A horror classic reborn!

Some of you have probably heard about this already, but I'm mentioning it again, just in case.

It's that classic horror rpg, Chill, that is crowdfunding a third edition!

The publisher have run programs like this before, and the scope is reasonable. I've had much fun with 1st edition Chill and even though this aiming at continuing the 2nd ed I still think this is a worthy cause. There was an attempt a few years back, but that one was not run by anyone able to deliver. It looks far better this time than the previous try.

Since I've already pledged, I've downloaded the quickstart and there are some interesting mechanical tweaks I think could work very well.

There are few games doing non-mythos horror, so go forth and pludge, S.A.V.E. needs your support against the Unknown!

How to write adventures - I keep talking about scene based design

I'm continuing my thinking on adventure design, and have now come to how I've planned out my Savage Worlds scenarios. Since I've heard so much about how great this game is for cons, I designed scenarios from that. I've listened to how people often use a scene based design to fit in the time constraints, and that fit me perfectly.

So, I wanted to do something with a lot of feel of the X-files. Since I started from that, it was very natural for me to think of a scene that introduce the mystery and then play the intro and then introduce the characters. Since I was not writing a TV-show, I did think up the first part, but we started play when the players entered the plot.

The first scene would utilize the outcome of the background scene as its "bang". So I imagined a miner in this small community being attacked by his whole kennel of dogs, and how his fiance would see it and panic. That was what had just happened. Then I planned on putting the PCs in that small mining town, fill it with NPCs and build scenes from character interaction and some"plot based" scenes that would exhibit more of the strangeness that was the basis for the hounds attacking the miner.

The main plot was that the miners had dug deep into the Appalachians in West Virginia, and uncovered Cthonians. They reacted by psionic mind controls and called in their minions. I planned to have some weird things happening, like the MIB show up and discourage the PCs from snooping, and finally have the fiance disappear only to call someones phone and lure them out into the wilds at night. I had decided that after fooling around like that, I would end it with a scene where the PCs found them somehow confronting "aliens" in a strong light and finally finding themselves with redacted memories in their car out on the highway.

So, how did it go, and how did I used the scene based design?

Well, I started with the players taking control. They came to the town, and started talking to people. I decided to take a cue from Vincent Baker's advice in Dogs in the Vineyard, and started to give away as much as possible from all the NPCs. Vincent is wise, for without that they would have stumbled!

Talking to the NPCs, the characters were set in a location, some people were there and that was often the extent of my scene framing. I did not include any "bangs" or any destabilizing events into those interpersonal interactions.

In between those I dropped some small bombs in the shape of scenes with not only location and people, but also destabilizing events. It turned out that those scenes which all had things happening they had to react to did work really well. I totally failed to make one of them a chase scene with the Savage Worlds chase rules, but that was only me at odds with that rules set, and I've posted about that in other posts.

Worth noting here is that I did not introduce any shakeups in the "interview" scenes we had. Maybe I should have, because I sometimes felt that all those individuals with cool stories to tell had to walk up to the player characters more often than being sought out. It might be something that is dependent on how proactive your players are, but I did take that with me to my next attempt. It was my greatest lesson from this kind of adventure design.

Then there was that about how to string scenes together. In this scenario, which I called "Deep Calls to Deep", the players had the choice of going where they wanted and talking to whomever they choose. That kind of made it very natural for me to toss in my bombs after they had learned stuff which would make the next thing happening feel more cool. It made for a fairly natural flow, I would think.

All in all I think it went well, and as far as I understood from the after game chat I had nailed the X-Files feel. Nobody ever got any hint it was a Cthulhuoid menace.

But, what could I make different, and better, the next time? I will talk a bit about stringing scenes together next time.

When horror hits home - an experiment with Unknown Armies

So we have just finished a session of Unknown Armies, and it really left the players feeling confused, and a bit freaked out I think. Was that good or bad? I'm going to think out loud about some of that.

First impressions from behind the screen is of satisfaction. I finally got to run a game that reads great, it's the best written RPG bar none, and even though I had to flip through the book a lot, it worked out ok.

We played one of the scenarios in the back of the 2nd ed rules, called Bill in Three Persons. This is a scenario full of weirdness, and also some really twisted NPCs and lot of opportunities to trying to cope in a world full of hard knocks. I thought it had lot of potential, and it had the excellent qualities of working fine with characters (and players!) that know nothing of the setting and don't know each other beforehand.

Once again, my players surprised me by not interacting with the NPCs. I guess I should have learned by now that these players wont actually approach and talk to everyone they meet, like I do when I play. When I asked them after the session, one of the actually said it was a weird scenario, where they was whisked from place to place and didn't have much people to talk to. How does that jive with their efforts to avoid interacting with the NPCs in the game? Maybe they were too freaked out by them? Let me take an example, with spoilers for the scenario, so be forewarned.

The scenario is in three parts, and is about how to three times encounter the person Bill Toge, and maybe put him on a different path in life than the one the PC encounter in the starting scene. Bill is not a very nice person, or at least a person who has been roughened up by life quite a bit. In our session the first part ended with Bill shooting one PC in the chest before being shot to death by a police sniper. I guess that established him as dangerous, and so dangerous that the players stayed out of his way in the rest of the session! That kind of puts a damper on the NPC interaction opportunities when he in the main NPC in every scene.

Mood wise I think the game worked perfectly, though. After the first 10 minutes everyone was already feeling freaked out and everyone could see their world trying to burst its seams. It was very David Lynch, so to speak. I loved it, and I those who commented said they loved it as well. That brings me to another point. How does it compare to Call of Cthulhu we played the session before that?

CoC ended with everyone mad or going mad in the alien city of Carcosa after seeing some alien monsters grabbing them and flying through space. In UA on the other hand, they had seen low life crooks getting shot, child molesters being harassed and drugged cultist being taken out by police. And getting shot. I think it all felt a bit more real.

It will be very interesting to compare when I finally run a modern CoC scenario, if it hits closer to home that way. I know that the idea of alien non euclidean angles and books about arcane non human knowledge doesn't sound horrifying to many modern people, as my players. Modern horrors, and modern non-Lovecraftian ones, feel more real.

After this run, I think it's time for something of a different genre. Horror wear out, and post apocalyptic gaming beckons, or Old West, or science fiction, or something else. But, I will run more Unknown Armies in the future, now I know for sure!

Personal horror

A few days ago once again sat down behind my Trail of Cthulhu screen as the Keeper of Arcane Lore. Once again we travelled back to New Orleans in 1929, as imagined by Kevin Ross. This time, people went mad.

I'm beginning to appreciate the way this scenario is put together. The tome The King in Yellow is the key for it, and today the characters found the book, and read it. Telling them what they found made me realize how the whole of the scenario is modelled on and structured by that book. But, the big thing I wanted to talk about was how that book affected the characters, and the players.

Kevin Ross has provided the Keeper with a short summary of the physical characteristics of the tome, and a quite detailed summary of the content of the text, and how it affect the reader. Combining this with how Ken Hite suggested Hastur as a viral meme, I managed to portray the reading experience of the tome in a way that I had never tried or experienced before. I'll get into some details.

I have not read Chambers, but this book might follow his story. I don't know.

So, the setting is a city and the characters are a royal family fighting over succession. A stranger arrives, in a Pallid Mask, and he bears the Yellow Sign. He proclaims the coming of the King in Yellow and at the ball he is the only one not who has not removed his mask, and then it is revealed that he has none. Somehow the city is then replaced with Carcosa and the city is now situated by the lake Hali and everyone goes mad.

So, how does this related to the scenario, and how did I use it? In the scenario, it's Mardi Gras and everyone is dressed up and there's a masquerade ball at the end of the scenario. As you can see, the idea of masks is a common theme, as is the idea of a ball. But, the question of identity and duplicity is also important.

When the first character read the tome, she lost 5 SAN at once and I decided that her feeling of identity had started to slip, and that the idea of personal belonging became kind of hazy, cleptomania struck her as quite logical. Also, she at once started to wear a mask.

The second character read the book, and lost slightly less SAN. That character was most strongly affected by the duplicity of cities, places and time. I described how time and place suddenly had no meaning, and how the one turned into the other just like the city in the book had turned into Carcose. It had always been Carcosa.

The third reader had notes from the others, and here I emphasized the labyrinthine qualities of the text, and how plot lines twisted into each other, and how the pages seemed to be out of order. The main thing to freak that character out was how the literary qualities was as mutable as the reality in the story was.

What I did was I gave all the players different views of what they had read, and how it affected them differently. I had great help of the summary of the text, and could use different parts of it for retelling and rephrase things to freak the character out. Many times when you play CoC, you find a tome, read it and dock some points of SAN and now you have learned occult knowledge and are slightly more crazy. I found that actually have something to present to the players was important, and one of them even noted the fact that they all got something different from the experience. Suddenly the otherworldly qualities of the cthulhu mythos became tangible, or more real. It drove home the idea that you could actually be affected by reading a text. It became personal.

I think the first time I came across the idea of personal horror, was in the World of Darkness games, like Vampire. In those games you play the monster, and thus it's personal. I became bored when I realized that it was just a super hero game dressed in black leather and lace. Call of Cthulhu on the other hand is often criticized for being slightly too cerebral and too focused on the indescribable. I think the criticism is often well founded, but maybe focusing on the personal experience of something like a text could be a way to make it more personal, and make the player connect to the character to some extent. The themes in the setting, and the weird qualities of the text reinforced each other. By underlining the shifting nature of reality in the text, the shifting nature of the reality in the game was kind of implied. Since it was different for each character and it became more personal, isolated and possibly even hinting at the utmost loneliness of all character in the face of the mythos. Can you say "existentialism"?

It was a good session.

What I don't like about Trail of Cthulhu

Since I just ran a game of Call of Cthulhu, including some rules and concepts from Trail of Cthulhu, I have spent some time pondering the qualities of the latter.

Why did I not just run a ToC game?

Basically, my main beef with ToC is that I don't really feel very comfortable about rolling one die. It might seem like a small thing, but I want more randomness in my games.

If you, like in ToC, rolls 1d6, may add in "spends" from your pools (all skills are pools of points) trying to beat difficulty of, say, 3-4, it goes without saying that most times randomness wont be a factor. Naturally, this is a design feature. Robin Laws who designed the game clearly states that his idea is to make the system drive a kind of narrative that behaves in a specified way.

Personally I like the quality of "new school" games, like the forge style games and others, to have rules that reinforce and drive toward a style of play the designer envision his or her game to be about. Many times, almost as many times that I have claimed Alignment leads to brain damage, I have elevated the rule of gold equals xp to sublime levels of design mastery, due to the effects it can have in enforcing a style of play. This is something I think is the great re-discovery stemming from Ron Edwards "system matters".

What kind of style is it then that ToC reinforce with its pools you can spend for basically guaranteed success? Well, it is a game where you can be sure, as a player, that the actions of your character will succeed. If you have a decent pool of at least 2, trying to beat 4 (a rough mean of a 2-8 scale) is an average chance of success of more than 80%. I think that makes it kind of pointless to have a randomizer with those odds. Before we delve too deep into math and probabilities, the main point of my argument is that on such a small scale a spend of one point, to say nothing of more than one, makes successes almost certain.

So, why is that bad? Isn't it good for the players to have say in when they get to shine? Well, no. Not when the object of the game is horror.

Horror demands giving up certainty and hope. Vagueness and isolation, and the strong possibility of failure and its following painful result is what drives the sense of horror. I think ToC is a fine game for CSI, but not for horror.

Some say the rules don't work that way in actual play, and they might be right. I have only played ToC once, but it did not falsify my principal objections to the rules. Feel free to disagree!

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.

Gaming Library: Carcosa

The book I'll look at today, is a small booklet called Supplement V Carcosa. Those who know some of the history of weird fiction obviously know about that name. If you also know something of rpg history, I think you know what those other four supplements are. This is a hobby project by Geoffrey McKinney, as his personal way of playing OD&D. 

Some of you might have heard of Carcosa before, and might even be sick of every mention of it. Then just pass along and let the rest of us talk a bit more.

Having said that, let's take a closer look at this game. The first thing you notice is that this is indeed almost a game of its own. While the structure of the booklet, and the cover text, claims it's a supplement to a fantasy rpg first published in 1974, it actually replaces most of the rules of that game.

What is it then? The character options are few, and easy to grasp. Like its parent game it's class based, and there are only two classes. They are Fighting Men and Sorcerors. The latter is all you get rules for, and they are basically summoners who can interact with nameless horrors. There are few creatures in the game which you would recognize from a regular fantasy campaign. Most are slime, oozes and fungi, and extra terrestial horrors in the Lovecraftian vein. All the magic in the game is rituals to summon, bind and punish these creatures. Add to this the existence of psionics and you have a distinctly unorthodox fantasy game.

Most reviewers have spent much time talking about the magic rules. Personally I don't find them worthy of that many words. You age, you have to roll saves and you wont know until too late if you failed. The rules are businesslike and not anything special. The reason Carcosa is available in a censored edition is that the descriptions of the rituals of sorcery are fairly gross. That is gross as in descriptions of murder, sacrifice, mutilation and other unwholesome deeds. It's very matter of fact and not gratuitous. Sure it's gross, but if you complain about that you should take a long hard look around the real world, and think about if you shouldn't take action to alleviate misery and dehumanizing behaviour there before you get all worked up over a game. Censorship don't belong in a open society. I bought the original edition for a reason.

What I find most interesting with the game is the fact that you get a map, with keyed encounters and findings for all the hexes! Not only will you get a new summoning based magic system, psionics rules, a new funky die roll mechanic and technological items (more on those in a second), you will also have somewhere to go and something to interact with. Make no mistake, though. There's no listing of nations, rulers, population density and trade routes. You will get a map and a list of what's in those hexes. Go wild.

So what was that about new ways to roll dice, and funky tech? Let me tell you. The designer of Carcosa have decided to do something interesting with dice. All damage rolls are variable! All hit points are also variable! Sometimes you will fight a spawn of Shub-Niggurath with 15 hitpoints and sometimes it might be 3. I really like that. A bit more funky is the fact that you roll all kinds of dice to determine damage, but the d20 will tell you (look up a short table) which of them is used! This will mean that carefullness is rewarded, and that when you attack you want to stock the odds in your favour and be ready to run. The result is a game where the world sometimes hate you, and it is prudent to take advantage of the days when fortune smiles upon you. It has a certain bleak charm to it. Frankly, bleak is what it is most of all, Carcosa.

Apart from that, I find the existence of Space Aliens, and alien technology to be the most jarring, and potentially most cool oddity in a very odd game. That is odd as in the existence of protoplasmic entities summoned by grisly murder and at the same time robots, androids and other technological artifacts from a retro style comic book science fiction. I can't decide if I find it amazing or just baffling.

Worth noting is that there are no immediate reasons for adventue in this world. Most of the monsters have no or little treasure and those technological artifacts might be the best shot at treasure.

So, why sould you get this game? Well, I'm kind of unsure who the audience would be for this game. Many of the gamers who like classic D&D style fantasy shun tech like the plague. Add to that the very gloomy world were most monsters are terrors who will drive you insane, turn to goo or just eat you will mean a very special kind of fantasy. That being said, if you like post apocalyptic games, or fantasy tinged with horror you might get lot of inspiration from this little booklet. There's not much art, and it looks like something designed in 1974, but Geoffrey sells it for a lot less than you would imagine, considering the amount of stuff it contains.

Go take a look! It is, if nothing else, innovative and a different mix of things we these days don't expect in our fantasy. It's a potent brew.

Finally an important message: