Lynn Willis has left us

I just read on Michael Curtis blog that Lynn Willis is dead. I remember reading on Chaosium's webpage Charlie Krank posting that Lynn was ill and that he had stepped down from work. It was a reminder for me that even people that have been in the business since I first started gaming are mortal.

Those names on the credit pages on the games I handled at a young, tender and impressionable age were names of demi gods living in a far off realm. Thanks to the net, it has become easy to get in contact with all those people and see how many of them are friendly and communicative individuals. It pleases me no end to sometimes be able to say "Thanks!" to those who have shared the dream.

Now I wish I had taken the opportunity to say thanks to Lynn. His name is one of those I've seen on the games I've played since way back. Memento mori.

Prepping Call of Cthulhu

I am going to be the Keeper of Arcane Lore again this Saturday, and now it's prepping time. As usual it's complex. In a scenario where investigation is common, you need to have lot of information available. Not only give the characters enough rope to hang themselves by, but also enough information for the players to to feel it is a real work they are interacting with. I find this is slightly different than a game like D&D or T&T.

The idea of making the game world seem real involves sound. When our Keeper ran us through the Beyond the Mountain of Madness campaign, he made good use of sound. Ambient sound like engine sound, arctic winds or the lapping of waves can go a long way to make the players feel involved, which is something I try to do when running CoC. The coming scenario, Tell Me, Have You Seen the Yellow Sign? (from Chaosium's Great Old Ones) will be set in New Orleans. Guess what kind of sounds I'll need? I don't even like jazz music...

You know what? Right now I'm contemplating how to introduce more yellow objects into our living room, just as "background noise". I wonder why CoC always makes people go that extra mile?

It would be fun to hear if any of my readers have done something like that, or if you have run TMHYStYS?

When not playing, listen!

I have not posted much lately, but it comes down to me not being able to involve myself much in gaming. Long hours at work and I still haven't been able to get a regular game going since before Christmas! From a gaming point of view, holidays suck!

What I have done while not playing anything is listening to other people playing. A while ago I bought a fine copy of Chaosium's marvellous campaign Horror on the Orient Express (HotOE). I wanted to play it, and almost got the chance last year before that attempt to find a new group fizzled. So, I decided to buy it, and to listen to the Bradford Players playing it.

Listening to other people play sounds strange, but it can actually be quite fun. It can also teach you a thing or two about table manners, how to handle troublesome players or just neat GM tricks.

HotOE is, since it's for CoC, a horror adventure. So, how would you expect it to play then? Grim and dark? Well, I have listened to a few different people running Call of Cthulhu, and I can say that American gun nuts are the most boring ones to listen to. Sound tactics and "effective" play. They might have fun, but it sure isn't fun to listen to. The thing is, the game must be engaging in some way, and one of the best way to make that happen is for it to be fun!

I'd really recommend anyone to listen to the recorded sessions of HotOE by the Bradford gang. Some of these sessions I laughed so hard it hurt when listening! The contrast between the grisly and quite horrific event the characters suffer and the jolly interaction between the players are excellent for contrast and effect. Also, listen to Paul when running the game. He is a Keeper (GM in CoC speak) of some skill indeed.

A friend of mine in the local game club ran his AD&D campaign a few days back, and summarized the event as "the players did what they should, entertained their DM". It made me think of Paul and his friends in Bradford. We do this for fun, right?

The dread curse of cthulhu

Very recently I got my copy of Horror on the Orient Express in the mail, after finding a complete copy on . This is the first time I've spent a three digit sum on a game. Am I crazy? I call this the Dread Curse of Cthulhu.

CoC was for a long time my favourite rpg. Now, I had never played it outside of a convention context, and had never played in any of the well regarded campaigns from Chaosium. The only thing I'd played were the "let's do something special since it is a convention"-scenarios. It's surely more fun to do something different than the regular kind of play, but I had never tried that "regular play". I still have very little experience.

Now when I have some money and are entrenched in not only the playing, but also collecting part of the hobby, I have been focusing on buying some of those great and well regarded campaigns. The bizarre thing is, that I have bought them with the express purpose of not reading them! I would love to have played in a regular, long term, Call of Cthulhu campaign. Instead I buy some of the best, and expensive stuff there is because I have the money, but not the group to play! That is the Dread Curse.

I'm very thankful to have gotten the opportunity to play in the Beyond the Mountains of Madness campaign last year. Without that I would feel very odd today, looking at yet another procurement. One of my goals for this year is to maybe finally play some CoC, but I have realized it's time to bite the bullet. I will take my place behind the screen, as the Keeper of Arcane Lore.

Maybe that will beat the Curse. Maybe.

Who in gaming is worth knowing about?

After my exasperated outburst about people not knowing about Ron Edwards I started thinking. Jeff Rients, always with his eye on the pulse of gamerdom, asked a very relevant question. Maybe the contributions by the "Forgeites" are not really impacting the hobby very far? Maybe rpg theory is largely ignored by most gamers? Even if that it true (and I hope it's not), it still leaves me with the question of who you should know about?

Earlier this year, a friend was giving me a ride home after a gaming session. I was kind of tired, and as I usually do in that state I was blathering on about whatever my mind had gotten stuck on. Amazed (and bored?) my friend asked me "How do you know all these biographical details about all these game designers!?" after I had talked about when someone started this or that game company. I am interested in the history of our hobby, and some things sticks in my mind. The ups and downs of the business end of the hobby seem to be one such thing. So, is this something everyone should know about? Quick! When did Greg Stafford start The Chaosium? Who else was involved? What? You don't care?

So who do you think everyone should know about in gaming? I guess the most famous people probably are Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. Being there from the start counts a lot. How about Rick Loomis, who in 1970 started the oldest game company still around doing the same kind of business? How about Mark Rein*Hagen who helped create the phenomenon that is White Wolf? How about Matthew Sprange who runs one of the most successful game companies today? How about Ed Simbalist? Frankly, I'm not sure I know who everyone should know about. I have many times found that the one-game-gamers who only know of Gygax and D&D to me seem like they have deprived themselves of some of the sublime heights possible in the hobby which so succinctly combines game elements, storytelling and performance art. And some really cool game mechanics and worlds, to boot! Just look at two very distinctly different games like Dogs in the Vineyard by Vincent Baker, and Tunnels & Trolls by Ken St Andre. Both opened vistas in my head I didn't even suspected existed!

So, hell know who is important enough in the big scheme of things. I just hope everyone out there treats the whole field of the hobby is one big dungeon, filled with treasure. Who don't want to explore some more, and get just a little bit more loot home? Happy delving!

Is investigative roleplaying railroading by default? A CoC case study

Some of you might have followed along in the discussion on Grognardia's retrospective on Shadows of Yog-Sothoth. The question arose if it has to be the case that investigative roleplaying with a "trail of breadcrumbs" leads the players along a railroad. Since I have just posted about my experiences of Beyond the Mountain of Madness, and accused that campaign of being a railroad, I felt it could be an interesting theme to continue and comment on. I decided to take out some of the CoC greats from my shelves and do some case studies.

First out is a golden oldie, Trail of Tsathogghua by Keith Herber. It was published in 1984, roughly the same era as Shadows of Yog-Sothoth. It's a collection of two loosely tied scenarios and one unrelated. The first one. The Trail of Tsathogghua is an expedition to icy lands, where an artifact has been found. It looks a lot like Mountains with the expedition leaders being NPCs and there is a timeline with things that will happen regardless of player actions. Also, at certain points interactions with authorities will happen, and they all happen "off stage". Roll some dice and the Keeper reads you the next clue your expedition member have uncovered. Should you fail, then there are NPCs around to tell you what you need. While the list of NPCs looks like it could be great fun to interact with some of them, it's still a good example of a very railroaded adventure. The second part The Curse of Tsathogghua is tied to some of the facts that became unearthed in the first part, and that one survivor from that expedition acted upon those facts and now the investigators follow his, incidentally, tracks. The idea of having a NPC with this special role who must survive, is just bad adventure writing. Having an adventure hinge upon something to happen is bad. The last and final part is totally detached from the first two. Interestingly enough, this last adventure The Haunted House is very different in style. It describes the background of a big mansion and why it is haunted. The the adventure is just a description of the adventure site, with appropriate hauntings described in different rooms. Go where you like, experience what you like. A good example of an investigative adventure that's wide open.

The second piece I wanted to look closer at is another adventure written by Keith Herber. This time it's his The Sanatorium in the Chaosium volume Mansions of Madness. It happen to be considered his best adventure, so it's extra interesting as a comparison. In this adventure there is a site (a closed environment), and a bunch of NPCs. There's also a menace. Compared to Trail this is very different. Something have happened, and you will have to get the information from the NPCs at the site before the menace kills you. Both adventures present a situation and a "story" that you will piece together. That's the common thread in both, as investigative roleplaying. But, while what happens in one is only at the players initiative, in the other it's always at the instigation of an NPC. There are no things that will happen, only factions with intentions and private goals. If the players wont interact with the NPCs, they wont find the clues to stop the menace, but they have all the power in the world to decide what happens. No NPC will push the story forward without you as a player pushing him or her first.

Worth noting is that one of these adventures is site based, and the other is based on a journey. The Haunted House is also site based, and is more open in style. The campaign that started the discussion Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, is also based on a lot of travelling. The other classic I have on my shelf, The Fungi from Yoggoth, is also a campaign where you travel a lot. I guess there's a strong temptation to hide one clue at each location and make them depend upon each other in a linear fashion. The sin here is, in my view, to make that the "story" that's supposed to happen. Do it have to be that way, though? Thinking on the format, you would imagine that it would be possible to avoid the worst sin by removing the linear dependencies to some degree and write the campaign so that visiting a site is not dependant on a string of former events. I know DGP worked on that kind of "plotting", with their nugget system for the Traveller material they published.

To make a parallel to T&T and D&D, where the dungeon is the backbone of the "story", we have many good pieces of analysis written in the OSR about multiple entrances, and interconnectivity between levels. I think this is a way of thinking that could be used while designing for investigative roleplaying as well.

So, in order to wrap this up I think the golden oldies tend to fall into a tendency of railroading when a lot of travel is involved. My hypothesis is that it makes it too easy to confuse all that travelling with "story" and thus needlessly limiting the players. Investigative roleplaying is not this by default, but it sure has happened more than once. Should I win the lottery I will take a closer look at the other classic as well, since it's supposed to do it just right.

The value of immersion - CoC At the Mountains of Madness

I have mentioned before that I am playing At the Mountains of Madness right now. This is the first time I have actually played CoC in one of Chaosiums big campaigns at home. Almost all my other experiences have been con games and one-shots. As everyone probably know, CoC is a game where mood is important. Our Keeper have managed to get us fairly involved by using a few steps which have been very effective, in their simpleness. First of all we start by moving to a different place in the room. We move the whole table, so we have a tangible clue that it's time to move our minds into a new place. Secondly we have had ambient sounds for the ship engines at sea, the storms at sea and the windswept plains of Antarctica. When we hit upon a storm at sea, with the noise of the engine and the wind loud in our ears it was impossible not to be there. I've read about this effect before, but now I have felt it. Effective and very simple.

Call of Cthulhu - the game where the rules tell you not to go on adventures

I have been thinking a bit about Call of Cthulhu lately. Fairly recently we started to play the gigantic campaign At the Mountains of Madness, and it switched on the part of my brain that pontificates upon design issues. I began to ponder what makes good old CoC tick.

Some of my recent musings on how rules reinforce and support a certain style of play is especially relevant to an analysis of CoC. If the simple rule that coins is the unit of experience and weight, reinforces the image of the characters as scoundrels our to make a buck, then the question is what is it that investigators in CoC get from the game system?

Chaosium's Basic Roleplaying, is a very slick skill based system. Apart from the stats which are rolled with 3d6, everything else is based on percentile dice. Combat system and skills is all based on rolling a d100 under your rating. Even testing against stats is often done that way, with the relevant stat multiplied by five. Nothing of this reinforce the image of investigators unearthing cults and combating otherworldly beings trying to enter our reality, does it? The key thing, of course, is the Sanity mechanic.

As many of you know, the sanity rules are kind of like mental hit points, SAN. See or partake in too much mind numbing things and your mind fragments. So, what will this teach you? Oddly enough it reinforces the view that the only way to stay sane is to never read a book, partake in a ritual or cast a spell and to shut your eyes as soon as some entity appears. It teaches you to run away and stick your head in the sand!

A typical Call of Cthulhu scenario might look like this. You hear from an acquaintance that a childhood friend have disappeared. Naturally you travel to his last known residence, gathering clues. As thanks for your curiosity you will loose some sanity from what you discover. After some fraternization with the locals you might hear that odd occurrences, maybe cattle mutilations, have been notices around the time when your friend was last seen and about. Following that trail and you loose some more SAN. Perhaps it will tell you that your friend probably have gone out in the wilds, and that once it's midnight he will probably do something really bad. Armed with some unsound knowledge and maybe some guns, you confront your friend and sends the bloodsucking monster back to the void. If you are lucky you only loose some SAN doing it, and if you are unlucky you get to see your friend killed and drained of blood before the beast it dispelled. Your mind is now very fragile and you probably need psychological help.

Did you notice something in that tale? At every step, getting closer to the final confrontation and solving the mystery, you loose SAN! The lesson here is that if you want your character to stay sane and healthy, you'd better not read any books and not investigate anything! There's a disconnect here, since these things which the game system encourages you to stay away from, are the very things you have to do in order to play the game successfully. I guess sitting in your room and never travel when you receive letters about missing persons could be considered successful, but it sure isn't very fun.

Now, players of CoC have disregarded the hints from the rules and actually went out and investigated, ever since 1981. It is a very successful game and often listed as a favourite of a lot of gamers. It has even been described as the "adult" game (by Ken Hite, I think). Maybe it's one of the few games where the heroics come from the fact that to play it you will have to act contrary to all common sense and the prodding from the rules. I'm not sure that is a good definition of adult behaviour, but it sure is a sign of a different player mentality than seen in many other games. The difficult thing is to understand how that came to be.

I strongly believe that rules enforce play. If the are a list of combat actions on the character sheet like "Parry", "Feint", "Dodge" you can bet that those three actions are going to be the most common actions taken by the players. By the same token, a game where you gain most of your experience points from killing other beings, the players will try to kill everything they see. The odd thing about CoC is that in that game it's not true.

If someone just reads the rules for CoC or read any play reports, they would get the idea that not investigating is the way to go. For some reason "the correct way" to play, i.e. do the heroic thing and go forth and protect the world at your own peril, is transmitted by some other means. Have you been taught the "right" way to play CoC? How did you learn about playing CoC? Personally I since long totally forgotten when and how I first heard of the game, and how I learnt how to play it. I wonder if it is a social contract, a code of conduct when playing CoC, that makes people to what is actually not very healthy for their character? I find the question intriguing, since there are a few other games out there which are similar to Call of Cthulhu. Maybe I'm paying way to much attention to this idea of mine that the rules of a game should support and encourage a style of play, but I know from experience how that have helped me in the past to "get" a game. I will probably wrote about my thoughts about that at a later date.

To end on a positive tone, I'd like to say that CoC still is one of my favourite games. The fact that I got the opportunity to join in a group playing At the Mountains of Madness is something I am really happy about. It might be that the game really doesn't make sense, but boy am I enjoying it anyway!

Edit: A follow up post to this was posted later to clarify a few points.

My Appendix N - gaming influences

You might have seen that Zack on his blog RPG Blog II is asking people to list the books, TV and other influences that have been important to your campaign, like the list Gygax made in the AD&D DMG.

I love lists of all kind, so here we go!

• Robert E Howard: Conan
• Fritz Leiber: the "swords" series about Lankhmar
• Michael Moorcock: all his fantasy, but especially Elric and Erekosë
• J.R.R. Tolkien
• Glen Cook: the books about The Black Company
• H.P. Lovecraft
• Pat Mills & Simon Bisley: Sláine
• Clive Barker: The Books of the Art
• Jack Vance
• John Ford: all his western movies

Without a doubt is Moorcock the biggest influence on my gaming. Not only have I played a lot of the marvellous 4th ed Stormbringer from Chaosium but the idea of the multiverse have influenced all my gaming immensely. I did start my career as an adventurer in Middle Earth, but after that I've called the whole Multiverse my home.

Some of the titles above are quite specific in how they have influenced me. I'd like to highlight the raw verve of the visuals of Simon Bisley as something I always come back to when I want to see the fantastic for my inner eye. Jack Vance on the other hand does the same with words. I'm not sure there is a theme, but compared to e.g. Gygax list it is a lot less centred on classic science fiction and science fantasy. While I do enjoy reading those yarns, they are not influencing my gaming much. Space opera is a special case, since I love to read it and would love to try to play something like it. But, for some reason science fiction gaming have never really worked out for me.

Who am I? And why am I doing this?

Now when I have gotten this blog going, and have posted some stuff I hope have at least some value as entertainment, I'm going to do the classic first post. Who am I? What are my intentions with this blog?

I first encountered rpg blogging in a style I enjoyed on Grognardia by James Maliszewski. He has a very personal style and he so prolific that I sometime wonder if he does it for a living! About a year ago I also happned to encounter Trollgod's Trollhalla and these two sites together gave me the idea to start a blog. The latter site, a hangout for friends and fans of Ken St Andre (and T&T), and my copy of the new edition of Tunnels & Trolls made me think that the world needed more blogs about T&T. At the same time I had enjoyed what James were doing at Grognardia, and wanted to be able to write about a broader theme, like the history of the hobby.

My history as a gamer harkens back to the middle 1980-ies (I don't think the rest of my personal history is that interesting. If you really want to know, post a comment to the effect!). Back then a Swedish company published a game, Drakar & Demoner, which was a translation of the fantasy game based on Basic Roleplaying, and specifically the Worlds of Wonder boxed set, that Chaosium had put out. It became very successful and spawned the hobby in Sweden. I played that one and their translation of Pacesetter's Chill and most importantly the translation of Iron Crown Enterprice's Middle Earth Roleplaying. The first session we played I felt the treasure was kind of cheap, so I added a mithril chain shirt and a couple of thousand gold pieces. After that we almost never adventured for monetary reasons, since I had made the characters so rich they didn't need it!

After this me and my friends bought a lot of games, sold them to each others or on convention auctions and then bought something new again. If we didn't have anything else to do, we would make up character for a new game system. I never understood how people could be content to only play one game, say D&D, all the time! This have shaped my attitude toward gaming a lot. My tastes are very eclectic and I love getting new games.

Nowadays I read a lot about how gaming was done before, and also about the latest developments in the indie scheme from e.g. The Forge. In between those two ends of the gaming spectrum, where some tries to re-create a old way of doing things and those who tries to do things nobody have did before, a lot of interesting stuff gets done. I reads and plays both ways.

This blog is intended to be my explorations of what can be done, and what I like and don't like. Since every comparison needs a foundation, I'm going to compare a lot of things to Tunnels & Trolls. It's one of the first RPG ever (some say it's the second oldest game ever) and it's also still in print and plays a lot like it always did even in its latest edition. I like it because it's both old school and new school at the same time! Perfect as a comparison to everything.