Category Archives: What’s he playing?

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New Centurions, Issue #11: Fear in Provence

By | | New Centurions, What's he playing?
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Last Saturday was the latest game in Clint’s BASH campaign. I was hoping to have something ready to take over and GM, giving him a chance to play, but work has been kind of insane the past few weeks, so it didn’t happen ((This time. I’m working on it, Clint!)).

Anyway, the session started with us interrogating Nightshade, a villain we had first met waaaaay back at the beginning of the campaign ((When it was run using the Icons system and we only had three players.)), when he took Queen Celeste hostage and freed the holographic Dr. Methuselah from his… stasis, or whatever it is ((We still don’t know, and I’m waiting for the other shoe to hit us squarely in the back of the head.)). He had turned up again during the Illithid Invasion, when an ally of ours captured him robbing a jewelry store during the panic.

Now that things had settled down somewhat, we decided to interrogate him. He turned out to be a cape-for-hire, very much like Lady Crimson, except not completely psychotic. After some negotiation, he revealed that he had teleported out of the Century Club with Dr. Methuselah to a location he didn’t know the location of. Somehow, he had been given knowledge of how to teleport to it, without actually knowing where it was. Also, his employers had given him a magnetic stripe card that allowed him to interact with Dr. Methuselah ((And presumably the other frozen, insubstantial folks in our lobby.)) as if he were solid, but he had left it with Dr. Methuselah when he delivered him.

We agreed to release him, in return for teleporting us to the same place he had brought Dr. Methuselah, and then let him go ((S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. wasn’t very pleased with that, as he was a criminal in our custody. However, by pitching it as giving Nightshade a head start before we came after him, S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. was somewhat mollified.)). There was some discussion of just S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. going along on the first teleport, to get a GPS fix on the location, but I pointed out that this might mean S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. was teleporting alone into a very dangerous situation, and it would be better if we went in force.

This turned out to be a good idea: whoever had built the place where we arrived had lined the destination room with high-powered lights, dispelling the shadow, giving us serious sunburn, and rendering Nightshade – who relied on shadows for his power – useless, as well as just about killing him through his vulnerability to bright light. S.P.E.C.-T.E.R.’s resistance to heat and radiation helped him stay active, and we got Nightshade wrapped in Queen Celeste’s coat and hunkered down behind Widomaker’s force field, while everyone went to work smashing the lights.

I gotta say, it was an ingenious, challenging, and flavourful supervillain trap, and I tip my hat to Clint for coming up with it ((Especially as I discovered later he wasn’t really expecting us to go this way, and came up with the trap on the fly. Kudos.)).

Once we had defeated the trap, we climbed out through the ceiling to explore the rest of the complex. My locators told me we were in southern France, in the Provence hills, and the tech of the installation looked to be WWII-era. We found a whole bunch ((Forty or so.)) of robots from that era that activated and attempted to attack us. I spent my Hero Die at this point to have S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. use his radio connection as a power stunt to shut them down, and then we got out of there.

To Paris.

There, Nightshade left us. Widowmaker doesn’t have the range to teleport us all the way home, so we called Aegis, and got them to arrange a safehouse for us. That gave us a chance to examine the footage of the robots, and we determined that they seemed to be modeled in a chess motif. There was no record of such robots being used in WWII, and the co-ordinates we had for the complex turned up no record of military or scientific installations there. Satellite imagery showed only an old barn on the site.

So, after reporting in to Shannon and getting a little rest, we headed back to the site, via Widowmaker’s teleport ability. We popped right down to where we had left, and found a number of Pawn robots, along with a Knight robot, ready and waiting for us. This time, S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. couldn’t shut them down, so we had to do it the hard way.

By the time we finished that fight, it was around 1:00 in the morning, so we called it there.

One other thing worthy of mention: After our discussion last time about the Hero Point Economy, Clint went out of his way to keep them flowing out to us, and I think that really helped the game move along, and get people doing riskier things. Something for me to keep in mind for tonight’s Feints  & Gambits game.

From the Armitage Files: Desperation

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.

**You Have Been Warned**

Last Saturday was the latest installment of my Armitage Files game. We picked up pretty much right where we had left off the previous session, with the investigators returning from Rot Tal to Arkham. The group had told me – via e-mail between sessions – that they intended to continue to investigate Edwin Carsdale and the Society of Syncretic Inquirey, but they hadn’t provided any real specifics about how they intended to do that, so I started things off by asking them what they had planned.

Solis wanted to look into the possible connections between Carsdale and the Donlands-Fuschack gang of bank robbers out in Montana ((This is one of the threads mentioned in the source document.)), and the fortune teller they apparently consult. So, he sent off a telegram to a contact in Billings, and got the names of three fortune tellers that had licenses and registered places of business in Montana ((I’m not sure if they still intend to follow up on this after this session.)).

Moon took some time to get his insurance money and start setting up his new shop. He was visited by Carsdale, whom the group believed was responsible for the firebombing of Moon’s old shop. Moon decided to play it cagey, and blamed the firebombing on anti-Semitic sentiments in the community. Carsdale seemed shocked to hear this ((Though according to Moon’s Assess Honesty, he was actually more amused.)), and, as a show of support, asked Moon to find him three rare books ((One of them a mythos tome, which he added to the list to see how Moon would react.)). It became pretty obvious to both that they were dancing around each other ((Moon had no interpersonal skills to counter Carsdale’s Assess Honesty. This prompted the quote of the game: “Fuck! I need some fucking people skills!”)), but neither was going to give the other the satisfaction of breaking character first.

Roxy, meanwhile, left town, assumed a new identity, and went to Kingsport to follow around Frost, one of the other members of SOSI who seemed to be in the inner circle with Carsdale. After about a week of this, she got bored, and decided to make something happen. She sent Frost a vague and threatening note, alleging that she knew something Carsdale was keeping secret. Well, Frost showed it to Carsdale, and mentioned that he had seen Roxy Crane in Kingsport ((Roxy is great at being sneaky, but a sucky roll is a sucky roll.)). Carsdale thanked him, and decided to take action.

A few evenings later, Roxy was attacked in her home by… something ((Okay, it was a dimensional shambler.)). She couldn’t see all of it, only the horrid mix of ape-like arms and insect appendages that seemed to reach out of thin air, from all around her, to try and grab her. She tried to run, she tried to shoot it, and almost managed to get away, but I got lucky right at the end. It grabbed her, and yanked her out of reality.

At this point, I left Roxy’s player wondering if she was dead, and moved on to the other players, who had been listening to this little encounter open-mouthed and wide-eyed. It was somewhat similar to when I had had the nightgaunts snatch Solis, but a little harsher, and I wanted everyone to be uncertain about her fate ((It worked well. Sandy even started working out a new character to continue the game.)) for a while. Especially because I was unsure about it, too.

So, I mentioned to the others that their characters hadn’t heard from Roxy in a couple of days. They jumped at this opportunity to go to her rescue, tracking her to Kingsport and the rooming house where she had been staying. There, they found some strange gouges on the floor and one of the door frames, and an investigation of her belongings showed her pistol had been fired twice. Unsure how to proceed, they recruited Roxy’s driver ((Roxy is a rich girl who got rich through crime – her own, and her family’s. Her driver has some useful skills.)) to help them kidnap ((I teased the gang about how well their kidnapping of Kittrell had gone for them, but they pointed out, quite rightly, that I had started it this time by kidnapping Roxy. Fair enough.)) Frost to interrogate him.

In an abandoned gas station on an old country road, Moon and Solis used a combination of Intimidation and Reassurance to good-cop-bad-cop Frost, who admitted that he had tipped off Carsdale, and that Carsdale was leading a few members of the group in certain experiments having to do with gaining access to higher spatial and temporal dimensions. He even claimed to have a page from one of Carsdale’s journals ((This was a document I threw together by snatching selected passages from Dreams in the Witch House, working in a Mandelbrot image (rotated to look kind of like a snowman), and a mention of strange crystals and joint pain. I produced it as a hand-out for the group.)) that described some of the effects of the experiments. He turned it over to the investigators in return for his life and the life of his wife.

Now convinced that Carsdale had Roxy – or at least knew what had happened to her – they decided to go snatch Carsdale and get him to tell them what he knew. At this point, I switched back to Roxy, to tell her how she was dragged through a different dimension (description drawn from Dreams in the Witch House) by a creature that was hard to describe because she was looking at it from all angles at once, but it seemed to have some hominid features, and some insectoid features, and four limbs ((Which was at odds with the number of limbs that had reached through to grab her. She figured that it must have reached through from different higher directions with the same limb.)), and that it was propelling her somehow through the void. It dumped her out on a cold stone floor in front of Carsdale, who was gesturing with a strange knife. Before she could do much more than lift her head up, Carsdale left the room and locked it from the outside.

I jumped back to Roxy a few times in the rest of the evening, usually to make her make a Stability or Health check, as her days of captivity in a cold, damp basement took their toll on her. I had a bit of a countdown going – in X number of days ((I’m not going to tell the players how many, but it was close!)), Carsdale was going to come back and sacrifice her. The group didn’t know that, however; they just knew that she was slowly dying and going mad. Especially after she found the strange crystals on the floor of the room where she was being kept.

Meantime, her compatriots tracked down Carsdale at his Boston home and went to pay him a visit. They surprised him, and tried to tackle him, tie him up, and take him somewhere quiet to beat information out of him. Unfortunately, Carsdale did not co-operate, and somehow caused Solis’s hand to knot up and atrophy ((Okay, it was the Shrivelling spell.)) before they managed to knock him unconscious. They tied him up and gagged him, and Solis searched his rooms, finding no trace of Roxy.

What he did find was a key marked Farm, and a deed to a farm outside of the city. Going with the classics, they rolled Carsdale up in a carpet ((Actually, if I recall, it was a blanket, but whatever.)) and hauled him down to the car. Then off they went into the wilds of rural Massachusetts.

At the farm, they found Roxy in a cellar room, nearly dead of thirst – she’d been there for three days. They also found a small laboratory, a selection of strange tools, a scrapbook collecting accounts of encounters with higher dimensions, and this happy little statue, along with the tiny crystals they had encountered before at Monument creek. This was too much for Moon, and he took Carsdale down into the cellar and shot him in the head. Then, after the big Stability check for committing cold-blooded murder and violating one of his Pillars of Sanity, he was pretty much catatonic.

Roxy was also pretty much out of the picture, being in poor shape both physically and mentally after her ordeal, so Solis bundled them both into the car, set fire to the farmhouse, and went to investigate the barn. He found a few small pallet beds set up in one stall, near a small firepit with a spit across it. And a swarm of flies in a stall farther back that he didn’t want to investigate. So, he just tossed a stick of dynamite into the firepit, and they got the hell out of there as the explosion brought down the old, rickety barn.

That was where we left things. They have essentially killed the SOSI, but they still have the weird link to the bank robbers in Montana if they want to follow up on that. Otherwise, they’ve got several other leads in their documents to pursue. We’ll have to see what they go after next.

One other thing to mention: there has been some talk amongst the group about how they’re going to have to start collecting some of the evil tomes they come across, rather than just burning them. To that end, I created a new tome for them to find this game, and they did. I think they plan on keeping it. Here’s the write-up I gave them:

A Discussion of Higher Dimensions

This book is a collection of thirty-four diary sections and other handwritten documents bound into a quarto book. Some of the pages are folded to fit within the bindings, and some are attached to larger pages with binding tape along one edge, allowing smaller pages to be anchored into the book. Each of the entries is the first-hand account of an experience wherein the writer perceived some aspect of higher dimensions, non-linear time, or the distortion of space.

Each entry is marked with a code number – no key is given as to what the number means – and is annotated with extensive marginalia, discussing possible scientific explanations for the events described in the main text. These notes are in a variety of handwritings, and each section ends with several  pages wherein the marginalia is developed and expounded upon, providing an extensive historical and scientific analysis of the event. There are ten pages between each entry, and from two to eight of these are filled with this summary and analysis.

Skimming the book provides 2 dedicated pool points for Anthropology, History, Physics, or Occult when dealing with the idea of higher dimensions or nonlinear time.

Poring over the tome provides +1 to your Cthulhu Mythos, or +2 if you have already experienced any of the phenomena the papers talk about. It also provides 3 points of Magic potential.

Spells

The analysis at the end of each section summarizes and distills the basic elements of the primary source in detailed scientific and occult terms. Of the thirty-four entries, nine provide enough detail that, in conjunction with other entries, the following spells can be derived:

  • Recipe for a Tincture to Effect a Temporal Dissociation (Compound Liao)
  • Meditative Principles to Expand Dimensional Awareness (Dho-Hna Formula)
  • Recipe for a Compound to Effect Dimensional Revelation (Powder of Ibn-Ghazi)
  • Speculations on the Causal Collapse of Living Subjects (Shrivelling)
  • Measures to Prevent Psychogogic Invasion (Sign of Koth)
  • Account of the Address of Higher-Order Predator Forms (Summon/Bind Dimensional Shambler)
  • Mental Collapse of Higher Dimensions into N-Space (Angles of Tagh Clatur)
  • Some Thoughts Toward Three-Dimensional Travel via Higher Dimensions (Create Hyperspace Gate)
  • Fragments of Rite Dedicated to Primitive Crossroads Deities (Call/Dismiss Yog-Sothoth)

It’s a pretty powerful, meaty volume in a very specific field of inquiry. But that field happens to be one that’s come up repeatedly in the game, and has become one of the central themes of the game. I’ve put in a bunch of spells, though the one most likely to use them (Moon) has already suffered some real blows to his Sanity, so it’ll be tricky. This may be a real leg up to the group, or it may be just enough rope to hang them. We’ll have to see how it goes.

I’m betting it goes badly.

 

 

Feints & Gambits: The Chain Hound of Pussy’s Leap

By | | Dresden Files RPG, Feints & Gambits, What's he playing?
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Last Friday was the latest session of my Feints & Gambits campaign. I had four players, and had planned to make this session much more focused, with a clear objective and a problem that could be solved in one evening, as a contrast to the longer, more sandboxy style of the last couple of scenarios. At the same time, I didn’t want to make things too straightforward; that always smacks of railroading.

This can be a fine balance to strike in a game like The Dresden Files RPG. To be faithful to the source material, you need an element of mystery and investigation, but this creates the hazard that the group will flail around looking for the plot coupon that lets them progress. If the coupon is too obvious, then they feel led around by the nose, which can make them obstreperous. Telling the group, “You need more information. How do you get it?” can result in them trying the same things, but doing them harder ((Whatever that means. “You don’t find anything under the bed.” “I look harder.” “Sigh.”)). And, when they run out of easy ideas, they can fall back on the old standby of divinatory magic ((Want a good tip to keep divination magic from overwhelming investigation? Make the the spellcaster be very specific about what the ritual is looking for, and how it’s going about it. It forces the group to view divination as just one more investigatory tool, rather than the magic solve-it button. “I use divination to find out who killed the ogre.” “Cool. How?” “Ummm… How about if I take blood from one of the wounds and use it’s connection to the murder weapon to lead me to that?” “Awesome! How complex are you making this?” Like that. Now, the spell can get them some valuable information, but doesn’t short-circuit the mystery. And other investigatory skills are still valuable.)). This can make mysteries and investigations both frustrating and boring for the players.

Now, when I run a game with a wide-open mystery, I try and make every path a path forward, but the value of forward changes with the path. So, with the whole Easter plot, any avenue of investigation would lead them in to the main plot, but from different angles. Thus, they followed the thirteen black iron daggers, and found the necromancer cult, instead of following the threats from the fey and finding the ghostly battle, but in either case they wound up dealing with the ghosts of the Easter Uprising, and the plot to take control of them. That said, it gets hard to tell in a game like that if you’re actually making progress towards anything really important, because you don’t know what the end-goal is.

So, this session, I wanted something that had a very definite goal, and a short trip from finding out about it to resolving it. I came up with several options, most of them reflecting some part of the changed nature of Dublin now that all the ghosts had been loosed. One in particular really got me thinking and planning, but I quickly realized that it would work best as a longer arc, so I’m saving that for later. In the end, I went with a quick note that one of the players had sent to me immediately after the setting creation session back last October. Here’s what she sent me:

Chained Hound

Location: Dublin – Pussy’s Leap, Templeogue area: The large black canine which walked his area created the sound of jangling chains with each step it took.

Now, I have to say, one of the things that attracted me to this hook was that there was a black dog at a place called Pussy’s Leap, but that’s just me. A bigger factor was that I wanted to throw in a good, old-fashioned monster hunt, where the folk didn’t need to be terribly worried about bystanders and could just cut loose. But I also wanted to tie this in to the new Aspect on Dublin, All the Ghosts are Free. To that end, I tweaked things a bit from the standard black dog stories, building a new backstory ((Which I’m not going to mention here, because the group failed to uncover it, and some parts of it may have consequences.)) and a hook into the story for the characters.

There was another thing I wanted to try out this session. I haven’t been happy with the lack of flow in the Fate Point economy – mainly, I haven’t been happy with how rarely I compel the characters, and thus hand out Fate Points. This has led to the characters valuing Fate Points very highly, and hoarding them when they can. They are reluctant to spend them. As Fate Points are a currency of cool in the game, this means that the characters haven’t been as cool as they could be, all tying back to my infrequent compels ((It also means that I’m not giving the players the kinds of character problems they took Aspects to get, which means, for example, Rogan doesn’t have any problems keeping her beast nature in check, and Firinne is remarkably restrained for a trickster changeling.)). I’ve told the players to let me know when they are compelling themselves, but my group seems to think it’s a bit gauche to have to ask for Fate Points just because they’re roleplaying, so that doesn’t happen a lot.

Then Ryan Macklin posted about player-on-player compels on his blog, and I thought, “Wow. That’s a great idea. Clean, simple, and engaging. I wonder if it’ll actually work with my group.” And the best way to find out if it would work was to try it. I put a big glass goblet full of the poker chips I use for Fate Points in the middle of the coffee table in front of the players, and outlined some simple rules:

  1. Any player can take a Fate Point from the goblet to compel an Aspect on any other player at any time.
  2. Players facing a compel from another player may decline it if they choose without buying it off ((I added this mainly to make the player-on-player compels less threatening, and so encourage them to take place.)).
  3. Any player may call foul ((We call this the “Dick Move!” rule.)) on any compel, which then must be retracted.
  4. GM compels must still be bought off with a Fate Point.

To get the game rolling, I ran a short scene for each of the characters. This was to deal with a couple of things that had come up after the last session, during advancement, and to start slow in order to give people a chance to try the new compel structure. So, we had:

  • The Warden of Ireland visiting Mark O’Malley, who now has almost everything he needs to be a full-on Wizard ((Lacking only Wizard’s Constitution.)), to offer him apprenticeship with one of the White Council. Mark, who really wanted to be a full Wizard, turned it down when it was explained that he would be leaving Dublin and be under the supervision and tutelage of his master for six or seven years.
  • Nate being accosted by a Snowbird ((That’s the gang of minor Winter fey led by Baglock.)) in the market on Moore Street, and blasting him when he wouldn’t back down. Then running away, because Constable Fergus was coming.
  • Firinne being evicted from her apartment, and conning the garda enforcing the eviction into taking her to a shelter and getting her permission to stay there for a couple of weeks.
  • Rogan’s mother coming to visit, to express how much the family misses her, and couldn’t she have been more careful with that necromancer, and her second cousin, who only had a little of the blood, had noticed a lot of ghosts gathering in St. Stephen’s Green, and could Rogan perhaps do her job and look into, please?

There were several compels handed back and forth during these scenes, and it made me pretty happy about the whole thing. And then, having the plot in hand, they gathered together to go look into the ghosts gathering in St. Stephen’s Green.

The ghosts were, of course, gathering around the Fountain of the Fates, and Mark whipped up a ritual to allow the group to see them. It was a disparate group, with clothes from the past 150 years or so, though many of them were wearing high boots and carrying rods and creels. Rogan drew upon her Bloodline of Power Aspect to force them to recognize her and speak with her. She got the story that they were fleeing to the Fates for sanctuary after being chased away from Pussy’s Leap by a big black spectral dog covered in clanking chains.

The gang then trucked off to Pussy’s Landing in Templeogue to track down and stop this ghost dog. Nate asked what he knew about ghosts, and I gave him the basic run-down about how they were not the actual spirits of people, but more like echoes or stains left behind after death, and that one needed to make them acknowledge you to be able to affect them ((Strangely, he did not ask how to make ghosts acknowledge you at this time…)), or else confront them in the Nevernever. They came up with the idea to use Firinne as bait, glamoured to look like a fisherman, while Rogan, Nate, and Mark followed her unseen along the paths near Pussy’s Leap.

And so we wound up with Firinne getting jumped by chain hound, Mark opening a portal into the Nevernever swamp adjacent to Pussy’s Leap to get everyone in and focusing on the hound ((This is the moment that Nate asked, “So, about getting ghosts to acknowledge us…” It’s all in the timing.)), and they started piling on.

I described the thing as looking like a giant of a man that had been twisted into a doglike shape by the chains wrapping around him, which trailed off into the darkness, and also reached out to tangle our heroes up. Viewing the thing with The Sight showed something strange: it was a ghost, but there were tattered remnants of a real, human soul, now long-destroyed, clinging to it. They tried to bring it’s human mind to the forefront, damping down its savage nature, and got it to scream out the name, “Caitlyn!” but couldn’t get anything more coherent from it.

The struggle was interesting to me, because I had made the thing up with a -15 Refresh cost, to pit against four characters who are effectively at Up To The Waist power level. I figured it would be a tough fight, though not all that threatening, but the group used the two secret weapons in the DFRPG: surprise and teamwork. They layered something in the order of five or six different maneuvers on the thing, and then Nate, once he was assured that the creature didn’t count as a human for the purposes of the Laws of Magic, dropped a mystic nuke on it, with about ten or twelves shifts of power.

I liked this, and stole a couple of his shifts for some pure-flavour fallout, blasting the Nevernever environment, and giving everyone some instant sunburn, while eradicating the hound.

Our heroes then ran like bunnies, because they heard other things moving through the Nevernever swamp towards them, and they didn’t sound happy.

That’s where we left it. Over all, I’m happy with the session, though I was interested to see that the player-on-player compels pretty much dried up once the group started in on the plot. Hopefully, that will change as people get more familiar with the mechanic, and see it as a way to stock up on Fate Points when they’re running low.

Looking at the actual events, it doesn’t look as if much happened this session, but it still ran later than usual. This was due in part to the introduction of the new compels, the amount of socializing we did, and the initial scattered nature of the beginning of the game as I did the individual scenes. Much as I enjoy these individual scenes, I think I need to cut back on them.

Still, I’ve got a few loose threads from this session, and some other ideas, forming a rich base for the next scenario.

 

 

Cthulhu Purist How-To

By | | GUMSHOE, The Armitage Files, What's he playing?, What's he reading?
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Graham Walmsley launched a preorder for his book Stealing Cthulhu over on Indiegogo, which is the UK version of Kickstarter. I got in on it, and just finished reading the .pdf version of the book.

I like it a lot.

It’s Graham’s ((Is it all right if I call you Graham? Thanks.)) guide to creating Lovecraftian scenarios for roleplaying games. Now, I bought it to use with Trail of Cthulhu, specifically my Armitage Files campaign, but it’s stat-free, and easily applicable to any gaming system where you want to run the types of adventures it describes. The advice is about how to build the right kind of scenario, and how to tell stories that reflect the ideas within the more purist H.P. Lovecraft stories.

This is important to understand. Stealing Cthulhu focuses on what Trail of Cthulhu calls the Purist mode of gaming. Things are bleak, horrific, deadly, and maddening, and you count it as a win if you run away successfully from the monster at the end of the story. You can’t actually win in Purist mode. You can only survive ((And often not even that.)). The stories that inspire this book are things like The Colour Out of Space, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Whisperer in Darkness,  The Shadow Out of Time, At the Mountains of Madness, and, of course, The Call of Cthulhu.

Graham is a perfect person to talk about constructing this style of scenario. He’s written a quartet of Purist scenarios for Trail of Cthulhu, published by Pelgrane Press. I haven’t read them all ((Because a friend of mine is going to run a couple of them, so I’m being a good player and keeping my nose out of them.)), but the ones I have read are solid, scary, and original. So, I’m going to trust his take on the subject matter.

But you do need to know what you’re getting into. This type of scenario is not going to suit all players; some people want more heroic escapism in their games. They want a chance to defeat the bad guy and triumph. If you’re looking for advice for that type of game, while there is some applicable advice in this book, you should probably look elsewhere. This is all about the joys of going mad while being shredded by something with too many mouths and dimensions.

Now, in addition to his advice, he also passed the book around to Gareth Hanrahan, Ken Hite, and Jason Morningstar, three other folks with mad Cthulhu cred, and had them annotate it for him. So, you get Graham’s take on things, coupled with a very knowledgeable peanut gallery tossing in their opinions. It makes for a good read.

Now, in talking about a book like this, it’s hard to keep from just paraphrasing bits of advice from it, so I’m going to talk about it at a pretty high level. If you want more details, go buy the book ((If the ideas I’ve outlined above sound at all interesting, you really should just go buy the book.)).

The main advice in the book is to steal from Lovecraft, but to then twist it to make it fresh again. Now, that doesn’t sound like something you need a whole book to say, but it’s the discussion behind that simple statement that make up the meat of the book. Graham talks about what it is useful to steal – creatures, scenarios, locations, patterns, and descriptions – and how to twist them to make them seem new without sacrificing the Lovecraftian bleakness and horror of the original. To do that, he ((And his annotators, as well.)) talks a great deal about what each of the things discussed mean: what they symbolize, what makes them horrific, and how to strip them for parts. It also talks about how to work in things that gamers like but that don’t often show up in Lovecraft’s Purist stories – things like gunfights, actual mysteries and investigation, magic use, and cultists.

This section leads off the book, right after the introduction, and makes up a little less than half the page count. It is filled with examples and references, and is a thoughtful discussion of how all the moving parts of a story fit together to produce the effect you’re looking for.  Graham points out not only what works, but some common pitfalls to avoid. The tone is somewhat scholarly, which is kind of fitting for a Cthulhu resource, and is offset by the more chatty tone of the annotations ((And kudos to Graham for keeping in the stroppy, argumentative ones. I enjoyed the contrasting ideas presented, and think it ultimately reinforced your theses.)).

The next section of the book cherry-picks some of the best elements of the mythos and shows how to ring them through the changes described in the first part of the book. It’s not exhaustive ((I was sad to see Ghoul left off the list, though the reason for that is explained in the Afterword, and I accept it.)) – there are only fifteen entries – but it illustrates the ideas in the book wonderfully. More than that, you wind up with the skeletons for two or three different scenarios for each entry, ready for you to flesh out and add the stats from your favourite system.

Graham finishes off the book with three appendices: Miscellany, where he lists the notes that don’t fit anywhere else in the book; Bibliography, which again is not exhaustive but very focused; and Cthulhu Dark, his rules-light system for running Lovecraftian roleplaying games.

Final assessment? The book is very focused on producing one type of play experience. That’s not to say that it’s not useful if you don’t want to create the kind of adventure where your investigators die horribly in the ancient catacomb of a bizarre church, but that you will find less useful stuff if you’re trying to do something more heroic. I don’t think this is a bad thing, any more than I think a hammer is a bad tool because it doesn’t tighten screws well. The book sets out to do a very specific thing, and succeeds in doing it very well. But with so many games trying to encompass a multitude of play styles, it’s important to know that Stealing Cthulhu doesn’t follow that path. Buying it with the wrong expectations will lead to disappointment.

I do have one little niggle. I’m hoping the .pdf version I’ve got is going to get another editing pass before it heads to print. There are a couple of typos, and some missing or inaccurate footnote references in it that I’d like to see cleaned up. In general, though, the text is pretty clean.

***Edit***

I have just had a brief exchange with Graham Walmsley. He informs me that there are hidden things in the book, and the typos I have noticed may be part of that. So, it looks like my little niggle, cited above, may just be me not getting the hidden stuff. I shall have to reread with an eye to that.

Thanks, Graham!

If you like the stark, eerie horror of Purist Lovecraftian games, this is the book for you. The advice is useful, and the scenario skeletons littered throughout the text are a gold mine of ideas, assuming you don’t just lift them outright and hang some stats on them. If you want to run a Purist Lovecraft game, in any system, this book will fill you with joy and your players with dread.

Which is how it should be.

 

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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***SPOILER ALERT***

I’m running Tomb of Horrors for this leg of the Storm Point campaign. You may not want to read on if you’re playing the game yourself.

***SPOILER ALERT***

Yeah, I broke down and told the group what adventure we were playing. The combat this past session was extremely frustrating, with dazing auras and devastating attacks from the monsters, and one of the players commented that the punishment for failing to solve the puzzle on the first try – the monsters appearing – was really kind of out of proportion.

So I told them that they were playing the new Tomb of Horrors, and suddenly they understood. Punishment in this adventure is always going to be out of proportion to the infraction.

We picked up the game after an extended rest, and the party investigated the sundial and brazier. They had no idea what it was for, and eventually decided to move on. The way led outside, and across a bridge, into another large, strangely shaped building. This one, in addition to the runes, had a number of tapestries hanging on the walls.

Now, one of these tapestries was important, and described in detail, and had an illustration. The others were sort of glossed over. I didn’t like the idea of zeroing the players in on this one tapestry right off the hop, so I didn’t show them the illustration right away, and I made up a descriptions of each of the other tapestries that they looked at. This had mixed results; it made them have to work a little more to find the tapestry that was actually important, but it also made them pay a lot of extra attention to the other tapestries.

They discovered the important tapestry by going around the walls, ripping down tapestries, and the enchanted one wouldn’t come down. That’s when they got the illustration, and they pretty quickly figured out that puzzle, using the platinum key they had discovered earlier. They also discovered the two secret doors in the room, but were unable to open them.

Then it was into the other half of the room, with a tall torch and numbers arranged on the walls. They figured out that they needed to cast a shadow on a number, but got distracted by the tapestries, and picked a number that seemed to indicate a time represented in the tapestries. This got them a heaping helping of mad wraiths and a rather brutal combat.

I have a sort of love/hate relationship with puzzles like this in games. When they’re fun, they can be a lot of fun, but eventually, they stop being fun and just become frustrating. As a GM, I find myself having to watch the players carefully, and judge when the puzzle is starting to shift from interesting to annoying. At that point, it’s best to give little clues and nudge the characters in the right direction. I mis-timed this one, and wound up having to be much more explicit than I would have liked in order to head off the frustration and annoyance.

Still, the fact that they party had to go back and play with the sundial to find the right number to cast the shadow on should – I hope – illustrate the fact that the solution to a given puzzle is not always immediately present in the room where the puzzle is. We’ll see.

That’s where we left it that evening, after the revelation about the adventure’s identity. There was more exploration and problem-solving this game than combat, which is certainly something I want to encourage, but the combat was pretty long and brutal. The fact that we were down two players also slowed things somewhat.

But it was fun, and we’re looking forward to the next one.

From the Armitage Files: Burning Curiosity

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.

**You Have Been Warned**

In between the last session and this session, my players discussed what they were going to investigate next. They decided to go looking into the Society for Syncretic Inquiry, and its possible connection to the Fuschack-Donlands gang of bank robbers. Some initial research led them to discover that Wilfrid Wakeling ((No relation to Wilbur Whately at all. Promise.)), the previous head of the society had died about a year and a half previously, six months or so after a stroke caused him to turn over leadership of the society to Edwin Carsdale. They decided to see if they could get someone inside the society to investigate.

They started their investigation into Carsdale and the society by climbing back up on one of their favourite hobby-horses: trying to use it as an excuse to get into the rare book collection at the MU library. The document mentioned that Wakeling had visited the collection from time to time, and they wanted to see a record of what books he had examined. Llanfer informed him that such information could not be released without permission of the collection’s curator – Dr. Armitage.

Now, there’s been a bit of friction developing between Armitage’s group and the investigators ((Except for Dyer, really. Dyer is going out of his way to be as helpful as he feels he can, because of the way they did the right thing way back in the beginning.)). This is mainly because the investigators keep coming to them for information, but not sharing any in return, and then looking affronted when the Armitage group is less-than-forthcoming. To be fair to the investigators, the initial set-up with the group was that they were supposed to investigate the things in the documents independently. This has morphed, in their memories, into them not being allowed to tell the Armitage group – especially Armitage himself – anything about what they’re doing.

Now, this is not necessarily a bad thing; I’ve always hated games where, to solve a mystery, all you needed to do was get the info-dump from the right NPC contact. But the fact that the investigators keep going to them for help ((Maybe having Dyer help them was a mistake, sending mixed messages, so they think that they just need the right approach. Which is kind-of true, but probably not in the way they think.)) means that they keep running into that friction, and are beginning to disdain the members of the Armitage group.

When they wouldn’t give Armitage any idea of who they were investigating, or what they hoped to find, Armitage (again) turned down their request to see the records of who had access to the special collection, and what they looked at. This led to more conversation amongst the investigators about the possibility of breaking into the library to get access to this information. I’m pretty sure they’re just looking for an excuse to break in, so that Moon – and possibly Solis – can get their hands on some of the nastier tomes. This desire twists all avenues of investigation around to involving the library. Maybe I should just break down and give them access ((This does open up all sorts of possible avenues for bringing in other threads, and tying them together. Hmmm…)).

Roxy did manage to get some information from Freeborn (and convert him into a contact for future use) in return for helping to finance his studies, including patronizing another expedition to Australia ((Ah, the flexibility of a Credit Rating of 7…)). Unfortunately, he didn’t know much, but he was able to give the basics of the Society: academics who meet to discuss cross-disciplinary pursuit of knowledge, breaking free of the silos of their own specialties.

Meantime, Moon did some research on Carsdale, finding out that he was a young Physics professor at Harvard ((Okay, I had a total brain-freeze on this one. I had decided he was from Harvard, but during the game, I could not remember the name of the place! I kept saying, “Oooh, you know, that big one, in Boston.” “Boston College?” “Nope.” “MIT?” “Nope. Damn. What is the name of that place?” And, of course, when I remembered, everyone stared at me incredulously. “You mean you couldn’t remember Harvard? Dude, what’s wrong with your brain?”)), and found one of his more controversial papers on non-linear time. This obviously caught his attention, what with his strange temporal experiences. And Solis took a trip to Boston, hoping to find out information on Wakeling (who was a professor at Boston College) and Carsdale. He found that Wakeling returned home to Suffolk, England, after his stroke, and died there less than a year later. The only new information he got on Carsdale was overheard on the train – two Harvard faculty members discussing him in none-too-flattering terms, referring to him as an ambitious young Turk with radical ideas. Again, this caught the group’s attention.

After a little more discussion, they decided on a two-prong attack. Roxy called Carsdale, and arranged an interview to be considered for joining the Society. She didn’t have the skills listed in the campaign book to gain entry (aside from a high Credit Rating), but she had a few other academic skills, and some Flattery, that she spent instead, while dropping hints about the weird things she’s seen over the past few months. I liked this approach, and it was played well, so decided it would be enough to get her membership.

Moon, meanwhile, had pitched me an idea to use Art History to uncover some way to intersect with the ideas in Carsdale’s papers. I thought for a bit, and said sure, if he wanted to make a spend, he could put together some stuff on Bach’s reversible fugues ((This is totally made up. At least, as far as I know.)) and some of the abstract painters that could be presented as musical and visual expressions of non-linear time. He used his Antiquarian special ability to have some of these examples in his bookshop, and went to the restaurant where Roxy was being interviewed by the Society and “happened to run in to” Carsdale there. Moon pitched his idea, which intrigued Carsdale enough to want to speak to him privately the next day.

Roxy’s interview with the Society went fairly well – she got invited to join. She also noticed that there seemed to be an inner circle; certainly, Carsdale and two others perked their ears up at some of the more blatant hints of mythos stuff. I don’t think she’s quite decided what that means, though.

Next day, Carsdale came to visit Moon. He was impressed by the pieces Moon showed him and played for him, and asked Moon to look over the next paper on the subject of non-linear time he was preparing to publish. He didn’t want to tell Moon what it was about, preferring to see if Moon could figure out his thesis, despite the advanced math. Moon promised to read it and provide feedback, and Carsdale took his leave. As he did so, the room seemed to shift and flatten strangely to Moon, and Carsdale seemed to grow into a tall, angular humanoid with strangely-articulated limbs, covered in an array of fine, waving tendrils almost like fur.

This was the same kind of thing Moon had seen a couple of times before, including when the visitors in Rot Tal had moved him outside of the normal spatial dimensions. The vision only lasted a second or two, but it made Moon suspect that Carsdale was somehow capable of manipulating his perception of time. After Carsdale left – “coincidentally” running into Dr. Solis coming to pick up some obscure and suggestive books – Moon skimmed over the paper, which seemed to suggest that, by acting in dimensions higher than the standard three spatial on single temporal, one could produce effects that looked miraculous. In short, acting in higher dimensions could produce magic.

Roxy had joined the boys by this time, and they spent some time talking about what they should do next. And that’s when I had a trio of Tch-Tchos show up and throw a Molotov cocktail through the front window of the bookstore downstairs.

There resulted a mad scramble – Solis and Roxy trying to put the fire out and Moon, with a better ((I just mistyped “better” as “bitter.” Both work in this context.)) understanding of how fast old, dry books will burn, worked on salvaging the most valuable and portable of items and then hightailing it out the back way. Solis and Roxy got the point and followed. Right into the Tcho-Tcho ambush.

Kris knives and blow guns proved to be no match for three pistols, though at the end of the fight, both Roxy and Solis were poisoned and fast on the way to losing consciousness. They dumped the Tcho-Tcho bodies in the trash cans behind the store, and Moon drove them to the hospital while I kept calling for Health checks as their muscles cramped, they started vomiting, and rapidly approached death. Samples of the darts allowed the doctors at the hospital to find an antivenin that saved their lives.

Before I go on with the story, I want to make a little aside about what I did here. I – very heavy-handedly, and without consulting the player – trashed something that was very important to the player. I took away the bookseller’s bookshop. This is an incredibly risky thing to do in the game, and I wasn’t sure that I should. On the one hand, it was the appropriate thing to happen, given what I know about the plot that the players don’t, and it provides a nice personal hook for Moon in all this. On the other hand, it’s kind of a dick move. I wouldn’t do it in many situations, and even when I thought I could, I would tend to avoid it.

But I did it here. I hit both the character and the player hard with this one. Why did I choose to do that? Well, mainly because I knew this player. I know that Michael likes the downward spiral for his characters, and I know he trusts me to not completely screw him over ((Well, he does now. There was a time in the early days of our gaming when we’d really pick on each others’ characters, so much so that others in the groups commented on it. The weird thing is that neither of us did it deliberately, and neither of us noticed we were doing it to the other, only that the other was doing it to us. We’ve worked past that, now. Mostly. 😉 )). I also made it pretty clear during the game that he had insurance, and enough of a base stock, to get another shop up and running in pretty short order, so that it was a temporary thing that had happened. If he wanted it to be, that is.

Anyway, I just wanted to note that I understand how this tactic could have blown up in my face. I judged it wouldn’t – this time – and I think I was right.

So. Back at the hospital, things calmed down. Solis made an attempt to examine the bodies of the Tcho-Tchos the next day, but some of his comments roused the suspicions of the police officer investigating the case, and he didn’t get the chance. Instead, he got to do some fancy back-pedaling and duck out the door.

Everyone was pretty beat up, by then – this had been a really hard session on Stability, what with one thing ((Lots of tests.)) and another ((Some bad, bad rolls.)). The group decided to get out of town for a few days and, because it was around a month since they left the visitors at Rot Tal, they went back to see if they left as promised.

They did. Around noon on the appointed day ((I had toyed with the idea of having them miss the whole thing because of the difference in the way the two races understand time, but then figured that would be pointless. Why set it up if I don’t have it pay off? And I wanted it to pay off in a specific way, this time.)), the inhabitants of Rot Tal gathered together in the village square, and… something happened.

Now, at this stage in the game, each of the characters has something strange going on, mentally speaking. Moon has strange time-jumps in perception, Roxy has visions of undersea cities populated by nameless things, and Solis is starting to have recurring visions of a puzzlebox that makes him very uneasy. The agitation of the higher dimensions caused by the rescue of the visitors sent each of the investigators into their personal visions:

  • Moon was back at home, eating breakfast in his kitchen, when he looked up to see himself standing in the doorway, pointing a gun at him. He drew his own gun and fired just as the other Moon also fired, and was hit in the arm. He came to on the grassy hill above Rot Tal with a bullet in his arm ((No one has yet asked how this could happen now that the bookshop has burned down, and I think that’s interesting.)).
  • Roxy had the vision of leading a procession of things up to an altar stone before a huge building. On the altar were many sacrifices – men, women, and children. The things Roxy was leading lifted her up onto the stone and slaughtered the sacrifices, and all the blood flowed to Roxy’s feet and up her legs. She raised her arms, and the colossal doors in the building before her started to open. Then she, too woke up on the grassy hillside.
  • Solis found himself once again in the strange temple with the puzzlebox on a plinth in front of him. This time, his curiosity got the better of him, and he started to play with it, trying to solve it. It changed shape as he worked it, from a rectangular box to a cube, and also changed colour from dark blue to a deep blue-green. Then he awoke on the hillside.

When the investigators looked down into the town below them, they saw that everyone had collapsed in the street. They went down and managed to revive Fred Jahraus, who took some time to figure out how to speak again. It was fun to play up Fred learning again how to use his body for a little while, but I got tired of doing it long before the players got tired of watching my contortions, so I jumped to a summary of how the visitors were now gone, having taken some few willing human minds with them. These included Jahraus’s mother. In return for the hospitality of the human bodies, the folks of Rot Tal were apparently left with a town that they owned and a large amount of money.

The investigators helped get everyone into shelter and fed while they relearned to be in charge of their own bodies and minds, and I gave them a Stability award for seeing that some things keep their promises, and that people can be good to each other ((I needed an excuse to give them some Stability back, or they would be useless in the next part of the investigation.)).

That’s when one of the players mentioned that the visitors were more like rats leaving a sinking ship: “Bye bye, now! Thanks for the hospitality! Good luck with the forthcoming apocalypse!” I’m pleased with the way some themes – like non-linear time and higher dimensions – are recurring in interesting ways through the game. It’s helping me solidify some of my thoughts about the endgame for the campaign, and giving me useful threads to weave into the ongoing narrative.

So, next time, the group is – I think – back to pursuing the Society of Syncretic Inquiry, to see if and how Carsdale is connected to the firebombing of the book shop and the mythos in general. I wonder what they’ll find.

 

New Centurions, Issue #10: Urban Paleontology

By | | New Centurions, What's he playing?
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We just finished playing our latest Armitage Files game, but I need to talk about the last New Centurions game, which we played last Saturday, so I don’t fall too far behind on these things.

So, we picked up the storyline a few days after fighting off the dimensional invaders, in the aftermath of what they had done to the city. Before play actually began, Clint talked with us about how he wanted to handle gaining new abilities using the experience system he rolled out last session. I still don’t have a real handle on how I want to advance S.P.E.C.-T.E.R., so I haven’t spent the experience yet. We also talked a bit about the Hero Point economy of the game, and whether we needed to tweak it for our purposes ((The answer to this is that we’re looking at trying one or two slightly different tweaks: during the game, Clint decided to hand out two Hero Points at a time instead of one, and after the game, he sent out some e-mail suggesting that spending a single Hero Point provided a bonus d6 result modifier, rather than a single point result modifier. Other suggestions included making Hero Points worth a two-point result modifier, and other options to get more points in the hands of the players, so that they get used for more cool stuff. Our experiment is ongoing.)).

And then we jumped into the actual game. Paladin was out of the city ((Which is to say, the player couldn’t make it that night, on account of having a life or something.)), on assignment with the new government agency that had taken command of the new problem of superhumans, called Aegis. While he was out of the picture, Aegis made the New Centurions a real sweetheart deal – substantial funding and material, in return for being able to call on us from time to time to deal with supervillains.

Given the climate of corruption and lack of government response in the city, we were somewhat skeptical ((Okay, we were too skeptical, really. But there’s a real trend in the groups I game with to distrust any sort of patron, because it’s kind of assumed they are going to turn on you eventually. That’s a standard trope in comic books, too, but it’s also rich story territory, so when I realized what I was doing in looking for traps and loopholes in the agreement, I stopped doing it and jumped on board.)) at first, but they value they were offering was such that we would have been insane to turn it down. So, we agreed, and the New Centurions are now associated with Aegis.

And that’s when the dinosaurs showed up at the NYU campus.

Little bit of background is required here. Clint, who runs the game, is married, and has two kids. His wife and his daughter both play in the New Centurions game, but his son, who is younger, doesn’t. But Clint runs another BASH game for his wife and kids, and wanted to give his son a chance to play with the rest of the crew. In the last session of the family game, which is set in the 1940s, Dr. Tempus used a time machine to escape from the heroes, but Thunderbolt (Clint’s son’s character) and Monkeydude (his sidekick) followed him into the timestream, ending in a nice cliffhanger.

Thus we had our first guest-star in the New Centurions: Thunderbolt and Monkeydude, who had followed Dr. Tempus through time. The megaraptors that appeared in our present were a side-effect of the time travel ((At least, that’s what Dr. Tempus said when S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. asked if the dinosaurs belonged to him and threatened to cite him for having let unlicensed sauropods loose in the city.)). The battle was fun – everyone kept throwing dinosaurs onto Dr. Tempus, until Widowmaker managed to corral them all with her forcefield. We turned Dr. Tempus over to Thunderbolt, who was sucked back to his own time when the time machine in the NYU lab activated.

That was pretty much where we left the game, with some thought about the next session, when we hope to finally interrogate the man who (we think) freed Dr. Methuselah from the weird time-trap/hologram/somethingorother we found when we discovered our headquarters.

We may finally learn what was up with that. And maybe even be able to free the original Centurions. Unless they’re just images. Or something.

But it’ll be fun, anyway!

Feints & Gambits: Easter Morning

By | | Dresden Files RPG, Feints & Gambits, What's he playing?
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Friday night, we wrapped up the necromancer storyline in the Feints & Gambits game. This is, in part, what prompted my last post about being taken out; I wanted to lay the groundwork to be able to explain – both to my players and to other readers of this blog – some of the decisions I made during play ((When I was studying Education at University, this was referred to as a “teachable moment.”)). Which is not to say I feel the need to defend these decisions; quite the contrary, my players seemed to really like the way the game went. But the decisions made, and the reasons behind them, can help to reinforce tone and style of play, and I want to make sure everyone is on the same page when it comes to that.

We had a full roster of players, and hence characters, this session, and I have to thank the folks who were missing last time for the easy way they brought themselves back into play. I appreciate the co-operation.

The gang was still at Kate’s place, with the necromancer cultist that they had taken from the ceremony at Trinity College Chapel. He seemed to be essentially catatonic, and Nate’s use of The Sight had shown that he was severely damaged in the soul, with his self shrinking away to nothing.  Mark and Kate decided that they were going to try and create a ritual to bring him back.  I warned them that the difficulty was going to be very high for this, citing as an example the fact that the base Complexity of a death spell is up over 20, and they were essentially trying to heal someone from one of those. They were not dissuaded, which pleased me ((Heroes are people who risk everything when it’s important enough.)), and pretty much everyone in the group got into preparing the spell ((I outline my thinking on this way back here.)), which they decided to set at Complexity 25. Which is big. Very big.

While the group was working together to come up with all the various Aspects to make up the Lore deficit, I was doing some scrambling. See, Mark and Kate wanted to cast the spell together, figuring that should give them some sort of advantage. I agreed, and then spent a frantic few minutes leafing through the rulebook to find out how co-operative casting works in the system.

I didn’t find any rules for it ((Wait for it…)).

So, rather than slow the game down, or say no to what I thought was a reasonable request, I ruled that they could each gather power to cast the spell, and it would all go into the pot to power it. But if either of them failed their control roll, all the power gathered by both of them would become uncontrolled. They thought this was reasonable, and went ahead with casting the spell.

Of course, after the game, I checked the rules when I had a little more leisure, and found the rules for co-operative thaumaturgy on page 272 of Your Story. ((Told you to wait for it.)) The upshot is that they’re pretty much what I came up with at the moment, which is good for two reasons: first, it means I don’t have to change the way I did it this time if the characters try it again, and second, it means I’ve internalized the mindset behind the rules well enough to be able to trust my instincts with them.

So, anyway, they managed the spell ((And I resisted the urge to try and compel a failure once the gathered power topped 20 shifts. It was tough to resist, but it would have been such a dick move.)), and pulled the poor little necromancer cultist’s soul back up into the light. It was at this point that I did the actual math for how many shifts they would have needed, and saw that 26 would have been a complete success. I decided that they offset all the damage done to his soul, except for the extreme Mental consequence he had taken. I thought this was a good way to reflect the impact on his mind and soul of the trauma he had gone through in this little ordeal.

The characters were able to talk to him, but he was extremely distrustful – hell, he’d just woken up in a room full of strangers, wearing nothing but a cheap rayon robe, and the people he was with looked suspiciously like the folks who he remembered shooting at his friends. Add to this the extreme Mental consequence I had decided on, which was that he had basically become a sociopath due to the damage done to his soul, and he played up the victim angle, begged to be let free, and said he didn’t remember anything. He also swore he had no involvement with paganism, satanism, new age, or magic of any sort. Eventually, they dropped him off in downtown Dublin, with Aleister urging him to go to a church and pray for his soul ((He didn’t. He went out the back way. Sorry, Aleister.)).

Meanwhile, the rest of the crew was back at Trinity, breaking into the guy’s dorm room. They cracked the ward on the door, and the door itself was child’s play. Inside, they found that their poor little cultist might not have been totally honest with them: the walls were black, and had a poster of Aleister Crowley on one, and a day-glo qabbalistic tree of life painted on another. There was even a little shrine with black candles and a fake skull on it. A search turned up a small stash of ecstasy and a journal written in Enochian script, which none of the characters could read.

When they tried the redial on his room phone, they heard the ringing in a nearby room, and went to investigate, finding another warded door. Instead of disabling this ward, Mark decided to see if the ward was designed to warn the caster when it was broken. It was, so he worked up a little ritual to let his toy compass point him back to the caster. This worked, though I mentioned that small drops of peaty water were starting to form under the plastic of the compass. Off they hurried to track down the necromancer and see what should be done.

At this point, there was some lively discussion about what they were going to do with the necromancer when they finally caught up to him. Or her ((But it turned out to be him.)). After seeing what he had done to his cultists when they were in danger of being caught, the gang were rightfully wary of him. They knew he needed to be eliminated, but also knew that, if he saw them coming, they didn’t stand a chance. They settled on the idea of finding him for reconnaissance, then setting up an ambush where they would be able to put him down with minimal risk ((To that end, Aleister picked stopped by his place to pick up a sniper rifle.)).

Here’s where I got to drag the plot back around to the Easter Uprising ghost battle storyline I had originally envisioned for this scenario. The compass led them to the street in front of the GPO ((Quite near the scarred paving where Nate had made his wall of fire back around Christmas time.)), where a crowd had gathered around a taped-off crime scene. Under cover of Firinne’s glamour, Aleister and Mark made their way into the crowd, trying to home in on the necromancer.

They found him. The description I gave started with, “Y’know, the guy might as well have a sign around his neck that says ‘I’m an evil necromancer.'” From there, I went on to describe his slicked-back dark hair, his pointy beard, his silver jewelry, his walking stick, and all the other trappings ((This was because I had forgotten the description I had come up with for the man in the setting document, which was very non-necromancery. But that’s okay; nobody called me on it, so I win.)) that screamed bad guy.

They retreated back to the group by the car, and Kate decided that she wanted to look at the scene with The Sight. I pulled the player aside and gave her a rundown on seeing the necromancer in all his dark power, drawing up some sort of energy from the screaming ghostly form lying within the bloodstain inside the crime scene tape. I also told her about the intricate silver and bronze chain that lay broken around the GPO, and the massed ranks of angry ghosts within, led by Padraig Pearse. Then I kicked her in the brain with a Superb attack, because I figured that was a pretty intense scene to have viewed with her third eye. She, of course, beat that difficulty handily ((So I don’t want to hear any more about your crappy dice luck, you hear me?)).

And then Kate was off, charging into the crowd to stop the necromancer from doing whatever it was he was doing. The rest of the gang, who were still planning on doing this quietly and out of sight, tried to stop her. Nate flattened her with some gravity evocation, but she yelled at Aleister that they had to stop the necromancer right now! Aleister and Rogan took her at her word, and charged into the crowd, while Firinne distracted the cops and Mark and Nate and Kate all tried spinning magic against the necromancer.

The fight ended with Rogan savaging the necromancer in her smilodon form, but that didn’t quite kill him. He had taken a lot of consequences – offset by his magical preparations, to a degree, but not completely – and had done some damage of his own, but it was time for him to concede ((And this is where it ties into that last post on being taken out.)).

Looking at the logic of the situation, the only way I could have had him escape would have been to let him magic himself away, but I didn’t think that would work very well – breaching the Nevernever is thaumaturgy, which takes some time, and Mark specializes in transport magic, so it wouldn’t be a guarantee that he could get away. Besides, the group had worked hard to track this guy down, and were responding heroically – albeit out of desperation – so I didn’t want to take away a victory so cheaply.

That left the death curse.

The necromancer, choking on his own blood, laughed up into Rogan’s tiger face, and said, “I free them all!” Then he died. The ghosts in the GPO began solidifying, and some hasty Lore checks showed that the pulse of power from the dying necromancer had broken any and all bindings on ghosts within Dublin. With the coming of the Easter Week fey game of pitting the ghosts of the Easter Uprising against each other for their sport, the ghosts within the GPO were already pretty solid, and angry, and started setting up defensive positions. Nate didn’t like the look of that, so he used spiritual fire to burn them all out of the building ((An evocation up around 9 shifts of power, as I recall.)). Only Padraig Pearse, fortified by his midwinter bottle of True Guinness, survived, and he did not look pleased.

So, that’s where we left things. The necromancer cult at Trinity is no more. All the ghosts in Dublin are free to do as they will. And the Easter Week fey games are spoiled. I imagine that there will be some repercussions from each of these things. And I also figured the efforts were worth a Major Milestone.

Next, I think, I will throw something easier and more direct at them. I’ve got a lot of ghosts suddenly loose to haunt things and cause trouble, after all.

Oh, and for those who are interested in what was actually going on with the necromancer and his plots, check the spoiler tag below. My players are free to do so, as well, but keep in mind that your characters will not know the stuff you read there. But the plot is done, and the plotter is dead, so it’s not going to have a lot of effect on the rest of the game. I’ll leave that to the consequences of your actions.

Spoiler

Dr. Aidan Blackwood was the head necromancer. He had a cult of followers, drawn mainly from the students at the university, devoted to unlocking the ancient dark magics neglected by the modern new age practitioners. He wanted, specifically, to chain the angry ghosts of Dublin to his will, granting him enough power and influence in the mystical world to expand his influence over the rest of the island, and maybe even beyond. Ghosts bound to your will, aside from being power sources, are just useful.

To join his little cult, each member had to undergo a lengthy initiation ritual, which was also a thaumaturgic ritual that tagged them with a death spell that could be triggered quickly. This was how Blackwood managed to transform his cultists from living students into bog mummies so quickly – the preliminary work had been done, and he needed only to trigger it.

Anyway, he didn’t want to risk himself being front-and-centre in this little plot, because if things went badly, the ghosts would tear him apart. So he got the senior member of his cult, grad student Grania Maguire, to take the lead in the whole thing. She would be at the GPO, enacting the main ritual, while the little coven of thirteen (down to ten, after the interference of the PCs) did a supporting ritual in the Trinity College Chapel to gather energy and funnel it to her.

Oh. And part of the ritual was having a prime number of cultists in the power-generation, so once they lost three members, three more had to sit out, leaving seven to conduct the ritual, and three to stand guard. That’s why there were seven at the altar in robes and three hiding in the pews with guns.

And, of course, when our heroes disrupted the (very powerful) ritual at the chapel, the main ritual at the GPO collapsed, but not before Grania had managed to shatter the fey chains binding the GPO ghosts. The power slapped her down, and the ghosts tore her apart. Hence, the crime scene. Blackwood was doing his best to suck up the death-residue of the ritual – along with what was left of Grania’s power – when he met with a toothy end.

And that’s the background story. Not a lot of it came out explicitly during play, but I thought some folks might be interested in how things fit together.

Losing It: Being Taken Out in The Dresden Files RPG

By | | Dresden Files RPG, What's he playing?
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So, here’s a quote from Your Story:

If the damage exceeds the character’s stress track, or occupied boxes “push” the stress off the right side of the stress track, the character is taken out, meaning the character has decisively lost the conflict. His fate is in the hands of the opponent, who may decide how the character loses.

I found this really interesting, from a GM point of view, and I’ve been looking at it in play for some time now. I even played with the idea in Night Fears, where I set the default condition for the characters being taken out by Mental Stress to be that they flee the haunted house.

It was this last thing that prompted me to start thinking about this post – I saw some comments somewhere online ((I don’t remember where, and I wouldn’t point to it if I did. My objective here is not to argue. The comment just helped crystallize some thoughts about the system and the way I was using it that I want to write about. Honestly, the fact that I saw those comments almost made me not want to post this; authors of any sort, but especially game authors, really have no call telling people how they’re supposed engage with what they write. But it gave me the basics of my premise here, and it highlighted an outlook I’ve seen – and shared – in play, so I figure I should disclose that. There. I think that’s enough whining about that.)) talking about how Mental consequences represent deep psychological trauma, and that using to represent scared kids was out of scope. And that is, indeed, how the rulebook describes Mental Stress and consequences, on page 217 of Your Story. Based on the logic applied there, getting taken out by Mental Stress means your mind is broken. And, further, that getting taken out by Physical Stress means you’re dead. And getting taken out by Social Stress means you get ostracized.

But I look back at that quote, and I think about all the other things it could mean.

Now, in most RPGs, losing all your hit points ((Or filling up your wound levels, or whatever that game equivalent is.)) means you’re dead. Games with Sanity systems have you go insane if you lose all your Sanity points. This makes it very easy to view being taken out in DFRPG in the same way, but really, that’s pretty limiting. Sure, the game has a pretty deadly conflict system, but it’s also cinematic. It’s designed to represent the kinds of things you see in the books – conflicts that have real consequences, and the threat of terrible things happening, but don’t always lead to death. Sometimes, it’s more interesting for the character to get taken hostage, or stuck with the cheque at the restaurant, or – for example – scared out of the haunted house.

I find it tough to remember this in play, though. It is a very different outlook from most other games ((Except maybe Toon, where you fall down if you lose all your hit points.)), and one that takes some getting used to. As GM, I have to make sure that I show the broad range options inherent in the idea of being taken out, so that the players will absorb the idea that Stress is not the same as hit points, and that losing a fight doesn’t necessarily mean dying.

What it comes down to is that the Stress tracks and consequences and being taken out mean whatever you want them to mean in the current situation. That’s right. They’re situational. Want a drinking contest? Physical, with consequences representing greater degrees of drunkenness and when you’re taken out, you pass out. Want to steal the crowd from a rival busker? Social, with the consequences representing lost tips, and when you’re taken out, your guitar strings break. Want to try and stay the night in the haunted house ((Yeah, I keep coming back to that. What can I say? I think it shows off how to model these things pretty well, if I do say so myself.))? Mental, with consequences showing how scared you are, and when you’re taken out, you bolt.

So, how do we get the players contributing their own creativity to it? We all know that players hate losing conflicts. It makes them feel that the whole game has gone to hell, and that’s a valid sentiment in a lot of RPGs. But if they don’t lose some conflicts in DFRPG, they won’t learn how to do so in interesting and creative ways. I think that, to make it work, you can do a few things:

  • Talk to them about it. This is always the best first step in helping to change attitudes and behaviours in a game. Use a little communication to lay out expectations and options, and make sure that everyone knows what’s available.
  • Throw them into some low-stakes conflicts. So often, conflicts in games are life and death situations. Toss in some contests that are interesting, but without much on the line. That way, win or lose, you can show alternate results for being taken out. And, if they happen to lose, they don’t mind so much.
  • Bigfoot them. Throw some opposition at them that they just can’t overcome. Yeah, in other games, that’s a big no-no, but in a game like this, where losing a fight doesn’t always mean dying, it’s not as big a dick move ((Note that it is still something of a dick move – there’s no getting away from that. But if you make the outcome cool enough, no one will mind. So, that’s what you need to do.)).
  • Teach them to concede by having NPCs concede. Show them what it looks like, and how it can be cool, and how it can earn them some extra Fate Points. Teach by example.
  • Teach them to concede by having NPCs prey mercilessly on their consequences. This is the stick to point 4’s carrot. Let the characters know that consequences can be a big deal, and they’ll be more apt to concede – and snag any extra Fate Points – than to risk having everyone for the next two sessions punching them in their cracked ribs.
  • Compel them. Compel them to concede a contest if that works with their Aspects. If they’ve already sucked up a consequence, point out how they get more Fate Points for that.
  • Reward the behaviour you want to see more of. Positive reinforcement works. This means you really need to be sure that you have a cool idea of what failure looks like in the situation, where losing is as interesting – or even more interesting – than winning.
  • Never, ever, ever screw them over. Sure, when a character is taken out or concedes, he or she loses the conflict. But they own the defeat scene. Even if the opponent gets to determine how they’re taken out, get the player’s input and buy-in. Negotiate a scene that will make everyone else jealous they didn’t take a blast of fire to the face. Because if you screw over a character with this, even once, you can lose the trust of the whole group for the rest of the campaign, and you can write this little bit of the system off. It’s too big a risk. Don’t do it ((And if you do it unintentionally, own up, apologize, and explain what you were trying to do. You’re human, and your players will understand if you screw up. But once you’ve apologized and explained, make it right, preferably with input from your players. That should earn you a pass on the mistake.)).

The key to it all, of course, is using both success and failure to advance the story you’re telling in the game. When you set up a conflict, think about what the consequences mean in context – a footrace is a Physical conflict, for example, but it’s unlike to result in a broken arm or pierced lung, and taken out probably just means losing the race or collapsing in exhaustion. You can even scale the severity of the consequences – maybe even a severe consequence from a drinking contest is erased after a day of rest. Make the consequences fit the conflict, and that includes adjusting recovery times if appropriate.

Also think about interesting ways to fail, both for the PCs and the NPCs. Maybe look at little subplots that can give a character the spotlight for a little bit if they lose, or that kick off new B storylines in the background. If someone goes to the hospital, maybe they encounter something strange there, or if someone is outmaneuvered socially and lose their job, they might get an interesting – and dangerous – offer of new employment. Make some of your ideas specific to the current scene, but try and keep a few more generic ideas in your back pocket for when the players surprise you.

Just remember that the cool of the failure must at least equal the direness of the situation it puts the character (or party) in. With enough cool layered on it, the players will go along with pretty much anything. Because they’re looking for cool in the game – that’s why we all play.

Help them find it somewhere they didn’t expect – on the losing side.

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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***SPOILER ALERT***

Two things.

First, I’m using a published adventure for this leg of the campaign, but the group doesn’t know what that adventure is. Please don’t tell them if you recognize it.

Second, because this is a published adventure, my accounts are going to have spoilers in them. If you start to recognize this as the adventure you’re playing – or going to play – you may want to avoid reading on.

***SPOILER ALERT***

Last night was the latest installment of the Storm Point campaign. Once again, I had a full house of players ((I’m starting to get spoiled, having everyone show up to every game! This makes all three of the restarted campaign.)), and once again, I’m pretty happy with the progress we made through the adventure. We did, however, wind up going later than we normally do.

We rejoined our valiant heroes as they were standing on a rickety rope bridge. The crossing was somewhat challenging, and a couple of them failed their checks and began to fall. I was rolling falling damage when Milo, the swordmage, decided to use Lightning Lure to snag his plummeting team mate and pull him back to the bridge, figuring a little lightning scorch is better than falling sixty feet. They all looked at me as if they expected me to say no to this idea, but I said, “Hell, yeah! That’s cool!”

Because it was, y’see.

And that kind of thinking is what I want to encourage in the game – using powers outside of combat, going for the cinematic approach. I always want to say yes to those kinds of ideas, as long as they’re not stupid ((Sometimes even if they are. Enough cool will outweigh stupid on the scales of GM Judgment.)). If it would look cool in a movie action scene, odds are I’ll say yes.

He managed to catch everyone that fell ((Though he almost missed Thrun; that dwarf has an extremely high Fortitude.)), doing around 10 points of damage to each of them, rather than the 33 points that an average 60-foot fall will do. Everyone was singed but grateful.

Once across the bridge, they entered an oddly-shaped building that contained a diorama of the site. They were able to identify the building they were currently in, and the little garden area below the cliffs where they first entered, but the rest of the structures were completely changed. Galvanys recognized the layout of the diorama as a graveyard for the high eladrin ((“So, we’re in a desecrated graveyard in the Feywild. Great. Is there anywhere worse we could be?” “Dude, shut up! The DM can hear you!”)), being eladrin himself.

Finding nothing else of interest here, they went out the other doorway of the building, across another rope bridge ((Couple more falls, couple more Lightning Lures)), and into the oddly-shaped structure on the other side. This building was more obviously constructed of several smaller buildings that had been cannibalized for building materials, and the inside was covered in deeply-carved runes. Investigation showed them similar to the ones that the group had found on the bodies of the harpies and dryads who had attacked them. Again, they seemed to be catching the energy of death, and channeling it somewhere nearby. Milo and Faran realized that this was definitely something bad, as the death energy should be flowing to the Raven Queen, the goddess of death, but was instead being siphoned off for other purposes.

The next room they entered had an overflowing pool with a key in the bottom ((“Does 4E have water weirds?” “I don’t think so.”)). Reaching into the pool for the key caused the water to rear up in the form of a serpent and strike at Galvanys, who had tried to take the key ((“See? Water weird!” “Actually, no. It’s just a magical effect.”)), teleporting him out into the nearby river right near the top of the falls. He managed to swim to shore, and made it back into the room inside a couple of minutes.

After some trial and error (and a few more dips in the river), the group teamed up to distract the trap while Ssudai, the dragonborn monk, snatched the key and ran for the door. Once he was past the doorway, the serpent collapsed back into the pool, and everyone cheered.

In the next chamber, they found a brazier hanging above a sundial, more of the strange runes, and a captive eladrin woman, who turned out to be a lamia.

This was a tough fight, made tougher by two things: first of all, the group didn’t have a controller, so very few close and area attacks. Second, I didn’t read the encounter closely enough, and dropped in both scarab swarms at the start of combat, instead of waiting until the lamia was bloodied to bring the second one in. The first point meant that, by and large, the group was doing half-damage to the lamia and the swarms, and the second point meant that they had more fronts to fight on, splitting attacks and damage more.

Still, though the fight was long and grueling ((And the first part pretty boring for Thrun, who spent the first three or four rounds alternately dazed and stunned.)), they managed to survive and triumph. Ssudai dumped burning coals from the brazier on some of the scarabs, and Faran dropped his blade barrier in a narrow point so that everyone could just keep hitting the lamia and pushing her back into the zone for more damage.

At that point, it was ten o’clock, which is about an hour later than we usually game on a Sunday evening, so I wrapped it up before letting them explore the room. That’s where we’ll pick it up next time. No one minded, because I told them they’d each get enough experience points to go up to tenth level.

But we got through two combat-ish encounters, and a total of five encounter areas, so I think we did pretty good for one evening. I like this quicker pace.

We’ll see if we can keep it up.