What's He On About Now?

**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 night was the first Armitage Files game in about two months. I try to run my games with a session every three weeks, but we’re all busy people, and the holiday season tends to be difficult to schedule. So, obviously, it’s been a while, but we’ve got back to it.

In the week leading up to Saturday’s game, I asked the gang what they wanted to investigate this session, so that I would have a chance to do some prep work before the game. At the end of the last session, they had blown up a mine full of… strange creatures, and narrowly escaped the Donlands-Fuschack gang.

The group decided to continue with this investigation, trying to figure out how the fortune teller back in Emigrant fit into all of this. So, I went back to my original notes¹ from the first time they visited Emigrant and fleshed things out so that there was something interesting for them to investigate.

As has become something of a tradition, we got together fairly early in the evening to dine on some very nice Indian food and talk a bit before starting the game. When we were ready to begin, we discovered that Moon was pretty badly hurt from the last session. As we were picking things up pretty much from where we had left off, the investigators decided that, before confronting the evil² fortune teller, they should head back to a big city to let Moon spend some time in the hospital.

While Moon was convalescing³, Roxy and Solis did a little more digging on background for the fortune teller, finding nothing of any use. When Moon was back in fighting trim, they bought a shotgun and some dynamite, and went back to Emigrant.

They parked the car about a quarter mile outside of town, down the railroad tracks so they could follow them back and not get lost if they were in a hurry⁴. They then crept into town, to the fortune teller’s shop, and broke in to the back.

Their first concern when breaking into her shop – the upstairs of which was also her home – was finding a pair of men’s boots in the mudroom in back. They did a cursory examination of the kitchen and the shop’s back room⁵, finding nothing of real interest⁶. Solis was able to identify the range of patent medicines on the shelves, and even a fair bit of the herbal remedies, and determined that they were nothing out of the ordinary for a rural practitioner who billed herself as an apothecary.

They crept upstairs, through the little sitting room, and into the bedroom, where they found the fortune teller lying on the bed. This caused a few moments of panic, especially when it looked as if she wasn’t breathing, but just lying fully dressed on top of the bed clothes with her eyes open. Solis finally plucked up the nerve to examine her more closely, and was quite shocked to find that she appeared to be no more than clothes and skin draped over a padded armature.

Everyone got very nervous at that point, and Solis was going to make a closer examination, but at that point, she blinked, and everyone decided to get the hell away from her. Cue the mad scramble down the stairs. They paused to take a closer look in the kitchen, and found that it had no food in it, and no sign of having had food in it any time recent. They poked about a bit, looking for a cellar door⁷ until Moon realized that, in this style of house, there was probably no cellar. There would, however,  be crawlspaces both under the house and between the first and second floor.

So, of course, everyone ran back outside to look under the house. At this point, I just gave up and went with it.

They got the little wood lattice gate off the entry to the crawlspace and saw a number of oilcloth-wrapped bundles inside. Roxy volunteered to go in a haul one out, and it proved to be a bundle of siding boards. A second bundle turned out to be bricks. The players looked at me curiously for a bit, then said, “I don’t get it. What do these mean?” And I said, “These mean that there were left-over building materials that she’s storing safely in case the house needs repairs. That’s the kind of thing people keep in crawlspaces.”

They tried to figure out if I was lying for a little bit, then shrugged and Solis crawled in to make a better examination of the space. He found a mounded section of the earth floor, and used his knife to try and dig it up. The knife blade went through about an inch or so of loose dirt and then hit a piece of wood.

That’s when the tcho-tchos pushed aside the planks that were hiding their tunnel and leaped on Solis⁸. There were three of them, and one grabbed each of Solis’s arms, while the third – who had drenched his shirt in poison⁹ – wrapped his arms and legs around Solis’s head. The good doctor struggled gamely, but was pulled into the tunnel and only managed to get out a muffled yelp before the poison shirt rendered him unconscious.

At this point, I had to start juggling scene cuts to give everyone a chance to do stuff and be involved in what was going on. Some of the time-frame got a little skewed, but it worked in play, so I count it as a win. Of course, I can’t remember exactly when I cut between characters, so I’m just going to go character-by-character through their stories.

Moon immediately crawled under the house, and down the tunnel in pursuit of Solis. I decided to give the gang a chance to rescue Solis – in a suitably challenging and cinematic finale – so the tunnel ran under the street down a few buildings to a warehouse. Moon made his way there, shooting the tcho-tcho that had been left to ambush him, and popped up through a trapdoor¹⁰ into the warehouse.

Roxy, waiting by the fortune teller’s house, heard a car on the street and hid. It turned out to be the doctor they had previously met. He came into the back yard and started calling for the characters. This struck Roxy as suspicious enough that she struck the doctor with a brick¹¹. Twice. And then stood and watched as he gasped to death on the sidewalk. Then she heard Moon’s gunshot, and ran down the street, finding the warehouse, and picking the lock on the front door to burst into the room.

Solis, meanwhile, had regained consciousness stripped naked and tied to the immense belly of a giant statue of an elephant-headed man. Yep, their old pal Chaugnar Faugn. Surrounding him were a dozen or two tcho-tchos, also naked, except for elephant-like masks. Some of these had the weird, fluid limbs of the things Moon and Roxy had faced down in the mine. Leading them was a large man wearing nothing but a full head mask that was a large version of the little crystal snow-man heads that they had learned was the effect of Chaugnar Faugn’s attention. This happy fellow started cutting on Solis, who managed a heroic Athletics roll to break the ropes tying him to the idol.

Which is when everyone else arrived.

Roxy managed to get the door open just in time to see Moon shoot down one of the kerosene lamps providing light in the building. The high priest¹² started chanting to put the flames out, and the tcho-tchos started swarming Moon and Solis. Solis tried to run for the door, but he was still suffering from the hallucinatory effects of the poison. Moon, worried that the high priest was going to put out the flames, threw a stick of dynamite into them.

Moon fully expected to die, along with the tcho-tchos and the priest. He thought it would be a valiant rescue of Solis, sacrificing his life to end this threat and save his friend. Unfortunately, Solis blew his Fleeing roll, and had already been roughed up a fair bit. I checked the damage on a stick of dynamite, and rolled it on the table in front of everyone.

Moon survived. Solis was brought to exactly -12, and was dead.

So were the tcho-tchos and the high priest and the statue and the walls. Roxy was hurt, but she and Moon managed to get Solis’s body back to the car and out of town.

Now, I hadn’t planned on killing anybody that night. In fact, I tend to go out of my way to make sure that there are chances for the PCs to escape and survive – it just means losing, sometimes. That said, this is a horror game, and the mortality of player characters is an important trope. If there’s no chance of losing, there’s no tension and no horror. So, I let the die fall and determine the outcome fairly and openly.

We ended the session a little early. The last thing we did in play was to hold Solis’s funeral. I wanted to make sure that the event was memorable, and to send off a good character with the kind of finale he had earned. I asked¹³ each of the other players to deliver a short, in-character eulogy of Solis, and I provided one by Prof. Armitage to round things out.

Then we called an end to gaming and helped create the new investigator.

Oh, and I told them the outcome of their investigation. Russel Fuschack was killed a few days later trying to rob a bank on his own, without his partner. Half the population of Emigrant, Montana was found dead. Again, the players asked me what that meant, and I just shrugged. I know what it means, but I’m not giving away any information on this one. They may decide to follow it up.

So, that was the first PC death in my Armitage Files game. All-in-all, it worked out, though I’m going to miss Dr. August Solis. He was a fun guy to torment.

1. By which I mean my scribbled diagrams. Of course, I had forgotten what all my shorthand meant by this time. [↩]
2. Allegedly. [↩]
3. With a revolver hidden in the hollowed-out Bible by his bedside. [↩]
4. What are the odds of that happening with this group? [↩]
5. Strangely – to me, anyway – they didn’t actually do any more than peek into the front room of the shop. [↩]
6. Though I think Roxy lifted her Tarot deck. Am I remembering that correctly, folks? [↩]
7. I don’t know why, but they were obsessed with finding a cellar. It all started with Roxy saying she wanted a peek in the fortune teller’s basement, and it was off and running. She tried explaining that it was just a figure of speech, that she didn’t know if the fortune teller had a basement, but everything seemed to start to revolve around how to get into this non-existent root cellar. [↩]
8. For this bit, I took the player into the kitchen, so that the other players were kept in the dark about what was happening. [↩]
9. I like tcho-tcho poison. It does whatever I need it to do, and the little guys aren’t afraid to put in on everything! [↩]
10. I had briefly considered making this come up in another crawlspace, but that just felt too mean. [↩]
11. See what I done there? [↩]
12. Of course that’s what he was. Didn’t I mention the full-head mask? [↩]
13. That’s a lie. I demanded. [↩]

The last session wrapped up the Channah storyline in the Storm Point game, which was good, but the most valuable part of the game – for me, anyway – was the discussion we had about the direction of the game from here on. That discussion happened at the beginning of the evening, but I’m not going to talk about it until the end of this post.

So, Channah.

Armed with the glyphs for Channah’s teleport circle, our heroes went out and purchased a copy of the linked portal ritual¹ and the materials they needed to conduct the ritual. They spent some time making sure they had a plan², and then teleported in to Channah’s hideout.

I was a little torn in setting up this evening’s encounters. On the one hand, I wanted to wrap things up this session, and our group is slow with combat³ – multiple full encounters meant that we would not finish this evening. On the other hand, it strained my sense of verisimilitude to have the group pop into the big main fight, kill the bad guy, and go home.

I addressed this with minions. After all, when you’re sneaking through the bad guy’s hideout, the incidental guard patrols should mainly be a threat because they can give the alarm, not because they might kill you. So, the party arrived in the cellar store room with the teleport circle to find that Channah, knowing he’s got some folks gunning⁴ for him, had set a guard.

They were, as I hinted, minions, so the gang took them out pretty quickly, but some bad rolls meant that one was able to give the alarm. There was only one door out of the room, so our heroes barred stood guard on that while they looked through the piles of boxes and barrels in the room. I tried to make it clear that the stuff was mundane supplies, but that just seemed to make them more suspicious, so they took the time to actually search everything.

At which point it occurred to me that there was this teleport circle in the middle of the room, and Channah knew how to use it. So, while everyone was either poking through barrels of flour or watching the door, a full squad⁵ teleported in behind them and got the drop on them. They mowed down this (larger) group of guards in good time, and realized that, every minute they were spending down here was one more minute Channah had to get ready.

So, out they went, and up the stairs, into the killing ground Channah had set up. I had planned the map to be fairly open to begin with, but with tables, chairs, and the like that allowed for the defenders to set up some defenses if they had a couple of minutes to prepare, which they did. The fight was tough, with some of the party’s tactics turning against them⁶. I ran into another dilemma during the battle, though.

Channah, unbeknownst to the party, was an oni mage. He usually appeared as a very, very old eladrin, and would appear and disappear using his invisibility, popping up to blast the party with some of his area attacks before vanishing again. Toward the end of the battle, I realized that it would be child’s play for Channah to just turn invisible and run off, carrying on his vendetta against the characters. I considered doing this, having him disappear for now, but come back as a recurring villain.

Then I remembered Jemmy Fish, and realized that wouldn’t work. The group would hunt him down to the exclusion of doing anything else. Ever.

So, rather than doing the better-part-of-valour, live-to-fight-another-day thing, I kept Channah there to end this. I got some good reactions when he unveiled his true form and began laying about with his massive sword⁷, and his hidden lamp-oil explosion meant that the last part of the fight was in a burning building, but the gang had thinned out his defenders enough that they were able to concentrate on him, so he went down fairly quickly⁸.

Next session, I’ll need to have something new for my players. Actually, what I’ll have to do is have a few options ready, so they can pick which direction they’re going to go.

Anyway. About that discussion I mentioned at the start of the post.

The previous session, I had mentioned that there was a moment when it looked like the group wanted to end the campaign and start a new one. In retrospect, I realized that we had been running this game for three years⁹, and it wasn’t a bad idea to take the group’s temperature and see if they wanted the game to continue, or if they were interested in a change. I started the conversation going with the following question on the Storm Point forum:

Okay, gang, last session I (facetiously) put forward a proposed campaign change, wherein you fellows become crime lords in Belys, the campaign ends, and we pick up twenty years later at first level, with you being the oppressed masses out to bring down the massive oppressors. (See what I done there?) Though I meant it as a threat, it is a viable campaign, and it seemed to capture the imaginations of some of you.

So, in light of that, I’m asking the group as a whole what you want to do. Here are the options:

• Continue with this campaign. We’ve just made it to Paragon Tier. Let’s see if we can make it to Epic Tier and become gods!
• Become crime lords and reboot. I like the world, but am bored with this character or storyline. The new one sounds better.
• Let’s try a completely new campaign. This has been fun, but I want the new hotness. Let’s try Dark Sun, or Eberron, or something else. We’ll have to have a talk to pick one.
• Let’s try a totally different game. D&D has been fun, but I’d like to try a different game system. Cthulhu, or space detectives, or superheroes, or something else cool. Again, we’ll have to have a talk to pick one.
• Screw you guys. I’m going home. It’s been fun, but I’m going to bow out of the game.

Feel free to discuss below. I am willing to roll with any of the above options, and my feelings will not be hurt if you choose something else. I’m leaving the poll active for one week, but what I’m really interested in is the conversation on the topic leading up to the votes. Revoting is allowed if the discussion changes your mind.

Have at it.

The vote was pretty overwhelmingly in favour of continuing with the current characters, but I wanted to get a better feel for how people were feeling about the game as a whole, and what they wanted to see as we went forward. The talk revolved around the fact that, three years into the game, the group had just reached 11th level.

The upshot is that the group would like to take the characters all the way to 30th level, but don’t want to spend another six years getting there. We talked about varying the progression rate in different ways, and the one that seemed to click for everyone was a technique I had used to good effect back when I was running Broken Chains – campaign downtime.

Campaign downtime means that we run regular sessions, with regular XP, and then, every so often, I say, “Okay, downtime. You’ve got two years. Give me a paragraph or two on our forum about what you do in that time, and level your character up three levels.” This allows the campaign to progress with the in-game stuff being highlights of the characters’ careers, while the out-of-game stuff allows them to flesh out backstory and provides passage of time in the game¹⁰.

The other thing we talked about was how the game was going to end. The upshot of that conversation is that I need to start using some of the stuff I’ve been talking about in my posts on emergent campaign storylines to pull together a focus for the rest of the campaign.

Now, one of the players wasn’t at the game, and wasn’t able to contribute to the conversation because of that, but I think we’ll have Milo’s buy-in on this. And it gives me some concrete things to do over the next little while to move the game forward in a way that I think everyone will like.

So, win.

1. Easy to do in Belys; the city is full of magic, wizards, and various fun arcane things. [↩]
2. Their usual plan is, “Get ‘em!” This plan was essentially, “We all ready? Okay. Now, get ‘em!” [↩]
3. There are a number of reasons for it, and some things that we could do to speed it up, but it comes down to the fact that this is a bunch of friends who don’t see each other that much anymore. One of the big distractions is our socializing and catching up, and I don’t want to lose that. So, we have slow combats, and I’ve made my peace with it. [↩]
4. Swording for him? Nah, that just doesn’t work. [↩]
5. Still minions. [↩]
6. Notably blade barrier. The party used this to great effect, but then Milo got tossed into it, and it left a bit of a mark. He survived, though. [↩]
7. Heh. [↩]
8. Well, he did. The entire session ran waaaaay over time, despite the things I tried doing to speed it up when I realized what sort of time-frame we were looking at. [↩]
9. With a brief hiatus for Gammatoba. [↩]
10. As an aside, it always strains credulity for me to run a game and realize that characters have gone from 1st level to 20th level in a matter of months, because they go out adventuring every day. If the world were really that challenging and deadly, everyone would be epic level by the time they were adults – or all the people would be dead. Just sayin’. [↩]

Last Friday was the latest session of the New Centurions game run by my friend, Clint. Our last session had ended with the White Tower¹ exploding. We started this session a little bit before that, giving us a chance to talk more with the local heroes, exchange information about the Methuselah effect, and generally get some questions answered.

Then, of course, the Tower blew up.

Actually, what it looked like was that a powerful blast of multi-coloured fire erupted from beneath the tower, tearing up through the interior, and slowly² eroding the outer walls and tossing the debris high into the air. The fire didn’t radiate heat normally – it was easy to approach to a certain distance, and then the temperature ramped up sharply, as if the inverse-square law was out of whack.

When we determined that we couldn’t get close enough to the Tower to do any good there, we got to the top of the walls and looked out at the city. It had gone completely dark; even the little bits of electricity that we had witnessed since our arrival were gone. Then we started seeing lights in the city, and realized that they were bits of the Tower debris falling into the streets, burning with the same multi-coloured fire.

We decided to split up³, with Paladin heading off with a magic-using type called Wicked, and Death Nell coming with Falkata, Widowmaker, and S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. was able to use his predictive algorithms to plot out the locations of the hot spots, and we set off to deal with them.

At the site, we found that the fragment had smashed some buildings, setting some minor fires, and was throwing off tendrils of mystic energy. It had also transformed some of the citizens into twisted, stunted creatures, who fled as we approached. It turns out that that was only so they could get the big creatures to come and thump us.

A little bit of experimentation⁴ revealed that water could not extinguish the magical “flames,” that non-living things could not touch the Tower fragment, that the tendrils and the areas they created were very dangerous to be in, and that throwing the big creatures onto the Tower fragment caused them to turn into even bigger creatures⁵.

The fight turned out to be surprisingly challenging, not so much because our foes were tough, but because the environment had interesting threats that we had to deal with, and we were unable to directly address the root cause of the problem; i.e., the Tower fragment. See, S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. couldn’t touch it, and hitting it with a weapon did no good, and none of the living players wanted to try to touch it after seeing what it did to the creatures. Widomaker was able to contain it in a forcefield, which cut it’s influence off from the surrounding area, but as she can only make one forcefield at a time, that was a temporary solution at best.

In the end, we built a bit of a cage over the fragment using the wrought iron fences in front of the townhouses, and ran off to the next trouble site.

And that’s where we left things.

1. The main tower of the Tower of London, the one you see in all the pictures. [↩]
2. Well, slower than an actual explosion, anyway. [↩]
3. Sort of. Paladin’s player wasn’t able to make the game, and Queen Celeste’s player was playing a different character (Death Nell) while Queen Celeste is doing some off-screen stuff for her character’s advancement. [↩]
4. That is, some desperate maneuvers in the battle that didn’t have the results we had hoped for. [↩]
5. That one’s on me, guys. Sorry about that. [↩]

So, today Wizards of the Coast announced the new iteration of Dungeons & Dragons¹. Of course, you know that, because that’s pretty much all that gamers are talking about on the Internet today.

I’m cautiously optimistic about the new edition. Every new edition of D&D has, to my mind, added something new and valuable to the D&D gaming experience, even if it’s left behind some things of value from previous editions, and I expect that this edition is going to be no different. It’s going to do some things right, and it’s going to miss the boat on some things. That said, the stated design goal of making an edition that is accessible and open to fans of all editions² points to the folks over at WotC recognizing that there are things of value that have been left behind in the previous years, and looking to correct that.

So. Cautiously optimistic, as I said. But as we wind down 4E³, there are some things that I really hope the design and development folks over at WotC have learned from the 4E experience:

• Value external playtester feedback. The various articles note how external playtester feedback was pretty much ignored in the development of 4E. This is a mistake, because it’s the external testers who will tell you what the game actually plays like at the table. Internal playtesters are great – and necessary – but they’ve often been steeped in the development process, and are coming to the game with a very narrow set of expectations. External playtesters have a much broader range of expectations⁴, and are better representative of the target audience. But that’s a no-brainer, right? WotC says it’s going to listen more to playtesters this time around. Let’s hope they follow through.
• Deliver what you promise. What I’m talking about here specifically is the horrible mess the online tools for 4E are. Sure, the character builder and the compendium are pretty good, but I still use the downloadable version of the monster builder, because the web-based one doesn’t have half of the functionality I need for tweaking monsters. And the virtual game table is only now really becoming available. And all the other adventure tools are… well, just not there. These are all really disappointing to someone who is paying for DDI every year, and finding himself using exactly one tool. So, you know, keep an eye on promises and the fulfillment thereof.
• It’s not all about the combats. 4E is a very focused, finely tuned ruleset, developed to make exciting, cinematic combats. And then you throw in some stuff to give the characters a reason for going from one combat to another. There really isn’t a lot out there to support play outside of combat – there’s just enough to allow the characters to find their way to the next fight. This is a large part of what makes the game feel very much like a video game⁵, and sends people looking for other things to play. All⁶ of the complexity and support for the game lies in the combat system, which emphasizes a very particular style of play. Broadening some of that complexity and emphasis would broaden the audience for the game and win back market share, I think.
• Look close to home for innovation. It’s obvious that the 4E developers looked long and hard at board games, card games, and video games when designing 4E, and that’s a good thing. But it seems to me that there are a lot of exciting new game designs out there in RPG-land, too, and looking at some of the indie⁷ RPGs and story games could provide a lot of ideas and insights into how to support non-combat actions, and how to speed up combats as well. Which is something I think D&D needs.
• Build in an entry strategy from the get-go. Start with the Essentials line, and then add the complexity. Don’t come in half-way⁸ through with the beginner set. I think this one is a no-brainer, but just putting it out there. That way, you don’t have to rely on the current fans – who may or may not make the edition switch – to build the market. You can capture the new gamers hitting the scene, and maybe even pull in the old-school fans who have poo-poohed the complexity of modern editions.
• Remember that the rules are a tool set. The rules are not the game. The game is what happens at the table. WotC is not the dispenser of truth about how to play the game, they are the providers of the rules, and the DM and players get to mangle them as they see fit. The groups are going to house-rule stuff, and twist stuff, and home-brew stuff, and just plain get stuff wrong, and that’s great, as long as they have fun. Concentrate on providing them a tool kit they can use to build their own coolness in-game, rather than a hard-and-fast, rigidly defined game experience. Leave room for the players and DMs to inject themselves into every level of gameplay and – as far as possible – support the different types of play experience. I know, that last bit is tough – be all things to all people – but it’s a valuable goal.

Those are the big lessons I hope WotC takes forward into this new iteration. Beyond that, I have my own pet peeves that I hope get eliminated and sacred cows that I hope get supported or returned to play.

There is, of course, going to be some public outcry about the whole thing – it’s another cash grab⁹, they’re ruining my favourite edition, they won’t listen to the fans enough, they will listen to the fans too much, it’s too much like game X, it’s not enough like game X, the whole thing is going to crash and burn, etc.

For my part, I’m cautiously optimistic, based on past experience. Let’s see if WotC can indeed produce a D&D game that is all things to all fans.

I’d be happy if they succeeded.

1. Note that they’re not calling it 5th Edition, but pretty much everyone else is right now. [↩]
2. A noble goal. I just don’t know how realistic it is. [↩]
3. I have no intention of jumping ship over to 5E right away unless it shows massive improvements over 4E AND can accommodate my ongoing campaign without the need for extensive revision of characters. [↩]
4. i.e., they have not drunk the company kool-aid. [↩]
5. I don’t know that it does that much, but that’s one of the primary complaints I hear. [↩]
6. Well, not all, but certainly most. [↩]
7. Whatever that really means. [↩]
8. Or three-quarters of the way, in this case. [↩]
9. C’mon, guys. WotC is a business, and of course they want to make money. That does not preclude them also wanting to make the best game they can. After all, that will net them more money, right? [↩]

I’m still a couple of posts behind, and it’s been several weeks since this game, so this is going to be another short-but-hopefully-sweet post. I really needed to get it up tonight because we’re playing the next session tomorrow.

Yeah. I’m bad.

So, at the last session, our heroes were pursuing the bagman for Channah, a local crime boss, through the sewers of Belys, in order to have a frank and open exchange of opinions about why the boys from Storm Point wouldn’t be paying any protection money. There was some discussion about what would happen after that point, with one of the players putting forward a strong preference for taking over Channah’s rackets.

Now, at this point, I spoke up. I told the players that I didn’t want to run a game¹where they were the villains. The² response was that most of the characters were Unaligned as far as alignment went, and that this would be okay. I countered with the statement that anyone running a criminal enterprise that involved protection rackets, prostitution, theft, drugs, and possibly slavery was a de facto villain, regardless of what the alignment said on their character sheets.

As my big guns in this argument, I launched into the following little rant³ to convince them that becoming crime lords was off the table.

Look. I know I generally give you guys a lot of freedom to decide what happens in the game, and what your characters do, and what their goals are. But I have to tell you, I have zero interest in running an Evil game and – no matter how you dress it up – that’s what becoming crime bosses in a big city is. I’ve run my share of Evil games back in high school, and I am not interested in running any more.

In fact, if you insist on going down this path, I will end this campaign. I will let you become the crime lords, but then the game ends, and I start a new 1st-level campaign where you all play⁴ the oppressed, exploited, downtrodden citizens who have spent the last twenty years under the thumbs of the Storm Point Gang, and the game will be all about killing your old characters and freeing the citizens from their oppression.

I should have known that my little speech was not having the desired effect when I noticed that everyone was quiet and listening to me⁵, not arguing. When I finished, there was silence for a few moments, then Dan said, “That would be awesome!” And Erik looked at me and said, “I realize you were trying to convince us that this was a bad idea, and I agreed with you, but you just talked me around to the other point of view. I want to play in that campaign!”

Chris just looked at me and sadly shook his big, bushy head.

At which point, I abandoned any sort of reasoned argument or persuasion and just said, “No. Not doing it.”

Now, though, I’m rethinking the whole idea. That could, indeed, make a pretty rocking campaign. On the other hand, we just spent three years getting everyone up to Paragon tier, and we’ve all got a lot invested in the game. I think we need to have a real conversation about this⁶; if the players want to play in that new campaign instead of the current one, I think that’s doable.

Anyway.

When we got down to playing, the heroes tracked the bagman to a trapdoor leading up into a warehouse down by the river docks. They triggered an alarm bell when they went up, and found themselves facing a couple orcs, a few ogres, and a war troll⁷. The fight dragged a bit because of all the brutes, but the good guys managed to prevail, and captured the bagman for interrogation.

Under their gentle questioning, they managed to get the bagman to agree to help them get to Channah. In exchange for the glyph key to Channah’s teleport circle, the party would let the bagman take over Channah’s territory – with the party being exempt from protection fees, of course.

So, tomorrow’s session is going to see the assault on Channah’s stronghold. The fights so far have all been below character level for the party, which may have been giving them an inflated sense of their own badassery, but the stuff I’m throwing at them tomorrow is going to be significantly tougher. That’s a little tidbit of a warning for any of my players who happen to read my blog before the game tomorrow.

Should be fun.

1. I’m a firm believer that the GM gets to have fun running a game. If he or she isn’t, why do it? Thus, if it’s a game I don’t want to run, then I’m within my rights to just not run it. [↩]
2. Somewhat predictable, really. [↩]
3. This is, of course, not verbatim. But it captures the rhetoric and the content pretty well. [↩]
4. And this is where the car left the road. Not even skid marks. It’s like the driver pointed the car at the cliff and stood on the accelerator. Obviously a suicide run. [↩]
5. I never get everyone paying attention to me at once! Never! [↩]
6. Probably not tomorrow, though; one of the players is unable to make the game. [↩]
7. FIRE or ACID. [↩]

As anyone who frequents this blog can tell, I’m even more behind on posting than I usually am. Sorry about that. There have been a number of things eating my time this past little while, and the blog has been neglected. Looking to start to fix that here.

Unfortunately, a lot of time has gone by since some of the events I’m reporting on, so these catch-up posts are probably going to be shorter and vaguer than normal. Once I’m back up to speed, things will¹ return to a more regular schedule.

At the end of the last session, our heroes had been moderately trounced by bad guys looking for the hard drive full of genetic data we retrieved from Les Fantômes². One of the Aegis agents helping us was dead, the safehouse had collapsed, and Paladin, Queen Celeste, and S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. were all buried in the rubble.

The aftermath of that had us digging out of the wreckage while Myra Glass harried us and her companions did their best to dig themselves out, as well.  We managed to acquit ourselves a little better in this battle – S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. even managed to pitch a rock right into the spot Myra materialized from her teleport, hurting her badly. After a bit of a chase through the city after the last escaping villain, we had secured the hard drive, and driven off the bad guys.

We turned over the one bad guy we had actually captured³ to the police, and figured we had better make our way out of France, especially as some fake⁴ Interpol agents seemed to be investigating us. That led us on to London, to check out the London chapter of the Century Club, and see what we could find there.

Widowmaker managed to teleport us to Picadilly Circus, where we found London to be… well, dark. Our information had revealed that there had been no transmissions out of England for the past several weeks⁵. The reason for that seemed to be that all technology more advanced than wedges and levers had stopped working. Well, that’s an exaggeration – it seemed that there were some items of technology working, but nothing more recent that about 1940⁶.

We finally tracked down some of the heroes of London, and they explained that technology had started failing when the magic came back, and that the countryside was now a place of dangerous fairy tales. S.P.E.C.-T.E.R.’s having a hard time accepting that, despite the time he’s spent around magic-using Queen Celeste, but he’s also plenty worried about what’s going to happen to him, being a robot and all.

And then, of course, we were attacked, and that’s where we left the game. Next session is tomorrow night, and I’m really looking forward to it.

1. Hopefully. [↩]
2. So we assume, anyway. [↩]
3. She was a feral, animalistic fighter that we chased down and exhausted because we couldn’t manage to hit her. And it’s been so long that I don’t recall her name. [↩]
4. Or genuine, but crooked. [↩]
5. Starting, of course, around the time that we found Methuselah in Manhattan. [↩]
6. My guess is nothing later than 1933. [↩]

I can’t believe I just found out about this.

Last week some time, Fred Hicks tweeted¹ about this comic called Atomic Robo. The tweet included this link, which you should check out. I did. And it intrigued me so much, I immediately went and bought all the Atomic Robo comics².

There are currently five complete series of Atomic Robo up on Comixology, each series running from four to six issues. In addition, there’s a sixth series that is in progress³ and three Free Comic Book Day issues. I read them all in a binge over the weekend, and am now very sad that I’ve finished them. Gonna have to reread very soon.

The idea behind the comic is simple: in the 1920s, Nicola Tesla built a robot. Ever since then, the robot has been fighting crime and dealing with weird technological mysteries, alongside his team of Action Scientists. What more could you ask for? It’s written by Brian Clevinger, drawn by Scott Wegener, coloured by Ronda Pattison, and lettered by Jeff Powell.

Now, the link above gives you a really good overview and teaser to the comics, so I’m not going to go into much depth about them. I’m just going to talk about why I like them, and why you should go buy them.

• Echoes of some great sources. You see the influence of Hellboy, Planetary, Indiana Jones, and Buckaroo Banzai⁴ in the story and structure, and the influence of Mike Mignola and Dave Stevens⁵ in the art.
• Transcending its influences. The influences in the book are visible, but the comic is not just a pastiche of the sources. It takes elements from the sources and turns them into something new, exciting, and brilliant. Standard tropes are lampooned or inverted, all with smart, savvy commentary on the sources.
• Taking chances. The stories jump all through Atomic Robo’s⁶ history, and deal with everything from Nazi super-tanks to time-traveling⁷ dinosaur geniuses to the evil manipulations of Stephen Hawking. It does unexpected things, smart things, things that fill me with mad glee.
• Smart, yet absurd. One of my favourite moments in the books – one which, for me, sums up the heart of Atomic Robo – is when a giant monster rises from Tokyo bay, and Robo says, “Why do we even have the square-cube law?” There is something sublime about that image: a sentient, atomic-powered robot built by Nicola Tesla complaining about a violation of physics.
• Trusts the readers. In that moment I described above, there is no explanation of the square-cube law. The book trusts the readers to get it. With the tangled, time-jumping stories, the book trusts the readers to keep up. The comic treats the readers as intelligent, creative, adaptable people, and trusts them to be able to follow along on the mad, joyous ramble through the story.
• Fun. Fun! FUN!! The stories, situations, and characters are just a whole lot of fun. The art is clean, kind-of-cartoony, with great monsters and expressions⁸ and fights and motion. It’s just an amazingly fun comic.

Here’s a link to the official website of Atomic Robo. You should go buy all the comics.

And Atomic Robo folks? Please make more. Very quickly.

Thanks.

1. Actually, he retweeted. But anyway. [↩]
2. Well, not went so much as fired up Comixology on my iPad and downloaded them. I love you, Comixology! [↩]
3. On issue #4, as I write this. [↩]
4. To be fair, I’m not really a fan of Buckaroo Banzai, but that’s more of an issue with the execution than the idea. The idea of Buckaroo and his Hong Kong Cavaliers rocks. What they did with it just didn’t work for me. [↩]
5. And probably others – I’m not an art guy. I can’t really talk intelligently about it. But the style reminds me a little of Mike Mignola, and Robo looks a bit like The Rocketeer, so there you go. [↩]
6. Yes, the robot’s name is Atomic Robo. Why else would the book be called that? [↩]
7. Or so he claims. [↩]
8. Atomic Robo has the most amazingly expressive face, considering he doesn’t really have a face. [↩]

Well. I have to say that this last session of Feints & Gambits did not go in the direction I had envisioned.

A large part of the reason for that was my fault – I hadn’t prepared well enough for the game to have a really solid idea of where the session was headed, looking to follow the players’ lead and fill in detail on the fly. That approach had a couple of problems: first, it was a large group, and that led to a lot of debate and discussion of strategy, which slowed down play and made for some very passive choices. Second, I tried to link in a couple of different threads, one¹ of which I should have dropped, which led to muddying the water and confusing the objectives.

For games like The Dresden Files RPG, I don’t design adventures, as such. What I do is create situations, where I know the movers and shakers, what their goals are, and what actions they will take if confronted with opposition. I put together a page or two of stats for the opposition², and draw a little map of the situation, showing the relationship between the various people, places, and agendas.

While building the situation, I look for ways for the characters to become aware of at least an edge of what’s going on – a hook to draw them in. The game usually starts with me running the hook scene³, and then I sit back and take my lead from the what the characters do.

That’s my normal process, and it works pretty well – usually. This last session, though, I hadn’t done enough preparation. I had all the elements of the situation, and knew the overarching goals of the main NPCs involved, but I hadn’t given enough thought to how they were connected. I was trusting to the interplay between the characters and myself to flesh that out, the way it happens in the Armitage Files game. But that game is more focused, with a stated overall goal, and only three players. Feints & Gambits does not have, and has not manifested, an overarching plotline to focus things, and the larger number of players diffuses the focus.

Anyway, I went into the game knowing that the focus was going to be Padraig Pearse’s ghost. Two of the hook scenes pointed to him⁴, suggesting that he was up to something, and that it was taking place at the GPO. The group saddled up and decided to break into the GPO after hours to scope the place out.

This is where the wheels came off.

See, my plan was that Pearse, who had almost been destroyed in his last encounter with the party, wanted them safely busy ghosthunting at the GPO while he raided the Guinness Brewery for more of the True Guinness, seeing as he wasn’t going to be given a bottle this year as tribute for acting as the judge of the Easter battle for the fey⁵. So, I planted a couple of clues at the GPO to show them that they were on a wild goose chase: no sign of any ghosts around, a carton of milk that psychometry told them had been deliberately soured by a ghost, and a couple of things the group didn’t uncover.

Well, I misjudged the clues. They weren’t enough to make the characters suspicious of the whole set-up, and they were spending a lot of time dithering around in the employees’ kitchen of the GPO, so I upped the stakes, and had the police show up, thinking this would drive them into the upper floors and out through the roof access, giving me a chance to seed a few clues along the way. I even threw Gene Hunt into the mix, to give them a little extra motivation to scarper.

Didn’t work.

I put Hunt and a squad of Gardai between the characters and their exit on the main floor, so they hid, trusting to their veil to keep them hidden from the search. It worked, but the cops were still between them and the way they came in. Aleister made a break for it past the police, leaving the veil in an attempt to draw the police off. This was a noble try, but we’re talking about one of the most historically important buildings in Dublin having been broken into. The cops are gonna be on the scene for a while.

To make things a little more interesting, I put a few squad cars out front with armed officers waiting⁶, but Aleister had no real problem getting past them. Because I was feeling surly, and because of the tip about the terrorists, I had the armed officers make a Discipline check to keep from shooting at Aleister as he ran into the crowd, and they failed miserably⁷. So, some gunfire into the bystanders who had gathered to see what was going on, and a couple of spectators hit.

Meanwhile, inside, Kate pulled the fire alarm and lit a garbage can on fire. The rest of the group headed upstairs, but stopped when they noticed a scattering of iron nails across the floor by the stairs. Nate cleared those out of the way with a little evoked magnetism⁸, and they headed on up with Firinne’s faerie veil intact, though Kate was still back in the kitchen and outside of the veil.

Hunt found her, and arrested her. Rogan decided to come down and try to talk to Hunt – whom she thinks is the Black Cat, a mortal who works to keep the mystical elements in Dublin from running rough-shod over the mundanes⁹. She also wound up cuffed and stuck in the back of a patrol car.

Outside, Aleister, agonizing over the bystanders shot in his escape¹⁰, ditched his jacket and cap and came back to administer first aid. Hunt came out and spotted him, and asked if he’d be willing to answer some questions at the station – he is under the impression that Aleister works for Rogan. Aleister declined, but put his hand on Hunt’s shoulder, and thereby gave him an excuse to arrest Aleister for assault.

So, Hunt, being used to dealing with a corrupt system and wealthy families getting away with whatever they want, is being cagey. He’s got each of the three folks he’s arrested at a different police jail, with the paperwork lost, and no sign of a solicitor.

The other three folks made it up and out of the GPO with very little trouble, and scampered away into the night.

To wrap things up, I decided an exposition dump was needed to drive home the fact that the thing had been a trap. While Nate, early the next morning, was watching the GPO¹¹, Aengus showed up, looking like he’d lost a bar brawl¹². He filled Nate in on the fact that Pearse had shown up at the Brewery and taken not just one bottle of the True Guinness, but five of them.

So. As I say, not the way I expected things to go. Next game, I’ve got a much more solid idea of how things fit together, so it should be more focused, as we head into the beginning of the through-line of plot that will lead to the culmination of the game. Actual culmination won’t be for at least six months, yet, but it’s coming.

1. At least one. [↩]
2. Sometimes. Lots of time, in games like DFRPG and Trail of Cthulhu, it’s really easy to improvise the stats I need. But for the big names and the “boss fights,” I like to have put some thought in before hand. [↩]
3. Or scenes. I find that, with my group, if I want to make sure the gang saddles up and involves themselves with the situation, it’s a good idea to plant seeds with a couple of the characters. [↩]
4. The third hook scene I probably should have dropped. It was tied to the Malleus Maleficarum trying to recruit Aleister, and I didn’t have a good connection between that and the plot for the session. I mean, the scene was good for developing Aleister’s character, and it introduced the Malleus into play, but it didn’t contribute to the current storyline, and may have distracted from it. Oh, well. [↩]
5. This is because all the ghosts in Dublin were freed by the death curse of a necromancer a few sessions ago. [↩]
6. I had decided, when I sent the police in, that they had been tipped off that there were dangerous CIRA terrorists breaking into the GPO. That justified the extra firepower. [↩]
7. -4 is -4, dudes. [↩]
8. Which pinned Firinne to the wall for a few seconds, too; she was carrying all of Aleister’s guns, because he didn’t want to get caught with them. [↩]
9. It was established in the setting creation that Hunt is clued in, but they have no real evidence that he’s the Black Cat. All they’ve got is rumour. [↩]
10. Compelled both his I Am Thy Shield and his It Should Have Been Me aspects. Yeah, I can be a bastard. [↩]
11. I think he was hoping Pearse would show so he could blast him to oblivion. [↩]
12. Yes, it is possible, because he’s probably not the Dagda at all! [↩]

Wow. I’m falling behind on the posts. Sorry, folks. I’ll try and catch up before Christmas.

We opened this last session of Storm Point with our heroes brainstorming what they wanted to do about Channah, the gang boss who thought it was a good idea to demand protection money from the party. There were some suggestions, but the group was really lacking information about how things worked in Belys. In the end, they decided to spend some time trying to figure out how the Belysian underworld was organized.

Full disclosure time. One of the proposals on the table was that the group find an enemy gang and get them to pay the group to wipe out Channah and turn his territory over to the other gang. I didn’t like that idea for one simple reason: it turns the heroes of Storm Point into petty thugs and enforcers in the big city. Now, part of what I want to do with this phase of the game¹ is to show the characters as being in a much bigger pond than they’re used to – they are the heroes of a little fishing town out in the middle of nowhere, and now they’re in the big city, playing with the big boys. But I didn’t want to completely invalidate their hard-won heroic status, and turn them into villains².

Given that desire on my part, I structured the underworld³ in such a way that getting one gang leader to pay to kill another was not going to happen. I had already decided that the city was ruled by a cabal of genasi noble families⁴, each of whom controlled a different section of the city. Within their own city ward, the noble family has pretty much absolute power, and is fiercely territorial. Thus, any incursion from another city ward – even by unsanctioned criminals – would be met with devastating force. No crime boss wants to risk attracting that kind of animosity.

I didn’t want to just close off avenues of action, though. I wanted to let the players know that, as long as they kept things fairly quiet and didn’t harm any civilians or attract official attention, the powers-that-be would turn a blind eye to them. After all, the nobles don’t much care if someone kills a gang leader, as long as no one is trying to usurp the noble prerogative.

So, in the end, the group decided to wait for the next visit from one of Channah’s men, and try and get a meeting with Channah himself, whereupon they would proceed with their standard negotiation tactics⁵. They didn’t expect the bag man⁶ to agree, so they posted the ranger and the monk on the rooftops to follow him back to the hideout that the group had so far been unable to locate.

It almost went the way they wanted. The bag man had an escort of ogres and a troll, and didn’t seem impressed with the threats the group made, nor with their demands. After all, they were in his city now, and were just country bumpkins from some no-name fishing village over the mountains. So, when they refused to give him the money, and demanded to meet with Channah, he refused. He gave them one last chance to pay, then nodded sadly, and dropped something in the kitchen well and walked out.

I cheated a bit here, and one of the players almost called me on it, but restrained himself⁷. What I wanted to do was completely wrong-foot the group to show them they weren’t dealing with Jemmy Fish and his halfling pickpockets back in Storm Point. So, I didn’t give anyone a chance to react to the guy dropping his little surprise and sauntering out. Unfair? Yeah, it is. But it was a dramatic choice meant to drive home the fact that these people are playing for keeps, and are good at what they do. Channah is smart, resourceful, and ruthless, and he has some good people working for him. That’s all information the group needs.

And thus the kitchen filled with a vapour of elemental water that started drowning everyone in the room⁸. They got the kitchen staff out of there, and the swordmage used his fire-based abilities to purge the elemental water before anyone died. And then they were out in the street, chasing the bag man.

Up on the roofs, the monk and the ranger kept pace with the bad guys, following them through the winding streets. They spotted when the bag man ducked out of the middle of his guards and vanished down an alleyway, and flagged down the other characters when they caught up on the ground.

Then it was down into the sewers, where they found themselves led into what was meant to be an ambush⁹. It turned out not to be a very good one, and our heroes got the drop on the bad guys. It was a fairly long fight, but the heroes were never really threatened. Their opponents were a few trolls, a couple shambling mounds, a basilisk, and a bog hag – none of them were up to the characters’ level, and the majority were brutes. When the hit the characters, it hurt a lot, but the hits were few and far-between. But man, could they soak up damage.

At the end of the fight, we wrapped for the evening. We actually got a fair bit done¹⁰, and I’ve been gratified that the last several sessions – and it looks like the next one this Sunday – have had a full roster of players.

We’ll see where they go from here.

1. The early Paragon Tier, that is. Maybe levels 11-13. [↩]
2. Arguments can be made about anti-heroes and shades of grey and how most of the group is Unaligned and yadda-yadda-yadda. Y’know what? Don’t care. If you get one gang boss to pay you to kill another one and give him the dead boss’s territory, you’re not heroes. You’re assassins. And that’s not what I want this game to be. [↩]
3. On the fly, as part of a skill challenge to gather information. [↩]
4. Just a quick note for those of you who read this post. While the first part of what I wrote about Belys there is accurate, the secret I list is not. What, you think I’m stupid enough to put a secret from an ongoing campaign where my players might see it? Don’t answer. [↩]
5. “Get ‘em!” [↩]
6. Bag half-orc, in this case. [↩]
7. Thanks, Erik! I appreciate the trust. [↩]
8. I handled it like a poison in mechanical effect. +5 vs. Fort, 2d6 damage, and ongoing 5 poison damage (save ends) each round on everyone in the room. [↩]
9. Channah is smart, remember? He plans ahead. [↩]
10. For us, at least. [↩]

Last week, Pelgrane Press made their new GUMSHOE game, Night’s Black Agents, available for preorder. The preorder included a bare-bones-layout version of the game and, being a ravening GUMSHOE fanboy¹, of course I had to grab it and spend the weekend reading it.

The premise of Night’s Black Agents is that a small group of ex-official spies – the PCs – working in the modern European intelligence underground stumble across evidence that a conspiracy of vampires² exists and is now aware of them. To avoid the vampires killing them, the newly clued-in spies must destroy the conspiracy.

That’s the bare-bones, unmodified version of the game. One of the things I like about NBA is that it is eminently customizable, and Ken provides four different modes of play that you can mix and match to get the flavour of spy story that you prefer:

• Burn Mode focuses on the emotional and social cost of being a spy. Think the Bourne series, or Alias.
• Dust Mode is the default setting, a gritty thriller-style game, like Three Days of the Condor or Sandbaggers.
• Mirror Mode is pure Le Carré paranoia and betrayal, where trust is a commodity and identity is fluid.
• Stakes Mode focuses on the higher purpose that motivates the heroes, highlighting their drive and dedication to get the job done, as seen in James Bond films and Tom Clancy novels.

As I said, you can mix and match these modes to get the right balance for the story you want to tell. You can also decide if the story you’re telling is a thriller, adding in special Thriller Combat and Thriller Chase rules to up the level of action.

The core of the game is the GUMSHOE engine, which has been tweaked to emphasize covert operations rather than pure investigation. The Investigative Abilities see the addition of Human Terrain, Tradecraft, and Vampirology, and the General Abilities get Network, Cover, and Surveillance³. You can also buy some specialty packages that give you a bundle of Investigative and General Abilities – these don’t give you a point discount, but are useful for seeing what kinds of skills an agent would have if they specialized that way.

One interesting tweak⁴ to character creation is the MOS – Military Occupational Specialty. It lets you pick one General Ability and, once per session, automatically succeed with that ability. It’s an interesting idea, and I think it could lead to some neat metagame resource management. There’s a nice little sidebar that talks about using the MOSs of the team as keystones when the agents are planning an op.

The other major tweak to the system is providing something special – a Cherry – for almost any General Ability with a rating of 8+. These are either something you can do for free (hotwire a car with a Drive of 8+), extra points in Investigative Abilities (1 free point of Diagnosis with Medic 8+), or a new way to spend points from that ability (get an extra die of damage from an explosion for 3 points from Explosive Devices). For the lo-fi Dust Mode, a lot of these Cherries are off the table, but there are a few marked as being appropriate for that style of game.

This iteration of GUMSHOE uses Sources of Stability, but it prescribes what they are. Each agent gets three, one each of Symbol (a representation of an important ideal, like a flag), Solace (a person the agent seeks out for human contact), and Safety (a person and place the agent would flee to without thinking). These three categories are chose to highlight the isolation of being a spy, and also to give the GM some nice, concrete targets when time comes to gut-punch the agent.

There are also twelve Drives to choose from, specifically chosen to fit into the spy genre. These are things like Patriotism, Restoration, Atonement, and Nowhere Else to Go. A sidebar provides some ideas for adding personal arcs, an idea first seen in Ashen Stars. The information here is far less detailed and structured than in AS, if only because NBA does not mirror an ongoing TV serial as tightly as AS.

The rest of the rules are pretty standard GUMSHOE stuff, with the exception of the Thriller rules and Heat. Thriller rules are options for combat and chases that add a more cinematic, over-the-top feel to the game – stuff like extra attacks, called shots, parkour chases across the rooftops, things like that. The book states right up front the fact that adding these in, while making for more extravagant action, will add a layer of complexity to the normally very fast GUMSHOE rules. None of them is overly complicated, but they are more involved than the extremely simple and light base GUMSHOE rules for such things.

Heat is a mechanic to determine how much official notice the actions of the group attract. It’s a number that climbs with every dead body, every police chase, and every heist, and drops only with time or evasion. Heat is rolled during a session to see if the authorities take notice and get involved to complicate everyone’s lives. So, quiet spies are safer spies.

The gear section of the book lays out not only a fun laundry list of spy toys, but also a vampire-hunter’s arsenal. So, beside the comms laser and flash-bangs, you’ll find garlic and wooden bullets⁵. There are also details on how the agents can get all the good toys, considering they’re likely on the run and on a budget.

Following the gear section is a chapter on special tactics that the agents can use to represent their training. Things like Tactical Fact Finding, which uses Investigative Abilities to gain an advantage in a tactical situation⁶, or Tag-Team Tactics, which is pretty much what it says on the tin – using one ability to provide a benefit to someone else using a different ability. This chapter also includes a brief primer on Tradecraft and Asset Handling⁷, and finishes with a short section on Adversary Mapping, to help the group make those neat picture-and-string organized crime diagrams you see in TV and movies.

Next comes vampires. This is where I really fell in love with this game.

Ken Hite, as anyone who has read Trail of Cthulhu or his Suppressed Transmission column knows, is a master of providing a range of options for any single idea, whether it’s an interpretation of a Great Old One or a possible reason the Dogon people know so much about the star Sirius. Here, he turns that skill to vampires, providing a pantry-full of ingredients to let you build the flavour of vampire you like best for your game. There’s a range of origins, powers, weaknesses, and motivations that you can blend together into pretty much whatever kind of vampire you want. To show how it all fits together, he provides four examples of very different vampires ready to be dropped into your game.

I cannot stress enough how much I like this chapter, and this entire approach. One of the problems with using vampires as the main bad guys is that everyone knows all about them, and thus there is no real surprise about what they can do and what they can’t. This is mitigated somewhat by the fact that there are dozens – if not hundreds – of different vampire versions out there in the world of fiction⁸, and they all have different strengths and weaknesses. What this chapter does is leverage that fact, drawing on fiction and folklore to provide enough options that the agents will need to do a lot of field testing to make sure they know how to go up against the vampires. It brings uncertainty and fear back into the vampire equation, where it belongs.

Oh, and it makes it clear that vampires are monsters. They are not misunderstood. They feed on and kill humans, whether because they’re evil or because they are alien and indifferent to human suffering. They’re the bad guys, not the dangerous romantic leads.

After the four statted-up versions of vampires, the book provides stat blocks for a few related creatures: the lamia, the bhuta, the dhampir, stuff like that. Handy if you want to throw a supernatural enemy at the agents, but don’t want to go full-on vamp on them just yet.

The last few sections of the book deal with building the conspiracy and campaign. There’s a discussion of what vampires need to survive, what their agenda is, and how to put together a diagram of the conspiracy.

This is my one criticism of the book. While there is a discussion at a high level of vampire motivations and requirements in a conspiracy, and and a discussion of what kinds of things fit in at each level of the conspiracy, and a finished conspiracy diagram⁹, I would have liked to have seen an example of building that diagram – going from the raw material and thoughts to a concrete finished pyramid. Just a little more guidance here would have been very helpful.

There’s also a good section on quickly roughing-in cities for the game, coming up with the bare minimum to fit the place into your ongoing campaign, as well as a few roughed-in examples and one more detailed city laid out.

The advice that follows, about building stories and the overall campaign, and determining the conspiracy’s reactions to the agents, is meaty and solid. There’s good advice on how to pace things, how to structure things, how to plan, and how to improvise madly when your plan goes off the rails. All in all, a very useful section of the book.

The book ends with an introductory adventure. I don’t want to say too much about it, so as not to spoil things, but it’s got some nice twists, with desperation and paranoia baked right in. It does a good job not only of introducing the vampire conspiracy, but also of showcasing the cold, dark, desperate world that is the espionage underground of modern Europe.

Final thoughts? Of course I love the book. Now, you might dismiss my opinion because I’m an ardent Pelgrane and GUMSHOE fan, but I don’t like the games because I’m a fan. I’m a fan because of the great games.

Specifically, I like this book for a few reasons. First, it provides an interesting combination of genres – you don’t see vampire/spy stuff anywhere else that I know of. There’s not even a whole lot of vampire hunter stuff out there. Second, it makes vampires scary again. They are monsters, and they are horrific and powerful. Third, the structure of the campaign fits the kinds of things I like to do in games. It provides a finite story, of a length determined during play, with a built-in climax that does not guarantee agent success. And fourth, it has enough tools and dials that I can customize the feel of the game to what my players want. Whether we go over-the-top James Bond style, or down-and-dirty George Smiley style, the game has the tools to support and reinforce the feel we decide on. Hell, there are even options for adding weird powers for the heroes, or removing the vampires entirely.

If you like scary vampires, if you like espionage games, if you’re looking for a dark, modern game of horror investigation, I heartily recommend you pick up this book, if not now, then in March when the hardcover is released¹⁰. You’ll like it.

1. Not to mention a ravening Ken Hite fanboy. [↩]
2. That almost works as a collective noun, doesn’t it? A conspiracy of vampires. Not quite, but getting close. [↩]
3. There also seem to be more cross-over skills, i.e., General Abilities that you can use as Investigative Abilities. [↩]
4. Which is not available in Dust Mode. Or rather, it is recommended that it not be available in Dust Mode. [↩]
5. Not that there’s any guarantee that these will work on the vampires in YOUR game. [↩]
6. Yeah, that’s kind of convoluted. Best I could boil it down, though. The book makes the use pretty clear, but it is a lengthy explanation. It’s a cool tweak, though. [↩]
7. Though I found myself wanting more information here. Fortunately, Wikipedia came to my rescue! [↩]
8. I want to note for the record that sparkling does not appear as one of the vampire powers/weaknesses. Just sayin’. [↩]
9. Called the Conspyramid. [↩]
10. I just couldn’t wait that long. [↩]