I was extremely lucky to catch up with Robin D. Laws, Creative Director of Pelgrane Press at Tabletop Scotland 2026, and it was an absolute delight to pick his brains about all things TTRPG related.
Amongst other things, we chatted about authorship vs player ownership, creating dramatic tension in games, rule shifts, and how gamers are, more than ever, getting to take the reins and be storytellers themselves. Robin also wore a really cool dino shirt (pictured).
Read the full interview below:
Hi Robin, how are you enjoying Tabletop Scotland so far?
It’s fabulous. I’ve never been to Scotland, certainly never been to Tabletop Scotland, so it’s very exciting to be at a new big show and arrive at the point where its trajectory is going up – and it’s a delight.
Excellent. And what are you here to promote? Got anything new to share with us?
The new things I have out are Page Turners, which is a game for one GM and one player. Pelgrane has done other one-to-one games based on Gumshoe, but this is a one-to-one game based on Drama System, on Hill Folk.
So, this is all about interpersonal interaction, but rather than creating something that feels like an ensemble drama, like an HBO show, as Hill Folk does, you’re creating something that feels more like literature with a single protagonist. And so, you can do like a Scott Fitzgerald pastiche. I did a Shakespearean comedy.
The other writers who wrote scenarios for it did everything from a Jane Austen pastiche to a Behind the Music. There’s a serious character-driven contemporary literary fiction piece. There’s a story about a young person growing up in a household, not only with the ordinary household strife, but a strange shadowy being in their world. But it’s a character-driven story rather than a straight up sort of horror procedural thing where you’re escaping from whatever it is. And at the end, there’s a long series of stories based on you’re playing robots who have escaped with the last humans from Earth in order to create human civilization elsewhere.
But in the first episode, you pass their radiation belt and all of the humans you’re supposed to be protecting die. But you’re programmed to protect human civilization. So, you land on the planet anyway and start building human civilization without humans. And so, then there’s a series, and it follows different generations as the politics of the robots evolve and a new generation comes up and questions the motives of the previous ones, they become more and more human-like, meaning there are more and more conflict between them. So, it’s a vehicle in addition to all of those other things of being able to do classic science fiction stories that aren’t space opera, that aren’t adventure stories, but are rather stories of ideas.
Okay, very cool. Now, most writers control every twist on the page, but as a game designer, your rules dictate how other people tell stories together. Where does your authorship end and the player’s ownership begin?
So, when you’re designing a game or even a scenario, you’re just laying out a blueprint for someone else to take and grab and make their own story. And a bunch of other people will do different versions of that story each time. So, you have to be very cognizant of the fact that you are just providing tools to someone else, building blocks.
And one of the things that I’m doing as creative director at Pelgrane Press is training a new generation of writers, and for example, to write gumshoe scenarios. And you have to be very careful of certain issues. Like you can just say: ‘Well, this happens’, and then I have to tell the designers, no it necessarily doesn’t, because guess what? The players have the ability with their different things that they can do in their character sheet.
They can stop that thing from happening. You have to account for what else could possibly happen. So you’re creating a groundwork for a bunch of different branching narratives that all still have to resolve at the end in some sort of satisfactory way. So that’s entirely the challenge of this whole art form.
And that brings us on to the fact you designed the Gumshoe engine to eliminate the risk of missing essential clues. When you remove failure from the act of finding evidence, where does a real dramatic tension come from?
So dramatic tension, if you look at any investigative TV episode or movie or novel or whatever it is, you never see James Bond like go to a place where he’s supposed to get the clue and just wander around baffled. Instead, often, someone will walk up to James Bond and go, here’s my plan.
They will tell him what’s going on because it’s never interesting to fail to get information, which is why you never see it in any other medium. And so all Gumshoe does is it doesn’t take out failure. It takes out the boring, stupid failure in order to have more interesting failures. For example, when you’re running away from the volcano layer or whatever it is, rather than just being stymied and having things stop.
Okay, smart. So, in your story analysis work, you split scenes into procedural problem solving and dramatic emotional negotiation. Which of these two modes is harder to capture in tabletop rules and why?
I wouldn’t say harder, but just We have been historically roleplaying has been less interested in drama than in procedural because of it started as a war game. And Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson basically accidentally created a story for him when they created a version of wargaming that just had one person and who kept coming back for previous adventures. That suddenly became a narrative, but they weren’t thinking of it in those terms. And so it took a while for people to become interested in the dramatic storytelling part. And for a long time, people just sort of free associated it without having a rule structure to support it. So, it took people like Emily Care Boss or later myself, and Hite and go, ‘well, what’s the structure? What are the rules underlying this in a way that facilitate what you’re doing rather than determine what you’re doing?’.
So, it just took a sort of a cultural shift of bringing people who were already interested in interpersonal stories to get into role-playing and then go, well, okay, here’s a set of problems we haven’t solved yet and it remains, the vast untapped fertile ground for storytelling compared to, ‘how do I get out of this cave?’ or ‘how do I climb this mountain?’ or whatever.
Thank you. Pelgrane’s catalogue ranges from Parisian art students facing reality decay to cosy halflings solving village murders over tea. What rule changes are required to shift a system’s tone from existential dread to comfortable domesticity?
So essentially, we started with horror, with The Esoterrorists and Fear Itself. And so The Yellow King, Paris is part of that and we’ve done different flavors of horror along the way. And so what Gar had to do with Merryshire is take all of the horror out. So, instead of having elaborate combat system, there’s just sort of a contest and you can be hurt. But what that means is up to you.
It would be only something that would make sense within the logic of a halfling detective story in a bucolic village, because you’re not the one getting murdered. There’s all kinds of murder in this bucolic village. village, but there’s not a lot of fighting, and the fighting is not hugely consequential. And so what Gar did is he just went, ‘you know what, you only die if you think it’s appropriate’, which solves that problem. And so, getting away from the typical first generation role-playing thought would be, how do I simulate this village to what kind of story you want to tell, what tone do we need, and therefore what set of gumshoe rules do we already have that fit the tone, and what do we need to create to get the tone that we’re looking for.
That’s a good answer. You often use classic theatre, cinema and literature as reference points for role-playing games. For someone completely outside the tabletop hobby, what does an RPG achieve as a storytelling medium that a play or a novel never can?
The hilarious thing, of course, is that always used to be the question. It would be “how do people outside see what’s going on in order to understand it?” And of course we have streaming shows that are selling out stadiums. So, the answer to how to make role-playing stories accessible to ordinary people would be turn it back into a passive medium.
So, and I think through that, when you see people engaged in streaming or whether someone brings you into a game. For example, our one-to-one lines, a lot of people have used that to bring their partners into role-playing, people who wanted to do it. And so really the sky’s the limit because role-playing has only existed for about 50 years.
If you think of cinema in basically the late 30s, that’s only kind of the beginning. And People are going to continue to come up with new ways. Another fascinating thing is that people who’ve been drawn in by streaming were brought in by watching D&D. When they played D&D, they did their own variations of D&D. And now there’s a whole generation of people who are creating story games. without the intervening story game movement or familiarity with that, but instead of going straight from D&D to, okay, I’m gonna use the D&D rules to create a story about motherhood and feeling overwhelmed. And that’s a fascinating leap for people to make, but it’s based on what they know.
And I think it’s a testament to how this continues to be sort of a ground-driven grassroots art form where people aren’t thinking of it as an art form, but they’re nonetheless getting to the goals and structures of art pretty quickly based on some surprising starting points.
Yeah, and you know, stories are at the heart of all of it, right? People have been telling stories for thousands upon thousands of years. You know, it’s just… makes perfect sense.
Right. And roleplaying sort of encourages you to analyze and think about what is necessary to drive a story and what makes an interesting story or not, which is where beat analysis came from is that I’ve discovered that the audience as it existed 25 years ago, I would just, well, do the interesting thing. And what’s that? What is the interesting thing? And so that whole project is about breaking down a sort of a nebulous artistic thing to people who think in a really linear, categorical fashion and trying to get people to look at stories and break them down because we’re immersed in story more than we’ve ever been before, right?
In the past, you would hear the myth of your people once a year, and then that was it. And now we’re deluge with narrative. People now are looking at their phones from micro dramas that are 90 seconds long, but how to emulate what’s going on and understanding it beyond the surface level of how it works on you emotionally turns out to be a bit of a challenge, but it’s the challenge that role-playing without knowing that’s what it was doing, it’s been doing for decades.
And I find as well that people come into TTRPGs as players and realise that actually they want to tell their own story through this medium, which I think is great, don’t you?
That’s the whole point of it. That’s the whole essence of the medium and what makes it different from all other art forms, except now, of course, it has this gigantic passive entertainment. So who knows? Who knows what’s going on?
Tabletop games rely on social contracts between players sitting around the table. When you design a rule, how much are you coding mathematical probabilities and how much are you directing social behaviour?
I am not someone who creates something with a vast statistical engine under the hood. I’m looking for ‘how do you create this emotional effect?’ and ‘How do you create a satisfying story for people?’ And sometimes for people who are very logic-oriented and now we have more and more people coming in who are more like the drama kids. And of course I was a drama kid, not an engineer or a computer scientist.
And now at a lot of tables it’s about trying to achieve a blend of those two things. Every piece of advice that’s broadly applicable depends very much on who you’ve got at your table. If you’ve got six people who want to simulate an environment and poke at it and have it poke back and don’t care whether there’s an exciting part at the end, you’re going to have to run a game for them or design a game for them that’s very different than a group of people who very much expect a narrative and a climax. Although I would argue that a lot of people who say they’re only interested in simulation and logic are disappointed when there is a big moment at the end.
Another great answer. So, last question. What are you working on behind the scenes at the moment? Is there anything you can share with us?
So, one of my new dictums as the first Creative Director of Pelgrane has been to not announce things too far in advance because we’ve had stuff that we’ve been in the air for a long time and people ask, ‘where’s this book?’ And it’s like, well, actually, we were hoping Ken and Gar write this book, this winter. So, the things I want to focus on are the things that have just come out. I’ve mentioned Page Turners, Hamlet’s GM Screen, which is the latest in my beat analysis of things.
And there’s a series of redos of Pelgrane Books that were started before I came on board but are now coming out. So 13th Age second edition is out. It’s ready. It’s here at the show. The new visually revamped version of Fear Itself, with the new Ocean Game campaign is heading to people now and will be out in the next couple of months. And then that’ll be followed by the Trail of Cthulhu, second edition, which is really gorgeous and great and had to be split into two books. It has a Georgian era supplement that goes with it by Philip Masters and Sarah Ann Saltiel, which does the Age of Enlightenment Cthulhu Style. That’s called Boundary of the Darkness. And so that’ll be a lot of fun for people who have done the 1930s enough to do the 1770s and just see how extra horrible things are now.
Alright, thank you very, very much for such a generous interview, Robin! It was great to meet you, and wishing you all the best for your upcoming projects.
You can check out Page Turners via the official Pelgrane Press website (and I recommend you do!).
Tabletop Scotland 2026 Coverage
Our thanks to Thistle Tavern for sponsoring our coverage of Tabletop Scotland. Visit their spacious store at 79 Shandwick Pl, Edinburgh for a huge selection of wargames, board games, and TCGs.
Loading articles…
- Dates: 4th to 6th September 2026
- Location: Royal Highland Centre, Edinburgh
What do you think of some of the key takeaways Robin D. Laws had to share with Bronwen? We’d love to hear your thoughts. Comment below to start the conversation!
