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ffutureshttps://bundleofholding.com/presents/YKRPG2023
This revived June 2021 Yellow King RPG Bundle once again presents The Yellow King from Pelgrane Press. Designed by Robin D. Laws (Cthulhu Confidential, The Esoterrorists) and funded in a June 2017 Kickstarter campaign, the brain-bending YKRPG uses the fast-playing "Quickshock" GUMSHOE system. Investigate the malign influence of Carcosa in mysteries of reality-changing horror across four different timelines inspired by the famous horror stories of Robert W. Chambers collected in The King in Yellow.
Trail of Cthulhu, Night's Black Agents, TimeWatch, Mutant City Blues – to sort out the many flavors of GUMSHOE, Pelgrane Press staff writer Gareth Hanrahan wrote a blog post, "What's Your GUMSHOE size?," that includes an excellent precis for The Yellow King RPG: "The game is divided into four sequences. Each sequence has a different setting and a new group of player characters, but there are thematic and personal links between each part of the campaign, and each one builds on decisions made in the previous sequences. In the first sequence, Paris, the players play American art students in Bohemian 1890s Paris. In The Wars they're doomed soldiers in the absurdist meat-grinder of the Continental War that's engulfed Europe. In the present day of Aftermath the characters are freedom fighters in an alternate America, trying to rebuild society after their successful overthrow of the tyrannical Castaigne regime. Finally, in This Is Normal Now, the players are ordinary people in a world that looks just like our present reality – except....
"Investigate the malign influence of Carcosa as it infects and warps reality. Battle against alien monsters and corrupted human servitors. Discover the nature of the King, his court, and his daughters. Some sequences also have specialized mechanics for aspects of play; The Wars covers battlefield hazards, giant war machines, and alien weapons, Aftermath has mechanics for political manipulation and furthering agendas. [There are] about 40 Investigative Abilities in total, but each sequence uses a much smaller subset. About 15 General Abilities, again customized to the sequence. Character generation uses a template system; note also that The Yellow King uses the QuickShock system for quicker combat resolution.
"Play The Yellow King if you want to explore the surreal horror of Carcosa; you want to shake up your campaign regularly, switching up settings and relationships; you like improvised weirdness, cryptic villains, and metafictional horror."
This bargain-priced June 2021 revival once again presents the complete Yellow King RPG and a congeries of Carcosan creations. We provide each title complete in .PDF or as MP3 audio tracks. Like all Bundle of Holding titles, these ebooks have NO DRM (Digital Restrictions Management), and our customers are entitled to move them freely among all their devices.
Ten percent of each payment (after gateway fees) for this Yellow King RPG revival goes to the charity designated by Pelgrane Press, Cancer Research UK. Cancer Research UK funds more than half of the United Kingdom's cancer research, including the lifesaving work of 4,000 scientists, doctors, and nurses fighting cancer on all fronts.
The total retail value of the titles in this revived June 2021 Yellow King RPG Bundle is US$116. Customers who pay just US$17.95 get this revival's King Collection (retail value $60) with the complete four-volume The Yellow King RPG (retail price $55), along with the six atmospheric music tracks in James Semple's The Yellow King Suite.
Those who pay more than the threshold (average) price, which is set at $27.95 to start, also get this revival's entire Scholar Collection with four more titles worth an additional $56, including a big compendium of stunning YKRPG handouts, Absinthe in Carcosa; Kenneth Hite's erudite edition of the original Chambers book, The King in Yellow: Annotated Edition from Arc Dream Publishing; and two volumes of Carcosan fiction by Robin D. Laws: the alternate-history novel The Missing and the Lost and the story collection New Tales of the Yellow Sign.
Last time I said: As I've said before, I managed to get a little burnt out on horror after writing and playing way too much Call of Cthulhu in the eighties and nineties. I'm also not a huge fan of the Gumshoe system - I'm not entirely sure why, I think it's simply that I'm more comfortable with other systems and really like some of their mechanisms, e.g. the sanity rules of Call of Cthulhu. But if you're into horror and/or the Gumshoe system this is probably for you.
I don't see any reason to change any of that.
