As time has gone on, my enjoyment of Cosmic Horror has mutated and evolved.  I’m certainly a fan of a lot of H.P. Lovecraft’s work, as well as many of his circle of friends, and ever growing circle of followers.  I particularly like its casting off of old, human-centric, spiritualism, and the embrace of the naturalist, existential ideas that reflect my own tastes and thoughts.  However, along the way, I’ve also developed something of an appreciation for the weirder, more esoteric, and uncanny stories that are often in Lovecraft’s orbit, if not harboring quite the same undercurrents and philosophies.  Robert W. Chambers’s The King In Yellow was one such work.  Here’s the thing.  Chambers was extremely prolific.  I’ve read three or four of his books, including the short story collection, The King in Yellow.  I am, to put it mildly, not a fan.  Much of what he wrote seems to be mostly schlocky nonsense.  The era’s equivalent of extra-trashy Romance novels with names like Claimed by a Playboy Sheikh.  It’s really only with the first four stories in his short story collection that I think Chambers achieved something special.  And it is those four stories that have inspired The Yellow King Roleplaying Game from Robin D. Laws.

There are four books, each set in a different time, or a different reality.  This review will be looking only at the first book, Paris.  It is set in the so-called Belle Époque era, specifically in 1895.  Players are meant to take the role of wealthy American students, off for an education, an adventure, and maybe a bit of debauchery in one of the world’s most storied cities.  You might be hobnobbing with famous artists, musicians, prostitutes, actors, philosophers, scientists, criminals, and pampered elites.  But you’ll also notice that something isn’t quite right.

That’s one of the things I find especially intriguing and thrilling with the mythology of the King in Yellow, the play and the titular character.  There’s a creeping sense of dread, not of a monster necessarily, but of a wrongness in reality.  Something is just slightly off, like you’re on a trip through Uncanny Valley.  I experienced it the first time when I was reading the Chambers story, The Repairer of Reputations.  It had been anthologised in some collection of Lovecraft-adjacent stories, mixed in with works from a bunch of Lovecraft’s contemporaries.  I went into the story blind.  I believe many of the stories in the book were written in the 1920s and 1930s, so when I read that it was set in the 1920s, I didn’t think anything of it.  Yet, as the story began, things weren’t quite right.  Military parades that felt more Napoleonic than American.  Suicide booths on the streets of New York.  A distinctly 19th Century vibe.  Something was up.  It felt so odd and otherworldly.  Only after I’d read the story did I find out it had been written decades earlier and meant as a Science Fiction story of sorts.  Whatever the case, the feeling it left me with was a weird, melancholic, haunted, vaguely dreamlike state.  I’ve never been into the drug scene, but I’ve always enjoyed a lot of psychedelic-adjacent art and music.  This gave me that feeling.

And that’s the feeling I think The Yellow King is going for.  With Paris, the first time period, the world is mostly recognizable.  The reality breaking influence of the King in Yellow is only beginning to take hold.  Perhaps most strongly in the minds of artists and musicians, as by their nature, they open themselves to things outside the societal consensus.  There’s so much potential for cool stories, with so much history and culture all crammed into a relatively small geographic location.  My brain was bursting with ideas, and threads I wanted to pull on.

I am, however, torn on this book.  On the one hand, it’s full of these cool sparks of ideas, and a bunch of useful information that a GM could use to build stories.  On the other hand, it doesn’t give you a ton of practical material to go on.  There are hints of what you might try to do for a larger, meta-campaign, using all four books.  But at least in Paris, there’s little concrete info on how you might do that.  There is one actual adventure, which seems fine, but I don’t think using such an obvious, famous novel as inspiration for the only era-specific scenario presented in the book was a great idea.  I don’t think the adventure is bad, I think I’d just have wanted something with a bit less pop-cultural baggage.  I like that the scenario doesn’t force linear plot progression.  There are some cool ideas in it.  It would have been a fine second or third scenario if more had been included, or one released in a later supplement.  But it being the only example didn’t work for me.

My other problem with this game is the system.  I’ve only played it once, so I can’t claim to have given it a fair shake yet.  However, this is at least the third book I’ve read using a variation of Gumshoe, and I am usually reminded of reading FATE and Powered by the Apocalypse games.  It feels like they’re trying to be both rules light and crunchy at the same time.  Or, they’re trying to be rules light, but failing, so that they become crunchy.  I’m not at all sold on the use of cards with this game, and I really don’t think they should appear in the book.  It’s not like you’re going to be able to photocopy them very easily.  If anything, it’s the kind of thing they should have offered as a free PDF download on their website, and call it good.  Instead, images of the cards take up almost forty pages that could easily have been another adventure.  There’s a part of me that thinks Gumshoe, at least as used in Trail of Cthulhu, and to a degree in this, was an overreaction to an easily fixable problem with Call of Cthulhu.  You could argue that, as written, many clues in Call of Cthulhu scenarios are locked behind die rolls.  You don’t find the clue unless you roll well, and if you don’t find the clue, you can’t solve the mystery.  There’s an easy fix that probably didn’t need a whole new game system to resolve.  Don’t keep clues behind pass/fail rolls.  If someone looks for a clue and fails their roll, give them the clue, but have it take longer than they want, or have it trigger a villain, or the cops, or whatever.  No need to make a whole different RPG to fix that.  I’m not saying that’s what happened.  It’s just how I feel sometimes when I read Gumshoe games.  More space could have been spent on frameworks for more scenarios or an overarching meta-story if this had simply been published as a Call of Cthulhu scenario.  I’m sure there are a lot of reasons behind the development of Gumshoe, Trail of Cthulhu, and The Yellow King that I am not aware of, and if the folks involved really felt like making their own system was the right thing, I’m not going to fault them for it.  But while I love the idea of some King in Yellow focused material, I wasn’t asking for another system to learn and run, especially one that doesn’t quite seem to be able to decide if it’s rules light or not.

I’m pretty sure I was a Kickstarter backer on this one.  Probably one of the last I did.  Somewhere along the way, I realized crowd-funding wasn’t really for me.  Mostly it was a budget thing.  I’ve been burned a couple times, but nothing major.  It’s mostly that there’s almost always a half-dozen projects I would love to back, and I simply don’t make that kind of money.  This was not a burn, even if I’m not totally thrilled.  I enjoyed reading through this book, and at some point coming up, I’ll read the next one.  My guess is that if I ever run this, or a version of this, I’ll have to do a hell of a lot of work to flesh things out and bring my players into it.  I’ll probably fall back on some Call of Cthulhu scenarios that are out there, too.  And to be honest, I’m much more likely to just use the Call of Cthulhu rules to run anything anyway.  I tend to run a fairly lean and stripped down game of Call of Cthulhu, and I think it generally works pretty well.  But again, there’s a lot of good stuff here.  I just wanted more, and I wanted more concrete and directly gameable material.

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