Monthly Archives: June 2011

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.

 

Ireland 2011

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This has nothing to do with gaming, but I’m planning a trip to Ireland this fall. Tonight, I launched the blog where I’ve posted my itinerary. I will be posting entries leading up to the trip, and hope to get a post up each day of the trip, with a few pictures.

If you’re at all interested in that sort of thing, you can see it here.

If you’re not, carry on.

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.