and Palo Mayombe. The loa ride in May!
  • GUMSHOE Zoom: Voodoo 2: The Invisibles. (Volume 2) The Invisibles, more than spirits and a little less than gods, can fit inside stones, trees, and their servitors’ heads — but not into just one issue of KWAS! Whether you call them Loa or Orisha, these mighty beings demand your attention and your sacrifice, but give you hidden knowledge and awaken your interior fires. This second issue of our two-issue Voodoo series gives you plenty of Invisibles to summon, battle, invoke, and ally with whether you’re hunting Dagon in Haiti or rogue programs on your starship.
  • Hideous Creatures: Byakhee. (Volume 2)“Apart from the curiously repellent feeling of human flesh under my hands, and furred wings, I was not able to ascertain what these creatures were like.” Servants of Hastur or misperceived shantaks? Astral psychopomps or sidereal scavengers? Climb aboard the byakhee and find out!
  • Hideous Creatures: Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath. (Volume 2“Worlds of sardonic actuality impinging on vortices of febrile dream – Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!” Are they nameless horrors or numbered servitors, Druidic nightmares or ab-natural abominations? Where do they grow, and on what loathsome food do they thrive? Follow them to Hell and Hydra, or to Mormo and Monsanto.
  • Hideous Creatures: Deep Ones. (Volume 1) This dives deep into the myth of the batrachian denizens of Innsmouth. Are they human hybrids, or alien implants? Telepaths or psychopaths? Mermaids or monstrosities? From the legends of the Japanese kappa to the “kulullu” carved on the walls of Babylon, the spoor of the Deep Ones lingers everywhere.
  • Hideous Creatures: Ghouls. (Volume 1) “These figures were seldom completely human, but often approached humanity in varying degree.” Charnel predators, or changeling denizens of Dream? Follow their tunnels from the sands of Arabia to the catacombs of Paris — or just stay in Boston for some fine New England cuisine!
  • Hideous Creatures: Great Race of Yith. (Volume 3)“As mental barriers wore down, I beheld great masses of thin vapour in various parts of the building and in the streets below. These steadily grew more solid and distinct, till at last I could trace their monstrous outlines with uncomfortable ease.” From unguessable aliens to cone-shaped librarians to beetle-conquerors, the Great Race of Yith takes many forms. Learn to recognize them, before they take yours!
  • Hideous Creatures: Hounds of Tindalos. (Volume 1) They are lean and athirst! Frank Belknap Long’s greatest creations emerge from the angles of time, slavering and frumious. Are they hell-hounds, haunts, or cold equations? Track the Tindlosi spoor through prehistory and posthumanity, from the Wild Hunt to Cerberus and the howl of Garm.
  • Hideous Creatures: Hunting Horror. (Volume 3) “I see it—coming here—hell-wind—titan blur—black wings—Yog-Sothoth save me—the three-lobed burning eye. . . .” Avatar or servitor, this winged and coiling horror haunts the dark and hunts those who seek it out. Shine a little light on this most shadowy of creatures!
  • Hideous Creatures: Lloigor. (Volume 2)“You make the usual mistake — of thinking of them as being like ourselves. They weren’t.” God or monster? Species or phenomenon? Dragon or disc — or discontinuity? Invisible, invulnerable, inexplicable — the vile vortices of the lloigor encompass all and care for nought.
  • Hideous Creatures: Mi-Go. (Volume 1) “As to what the things were — explanations naturally varied.” So are described the fungi from Yuggoth, the half-crustacean haunters of the hillside, the malevolent alien miners … are also opponents of the Yellow Sign and tireless questers for science. And that’s just one story! Are they servants of Nyarlathotep or fellow sentients trapped in a hellish cosmos? Listen for their whispers in tales of kobolds and kallikanzarai, look for their traces in Himalayan snows and heartland crop circles.
  • Hideous Creatures: Rat-Things. (Volume 2)“Witnesses said it had long hair and the shape of a rat, but that its sharp-toothed, bearded face was evilly human while its paws were like tiny human hands.” Witch become rat, or thing become hyper-physicist? Familiar-ize yourself with Lovecraft’s creepiest creation.
  • Hideous Creatures: Serpent Folk. (Volume 2“The features mingled and merged in a seemingly impossible manner. Then, like a fading mask of fog, the face suddenly vanished and in its stead gaped and leered a monstrous serpent’s head!” They built Valusia before the dinosaurs, and lurk behind half mankind’s darkest cults. Are they extra-dimensional, extra-terrestrial, or just extra venomous? You won’t fool the Children of Yig, in any skin they wear.
  • Hideous Creatures: Shoggoth. (Volume 1) Infinitely plastic and ductile — slaves of suggestion, builders of cities — more and more sullen … intelligent … amphibious … and imitative! If something can take any shape, what is its true nature? Are the shoggoths slave machines or biotech Singularity? Are they one or many? Tekeli-li!
  • Hideous Creatures: Star Vampires. (Volume 1) “The human blood on which it had fed revealed the hitAre they summoned demons or feral predators? Are they kindred or competitors to Colin Wilson’s Space Vampires? Herein we therto invisible outlines of the feaster.” Invisible outlines that shall be expanded upon, extended even, into all sorts of dimensions. race the Shambler From the Stars, with bonus Night’s Black Agents statistics and a scenario seed.
  • Hideous Creatures: Tcho-Tcho. (Volume 3) “The nastiest people who ever lived … and whatever it is they were doing, they weren’t going to let a stranger in on it.” Do you really want to know what the Tcho-Tcho know? Too late.
  • Hideous Creatures: Wendigo. (Volume 3)” In spite of his exceeding mental perturbation, Simpson struggled hard to detect its nature, and define it …” Cannibal spirit or arctic ogre? Wind-walking demigod or folie a faim? Hunt the Wendigo down — or up into the skies, where mad auroras roll.
  • Las Vegas: 1968. (Volume 3) takes you to Sin City in the heyday of Howard Hughes and the Rat Pack, the mob and the Mormons, the fear and the loathing. Everything’s for sale and nothing’s for certain, except the house wins. Featuring happening hooks for vampire conspiracies, esoterrorism, and FALL OF DELTA GREEN Mythos machinations!
  • Lilith. (Volume 1) “Satan here held his Babylonish court, and in the blood of stainless childhood the leprous limbs of phosphorescent Lilith were laved.” Lilith as Queen of the Vampires, Lady of the Night — or as First Rebel and First Heroine? We look at the many faces of Lilith, as a Trail of Cthulhu titan (Elder Goddess or Great Old One), Night’s Black Agents vampire queen, Mutant City Blues super-Typhoid Mary, and at her role in the center of the First Esoterror Operation.
  • Looking Glass: Mumbai. (Volume 1) We look at India’s mightiest metropolis, from its legendary crime syndicates to its glamorous movie colony — and we look beneath it, for vampires and conspiracies and Mythos maneuverings. A “Low and Slow” city setting for many possible GUMSHOE games.
  • Moon Dust Men. (Volume 1) President Eisenhower established Project Moon Dust in 1953 to locate, contain, and coordinate everything known about the alien presence on Earth. The public-relations and open-source arm of Moon Dust was called Project Blue Book. Blue Book ended its work in 1970. It is 1978. Your work never ends. This GUMSHOE campaign frame can be a sci-fi, conspiracy, or horror game – it’s up to you to find the truth.
  • Moon Dust Men: Galileo Uplift. (Volume 3) To fight aliens, one must use the alien. Take it apart, reverse-engineer it, rebuild it, turn it into armor and sensors and weapons and aircraft good enough to win a war against an enemy from the stars. Tech and gear for your high-powered MOON DUST MEN game, powered by a new GUMSHOE “tech tree” subystem for bootstrapping invention and development.
  • Moon Dust Men: MAJESTIC Overwatch. (Volume 3) The Moon Dust Men are the tip of the spear. MAJESTIC-12 aims it. Manage the global war against the aliens with this new GUMSHOE subsystem. Do you build retro-engineered Aurora craft, or bioroids to fight on the Moon? Do you launch satellite screens or dig in anti-saucer lasers? You decide where the black budget goes — and who it goes after.
  • Mutant City Spies. (Volume 3) Ten years after the ghost flu hit, the world is changed — but the secret world stays the same. Enemies of your country still plot, terrorists still scheme — but now they might have superpowers. An espionage-specops frame for Mutant City Blues takes the super fights into the shadows.
  • The School of Night. (Volume 2)“Black is the badge of Hell; the hue of dungeons and the School of Night.” Queen Elizabeth’s realm lies vulnerable, not just to the Spanish or the plague, but to occult forces perhaps more dangerous than either. You study those forces at the risk of torture — at the risk of your soul — but you must hold them at bay or see England destroyed. This GUMSHOE campaign frame sets the PCs on the stage with John Dee, Christopher Marlowe, and Sir Walter Raleigh … and perhaps with traitors in their ranks.
  • The Spear of Destiny. (Volume 3) Is it the Spear that pierced Christ’s side, or the Spear of Odin? Does it grant true kingship or invincibility? Who has borne it through the millennia, and who seeks its true whereabouts now? This issue pierces the legend to reach the truth — and then makes the legend invincible. Plus, a look at the Spear for NIGHT’S BLACK AGENTS, THE ESOTERRORISTS, TRAIL OF CTHULHU, and TIMEWATCH.
  • Tomb-Hounds of Egypt. (Volume 2) “God! … If only I had not read so much Egyptology before coming to this land which is the fountain of all darkness and terror!” All you need to know to forge a Pulp archaeology campaign set in 1930s Egypt – for Trail of Cthulhu or just GUMSHOE Bullwhips & Baboon-Mummies!
  • Unspeakable Cults: The Starry Wisdom. (Volume 3) We give the Hideous Creatures treatment not to one beast but to a whole cult — the “disliked and unorthodox Starry Wisdom sect.” Vile rites and terrifying symbolism unfold to shadow your Trail of Cthulhu game, along with alternate takes, investigative leads, possible echoes, and sinister scenario seeds.
  • Vendetta Run. (Volume 2You’ve done worse things, but you’ve never done anything as dangerous as angering the Earps. Because now they’re coming to kill you. And they can’t be killed. Not permanent, anyhow. A survival-horror frame for Fear Itself set in the worst and weirdest West.
  • Xeno-Archaeology! (Volume 2“No other ancient city on Mars had been laid out in that manner; and the strange, many-terraced buttresses of the thick walls, like the stairways of forgotten Anakim, were peculiar to the prehistoric race that had built Yoh-Vombis.” From the Face on Mars to Precursor artifacts orbiting dead quasars, the mysteries of space aren’t all astrophysical. For some answers, you have to dig. Ruins — of cities, starships, and planets — hold danger and horror, riches and knowledge. What a lost species or a cunning GM can build, bold exo-archaeologists and their players can uncover.
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