Parigi

The Yellow King RPG #1

by Robin D. Laws

In the first installment of The Yellow King Roleplaying Game, the mind-bending influence of Carcosa, a malign alien realm described in a classic cycle of horror tales by Robert W. Chambers, permeates the night-time streets of Belle Époque Paris.

It is 1895, and you, a close-knit band of American art students, wish only to learn your craft, soak in the greatness of the masters, attend the occasional costumed ball, and submit to the tipsy whirl of Parisian revelry.

But when you stumble across a sinister play that alters perceptions, shifts realities, and summons the uncanny, you can't help but investigate a hidden world of menace and danger.

This book contains:
• All the GUMSHOE rules you need to play the game in the new, streamlined version we call QuickShock.
• A guide to Paris life. From the champagne fizz of Montmartre to the slashing knives of the Quartier Pigalle, you find witnesses in its taverns, revealing documents in its libraries, and darkness in its fabled catacombs.
• Famed personages to aid or impede your occult mission. Drink with Toulouse-Lautrec. Trade backstage secrets with Sarah Bernhardt. Borrow a fistful of radium from Marie Curie.
• Foes, unnatural and otherwise. Trade barbs with legendary vampires, scientific theories with mad experimenters, and bruising blows with walking corpses.
• GM tools to guide anything from a terrifying one-shot to a massively interwoven story arc.
• A complete sample adventure, "Ghost of the Garnier". Don your formal attire!
• A full complement of Shock and Injury cards to mark the mental and physical costs of your struggle against the dreaded King in Yellow.

Genres: Horror, Role Playing Games, Games, Fantasy

247 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2019

About the author

Writer and game designer Robin D. Laws brought you such roleplaying games as Ashen Stars, The Esoterrorists, The Dying Earth, Heroquest and Feng Shui. He is the author of seven novels, most recently The Worldwound Gambit from Paizo. For Robin's much-praised works of gaming history and analysis, see Hamlet's Hit Points, Robin's Laws of Game Mastering and 40 Years of Gen Con.

Reviews

[Travis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robin D Laws has once again convinced a publisher to underwrite his current personal obsessions and we are all the better for that.

[Ramón Nogueras Pérez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un juego que consigue ser original, sorprendente y evocador. Aunque sólo he jugado una sesión y por ello creo que me falta todavía rodaje, la primera impresión ha sido muy buena. Me gusta particularmente el poder enlazarlo con las siguientes partes en un arco transtemporal y transdimensional, casi, o centrarte en una sóla época y disfrutarla. Magníficos valores de producción, por otro lado. Muy recomendable.

[Benjamin]

Here's a game that I would love to play, and yet when I describe the premise -- reality is fracturing and no one can agree -- the response I get is: "that sounds like the world we're living in." Yes, I say, yes I will yes.

If I remember correctly, Laws started this game project when he was asked to make a game out of his expanded Yellow Sign stories; that is, in the original Robert W. Chambers's stories -- the four that mention the King in Yellow, the damned play, the Yellow Sign -- there's two main settings: art student Paris and 1920s fascist America (with its suicide machines). Laws wrote more stories in these venues, tying them together with the play as a sort of shape-shifting horror that insinuated itself into different realities, potentially breaking or making them.

This, then, is the game version of that: four settings where characters gets caught up in general weirdness deriving from the King in Yellow and his sinister court in Carcosa. What are these things? Who knows! As Laws notes, Chambers borrowed elements from Bierce, and then had elements borrowed from him, and it's all over the place. And yet, even with that central mystery -- or again, as you might expect, because of that -- I find these four settings unique and fascinating:

In Paris, art students get caught up in weirdness in 1895. In the Wars, PCs are soldiers dealing with weirdness in an alternate world war featuring Vernean machines. In Aftermath, PCs play modern ex-freedom fighters cleaning up the lingering monsters of the toppled American dictatorship. In This is Normal Now, PCs play the normal versions of their Aftermath characters, slowly learning that not everything is normal, even as everyone around them insists on treating it as such.

(So, like Paris and This is Normal Now take place in one timeline; The Wars and Aftermath take place in another. All of them are infected with reality-warping horror, on top of the usual human problems.)

There's a lot of smart work here to make these settings gameable, from the in-depth and fascinating characters of Paris to the more sketched out character types of The Wars (since you'll likely not get to keep meeting the same lieutenant, since they'll probably be blown up by a walking tripod tank) to the institutions and organizations of This Is Normal Now (since PCs will both meet people but also have to deal with, say, the shady pharma corp or the new cult).

For mechanics, this uses Quickshock Gumshoe rules, which are Gumshoe rules (you get clues automatically, since the interesting thing in investigative fiction isn't "will they find the clue?" but "how do they find the clue and what do they do with it when they have it?"), but with the addition of cards for certain conditions. So, you get attacked by a madman with a knife, but _mostly_ succeed? Maybe you get the card "Cut by Madman", which has a -1 for some future rolls. Or maybe you fail and you got the more serious injury "Slashed by Madman", and now you have to find a doctor or else. It seems like this makes combat/play more narrative and faster, but that's just a guess.

Also, for mechanics, character creation seems story-focused: first, there's always a reason for the characters to know each other (either you were all in the same rebel crew in Aftermath or in Paris, you might trust one character and want to protect another); second, all of them have a drive that gets them involved in horror; third, each setting involves you describing some odd bit of business you saw or were tangentially involved with.

(I was a kickstarter backer for this, and so I got a few extra, like the in-universe diary of a madman, Absinthe in Carcosa and Laws's novel, "The Missing and the Lost", which I am reading and will review separately.)

[Matthew J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book one out of four for this game, this one contains the rules and general set-up for the whole, as well as its Paris in 1895 setting. I'm pretty sure I kickstarted this, which isn't something I really do anymore. It's been a while since I got it and I'm just getting around to look at it.
I'm a bit torn. I'm not super sold on the Gumshoe rules. It's another one of those "rules light" games that doesn't quite work out that way (FATE, PbtA, etc.). I'm willing to be proven wrong, but I've only played this once, at a con back in 2019, and it didn't wow me.
Also, while the setting of belle époque Paris is absolutely fantastic and bursting with potential for stories of the King in Yellow, I'm not sure there's all that much to go on here. Or, more accurately, there's not as much specifically, directly gameable material. It's more of a sandbox sort of thing, with a bunch of building blocks laying around for you to build something. That's fine, I suppose, but something about this set-up in particular feels like it's begging for more. There is one adventure, and it seems fine.
I'm probably not moving on to book 2 right away. But at least I've gotten a start.
There are hints at what could be a really amazing overarching campaign spread across multiple times and realities. I wonder if the later books capitalize on that. I'm not sure they will, though.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really like the underlying simplicity of the Gumshoe system, and the changes that Quickshock makes to it even more so. Shock cards are a brilliant idea, and the abbreviated combat procedure looks promising. Unfortunately, I have yet to find a group that really likes the way that point spends work, and I'm not sure I blame them, as I'm not so sure I'd like them as a player either.

I like the setting of this game, and the concept, but I wish there was more guidance on how to create your own adventures, either in the form of more adventures to begin with, more adventure seeds, or more detailed advice on how to proceed. What's here is good, but it feels incomplete. I hope that some of what I'm looking for might be in the GM advice in the 4th volume of this game.

[Jeremy Wong · Rating 5 out of 5]

History, horror, weird mystery. It’s the apotheosis of horror RPGs by the Pelgrane team, for now.

[Marco Sectario · Rating 5 out of 5]

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