In August 2017 we resurrected our November 2015 Esoterrorists Bundle, featuring The Esoterrorists roleplaying game by Robin D. Laws (Feng Shui, HeroQuest, Hillfolk) from Pelgrane Press. As an investigator for the benevolent secret conspiracy Ordo Veritatis, you defend modern-day reality against a loose network of occult terrorists, the Esoterrorists, who try to weaken the protective Membrane and summon Unremitting Horrors from the Outer Dark.
You and your teammates share a background in investigation. You may be a world-weary homicide detective, a lab-coated forensic scientist, a grizzled old-school reporter, a tweed-jacketed scholar, or even a hanger-on in the criminal underworld. Your secret worldwide organization operates with the tacit approval of the world’s major powers to fight the machinations of the Esoterrorists, a network of misfits and rejects from various occult traditions. Your enemies stage hauntings, create Fortean phenomena, and insert false evidence of nonexistent conspiracies into the historical record. These begin as hoaxes but, as they create mass hysteria, become real. As they peak, they spawn Creatures of Unremitting Horror, bizarre modernist monsters. Your job is to destroy them.
The Esoterrorists was the first RPG to use Robin’s GUMSHOE System (seen in Trail of Cthulhu, Night’s Black Agents, and many other RPGs of detection and mystery). The GUMSHOE rules ensure your investigation never grinds to a halt due to a failed die roll. As top paranormal detectives, you never fail in your areas of expertise. When necessary, you can expend extra effort to glean more from the evidence than any plodding journeyman could hope to find.
This revived Esoterrorists Bundle had everything you need — both ebooks and music! — for your own campaign of heroic struggle against sinister world conspiracies. There were four titles in our Player’s Collection (retail value $44):
- The Esoterrorists 2nd Edition (retail price $15): The original GUMSHOE System investigative game of sinister occult conspiracies. We also include The Esoterrorists 1st Edition (retail $9), because Pelgrane gave it to us so why not?
- The Esoterror Factbook (retail $15): An indispensable reference for assets, protocols, psychogeography, Membrane permeability, and Techno-Macho Utterances.
- Dissonance – Music for Esoterrorists (retail $5): Four atmospheric tracks by composer James Semple encompassing suspense, action, and horror for The Esoterrorists or any modern mystery game. Includes the music that introduces the ENnie-winning podcast Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff.
Those who paid more than the threshold (average) price gained +2 to Negotiation and also got our entire Gamemaster’s Collection with eight more titles worth an additional $75:
- The Esoterror Summoning Guide (retail $10): The Ordo Veritatis summarizes what it knows of the enemy’s world-threatening methods.
- Book of Unremitting Horror (GUMSHOE version, retail $15): A boundary-crossing collection of truly disturbing modern monsters.
- Albion’s Ransom: Little Girl Lost (retail $9) and Worm of Sixty Winters (retail $9): A complete two-part campaign of battle against a climate catastrophe in northern England.
- The Love of Money (retail $10): A full-length campaign investigating Esoterrorist funding sources, and what they’re doing with all that rhodium.
- Profane Miracles (retail $5): Leonard (Fate Core) Balsera’s fast-paced investigation of a millionaire supposedly raised from the dead.
- Six Packed (retail $4): A gruesome revenge killing in a London slaughterhouse leads to a terrible threat from the Outer Dark.
- Worldbreaker (retail $13): The complete, published version of the world-spanning campaign by Robin D. Laws. This offer’s original November 2015 run had a preview playtest draft; this is the final book. And if you bought this offer in 2015, you got this new addition automatically on your Wizard’s Cabinet download page.
That’s a US$107 value, well worth it just for the (possible) protection from Torture Dogs, Snuff Homunculi, Feral Drowners, and other Unremitting Horrors. (Protection not guaranteed.) Ten percent of each purchase (after gateway fees) went to the charity selected by Pelgrane Press co-owner Simon Rogers, Cancer Research UK.
