Now a Silver ENnie award winner and Golden Geek award nominee.
Formless Fears!
The Armitage Files presents a boldly innovative way to generate blood-chilling adventures for your Trail Of Cthulhu investigators. Players seize on clues presented in the ten mysterious documents.
They choose which leads to track down. The Keeper, using clearly broken down step-by-step techniques introduced in this volume, improvises suitably mind-blasting mysteries in response to their choices. Weave these together into an epic campaign of madness, dread and danger.
Terror Between the Lines!
Mystery takes on written form when pages from a disturbing manuscript fall into the investigators’ hands. Can your mind correlate the awful beauty of 10 stunningly distressed handouts realized by acclaimed illustrator Sarah Wroot? A series of scrawled messages, comprising a free-floating cacophony of facts, speculations, and fevered imaginings, portends cryptic doom. Preliminary inquiries reveal that they are written in the hand of Dr. Henry Armitage, director emeritus of the Miskatonic University Library.
Components of Calamity!
Combine the documents with pre-prepared elements such as supporting characters (in sinister, heroic or in between versions), organizations, locations and artifacts to create your unique version of the Armitage Files. An article on improvising GUMSHOE, by Steve Dempsey, shows you how.
With clear advice to players and Keepers on improvisation, extensive examples and advice, following the Trail of Cthulhu Will Never Be the Same Again!
Will You?
For anyone who doubts an investigative sandbox campaign is possible, this book is the winning counterargument.
I know of no other books like this one. I hope this is not the case for long.
“The Armitage Files” is definitely a book anyone interested in running Trail of Cthulhu should own, especially if you want to try something new. But it proves – without a shadow of doubt – that it’s possible to improvise an investigative games if you are open to follow the advice given in the book.
This is a masterpiece. Not because the adventure is astonishingly good and attractive, but because the thinking behind the book, the perfect sandbox layout and the second to none writing is as good as it gets. This is Robin D. Laws at his best.
Why do I love it? Most modules don’t fit my style of GMing. I’m a very improvisational GM who likes to build scenarios around my players (rather than run railroady static scenarios where the players feel disconnected and “dropped in”). The Armitage Files works perfectly with how I run games.
The Armitage Files is a unique game book. Pelgrane’s once again demonstrated that they’re willing to go in new and novel directions. At the same time we once again get their high standards of production, layout and illustration. I know I’ve spent a lot of attention on the Gumshoe line, but they keep making interesting things… Quite honestly I wish I’d never read this sourcebook. Instead I wish I’d been able to come into a campaign using this without any foreknowledge. That would have been the coolest thing… This product blew my mind. I think every GM with an interest in alternate campaign approaches ought to read it.
The Armitage Files is, from my point of view, the best supplement that has brought so far the editorial for The Trail of Cthulhu. Represents a radical shift in the way of set scenarios and from the point of view of the editorial a contribution to help further differentiate whether this product fits the rest of this Lovecraftian material on the shelves across the globe.
