Colonial Gothic: Player Companion

Yesterday was Halloween, and Rogue Games took advantage of the occasion to open preorders for Colonial Gothic: Player Companion.

If you don’t know Colonial Gothic, it’s Rogue Games’ tabletop RPG of intrigue and supernatural horror at the dawn of American history. If you’re a fan of Sleepy Hollow – the TV series, the original story, or any of the movies – and you enjoy tabletop RPGs like Call of Cthulhu, you’ll find a lot to like about Colonial Gothic.

I call it “the American Revolution as imagined by H. P. Lovecraft and Dan Brown,” but that’s just a starting point. It can be played like a tabletop version of Assassin’s Creed III, or as “Cthulhu 1776,” or even as “WFRP 1776.” We’ve heard from teachers who use it as a classroom tool, discarding all the supernatural elements to give students a first-person perspective on the birth of the nation.

Rogue Games’ website offers more information about the game, and there are active fan communities on Facebook and Google+.

As you’d expect, The Player Companion includes a lot of new player options, including skills, weapons, spells, and combat. There are also completely new systems for character advantages and disadvantages, social level (very important in those times), plus an updated version of the character templates from the old ebook release to make character (and NPC) creation quicker and easier. It comes in both print and PDF versons.

Following on from the Bestiary, this book is part of an effort that has been close to my heart for a while: to build out from the 2nd Edition Rulebook and provide Colonial Gothic with a strong suite of core books that give players and GMs the ability to tailor the game to their own preferences. Richard and I are already talking about a GM’s book to complete the set.

Richard is also working hard on the third installment of the Flames of Freedom campaign, to follow on from the critically acclaimed Boston Besieged and The Philadelphia Affair.

As for me, I’m working on a super-secret project that will see me working with an old friend from my Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay days. All I can say about it for now is that it’s going to look amazing, and I expect it will cause quite a stir when I can finally talk about it.

So if you like the idea of facing down scheming Freemasons, monsters from folklore, and Things Man Was Not Meant To Know as you uncover the secret history of the 18th century, give Colonial Gothic a try. We think you’ll like it.