One game you want to get more familiar with?

GUMSHOE. Which may sound odd to people who know me. I play a lot of Gumshoe. Recently, The Yellow King RPG and, soon, a return to Trail of Cthulhu. A Trail of Cthulhu campaign in the Bookhounds of London setting, using The Armitage Files as the campaign basis. I’ve been reading and playing Gumshoe games since 2007, almost twenty years, but I’ve never got bored of them, and I always feel I’m learning something new. Partly, it is due to their simplicity; you can interpret how the core system works in many different ways. Also, it’s the many iterations of Gumshoe; any genre can be satisfied. But mainly, it is the quality of writing and inventiveness of the supplements and scenarios.

Bookhounds of London transplants the investigators into 1930s London. They all play greasy, grubby, greedy booksellers, buyers, and collectors. Centred around their shop, they take on various roles: analysing ancient tomes, searching for new ones, connecting collectors to them, and even attempting to repair or recreate them.

The shop itself becomes a shared resource; using it often helps find a piece of information in an obscure book. A cast of characters is quickly built up: finders, collectors, benefactors, those both on the wrong and right side of the law.

London of the 1930s is well represented, and I’ve managed to secure the twelfth edition of the Philips A. B. C. Pocket Atlas-Guide to London (1924), which beautifully captures the common locations of this London and will prove an invaluable source for the players. You can pick it up here for the princely sum of £1.20.

Lastly, there is The Book of the Smoke by Paula Dempsey. A fictitious miscellany of occult occurrences across London, collated by the late Augustus Darcy. So much flavour packed into these 146 pages; each entry, a possible springboard to a new avenue in the PCs’ case.

Following this, we pick up The Armitage Files, a series of rambling extracts from ten documents. Players use this to improvise an investigation: the locations, the GMCs, the organisations and ultimately the path through a series of mysteries. Some excellent advice from Steve Dempsey on improvising Gumshoe; check out his magnum opus, Fearful Symmetries, for more of the same.

All of this goes to show that even though I have nearly twenty years of familiarity with Gumshoe, there are always surprises to be found; Pelgrane is truly one of the most influential roleplaying game companies of the twenty-first century.

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