Author Archives: Rick Neal

Gamma World: First Impressions

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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So, like every other gaming fan-boy, I grabbed my copy of Gamma World on Friday night. Not only am I running the Gamma World Game Day on October 23 at Imagine Games and Hobbies, but the Storm Point campaign is looking at taking a short D&D hiatus to play a little Gamma World. I’ve spent some time over the weekend reading through the game and generating some characters, just to try things out, and I’ve got some initial thoughts on the game.

It looks like a lot of fun, but it is pretty fine-tuned for a very specific kind of play experience. The game is designed to be rather crazy, with strange mutations, bizarre landscapes and situations, weird tech, and high mortality rates among PCs. The mechanics are based on D&D 4e, with things tweaked a little bit for the new style of play. The healing rules, the level-based bonuses, and a few other things have been altered to reinforce the free-wheeling, beer-and-pretzels, absurd style of play that the game fosters.

Like pretty much all Gamma World editions, character creation is random ((Admittedly, it may be a little more random in this version than in some others.)), and you can wind up with some very strange characters to play. When you factor in the idea of Alpha Flux, and the changing mutations reflected in the Alpha Mutation cards, characters can – and do – change from one encounter to another. The random rolls can create some very strange origin combinations, and the Alpha Mutation deck adds another layer of weirdness as you try to figure out how your gravity-bending android suddenly has the power to read minds or grow tentacles ((The baseline explanation, of course, is provided by the explanation of the Big Mistake, with the mixing and merging of alternate universes still ongoing, re-editing the characters from time to time.)).

Most powers and weapons ((Especially Omega Tech items.)) do pretty impressive amounts of damage, and hit points are about on a par with 4e. This means that characters are not as durable as you might expect them to be, especially as healing is pretty thin on the ground. No more healing surges – instead, everyone can take a second wind action once per encounter and heal up to full after each encounter for free. Second wind has been beefed up, healing half your hit points, instead of a quarter, and it’s only a minor action. On the down side, there are fewer powers and items that I’ve seen that offer healing. This can lead to a pretty high mortality rate during play.

The game touts this as – well, if not actually a feature, per se, at least a design goal. Characters are pretty quick to generate, so dying means you’re out of play for maybe fifteen minutes as you whip up your new mutant to wander by and join the fun. Because so much of the game is focused on the experience of playing your character changing so often, this is less jarring than it might be in a more… serious, I guess… game.

I have to admit that I was a little leery about the use of cards and deckbuilding in the game. It struck me as injecting a lot of what I don’t like about CCGs into my RPG fix – you need to buy more and more cards for your character to be viable. After reading the game, I am less troubled by it. The game comes with enough cards that you won’t ever need to buy a booster pack. They are completely superfluous to play. Having said that, they do add some real coolness to the game, with neat new powers and toys to make the game even crazier than before. The guides to deckbuilding are very loose and, while they can let you tailor your mutations to fit a little more with your character concept, I can actually see a carefully constructed deck removing a lot of the weird, unexpected awesome that the cards can contribute. If you’re always pulling the same four Psi mutations and Xi items, you’ll never have the wild, giddy joy that comes of suddenly growing mandibles for no readily apparent reason and going to town with your newly discovered force pike ((In addition to this, Gabe over at Penny Arcade makes a very telling point: “If you decide that you would like to build your own decks to draw from then yes, you can go and purchase booster packs. You are not at a disadvantage if you don’t though because this is not a competitive game. In MTG you are pitting your deck against your opponents. If you don’t buy booster packs you don’t have a deck and that will making winning very difficult. In Gamma World you are playing with your friends and against the DM who does not get to draw any cards. The cards are just for fun and to help you kick the shit out of whatever the DM throws at you.” Thanks, Gabe!)).

So. As I said, the game is very focused on a certain kind of loose, rollicking, wahoo style of play by default. In doing some thinking, there are a couple of things that I think you could tweak with house rules to turn it into something better able to sustain long-term campaigns, or turn it into a more serious type of game.

Less Random Characters

If you’re not a fan of the very, very random character generation, it’s pretty easy to change it to allow for more designed characters. Allowing players to pick and choose their origins – even if you only let them choose one of their two origins – can go a long way toward letting people play the kind of character they want. And you can bypass the random roll of attributes for those not set by origins, allowing players to use an array, similar to in D&D. Easy.

Now, I found the random character generation I tried this weekend produced some interesting and very playable characters. The three I rolled up include a robot powered by a contained quantum singularity (Android/Gravity Manipulator), a colony of psychic Moebius Newts (Mind Breaker/Rat Swarm), and a Mi-Go (Plant/Cockroach). I think the random elements can really spark creativity, especially when you’re trying to reconcile two apparently contradictory origins.

This will also lead to a longer character creation time, so if you’re going to do this, you need to also address the next issue.

Lower Character Mortality ((I almost typed “Lower Character Morality,” which is a completely different kind of game.))

Allowing characters to take a third wind in combat might be all that’s required to balance this. That and maybe making some healing potion analogue readily available during play. If you’re looking for something more complex, you can revamp the damage of the various weapons and attacks so that they’re more in line with 4e values.

Stable Mutations

First off, everyone gets a couple of powers based on their origins that are consistent no matter what happens with the Alpha Mutations cards, so it’s not like everything about your character changes when you draw new mutations. But some of the weird things that happen with Alpha Mutation cards kind of strain credulity when they come up outta nowhere ((“What do you mean, now I’m aquatic? When the hell have we been near any water? This is a desert!”)). Allowing characters to build their own Alpha Mutation deck is one answer – they can pick options that fit their character concepts a little better, and focus on certain types of powers. Another option is to give each character a permanent card (or two, or more, if they’re of sufficient level) that they don’t have to discard after use. You can then decide if they get to pick the card or if it’s random. You can even do a combination – they get three random cards, and have to pick one to keep.

Those are just some thoughts after reading the game. Having looked at some of the buzz online, though, I’m going to encourage the Storm Point geeks to play it as written, at least for our first game.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

From the Armitage Files: The Fate of Wallace Hutchinson

By | | GUMSHOE, The Armitage Files, What's he playing?
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**Potential Spoilers**

The Armitage Files is an improvised campaign structure. It uses a number of stock pieces, such as NPCs, organizations, and locations, that are strung together by individual GMs to fit player action. The adventures I create with it may or may not match any other GM’s version of the campaign. That means that reading these posts may or may not offer spoilers for other game groups.

In addition, this post in particular has some spoilers for the Pagan Publishing adventure Realm of Shadows.

**You Have Been Warned**

Saturday night was the latest installment of our Armitage Files campaign.

We had left the last game with the characters deciding to go snooping after Wallace Hutchinson, who had come to their attention previously during the Helping Hands investigation, because they had found evidence at one of his warehouses of a potential Cthulhu cult. Their decision had caught me completely off-guard, and I asked their permission to stop the game early so I could prepare some interesting things for the search for Hutchinson ((What can I say? I was tired after running the D&D Game Day at Imagine Games, and not as nimble on my mental feet as I wanted to be for this change in direction. Also, their decision sparked a bit of an idea that I needed to do a little research to pull off the way I wanted to.)).

See, when they suggested going to hunt Hutchinson, a wealthy businessman who had fled the police, somehow I flashed to the Pagan Publishing adventure Realm of Shadows, which is a great little campaign in itself ((Of course, so is everything else by Pagan Publishing. If you like Cthulhu games and you haven’t looked at their stuff, you’re doing yourself a disservice.)). Part of the game takes place down in French Guiana, at a ziggurat full of ghouls, half-ghouls, and their followers and worshipers. It’s a wonderful, nasty denouement for the RoS adventures, and I thought the exotic locale and the ghouls would make a neat departure for our campaign.

I was wrestling to make it fit, though. Sure, it would be easy enough to give the players the clues they needed to send them down there, and run them through a jungle trek and the nasty, ghoul-filled pyramid at the end, but it didn’t really tie all that well into what had gone on before in the investigation of either the warehouse or the Helping Hands. In addition, I’ve been trying not to show too many monsters, keeping them remote, mysterious, and damned frightening for the characters. Throwing them into a hive of ghouls struck me as a little too much, too fast. Besides, the whole adventure is set up as the climax to an ongoing campaign against the ghouls, and is appropriately big and horrific. I wasn’t using it as a campaign climax, and I was worried it was going to overshadow the rest of the campaign.

Then, due to some cancellations ((First, of my new Dresden Files RPG city-building session, then of the Fiasco game I had proposed to replace it.)), I found myself with an extra evening free to work on the prep for the game. After doing some fiddling with it, I had a brainstorm, scrapped the RoS idea, and came up with something that I think worked better.

So, the investigators started by digging around in the public record, looking for properties Hutchinson owned that he might use to hide out. Unfortunately, he’s a rich guy, and there were too many options with not enough information to narrow them down. They talked to the police, with no better luck – the FBI had taken over the case, because it was probable that Hutchinson had crossed state lines. But the cop Roxy talked to did mention that the Hutchinson business lawyers had been able to keep the cops and the feds out of Hutchinson’s business office in Kingsport.

Playing to her strengths, Roxy broke into the offices one night, bribing the cleaning staff to bring her in with them and then forget it ever happened. Moon and Solis stayed outside, Solis watching the front and Moon the back. Roxy was very jumpy about the burglary, still feeling somewhat nervous after what happened the last time the party split up like this ((Deep one vs. gangster, with a birth and a grenade thrown in.)). She cracked Hutchinson’s safe and, among the watches, cash, and business papers, she found a handkerchief-wrapped bundle. She stuck the bundle and the watches into her pockets, put the rest into the cleaning cart, and headed out. For some reason ((Certainly it was nothing I did or said…)), she didn’t trust the elevator, so she put the cart into it and sent it down to the ground floor, while she went down the stairs. At the bottom, the elevator door opened, but the cart was not inside. Freaking out a bit, she ran.

Aaron, meanwhile, was waiting in the back alley, when he started to smell the sea. This was quickly overwhelmed by a pungent stench, and he turned to see a tall, humanoid shape, close to nine feet tall, in the shadows, reaching out toward him. He drew his gun, but the odour was making his eyes water and nose run. The thing closed its strangely shaped hand over Moon’s gun, which he fired. The shot brought the others running, to find him bent over on the ground, eyes and nose streaming, hacking, coughing, and retching. The group identified the creature as similar to the thing Armitage said he had encountered in the library in the latest document, and Solis found the same fibers in Moon’s mucous.

Business documents were lost in the cleaning cart, but Roxy still had the handkerchief-wrapped bundle. It contained a plate of what appeared to be metal, but upon analysis, turned out to be some sort of strange ceramic. It was etched with bizarre symbols, and accompanied by a page of a journal that seemed to translate it ((I spent Saturday morning creating these as hand-outs. Unfortunately, the plate was just printed on cardstock, but it still looked pretty good.)). It hinted at an impending incursion into our reality of Those Outside, presaged by many strange events and conditions orchestrated by the Voice, which was one of the masks of Nyarlathotep. One of the ways the document said you could tell that the end was approaching was by the occurrence of periods of non-standard time, where perception of time and duration become fluid or porous. This really got to Moon, who has been experiencing just such events.

The other things the document told the group was that Hutchinson had been planning to go to a mine in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, to learn more from some beings that said they would have to make some changes to him before they could do so.

Somewhere in the midst of that – I forget exactly where – Aaron used his Cthulhu Mythos to get a handle on the thing in the alley ((He is using it a lot, which is really helping him burn through his Sanity.)). I gave him a spiel about Sasquatch, and Skunk-Apes, and Yetis, and how they were tied to the Mi-Go, which didn’t make him very happy, so I felt my job there was done.

Anyway, they packed up and headed off to the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the small mining town of Doylestown. They decided on posing as journalists doing a story on Skunk-Apes and other local folklore, with Roxy being the primary journalist, Aaron being the editor, and Solis being the scientific expert. Talking the idea up in the local pub – and buying many drinks for the locals – they managed to get the name of a local who claimed to have actually seen something strange in the woods, as opposed to the normal friend-of-a-friend stories.

They sought this fellow out and, after some Flattery, Reassurance, and outright bribery, he told them the story of going up on a nearby mountain with his dog, and how the dog was vivisected in a few short minutes it was out of his sight, and his glimpse of something he said looked like a giant grasshopper with a rotten pumpkin for a head. Moon identified this as a crude description of a Mi-Go.

A little investigation at the local newspaper turned up a story about the mine being closed in about 1820 and the whole production moved to a neighbouring mountain after a series of caves were discovered and a team of engineers were lost in them. Local folklore said that the original mine was cursed. This seemed like a good target for investigation.

In the mine, they found the caves, and saw that many had ropy, pulsing tubes of some fungal matter running along the walls and ceilings. In one chamber, they found many of these tubes joined by masses of strange fungus that emitted strange smells and colours, while they worked almost like hearts to move bizarre liquids through the hoses. In another, they heard strange buzzing voices persuading a flat, tinny voice that it was time to leave. When they made it to the place they had heard the voices, all they found was the vivisected body of Wallace Hutchinson, along with a number of empty cylinders made of the same substance as the plate they had found, marked with similar symbols. Moon managed to catch sight of some indistinct shapes flying up through a chimney in the chamber carrying one of the cylinders, but the shots he fired at them had no effect.

The group planted the dynamite they had brought to bring down the caves ((Gracious even in defeat, huh?)), and fled the town.

Not sure what they’re planning next, whether they plan to go back to the warehouse and snoop some more, or to move on to something else. Whatever the choose, it should be fun.

Finding the Cool

By | | What's he playing?
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I had the edges of this idea stuck in my head, and rather than lose it, I sent it out by Twitter:

Thought on #rpg – The game is not the story of my character. It is the story of our characters. We need to help each other find the cool.

A few people seemed to think that was interesting enough to retweet, so I kept mulling it over, trying to articulate exactly what I mean by that.

First of all, even though I haven’t stated it overtly ((At least, I don’t think I have.)), my view of roleplaying games is that they are vehicles for creating moments of coolness – cool characters, cool scenes, cool situations, cool adventures, cool villains, cool… whatever. They are cooperative tools for collectively evoking that coolness in play. They are the frameworks we use to construct fantasies that generate the kinds and flavours of cools we find most compelling.

This leads to the thought that we all have the same job in a roleplaying game: looking for, evoking, and highlighting the cool. Whether as players or GMs, we should be trying to add as much cool to the game as we can.

Now, this is all neatly sidestepping the question of what is and is not cool. That’s because the value of cool changes with each group, with each game, with each session, with each person. The functional value of cool is collectively determined through the process of play, and is not easily predicted or repeated. Indeed, repetition of a single cool thing often depletes the cool, devaluing it. Such is the nature of a subjective judgment.

But cool is like pornography: we all know it when we see it. So, if I don’t define what it is, exactly, I still have faith that you all know exactly what I’m talking about, even if your idea of it is completely different from mine.

Now, where the characters come in. I’ve been looking back over the course of my roleplaying career, and I’ve noticed an interesting progression in my play. This is highlighted by the fact that, in my extended gaming group, there are players at pretty much every stage of roleplaying experience, and I see some of the things I went through in their play ((I want to stress at this point that the things I’m seeing aren’t bad. They are legitimate ways of approaching and enjoying roleplaying games. I have just found other ways of approaching and enjoying games that I find work better for me.)). Couple that with the interesting way that games like Fiasco really sell story over character, and I’ve been doing some real thinking about how I play games.

One of the common approaches we take to games is that they are the story of the character we happen to be playing. And, to a degree, they are. And, just as in real life, we are the heroes of our own stories. So, we focus on how the situation affects our characters, and choose our reactions and options to reflect our characters’ objectives and desires. We make use of our time in the spotlight to push forward our characters’ narrative. And this pushes forward the group narrative, as well.

Lately, though, I’ve been noticing the wonderful freedom that comes from playing a character that I’ve decided is a supporting character, rather than the main character. I know, it sounds like it runs counter to the entire point of playing in a roleplaying game, but it really doesn’t. In fact, I think it helps build more cool into the game.

In Fiasco, there usually comes a tipping point, where everyone figures out who the story is really about. I mean, sure, it’s an ensemble story, with everyone contributing to the overall plot, and everyone playing their character hard, going after what’s important, but one narrative thread usually presents itself as the most interesting and compelling out of the mess. When you spot that thread, the way to make Fiasco really work is to drive everything toward that thread and the characters it features. It makes the story cooler. When you don’t drive toward the obvious thread, when you instead keep pulling on your own character’s objectives without regard for that central emerging narrative, you wind up with several smaller, less cool stories.

Either way, Fiasco is fun, but one way produces a much cooler story than the other, and that produces more fun.

What this means in practice is that you sometimes must relegate your character to supporting character status if you want to bring out the coolest aspects of the game possible. So, for example, if it becomes clear that Frank, the dirty cop, is the main character, and the story becomes about his attempts to redeem himself, then I, playing his ex-wife Margaret, want to make that story as interesting, as cool as possible. That doesn’t mean that I play every scene with Frank, or always defer to him, or keep talking about him when he’s not there; but it does mean that, when my scene comes around, I want to do something that’s going to come up in the main storyline, something that will give Frank a little more to deal with, something that will give Frank an opportunity to do something cool. So, maybe I start dating the guy Frank just befriended.

See, that way, I’ve done something that fits with who Margaret is, and fits her narrative, but also adds a cool element to Frank’s narrative, because you know Frank’s going to find out and have to deal with it. The story becomes cooler for everyone ((And poor Margaret ends up with a broken heart and a black eye, while Frank winds up in the office of a movie producer with a gun.)).

But that’s Fiasco, right? It’s not like a normal roleplaying game ((Whatever those are.)). Sure, but does have a lot to teach us that is useful in a normal roleplaying game. Some big, valuable lessons about pacing, narrative control, scene structure, conflict, and dynamic tension.

And how to support another character’s storyline.

In a lot of roleplaying games, when it’s not your turn, or when the spotlight is firmly on someone else’s character, we tend to sit around, waiting for our turn. Sure, we pay attention, and maybe offer suggestions or commentary, and we enjoy the show, but really, we’re waiting for our moment to shine. When we come up to bat, it’s all about our character.

But it doesn’t have to be. Just because someone else has the spotlight doesn’t mean that we need to grab it back at the first opportunity. Or that we need to use it just to shine on us when we get it. We can take the opportunity to help another character be cool.

Because what I said earlier is true – the game is not the story of my character. Nor of yours. It is, collectively, the story of all our characters. In a good game, like in a good ensemble TV series ((Boston Legal was a great example of this, actually, and Leverage continues to be.)), each character is going to get some of the spotlight every session, but one or two – with their specific storyline(s) – are going to be singled out for the main focus. This allows each character to grow and develop as they move forward, and more to the point, allows the group as a whole to grow and develop. The dynamic and relationships will shift and change, deepening and broadening, making the entire thing feel more real. More cool.

See, this very interesting thing happened at the last New Centurions game. One of the players, introducing her character, told about how she was sent back to the past to help avoid a huge disaster. The disaster? Apparently, in her timeline, my character, a robot, fails catastrophically, blowing up Manhattan Island. Now, this was just something she had come up with, no input from me or the GM, and my initial reaction was… less than pleased ((I mean come on! She’s messing with my character!)).

But the more I thought about it, the more I saw what a gift she had given me ((So, thanks for that, Fera!)). I mean, she just added an entire layer of coolness to my character with that little idea. Suddenly, my character was not just an emergency rescue robot, he had this sword of Damocles hanging over him, and the relationship between our characters takes a strange turn into very complex – and interesting, and cool – territory.

It was part of her story, but it made her a strong supporting character in my story as well. It was something that she did that added to my cool.

So, I want to look for opportunities like that, now. In addition to focusing on my character’s story when I get my moments in the spotlight, I want to try and shine some of the spotlight on another player’s character, helping them to find something new and cool to add. I want to look for the cool in other PCs, in NPCs, in the situations and stories and environment ((Because GMs deserve some coolness, too.)). I’m not looking at turning my characters into incompetent fools just to make the other characters look good – I want to use the cool of my character to bolster the cool of others. Maybe this will mean some strange character choices – not always playing fully to my character’s strengths, giving in to my characters weaknesses a little more, maybe getting captured or hurt or whatever to give someone else a chance to be the hero – but I think it will allow more cool to be found in the story.

More to the point, I want to spend the time between my spotlight moments looking at ways that I can contribute to the cool things the other characters are doing, without stealing the spotlight from them. What support can I give that will make the other character cool? What can I say or do that will give them the opportunity or tools or ideas that let them take their characters to the next level of coolness?

Because the game is not the story of my character, although my character’s story is a part of it.

The game is the story of our characters.

And we all need to help each other find the cool.

Because wherever the cool is found, we all get to share in it.

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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Last Sunday was the latest installment of the Storm Point campaign, and it wound up being a bit of a frustrating throw-back for me. This was all my fault: first of all, I was late to the game, so we were kind of rushed. Secondly, I put together a pretty big fight, which I knew would take a fair bit of time, and the late start, along with the big fight, made things drag at a couple of points.

Now, I mentioned in previous posts that I was trying to use smaller combat encounters, to get through more in a single session. I deliberately used a larger one this time because I realized that, although the group had just hit 9th level, I still had not given out the bulk of the treasure for 8th level. Rather than just exacerbate that problem, I put all the treasure in a big pile and gave it some tough guardians.

The game-reason I came up with for the encounter is that, though Silverfalls had been taken by invaders centuries ago, and looted at that time, there were still periodic scavenging parties going through the many, many mansions, tunnels, and buildings. This one party had accumulated a pretty good haul, and were gathering it at a staging point to carry it down deeper into the dwarven ruins.

So, the party is not all that stealthy. The bad guys figured out pretty quickly that there were interlopers, and set up a bit of an ambush. Our heroes found the pile of booty, guarded by a gang of troglodytes and a single drow. Once they were engaged, a few more drow popped out of the scummy pool of water where they had been hiding, and a drider dropped out of the shadows to join the fun ((7 troglodyte maulers, 1 drow cleric of Lolth, 3 drow adventurers, 1 drider fanglord – 3725 xp, an 11th-level encounter for 6 characters.)).

I could tell early in the game that the fight was going to stretch longer than I had anticipated, so I ignored some of the more complex ((And, unfortunately, more interesting.)) abilities of some of the combatants – the drows’ darkfire, for instance. Still, it went on longer than I really wanted it to.

But we got through it, and now the gang is looking at pressing into the Lower City, still searching for the bones of Thrun’s ancestor, which should lie where he fell defending the evacuees.

And what could go wrong with that, right?

New Centurions, Issue #3: Gang War

By | | New Centurions, What's he playing?
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After the last session of our ICONS New Centurions game, I wrote a post where I enumerated several problems we had with the system, but went on to say that I still liked the system.

Upon reflection, I’ve changed my mind.

And talking to the other players, and to the GM, I’m not alone. The system just was not working for us, for all of the reasons listed in the previous post.

But we still wanted the game to continue, so Clint, who is running the game, went looking for a different simple superhero rules set. He looked at a few of them, but decided to go with BASH ((As Clint has asked at least once, what’s with all the capitals?)).

So, I spent Saturday afternoon converting S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. ((See what I mean about the capitals?)) into a BASH character and learning the system. I gotta say, I like it a fair bit after one session. It moves quickly, seems a little more flexible in play, and uses a neat mechanic ((To be fair, I’m not sure everyone will think the mechanic is a smooth and easy as I do. I spent many years working a till in a bookstore, so multiplying numbers in my head is very much second nature. For those without that advantage, the the game includes a simple chart to do the math for you.)) to handle all the action. It has open-ended rolls, and a mechanic to improve your rolls that I think works a fair bit better than the Determination points in ICONS, allowing more flexibility and improvisation.

Clint added one house rule: he converted the attribute scale to make it more fine-grained, running from 0 to 10 instead of 0 to 5, basically inserting a separate level between each of the previous ranks. Now, I didn’t have any problem with the original scale, and I thought the system he found and incorporated in the game lacked a certain aesthetic quality to the design that was present in the original, but seeing as I had taken all even-number attributes in the new system, it didn’t affect me really at all, so my opinion is not all that relevant.

We did find that, in play, even though it looked like it should run just as easy and intuitively as the base system, the new scale did not. It caused confusion when integrating with the powers, and necessitated an extra layer of math in calculating outcomes. Somehow, the little change wound up generating headaches in play, and not offering enough extra functionality, causing Clint to decide to go with a different optional scale ((The new scale is basically the same as the one we played with, but doesn’t double the attribute numbers, instead inserting a + or a .5 to indicate a level between the two original levels. Doesn’t seem like much, but I think it’s going to address the main difficulties we were having.)).

Anyway.

This session, we were adding two new players to the game, bring the ranks of the New Centurions up to five in total ((Welcome, Tom and Vickie!)). We muddled around a bit at the beginning until we got the point that we were at a dead end with the investigations into the Century Club, Dr. Methuselah, and the sinkholes, and finally got into the story that Clint was using to introduce the new characters. This involved a speeding SUV, armed gang members, and a suitcase of money, the Five Dragons of a Chinese gang, a crimson ninja, hints about the Mafia, and our little group of heroes promising to retrieve the aforementioned suitcase of money from the Chinese gang and return it to the Latino gang so they could give it to the Mafia and head off a burgeoning gang war ((Clint likes making characters choose between the lesser of two evils. Sometimes, you need to measure them very, very carefully.)).

We found that the system ran very smoothly and intuitively, although we intentionally avoided some of the more complex combat options for our first outing. I ran into a couple of weird things with my character that were the result of not really understanding how the system works in play – specifically, I had overlooked a power that would actually make my Clairvoyance power (which is the BASH equivalent of Precognition) have a chance of working, and I had spent power slots on Armour, even though my Defense roll is high enough that it makes the Armour pretty much redundant. Clint has graciously allowed me to rejigger the numbers a bit for the next game.

I’m glad we made the switch to BASH. It’s just a better fit for the group and the style of game we’re playing. And I’m especially glad that we were able to convert the characters pretty seamlessly – but with what I feel are overall improvements -  to the new system.

I’m looking forward to the next game.

Fearful Symmetries: Hunt’s End

By | | Dresden Files RPG, Fearful Symmetries, What's he playing?
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Last Friday night was the latest installment of Fearful Symmetries. We wrapped up one of the man storylines, moved a couple others forward, and the characters brought about a fairly major change in the city. All in all, I felt they had really earned the Major Milestone I awarded at the end of the session.

Over the past few sessions, the characters had got themselves wrapped up in a few different storylines that could easily have led to a good climactic session – the whole Hunter thing, the Petrunas cult, the Gold Lane curse. They did some follow-up on everything, but the deadline on tracking down the fellow who had promised to kill Emeric after one month sort of took priority. So, that’s what they mainly focused on.

They had the name Konstantin Akrady to follow up on, and learned that the man who had threatened Emeric was most likely the Arkady, head of the clan. Konstantin was known to bring game to a butcher named Rostislav, in Hradcany, who had a very strong, but mute, assistant. That was enough to start with.

Izabella had heard of the Arkady clan, old horror stories coming out of northern Russia of shapeshifting bogeymen that had spread east, apparently devotees of the darkest aspects of the Wild Hunt and the Erlking, willing to hunt, kill, and eat anything that offered a challenge. That knowledge cheered them up immensely.

Emeric went to Rostislav’s butcher shop to try and get a line on Konstantin Arkady. Besides getting an oblique hint that he should come by the next day around dawn, he also found out that Evzen, the Petrunas cultist who had approached the characters for their help, had died in a fall. Further investigation revealed that Evzen was drunk and walking along the top of the Hunger Wall, when he fell and broke his back on a rock. Emeric recognized this as a traditional form of sacrifice to Thor, and he and Izabella decided that there must be some sort of infighting within the Petrunas cult that led to Evzen (and his progressive ideals) getting sent home to Thor.

The followed up on that a little bit, checking out the Chapel of St. Lawrence on Petrin Hill, and meeting Pastor Nicola, the priest. Emeric sensed that the pastor had a faith powerful enough to work miracles, but couldn’t decide if the man was what he appeared to be – a fairly tolerant Lutheran who turned a blind eye to the lingering papist tendencies of some of his congregation – or if he was secretly running a pagan cult ((This is sort of an interesting phenomenon. I mean, they know that Nicola is the head of the Petrunas cult, because they decided that in the city creation. But they keep the information from the characters very well. I think they also suspect me of changing some of the minor aspects of the setting to keep the mystery and excitement alive. And they’re right to do so.)).

Well, they wound up meeting Konstantin outside of Rostislav’s butcher shop in the early hours of the morning, as he was dropping off a small cart of dressed deer, boar, and one human ((“For the pies,” he said.)). In the ensuing discussion, he offered to help the characters find and defeat the Arkady, as Konstantin planned to take his place. He promised that, if the pair helped him, the Arkady clan would stay out of the characters’ way, if they stayed out of clan business. The information he gave about the Arkady’s preferred tactics – that he would start whittling away at Emeric’s friends long before the month was up, that the Arkady had no problem running away to fight again later, that the optimum attack was always an ambush or trap – and about the Arkady’s weakness – blessed weapons – were enough to get the characters to agree.

This made me very happy, as they each swore to honour the bargain on their names and powers. The idea of the pair swearing an oath to a monster in order to defeat a bigger monster was something I had been hoping for. Not only does it help reinforce the themes of the game ((Especially the theme Supernatural and Religious Gang Warfare.)), it gives me wonderful hooks to complicate the characters’ lives down the line.

So, preparations. Izabella whipped up a veil that would also mask her scent, both characters got their weapons blessed – Izabella at St. Vitus, Emeric at St. Lawrence ((And how could that come back to bite them?)) – and Amadan gave them a vial of water gathered on the Hill of Sacrifice in the Fey lands under the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, which he said was for direst emergency only ((They didn’t use this, and so still don’t really know what it does.)). Then they used the blood Konstantin had given them to make their way through the Stag Moat, and across into the Mittelmarch and the hold of the Arkady.

Now, my whole plan with the Arkady was that he was a plot-device-level character. Even Konstantin, one of his minions, was statted out at -19 Refresh. Defeating him relied on being able to assemble enough information, leverage, and assistance to defeat his various protections and abilities. The way things worked out, Konstantin had asked the characters to strike at the Arkady, wounding him and causing him to retreat, whereupon Konstantin would use his shapeshifting to follow and finish him. That would replace the Arkady with Konstantin (the new Arkady), free Emeric from his deadline, and basically keep things more or less status quo in Prague.

Things didn’t quite work out that way.

The characters had prepared very well, and accepted a number of compels through the evening, so they had a fair number of Fate Points to burn on the final encounter. The Arkady, overconfident, gave them the first shot for free. Huge mistake. Trusting in his toughness and recovery, not knowing that Emeric had had Beortning blessed, he sucked up a 13-shift hit. Big brouhaha followed, as the Arkady tried to flee, shifting shape madly, but was kept from doing so by Konstantin ((As promised by Konstantin, the other Arkady clansfolk stayed out of things. Emeric had been declared the Arkady’s prey, and so no one would interfere.)).

At this point, I thought that the characters would back off and let Konstantin settle things, but I should really have known better. They followed after the pair, keeping them from getting too far away, and doing more damage to the Arkady. I decided to change things up, seeing as the characters were more involved than I expected, and had the Arkady suddenly pull in all his power from the Mittelmarch demesne around them, as well as from the entire Arkady clan. Everything, including Emeric, but excluding the well-veiled Izabella, burst into flame and began to die as Arkday took on a powerful, monstrous form and prepared to unleash his fury on Emeric for forcing him to destroy his family.

But Izabella had roused the spirits of all the animals the Arkady had killed to harass him ((And paid to keep them under control by buying off a compel that they slip free to attack everyone.)), and Emeric pinned him to the ground with Beortning. As he shriveled and died, the forest kept burning around them.

Once he was ash, Emeric and Izabella started to try and make their way back to the Stag Moat. Faced with the terrible fire, and fearful that it might spread into Prague, Emeric exerted his pyromancy to maximum effect, spending the last of his Fate Points and taking much stress and consequences to suck all the fire into himself, quenching it instantly. They made their way back to the Stag Moat, and that’s where we called the game.

So, Clan Arkady is gone. That’s easily worth a Major Milestone. I also have some city advancement to do – this is going to change the nature and Aspect of Jeleni Prikop. I haven’t decided how, yet, but I’ve got some interesting ideas percolating.

And there’s still a number of things hanging over the characters’ heads, and only about five months left before the Battle of White Mountain and the occupation of Prague by Catholic forces. Plenty of good stories ahead.

Dogland, or How Have I Missed This Book For Thirteen Years?

By | | What's he reading?
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I finished reading Dogland by Will Shetterly last weekend. It was published, according to the book, in 1997.

How the hell have I overlooked this amazing book for thirteen years?

Well, okay. Will Shetterly is not a name I routinely look for on the bookshelves ((At least, it didn’t used to be. That’s changed, now)). Long ago, I read Cats Have No Lord, and the stuff he’d written in the Borderlands series, but while it was okay, none of it really grabbed me, and I started ignoring his stuff.

I don’t remember where I heard about Dogland. I just remember seeing the book in the store, and thinking, “Oh, yeah. That’s supposed to be good.” So, I bought it. And then it sat on my shelf for several months before I got around to it.

What’s the book about? Well, it’s about a young boy – four years old, almost five, when the story starts – who, in 1959, moves with his family to rural Florida, where they start up a tourist attraction called Dogland. Because of his father’s colourblind approach to hiring and the way he treats people, the family runs into some problems with the less-enlightened folks in the area.

That’s the basics of the plot, but the book goes far, far deeper. It’s also about how we learn what is right, how we gain our values, how we build families, and how stories shape the world. Or at least, our perceptions of the world. Because the book is also about how our memories are less reliable than our imaginations, and when we think we’re engaging with the real world, we’re often just engaging with the stories we tell ourselves about the world.

I know, I know. It sounds like pretentious literary navel-gazing. It isn’t. It’s saved from that fate by a clear, simple, involving writing style and a good story that’s worth reading even without the interpretation I just made ((I can’t help it. Being an English major in university has damaged something in my brain. I have to think about stories in this fashion.)).

The first chapter has the main character, Chris Nix, telling stories about his family that were told to him, and he’s very clear there that he can’t vouch for the truth of them. That sets the stage for the rest of the book, which is Chris Nix telling stories about his family that he witnessed. The entire book is a series of anecdotes, vignettes almost, pulled from the life and viewpoint and understanding of a young boy who doesn’t really understand everything that’s going on.

Because there’s a lot going on that the reader understands but Chris doesn’t. Adult things, deep things, important things, things that change the way the world is. But Chris, being just a child, merely witnesses without really understanding, and gives equal weight to the fear he has of jumping into the water from the roof of a houseboat as he does to the fear he has when a Klan rally shows up at Dogland.

The fantasy in the book is very subtle, and revealed mainly if you pay attention to the names of the characters. But there are mythic patterns playing out, and an important battle between good and evil. It’s balanced by, and given the same treatment as the strain of a difficult family situation and the problem of bullies.

What I’m trying to say is that Shetterly presents a wonderful, faceted look into a solidly realized world. We can’t see the whole thing, but we see enough of it to know the shape, and it feels so true to childhood memory that it’s easy to accept as real. Reading it, I was reminded of Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes, as well as Dan Simmons’s Summer of Night, and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.

I’m currently reading Shetterly’s The Gospel of the Knife, which is also very good, but very different ((It’s written in second-person voice, for one thing. And I gotta applaud the courage of the writer who attempts that, as well as the skill of the writer that pulls it off. Shetterly does both, so standing ovation for him.)), even though it also deals with Chris Nix, now 14 years old.

Pick the books up if you like modern fantasy, or magical realism ((I don’t really know what the difference is. As far as I can tell, “magical realism” is a label writers and publishers use to avoid the genre ghetto, so they can be considered serious and literary.)). Me, I’m going to keep looking for new stuff from Will Shetterly. Hopefully more of the Chris Nix stories.

I really don’t want to miss another book like this for thirteen years.

Fiasco: Lust, Ice, and Penguin Drumsticks

By | | Fiasco, What's he playing?
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Friday night was my third game of Fiasco. We had five players, three of whom had never played before – indeed, they hadn’t played any games like Fiasco before. Still, the game is quick to teach to people, and quick to play, so it didn’t slow things down at all.

It can be hard to describe what happens in a Fiasco session: the nature of the game produces convoluted webs of interactions, and makes it easy for the stories to get tangled and non-linear. This is all to the good, as it mirrors the way the movies and books that serve as the source material for the game handle narrative and character. It just makes it hard to sit down and say, “This is the story of the game we played.”

That said, this is the story of the game we played.

We used The Ice playset that comes in the rule book. Actually, Michael had the interesting idea of passing the stack of playsets around the table and having each person eliminate two of them. What with the sets that come with the books and the ones you can download from the site, I’ve got a pretty fair pile of them right now – fifteen or sixteen – and it seemed a good way to narrow down the selection when no one had a really strong desire to play a particular set.

Character-wise, we wound up with a nice mix of scientists, eco-terrorists, and support staff. There was a romance that was falling apart, social and professional rivalry, revenge plots, heavy drinking, home-made pornography, spats over vegetarian cooking, sabotage, and the barbecuing of penguins – not necessarily in that order. As is pretty much required in such a setting, the fuel tanks went up at one point, and someone tried to strand someone else out on the ice to die.

The actual structure of the story was very different from my previous experiences with the game. Throughout the first act, the outcomes tended to be overwhelmingly positive. That left a preponderance of black dice for the second act, plus some very nasty tilt elements – cold-blooded score settling and collateral damage. Overall, it was like pushing a big rock to the top of a hill through the first act, and letting it roll down onto a defenseless (and explosive) village in the second act.

In the end, I was dead – beaten to within an inch of my life, then choking on my own blood in the infirmary. Another player lost a leg and had his life fall apart, while a third went to prison after getting his face cooked in the aforementioned fuel-tank explosion. The character in charge of the base wound up still in charge but with no hope of every getting out, and my nemesis – the vegetarian cook and eco terrorist – flew happily away to her next job.

We all had a lot of fun with it.

I’m starting to figure out a few things about the structure of the game, and the way the different factors in the game work together to make the story work the way it does.

First, the game is very focused on the story. Now, that may sound like a no-brainer, but I’ve been thinking, and I’ve come to the conclusion that, when we generally talk about story-focused games, we’re really talking about character-focused games. We focus on the way our characters act and behave, and try to build a story around the motivations and desires of our characters. We identify with our characters, and so we focus on what our characters do, and that’s where the story comes from.

Fiasco does things backwards in that respect. You build the situation, which dictates the characters. The situation – the story – is what drives the play, and the characters exist only to serve the story. The nature of the playsets is such that you tend to not identify as strongly with the characters – they tend towards the unsympathetic but fun to play, especially as you drive them towards destruction.

That’s the second thing: at first glance, the game looks like it has some competitive aspects. You can throw strange relationships, locations, needs, and objects on the other players, looking to mess them up. You can toss mixed die colours at the other players, trying to make sure they end badly. That’s the way things seem to go the first game or two.

However, as I’ve played, I’ve found that the competition turns out to be different than you expect. I find myself competing, less to end well, than to end badly in a horribly spectacular way. It’s a competition to get the rest of the players to go “Wow. That’s messed up. Bravo.”

Third thing I’ve noticed is that the most important skill to master in this game is not improvising the scene, or deciding on your character based on the set-up, but knowing when to end a scene. Part of that is not identifying too strongly with your character, so that you can accept that you need to “lose” a given scene. Part of it is learning to recognize the tipping point, where things will turn either to the good or bad outcome.

That’ll definitely come with practice; I know I’m better at it now than I was the first time I played, and I know I’ve still got some distance to go. But mastering this skill makes the game really move along, and will tighten play so as to pull the focus more and more onto the strange, nasty twists that arise.

Fourth thing. The playsets are brilliantly constructed to build in conflict and confusion, driving the game towards meltdown with giddy speed. The tilt that happens after act one certainly accelerates things, but everything will go to hell even without that little extra push. Part of it is the list of options in the playset, and part of it is the expectation of the players, as set by the game itself.

The final thing I want to mention is the way Fiasco straddles the line between board game and roleplaying game. It has all the roleplaying elements you might wish for (except for character advancement and campaign play), but fits nicely into the kind of slot that you usually reserve for board games – it requires no prep, has great replay capability, and fits into a two- to three-hour slot nicely.

I’ve got most of my gaming group initiated into Fiasco, now, and everyone likes the game. It fills a niche that we wanted filled, and it’s just a great deal of fun. Bully Pulpit Games is releasing new playsets every month, which is great support for the games.

Go get the game. Give it a try. You’ll like it.

He’s Doing It Again!

By | | Dresden Files RPG, Feints & Gambits, What's he playing?
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If you’ve been following my Tweets, you know that last week I sent out invites to my game group for a new Dresden Files RPG campaign. I sent invitations to 11 folks, telling them all that the limit for the game was 6 people. I had all the slots filled within 36 hours.

Now, one of the reasons I sent the invite out to so many people is that I wanted to fill the slots fast; I’m terribly excited about starting a new DFRPG campaign. And I wanted to make sure that all the players who helped with the playtest – plus a couple of others – got invited.

It’s a weird experience for me, inviting players into a campaign at this stage. Usually, I have a pretty solid idea of the world and the big themes before I send an invitation to people, and I usually have an information packet ranging from 2 to 10 pages outlining things. I still sent an information package, but it was more about what I expected in the way of pregame, setting-building participation. It said this:

Okay, folks, you knew this was coming. This is your official invitation to join my Dresden Files RPG campaign. Now, before you get all excited, I’m setting some ground rules and expectations, so read this whole document first before you jump in with a commitment.

The Basics

  • I want to run this game quorum-style, so that we play as long as a minimum number of players can make it.
  • I don’t want players to have to double-up on characters, so if you can’t make it to a session, your character will not participate.
  • To help facilitate this, I’m going to be doing my best to keep things to bite-sized chunks, so that we don’t end a session in a circumstance where your character needs to be there for the next game, nor one where it is unlikely that a character could join the next session.
  • That said, I don’t want to have things quite as episodic as the Hunter game. I would like more of an opportunity to build in longer storylines that span multiple sessions.

Expectations

These are the things I want to do to establish the game. I would like every player to participate. This will pretty much happen in the order listed.

  • Establish Power Level. There are four different power levels, and I want the group as a whole to choose which one we’re going to use. They are:
    • Feet in the Water: 6 refresh, 20 skill points, skill cap at Great. Enhanced mortal level. You can do stuff even the best of humanity cannot, but only barely.
    • Up to Your Waist: 7 refresh, 25 skill points, skill cap at Great. Low-level supernatural level. You may be a magical being, but you’re not big fish. This is where you can start playing a Sorcerer.
    • Chest Deep: 8 refresh, 30 skill points, skill cap at Superb. Minor-league powers, but at least you’re in the league. This is where you can start playing a Wizard.
    • Submerged: 10 refresh, 35 skill points, skill cap at Superb. Welcome to the show. This is the level we playtested, and is about the level of Harry Dresden at the beginning of Storm Front.
  • Pick a Setting. Where do we want to set the game? Winnipeg? Chicago? Baltimore? Another city? A rural setting? Road game? The Nevernever? I want the group to decide this. Everything is on the table: modern, historical, futuristic, sci-fi, whatever.
  • Build the Setting. I want to go through the city-building method in the book to develop the setting to a playable level. Even if we choose to play in Magical Winnipeg, I still want to go through the new method, even if we use a lot of the same material. For that, I need all the players to do a little prep work.
    • First, read the City Creation chapter in Your Story.
    • Second, do a little thinking about the setting we’ve picked. Make some notes, if you like.
    • Third, come to the city creation session, and we’ll put together the setting following the guidelines in the rules.
  • Build Characters. Character creation will take place in a group session, complete with all phases and the novels being done.
    • Make sure you have a solid character concept in mind, and have looked at the kinds of stunts and powers you will need to make it work. Of course, I’ll be more than happy to answer any questions before and during the session.
    • I am also going to be building two characters as NPCs, so that they have some tie to the PCs.
    • I would like to encourage anyone who is interested to build a second character during this session as an NPC. These characters will belong to me, and become canon in the game world.
  • Finish Up. Once the character creation session is done, we’ll likely need one more group session to finish off the setting creation and allow for any last-minute character adjustments.

Why all this blather?

I want to make sure that you realize, before committing to the game, that I want a fair bit of up-front work from the players to help establish the game. I’m looking at a minimum of an e-mail discussion to set the power level and the basic setting, one group session to build the setting, one group session for character creation, and one follow-up group session to finalize everything.

This is more group involvement than I usually ask for at the start of a campaign, but the way DFRPG is set up, this kind of thing will pay off in a much richer, more tailored campaign, with plenty of things tying the PCs to the world and the NPCs. It will also, I hope, create a greater emotional investment for the players, which will make the game more involving for all of you.

This prep work is taking the place of The Bribeâ„¢ for this campaign.

What’s next?

Read what I’ve written here and, if you want in and are willing to make the commitment I’m asking for, let me know. First six positive responses get in, but I’ll run with as few as three. Deadline for responses is October 1 – if I haven’t heard from you by then, I will consider that a no.

The last page of the invitation was a list of links to articles on this blog and on the DFRPG site about the game that I thought would be useful information.

We’re starting with a discussion about the power level and setting for the game, and brainstorming some character ideas. To facilitate this, I’ve set up a forum. Now, if you’re curious to watch the sausage of the game getting made, you’re welcome to visit the forum as a guest and read the posts; however, I’m only going to be activating accounts for the players and maybe one or two special outsiders, just to keep the conversations uncluttered. Don’t be offended if you try to register for the board and I turn you down.

Still interested in seeing what we’re doing? Okay. Here’s the link.

I’m really looking forward to the game. I can’t wait to see where it’s set and what it’s about.

From the Armitage Files: The Death of Aaron Moon

By | | GUMSHOE, The Armitage Files, What's he playing?
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Wrapped up the latest Armitage Files session about half an hour ago. We usually go later than this, but I was tired and my brain was a little worn out by running the Red Box D&D Game Day at Imagine Games this afternoon. That was a fun session, with some great moments, but it ate up a lot of my energy, not to mention my prep time. So, when the game took a turn that I was completely unprepared for, I asked the players if it was all right if we stopped early to give me some time to come up with cool stuff to happen down this unexpected avenue.

Well, not really to come up with the cool stuff: I’ve got some good ideas right off the top of my head, but I want to do a little research into certain actual places and events, as well as to read a couple of Pagan Publishing scenarios that I half-remember and want to crib stuff from.

But before I get into any specifics, I need to say:

**Potential Spoilers**

The Armitage Files is an improvised campaign structure. It uses a number of stock pieces, such as NPCs, organizations, and locations, that are strung together by individual GMs to fit player action. The adventures I create with it may or may not match any other GM’s version of the campaign. That means that reading these posts may or may not offer spoilers for other game groups.

**You Have Been Warned**

A couple of sessions back, I gave the group the third document. I’ve come to understand that the rate at which the documents are given to the group does more than set the pace by providing (or not providing) more avenues of investigation; it also drives the tension of the story. I made it clear that the documents were going to come at a rate of my choosing, and that things might get very bad for everyone if they didn’t keep up the pace. They would not have time to investigate everything in every document, so they needed to choose carefully what they thought was most important, and figure out where they could have the biggest impact.

Basically, I made it clear that the documents were a countdown.

Anyway, the thread they decided to follow was the death in the factory. The name of the dead person was scribbled out, but with his knowledge of paper and inks, book restorer Aaron Moon was able to clean off the scribbles to read the name of the slain investigator. It was his own.

The following spoiler is safe for my players to read, but players in other campaigns may wish to give it a miss, because it gives away a bit of a secret.

Spoiler

The Armitage Files book recommends that the name of the dead person be that of the character most likely to be talking with factory workers. Now, my characters are all equally unlikely to be welcomed on a factory floor, so that idea didn’t work well for me. Instead, I decided that the name would be the name of the first character who asked about the name. That idea sort of got derailed, because the first character to express an interest was Roxy Crane, and the rest of that section of the document made it clear that the dead person was male. So, I changed it to the second person to look at things, which turned out to Aaron.

That freaked him out a bit*, and he poured on a little more solvent to eat away that section of the document and hide the fact that it said he was dead* on a factory floor somewhere. Dr. Solis decided to give it a try, and he also uncovered Aaron’s name, using his chemistry expertise.

Well, that was enough to really light a fire under everyone, and they started scrambling to find out where this factory was. The one link they had was the name Will Moran, which helped them track down Hutchinson Manufactory, a company in Kingsport that produced machine parts for diesel engines, primarily for ships.

My players are really starting to dread Kingsport.

The name Hutchinson also sounded familiar to them, and they managed to figure out that the company was owned by the missing chairman of the Helping Hands, who was currently sought by the police for questioning about his involvement with the deaths of numerous transients. I did this because I wanted to start weaving some more common threads into the narrative of the game, making things more cohesive and seeing what patterns emerged in the minds of my players.

This is, I think, an important thing to do with this campaign, because it doesn’t have any inherent cohesive storyline. The Keeper and the players have to distill one out of the play sessions. I like this idea, but it’s a bit like paper-making, in my opinion: you need to make sure there are enough threads in the pulp for the final product to hold together. So, I wanted to weave in some older loose ends and overlooked references to see what overarching theme and plot might coalesce.

Our heroes drove out to Kingsport to stake out the factory, and saw labour organizer Wally Endore being frogmarched* off the property. They persuaded them to let them drive him home, and plied him with alcohol while trying to find out if anything odd was going on at the factory. His answer was basically, “You mean, besides being picked up in a saloon car and given bourbon to answer questions about a factory I’ve only been to three times?”

But they did find out that the factory operated 24 hours a day, except that it closed down on Sundays. They dropped Wally off at his boarding house, and decided to send Dr. Solis in undercover as a health inspector worried about disease-carrying rats. His investigation allowed them to update the blueprints Roxy had tracked down for the buildings with what entrances and exits were currently functional, and to generally scout the ground. They returned just before dawn on Sunday to investigate the room where Aaron died/will die.

Nothing in the paperwork or records revealed anything of interest, but Roxy found a thin sheet of veneer tacked to the underside of a workbench. When she pried it open, it revealed a strange symbol that seemed to try and worm its way into her head. In best Cthulhu tradition, she immediately called Aaron over to have a look at it, too. Aaron went a little farther: he copied the symbol down on a bit of notepaper, making it wiggle even more in his head.

Things dragged a little at this point, as the gang kept looking around for more information. I finally remembered to download the Scene sign that WatsonSE told me about after my last post (Thanks, WatsonSE!), printed it out, and waved it at the players.

Back home, Aaron found that the glyph was similar to ones found in certain defaced idols in the sunken ruins of Nan Madol, origin of Ponape Scripture of dark reputation. He decided to use his Cthulhu Mythos to gain more information, along with a 1-point spend, so I told him that the symbol was a representation of Cthulhu’s eye, and was used to draw the attention of the sleeping Old One.

This is leading to a theme that I wanted to emerge in the game, and I’m glad to see it working. See, I’ve been listening to some interesting audiobooks about physics, and one of the things that I’m trying to pull in is the observer effect, twisted to make it more Mythos-cool. I want to avoid having the characters actually encounter any of the big names in person, but I want the idea of attracting the attention of one of the old gods or titans is dangerous in and of itself. I started it with the Chaugner Faugn thing I did a while back, where it was the attention of the thing that was sucking the temporal potentiality from those it paid attention to, and I’m continuing it with this little sigil thing.

Figuring out the nature of the symbol led Aaron right down to the furnace with his little sketch, and he watched until it was ashes. Roxy had defaced the one carved in the factory, as well.

At this point, the group decided that they really needed to track down Hutchinson and see if he was running a factory full of Cthulhu cultists. I had already decided where Hutchinson was, roughly, but I hadn’t done the research I wanted to do to have a solid foundation for improvising this section of the investigation. It’s also offering me an opportunity to either increase or decrease the complexity of what’s going on: I can either make the Hutchinson thread connect to the death of Aaron Moon, simplifying things, or I can make it a different, parallel avenue of investigation, complicating the investigation as the characters have to decide which line to pursue and which clues belong to which mystery*.

But I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I like to be prepared for the improvisation I’m going to have to do. So, because it was getting late, and I was tired and my brain was less than agile, I begged my players’ indulgence, which they graciously granted.

I wrapped up the evening by dropping the other shoe about the glyph: both Aaron and Roxy had disturbing dreams, featuring the ocean, drowned people, and something huge and terrible rising from the depths.

Tomorrow, when I’m a little more on the ball, I’m going to schedule a few more games, so that we can get back to a regular schedule. I’ve missed running this game, and am glad to be back to it.

 
 
 

*Though not as much as it could have – my players were rolling great guns on their Stability tests tonight. Almost made me wonder why I was bothering. Back

*Or would die, if you adhere to their current opinion of what the documents are. Back

*Frogmarched is in the WordPress spellcheck dictionary. WordPress is not. Nor is spellcheck, but that’s most likely because of the neologism of the compound. It likes spell-check just fine*. Back

*As a word geek, these things interest and amuse me. Back

*Arturo Perez-Reverte played with this trope to great and entertaining effect in The Club Dumas. Back