GUMSHOE GM Jam

Last weekend, I participated in a GUMSHOE GM Jam hosted by the Play on Target podcast. It included some fantastic GUMSHOE folks: Stephanie Bryant, who's worked on some of the same GUMSHOE projects I have this year (Book of Changing Years, Dracula Dossier scenario); Yohann Delalande, a French translator for Pelgrane who I met on Twitter thanks to our mutual love of GUMSHOE; and Steve Dempsey, who's basically the ur-GUMSHOE GM.

We talked about why we run GUMSHOE, what we love about the system, and people's misconceptions about how it works. In particular, the oft-discussed issue of whether “you get all the clues” == “railroad” came up. For reading beyond the podcast, I'd recommend Will Hindmarch's No Clues Without Consequence series. I'd also recommend his his piece on RPG railroads which questions whether they're even a bad thing (or looks into how to do them right).