Casting the Runes Preview

This special preview gives you a glimpse inside Casting the Runes, the new GUMSHOE-powered game of occult investigation, set in the world of M. R James’ celebrated ghost stories and tales of the supernatural.

Written by Paul StJohn Mackintosh, and published by The Design Mechanism (creators of Mythras), we are launching our Kickstarter Campaign on January 2nd 2020. As you can see from this preview, the book is essentially finished: writing is done, editing complete, and even layout is finalised. The Kickstarter campaign is therefore aimed at funding the book’s physical production in standard and prestige formats, and commissioning new art to replace the Public Domain pieces we’ve used in this pre-production edition.

What this means is that as soon as the campaign closes, Backers will have immediate access to the pre-production PDF and can start playing Casting the Runes immediately. No waiting months for a finished product; we have it ready to go.

Stretch goals for the project aim to increase the production values incrementally: adding a leatherette cover, dustjacket, book marks, and other embellishments to create a prestige version that wouldn’t look out of place on the shelves of Kings College library at Cambridge University, where M. R. James was Provost. There are a couple of other stretch goals too, and these will be revealed during the campaign.

We hope you enjoy browsing these preview pages; we’ll be offering more previews as the Kickstarter progresses.