For Pelgrane Press
Trail of Cthulhu
There is – by certain unreliable and maddening accounts, and now by your own dreadful experience – a city on the eastern seaboard of the United States, in northern Massachusetts. You do not recall seeing it on maps when you were growing up, and no-one of your acquaintance ever admitted coming from that place until you found yourself living within its eerie confines. It is a city of windowless cyclopean skyscrapers, of crumbling baroque buildings and ruins that must, impossibly, predate human habitation in this part of the world. At times, you can see remnants of familiar small towns which have grown together into this monstrous conurbation – Dunwich in the west, beyond Sentinel Hill; quaint Kingsport, by the sea; industrial Innsmouth, the engine of trade and commerce; and the city’s heart, Old Arkham.
You know that this city is monstrous.
You know that the city government are in the thrall of – or in league with – alien horrors.
You know better than to go out at night, when the clouds roll in from the sea and shapes move in the sky. You know there are occasional, unpredictable streets that come and go according to some unearthly schedule, that strange black ships dock at Innsmouth to trade with the squat, ugly denizens of that neighbourhood. You know, too, that not all of your neighbours are sane – or human.
But you’re trapped. There’s no way to escape the city.
Because the city is the world.
Cyclopean skyscrapers, bizarre cults, strange foreigners and eerie alleyways – the city of New York stands on the threshold between the modern age and the Mythos.
No-one in the NYPD speaks of it, but everyone knows that certain neighborhoods are to be left alone and that there are worse things than criminals in the shadows. Only the foolhardy or the desperate follow the trail down these haunted streets.
The Investigators are law enforcement agents and their civilian consultants, answerable for their actions, but will the full force of the law be enough to stem the tide of the Mythos?
Hideous Creatures: A Mythos Bestiary
Lovecraft created his various “shadowy congeners” because the stories of vampires, werewolves, and even ghosts had become too familiar and too formulaic to evoke true horror. Almost a century after he wrote, his own monstrous races have likewise begun to seem like comfortable story furniture rather than unnerving signals that the world is horrible and wrong.
In Hideous Creatures: A Bestiary of the Cthulhu Mythos, we present a comprehensive look at Lovecraft’s hideous creatures, from as many angles as we can. Our goal is contradiction, surprise, and most especially the uncanny: the recognition of something familiar as something weird. As in the “Gods and Titans” section of the Trail of Cthulhu core book, this book deliberately contradicts itself, blurring boundaries and erasing certainties in the name of the uncanny. In your campaign, these variant truths might be misunderstandings, legends, heresies, or deliberate lies spread by the creatures to lull their foes into a false sense of familiarity.
Hideous Creatures: A Bestiary of the Cthulhu Mythos is the Trail of Cthulhu bestiary written by Mythos giant Kenneth Hite and fellow experts Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, Becky Annison, Helen Gould and Ruth Tillman, in the tradition of the award-winning Book of Unremitting Horror and the 13th Age Bestiary. Creatures are not just antagonists to fight or flee from; they are entire adventures by themselves, leaving physical traces, occult clues and madness in their eldritch wake.
Fall of Delta Green
The sonofabitch is in here somewhere. I saw him — I’m gonna get him.” – The French Connection
In 1968, in response to sinister influences that threatened to corrupt America from within and without, the USA Federal Government established a new agency – one that quickly acquired a reputation for ambitious operations overseas, for covert action, and for doing what had to be done, no matter the cost.
This new agency was the United States Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, the BNDD.
And within it – the forces of DELTA GREEN.
Hunt the Unnatural across the world! From the opium fields of Laos to the skies above the Pacific, from Turkish smuggling routes to the secret heroin labs of Marseilles, follow the trade in misery and fight the horrors along the way. Expose the criminal underworld – and discover that it’s inextricably linked with other secret realms.
The Borellus Connection is a campaign for The Fall of DELTA GREEN, using the heroin trade and the BNDD as a narrative spine. The campaign runs from South-East Asia to the Middle East to Europe, as the Agents uncover the sinister machinations of a necromantic cult.
Eight linked operations, each one playable as a standalone investigation or as part of an epic hunt for an infamous enemy! Designed by Kenneth Hite, written by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, the team that brought you the ZALOZHNIY QUARTET and the DRACULA DOSSIER are called up again to create a tale of sordid intrigue, cosmic horror, and desperate action against the Mythos!
13th Age
The Book of Ages
Night’s Black Agents
The Persephone Extraction
Solo Ops
Other
Esoterrorists 2nd Edition
Ashen Stars: Dead Rock 7
The Paragon Blade
For Cubicle 7
The One Ring/Adventures in Middle-Earth
Adventures in Middle-Earth
Darkening of Mirkwood
Heart of the Wild
Tales from Wilderland
The Laundry Files
The Laundry
Doctor Who – Adventures in Time and Space
For Mongoose Publishing
Pirates of Drinax
For Galileo Games
Heart of the Fury
(full ludography to come – for a longer list, here’s my rpggeek entry)
Gareth Hanrahan 