Noble Dogs

Several years ago I ran what I believe to be one of the best single-session Call of Cthulhu scenarios of all time.  That scenario is My Little Sister Wants You To Suffer which is one of a collection of scenarios included in Cublice 7’s Cthulhu Britannica.  I liked it so much I ran the scenario 7 times for more than 35 different players, posted a review online, (Spoiler Warning)  and even made available the additional materials I had created to enhance the game (a sectional map, simplified character sheets and handouts, computer voice prompts etc.).  It remains an enduring favourite scenario for me, containing the right level of complexity, lethality, hilarity with a killer twist.

I’m therefore very pleased to say that Paul Fricker, the author of My Little Sister, has released a new one-off scenario for Call of Cthulhu called Dockside Dogs.  He’s made this scenario available for a small donation into cancer research.  You can support cancer research here [EDIT: Updated as Paul has now set this up via DriveThru RPG]. Dockside Dogs is a modern-day scenario for 3-6 players and includes character sheets for Mr. Beige, Mr. Purple, Mr. Black, Mr. Red, Mr. Silver and Mr. Green.

Congratulations to Paul, both for donating his work to such a worthy cause, and for his contribution to the forthcoming 7^th Edition of Call of Cthulhu.

In other news I have commenced running ‘Beyond the Mountains of Madness’ and am enjoying finding the right balance for the slow start to the campaign.  Hopefully the time and effort spent in this early phase, developing the characters, and their relationships, will pay dividends in drama when we get to the ice.

Return to the Cold

There hasn’t been a great deal of activity here in recent weeks.  Mostly this is because I’m in the middle of trying to revise EPOCH, my horror roleplaying game, and add some adventures.  Posted below is a teaser extract of the blurb and cover:

"EPOCH is the game of character-driven horror.  At its heart is the goal of delivering a genuinely scary experience in a single game session.  EPOCH delivers this by identifying, and cutting through, conventional barriers to achieving strong player engagement, placing the focus squarely on character and supporting this with a simple, yet evocative, system.

 

There will be blood…  EPOCH is a game of survival horror, and much like the movies, not all of the characters can expect to survive until the final scene.  Unlike many other games, EPOCH players have complete control over the fate of their characters.  They may know the rules of the horror genre, but who becomes a victim, and how, is different every time.

There will be drama…  EPOCH rewards interesting character play with increased chances of character survival.  Players are not just the protagonists, but also act as the audience who hold the fate of all the characters in their hands.  Using a simple, flexible, character creation method, complications and flashbacks, players shape their back story to reveal interesting new facts and surprising twists.

There will be a reckoning… EPOCH assumes a high level of character competence, streamlining skills and abilities, and placing the focus back on the characters’ story and the personal impact of the horror.  But victory is never assured, evil may prevail, and the true cost of the horror is never fully revealed until the final credits roll."

Thanks to Doug for an amazing job with the cover art.

In other game news, I finished running Lure of the Expanse with a suitably epic ending.  As with the rest of Lure, the ending has grand ambition and scope, but is not backed up with a lot of detail.  I think the campaign could easily have been 2-3 times longer and really done a great job of each of the really ambitious and fascinating elements. As it is, it feels like the outline of a truly great campaign, but ultimately fails to deliver on its promise..

This week I hope to run a one-off game of Flying Coffins for my Cthulhu group this week - I've long throught WWI aviators would make a great cthulhu adventure, and even wrote a plot outline of an adventure myself, but have yet to write it up:

Next, in time for the return of winter, it’s a journey Beyond the Mountains of Madness.  I’m using a toned down version of my pulp house rules, which allow the players a finite number of skill re-rolls.  I’ve also drawn on the Pillars of Sanity concept from Trail of Cthulhu to have the players crate several anchors for each character – unfulfilled ambitions or links to the world, which can restore a limited amount of sanity during the campaign with appropriate play.

Gaming in 2011

It's the second birthday of TPK, and I'd like to thank you for stopping by to read my thoughts on all things gaming.  Last year at this time we (Morgue, Cam , Gareth and I) had just released The Aotearoa Gambit to support some of the real heroes of the Christchurch earthquake (by the way, it's currently on sale).  It remains something I'm proud of, although it's hard to believe it's been a year since we worked on that.

At that time I set some goals for the next 12 months, and I thought I'd better check in and see how much progress I made against them:

1. Continue to run my Kingsport Tales campaign.
Alas, this I failed to achieve.  Other campaigns took precedence and Kingsport languished.  I'd love to return, and plan to try and recapture some of that old Kingsport magic with the slow burn of 'Beyond the Mountains of Madness' later this year.

2. Run Masks of Nyarlathotep – Pulp Edition.
Check.  It was great fun - my thoughts on the campaign are here.

3. Run a Rogue Trader mini-series.
Check.  I'm in the middle of running Lure of the Expanse right now, my thoughts on it are here.

4. Run a Superhero mini-series.
Check. I ran Reverie for a great group of players, and posted about it here.

5. Attend upcoming Wellington tabletop roleplaying conventions.
Check. I attended, and ran games at Day of Games, ConFusion, Fright Night and Kapcon.

6. Write and publish EPOCH
Partial check.  I've almost finished the first draft of my character-driven horror roleplaying game, but there's still a fair ways to go before I publish it.

7.  Write and submit a scenario for Fear Itself
Nope,  this remains something I'm interested in doing, although I'm currently pouring all my thoughts and creativity into EPOCH, and it seems hard to imagine spending any time on a horror game that wasn't EPOCH as it represents my best efforts in this genre.

8. Write and submit another scenario for ICONS
Nope.

9.  Write and submit a monograph or scenario for Call of Cthulhu
Check.  I wrote Sundown a Call of Cthulhu Adventure of the Old West to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Call of Cthulhu.

So how about the next 12 months?  Well here are my goals:

- Finish and publish EPOCH
- Write a good selection of scenarios for EPOCH
- Run the Call of Cthulhu campaign Beyond the Mountains of Madness
- Run the Warpstorm Trilogy, a Rogue Trader campaign
- Attend upcoming local tabletop roleplaying conventions
- Write and publish my Call of Cthulhu resource
- Write and possibly co-run a zany disco based game with Mike

What about you?

Going Rogue

I’ve recently been running Lure of the Expanse for Rogue Trader, and I have to say, it’s been a really fun time. I’ve been wanting to run a science-fiction campaign for some time, after playing in Doug’s Dark Heresy game for Fright Night Splinter of Corruption, and Rogue Trader is the first game that really appealed to me as a premise. Rogue Trader seems to do a lot of things well, I’ve already written about how it formalises the individual vs group paradigm in a way that works with the current published material, so I thought I might expand my thoughts on why Rogue Trader is currently hitting the spot.

First, the core system has a fair bit of crunch. Rogue Trader is a slightly tweaked version of the Dark Heresy system, which, in turn is a slightly tweaked version of the core WFRP 2nd ed. System. What this means is that there are a lot of pages in the book devoted to character paths, and a lot devoted to equipment. Trying to read this cold is a bit of a hard task unless you just love this kind of detailed abstraction. Personally, I don’t, and I struggle to prioritise this reading over my scenario prep and broader reading for the setting, which leave me feeling a little behind the curve on the characters. Not a big problem, games like D&D 4th ed. showed that you can compartmentalise characters from the GM tools, if you do this in a consistent and balanced way.

Unfortunately Rogue Trader lacks the finesse and completeness of 4th ed. D&D in this regard, leaving the players sometimes confused and working to integrate several sections of rules. This is no worse than many old-school games of this ilk, but much like the games on which Rogue Trader has been based, a casual player will spend a fair chunk of the game flicking through the rules – so you’d better have multiple rulebooks if you don’t want to slow the game right down.

Next, combat. Again, this is a fairly traditional fare, which is fairly reminiscent of D&D 3.5. However, unlike 3.5 which, more or less, required you to use a map or tactical layout, you can get by in small scale Rogue Trader encounters without such tools. This is mostly due to the ‘exploding’ dice mechanic (like in WFRP) which can unexpectedly truncate combat, and the presence of a combat specialist in most Rogue Trader’s retinues. Unfortunately, if you want to run a larger combats you really do need some kind of tactical materials, plus, as with WFRP in the GM chair there are inevitably a large number of special abilities and traits to look up (and, not being familiar with the character section works against you here) which adds to the prep time for a given game.

I should have said the above section refers to personal combat, because in Rogue Trader starship combat is also something you can do. So far it seems fairly cool, although we have only lightly touched on it to date.

That brings me to the neat stuff about Rogue Trader. First the themes: exploration and profit. Powerful ideas which go to the heart of many games, especially games like D&D. By making the quest for plunder explicit, then abstracting the actual mechanic to a generic profit factor, there is a lot of scope for excellent roleplay and creative approaches, without being bogged down in endless tables with prices etc. The exploration theme is strong as well. As a Rogue Trader you are a privateer, usually operating in the Expanse, a lawless and wild part of space with a full range of science fiction possibilities – from hostile aliens, to haunted ships, to planets which seem like paradise but with a deadly secret, and pretty much everything in-between. Balance this against the traditional 40K setting (mankind besieged by the forces of chaos, cult of the god-emperor, scientific dark-age, xenophobia etc.) and you get a nifty setting, with some reasonable boundaries on the characters, but also a good amount of scope for whatever you care to do.

The neat mechanical abstraction mechanic carries through to starship management. Crew morale and population have rating out of 100, and most of the management challenges simply draw on this system. Have a nasty virus outbreak? No problem, lose 1D5% of your crew population. Too long in the warp?  Minus 1D5% crew morale.  Quell a mutiny with violence? Sure thing, the crew morale might not drop by much, but you’ll lose more of your crew, abstracting pitched battles, barricades and hundreds or even thousands of combatants. It’s simple, and allows for some great roleplaying, without getting bogged down in detail.

Then there are the achievement points and endeavours.  A neat, abstract, way to construct a scenario, with the group collectively earning achievement points, which they 'spend' to complete the current endeavour.  Get enough points, you've completed the task.  This system runs parallel to traditional experience points for characters.  I like this compartmentalisation, but really the achievement points, as they are, have little relevence to the players.  It might have been better to allow them to cash these in to gain additional fate points, perhaps change a narrative detail, automatically suceed in a test that effects the whole ship, or prevent a villain from spending their fate points.

So far, every session in the campaign has delivered a different kind of experience, based largely on shifting the spotlight to different characters at key moments, while also forcing group decision making – which makes for a fairly cohesive experience. The challenges and environments have been diverse, while also barely scraping the surface of the sci-fi genre. The adventure material does suffer a little from ambitious scope of the setting.  The Lure of the Expanse details no less than half a dozen planets and other more exotic locales, like Footfall (think a sci-fi version of Tortuga), a space station and trading port built into an asteroid - yet, understandably there are only 5-6 pages detailing each of these locales, meaning that much improvisation is required if the players decide to explore a little more broadly.  The game would be enhanced by more releases which detail planets, systems and sectors and contain side adventures, like was done for WFRP 2e, but then I'm not sure how well these sold. 

I'd also like to see more adventures.  Lure is great, and I like it enough I want to return and run The Warpstorm Trilogy after Beyond the Mountains of Madness later this year, but more adventures rather than more rules and options books would be nice.  The game also suffers from fairly standard Fantasy Flight 40K RPG issues - rubbish index in every book, poorly thought out GM screen (although nicely made) and a range of proofing errors.  On the plus side there are several free adventures, complete with mini-system summary you can download, and I imagine the material in Rogue Trader ports fairly easily into other 40K RPG game systems.  Overall, a really strong game, and one I'm glad I decided to purchase.

Oh, and make sure you check out Andy's excellent novelisation of a scene from last weeks game 'The Bull and the Wasp'.

Kapcon 21 - Part 2

In Rounds 3, 4 and 5 I ran the Love of Money, a recent Esoterrorists release. In December I was looking around for a published scenario to run as a second Kapcon offering and picked this after a skim read – in retrospect it wasn’t the best game to take to a time limited ‘con. Firstly Esoterrorists is a complex setting, I lost 35 minutes to establishing the setting and system alone. Secondly the pre-generated characters were very detailed (3 full pages of text). I don’t think they were overly complex (with one exception) but they were, perhaps, over written. As an existing team of investigators who have established relationships, who find themselves in a bad spot, there was probably more detail then I think could easily be absorbed in ‘con conditions.

Finally, the plot, which had several cool scenes, was overly complex, and unnecessarily convoluted. It prompted the players to think it was even more convoluted then it was, which chewed up a lot of time. Finally, investigative games are a tough ask in a ‘con. Players inevitably engage with the investigation more thoroughly than is anticipated by the scenario, and even in a fairly tight setup where the clues are guaranteed – like Love of Money – there is a fair bit of doubt and second-guessing which slows the scenario down.

After the playtest, I had taken steps to address some of the problems, and managed to cut the scenario down from 4.5 hours to 3.5, and with a little effort 3.25 hours, although this inevitably truncates the climax, which is a shame as this is a much better scene than the longest scene (the intro). Plus, I prefer to have my games come in on time, for everybody’s sake.

How did it go? Well, the averaged response is good. I think most groups enjoyed the game and had fun. But some games felt like they dragged, and some players played a less active role than I’d have liked, while others were better as the players managed to dig out some characterisation and conflict from the pre-generated characters. As a GM I found running Love of Money really, really hard work, and wished that I had offered Sundown to replace this for 2 of the 3 runs. It wasn’t a bad game, but I don’t think it lived up to my normal Kapcon standards. I think this is entirely my own fault for trying to force a square peg through a round hole, and I’ll certainly look to take some lessons away from it.

In Round 3.5 I was going to simply go and have a drink with some of my regular Cthulhu group to debrief the first day of the ‘con, but that wily salesman and veteran GM, Mike Sands managed to sell me on Psi-Run a game where people with psychic powers and amnesia are hunted down. It sounded cool, so I thought I’d give it a go.

Much like Geiger Counter, this game starts a little rough - from a cold start you have to make a number of character decisions that you might wish you could rethink once you understand how the game works – so subsequent runs would be fun, but it’s tough on the first run-through. Also, like Geiger-Counter, the system seems to not account for a player’s natural desire to have their character ‘succeed’ (which in this context is remaining on the lamb) at the expense of other elements – so on most of the tests we made people didn’t prioritise answering questions about their characters amnesia which prolonged the chase. This is reinforced by the fact that having the chasers get closer affects all the characters - regardless of their circumstances - so there is an additional social pressure not to screw everyone with your decision.

However, unlike Geiger Counter, Mike acted as GM and did a great job of contextualising the chase, setting and the inevitable psychic surges. This helped structure the game to a point where most of the player believed that actually it might be better if the psychic escapees were recaptured, rather than continuing to wreck havoc on the world. In my opinion, the weird mix of complete creative freedom, which is then straitjacketed by an overly dictatorial dice mechanic. All in all, I had a lot of fun playing this, and would recommend it to others in the hands of a GM who loves to improvise.

For Round 6 I ran Piledrivers and Powerbombs for 8 players. In retrospect I think 8 might have been a touch ambitious and I probably should have used a variant of the ‘royal rumble’ party rules. Needless to say I will tinker with it to try and get a slightly more coherent approach for the next outing. It was a really great time, and a great way to have some silly fun to close out the 'con. I’ll cross post my remarks from NZRaG:

Kapcon Summer Slam in round 6 was epic-level insanity - the players were screaming, cheering, jeering, waving hillarious signs, smack-talking and scene framing until they could wrestle and game no more. I salute your ridiculous, magnificent, amazing wrestlers:

- Rainbow Warrior (Sophie)
- Polar Bear (Nick P.)
- Jolly Roger (John B.)
- G.I. Joey (Liam)
- Baseball Boy (don't remember your name, sorry)
- La Cucaracha (Stephanie)
- El Diablo (Andrew M.) *Crossover character from D.O.G.
- Drunken Truckie (Grant)

And, all of their hilarious and tragic nemeses.

You can read my report of Kapcon 20 here and here.

Kapcon 21 - Part 1

My Kapcon started on Thursday this year, when we playtested Liam’s The Matter Involving the Missing Cats, an adventure for Cat-thulhu, where you play Arkham cats investigating the Mythos.  I reprised my role as Pops the (mostly) fearless maine coon, and we soon got to the bottom of the mysterious lights and missing cats, and managed an improbable victory of sorts.  I tried to provide some useful feedback, and Liam said the game ran well at Kapcon

I spent most of this Kapcon (5/6 rounds) running games, and these games either ran to time – or slightly over time, so it felt I had less time to talk to folks than in previous years, but it was good to catch up with some people at the drinks beforehand.

Round 1 was Games on Demand. This was my first ever time in the G.O.D room during a round, and I was impressed by the enthusiasm of those proposing games, and the range of games on offer. I elected to play Geiger Counter (although it was a close call over Monster of the Week) as I wanted to try this well regarded survival horror offering as part of my thinking about EPOCH. The game was admirably facilitated by Svend, and we somewhat randomly agreed to play Steampunk adventure in a South American Jungle, with an abandoned research station, ancient temple, and infectious Panther People.  It was very much like the opening chapter of The Passage, only with more Victorians:

This was a fun game, and I think the mechanics were very interesting. I liked the idea of a thought dump at the beginning, and was very impressed with the trailer mechanic, but I’m not sure that this, and the inclusion of useful ‘elements’ at different ‘locations’ is sufficient to create a rich or well developed plot when the players are trying to balance a mechanical consideration of their own characters survival against the fluctuating dice pool of the ‘monster’. The game had a rich set-up, but the twists and developments were executed on a much less ambitious scale, as the burden of balancing continuous creativity wore against mechanical considerations and general fatigue. Like many Indy games there is also a constant tension around getting universal buy-in for new ideas, as these will affect all the characters – so a group of like-minded individuals might furiously agree and have a great time, but a group of strangers are more likely to be tentative, and often accept ideas they don’t like for the sake of politeness, and have a less rewarding experience as a result.

For the record, my character, the cruise director of our giant zeppelin cruise ship, Athos Theopopolus, managed to keep things together until the very end, trying to keep the spirits of his Victorian cruise ship passengers high until he discovered the zeppelin had crashed in a freak storm, and the survivors were finally overrun by Panther People.

Round 2 was Sundown, my Western Call of Cthulhu game, and the third time I’d run it. This time I had decided to run a game with all 8 pre-generated characters, as I was fairly sure the simplicity of the scenes and relative dynamics between the group (there are 3 bad-ass loner types) would allow this increased cast.

On the day, one player didn’t show. I radioed for a replacement, but alas, none were forthcoming. The game was actually great – it delivered almost exactly the kind of experience I wanted. While reasonably limited and formulaic in structure (it is a Call of Cthulhu ‘con game), the players did a great job of bringing the characters to life, and ensuring their drama overshadowed, but did not obstruct, the main plot. I thought every player did a great job, and afterwards I was immediately keen to run the game again – which is usually a sign that the game has gone fairly well. 

To be continued...

A New EPOCH Begins

I’ve finally got around to writing a first draft of EPOCH – my experimental horror game.  It is a game of 3 parts.  A Skeleton, which provides a framework for open dialogue with players, and which establishes the conceit of the horror genre, all driven around the concept of closing the distance between player and character.  Muscle, which provides a simple system designed to support and reinforce the skeleton, emphasising player choice, and the traumatic nature of being a character in a horror setting.  Finally the Skin, which is draws everything together into a single structure, and provides some tips and tricks to help the game  try and deliver on its potential.

Today I thought I’d raise the issue of player choice.  In EPOCH I decided I wanted the players to have complete choice over the range of outcomes that will befall their character.  There are no character sheets, no dice, no numbers.  Just a range of outcomes to choose from.

I wanted this more naked style of approach to remove some of places where players can hide from horror – the small abstractions and devices which can generate endless distraction – by removing these I hope to encourage players to close the distance between player and character for longer periods (I’m tentatively calling these suspense phases).  I wanted to emphasise the players choices would entirely dictate the fate of their character – the GM cannot ‘kill’ a character, every death, maiming or psychosis would be entirely the choice of the player.  These outcomes are known in advance, the same way an audience knows that most characters in a horror movie won't survive, and indeed many will meet a grisly end - but the specific details of who will survive, and how, remains a mystery.

Obviously this is just a teaser of what I’m working on building into EPOCH.  I’ll post more here in due course, as I get closer to a finished draft.  In the meantime, if you’d like to get an advance draft, or simply share your thoughts on this – I’d welcome any input.

Continuing the theme of horror games – I recently picked up Dead of Night (2nd ed.)  in New York.  The blurb made me think it was going to deliver a game along the lines of EPOCH:

"Dead of Night is the roleplaying game of campfire tales, slasher movies and b-movie horror. It is a game of screaming victims, unstoppable killers and slavering monsters, where the horror movie clichés flow thicker than blood and the only victory is survival.

Dead of Night is designed to be quick and easy to play, with rules that help you tell horror stories without getting in the way of the fun. The rules are simple and straightforward to learn, yet offer all the options and depth to allow you to customise the game however you like."

But I was surprised to find that the creators had concluded that monsters were the essence of horror movies.  That’s not the way I see it – character is king in horror.  Without character we care little for monsters, we lack a connection to this abstract fantasy and, therefore, we find it increasingly difficult to suspend our disbelief.  That’s why I am writing EPOCH to put the focus on character, and to try and really invest the players into the characters they create.  But Dead of Night is an interesting take nonetheless – Can you recommend any horror games (or even non-horror games) that emphasise character?