View From the Pelgrane’s Nest – February 2019

NEW! Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops and Even Death Can Die

As everyone knows, the best way to dodge the hassle of trying to book a restaurant on a busy night is to stay in. And we’re on hand to help provide some SFW activities for any scheduled one-on-one time this month. New out this month is the pre-order for the second GUMSHOE One-2-One game, Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops. Get your pulses racing with some high-octane NBA action as burned MI6 agent Leyla Khan escapes from the vampiric conspiracy who’ve trapped her in their thrall, and tracks down and destroys her former masters before they recapture her.

Or, play WW2 vet Langston Wright, who fought for his country, but can’t battle the Jim Crow laws of 1942 DC, in three new adventures. Maybe Vivian Sinclair, incisive journalist at the The New York Herald, who goes undercover in sleazy clip joints and gets caught between the union and scab laborers in new adventures, is more up your street. Or noir detective Dex Raymond, facing Hollywood and the mob in the LA night; all of whom are in the nine-adventure collection Even Death Can Die for Cthulhu Confidential.

Other companies’ games

Those of you looking for a more thematically traditional way to game on the 14th should check out Emily Care Boss’s genre-defining Romance Trilogy of games (Breaking the Ice, Shooting the Moon, and Under My Skin) published by Black and Green Games; having recently celebrated its tenth anniversary, this classic collection has been revised and reedited for more current tastes, and is available in PDF direct from the Black and Green Games website, or in print from our good friends at Indie Press Revolution. And February 14th sees the release of Star Crossed, the two-player game of characters-powerfully-attracted-to-each-other-who-have-a-compelling-reason-not-to-act-on-their-feelings tension by Alex Roberts, formerly of this parish. Check out publisher Bully Pulpit’s website for more details!

Work in progress update: Mutant City Blues 2nd Edition

Gareth’s finished the post-playtest feedback edits on the second edition of Mutant City Blues.

For those of you who haven’t come across this lesser-known gem of the Pelgrane library, ten years before the time of this GUMSHOE police procedural, a Sudden Mutant Event caused 1% of the world to develop mutant powers. You play the Heightened Crime Investigation Unit, charged with scrutinising crime scenes and the Quade diagram to uncover the criminals behind your hometown’s mutant cases. We’ve now handed it over into the care of the copyeditor, and started work on the art direction – including this first-rate first draft cover by Eisner Award-winning comics artist Gene Ha, featuring the in-world fiction stars Chu and Lomax.

Work in progress update: The Borellus Connection

Having finished MCB2, Gareth’s now fully focused on The Borellus Connection for The Fall of DELTA GREEN. This collection of eight thematically linked operations can serve as a connected campaign, or as stand-alone operations the Handler can drop into the course of an ongoing investigation. Gareth and Ken are on track to have some highly classified samples ready for appropriately cleared playtesters at the end of this month.

Work in progress update: Night’s Black Agents Director’s Screen & Resource Guide

The final layout for these is now finished. Pre-orderers, you can find the updated files available for download on your bookshelf now. Unlike our previous 13th Age and Trail of Cthulhu GM screens, this will be a thicker, 4-panel screen. We’ve sent the files through to the printer, and we’re waiting for the print proofs to be shipped.