So, what does that stat do again / Coming back to World of Darkness

I've been running Night's Black Agents, a Gumshoe game, for nearly a year now, and other Gumshoe games (Fear Itself, TimeWatch, Trail of Cthulhu) for longer. I've become familiar with  the system, how it works and how to make stuff up on the fly. It's now my 'go to' system. 

It used to be World of Darkness, though. I learnt to GM by running Vampire: the Masquerade. The first game I ran to an actual conclusion was a Hunter: the Reckoning/Mage: the Ascension mash up. I loved the games and the Storyteller/telling systems. 

I still have a great fondness for them, and hold them in high regard. 

So I've been thinking about what I would like to run once NBA finishes. I decided that I would like to run Mage: the Awakening. I've always had a soft spot for Mage, and would like to do something with the nWoD game. 

I play almost exclusively over Google+ Hangouts these days, and we use Google spreadsheets as character sheets. This means that there's a one off exercise of transcribing the character sheet to a Google Sheet format. 

I did that this weekend, and realised that WoD games, and Mage: the Awakening in particular, are really complicated. 

Keeping track of three different types of damage - Bashing, Lethal and Aggravated? Awakening also throws in Resistant damage as well, for four(!) types. 

Tracking Willpower, Morality trait (Wisdom in Awakening), Mana, Gnosis, Paradox, spell tolerance and Virtues and Vices is a massive drain on the player and storyteller before you start adding temporary health, speed, initiative and defense bonuses. 

I don't think I can do it anymore. It just seems like so much effort. 

Which is a shame - the settings and a lot of the game conceits are excellent.

The Walking Dead / Fear Itself - A Gumshoe Hack

You can run a fully functional, highly dramatic game based on AMC's The Walking Dead using the Fear Itself RPG with no system adjustments.

It's true. Look.

The Walking Dead is a dramatic, character driven show that focuses on characterisation and interaction. It also has zombies. This is often a secondary concern, as the real drama comes from the interaction between the characters and the conflict caused by their different motivations, desires and decisions. The characters move from location to location, looking for signs of life, food, shelter, tools, weapons and signs of walker infestation. They often suffer from severe stress, fatigued, emotional trauma and exhaustion, and their mental health ebbs and flows as a result

Fear Itself is a horror game that creates a disparate group and engineers conflicts between them. It allows you to pull together characters from all walks of life, give them lines to ally along or fall out over and then throw into a stressful scenario.

Within Fear Itself a characters mental health is recorded through the Stability ability. As this drains away and falls below 0, characters start to experience stress disorders - phobias, paranoia, irrational behaviour, hallucinations.

Rick Grimes suffers a massive Stability loss after Lori dies, and succumbs to paranoia and hallucinations as the stress of leading the group alone and the guilt of not being able to protect his wife finally overcome him. 

Fear Itself covers this off nicely.

Talking of Stability, Fear Itself allows characters to define a number of Sources of Stability - People, Activities or Innate Traits that give you some comfort and allow you to retain your sanity in trying times. 

Lori and Carl were Rick's Sources of Stability. Darryl and Carol found support in each other, Glynn and Maggie found they could give each other solace in another way.

Darryl also maintains a badass facade to keep himself on an even keel, Carl tries to maintain his independence and Rick became a leader. Shane makes Lori and Carl his Sources of Stability, then when Rick returns and Lori and Carl are denied to him, Shane begins his descent into madness.

Losing one of your Sources of Stability - either through death, being disproved or betrayed - is a crushing experience. 

We can also look at The Governor - He tried to re-establish some Sources of Stability; Lilly and Meghan and becoming leader of a new band of survivors. When this falls apart,when he sees that Meghan is bitten, he takes a massive hit  to his Stability and attacks the prison recklessly and mercilessly. This leads to his death.

We can also look at the character defining moment in Fear Itself - The Worst Thing I have ever Done. 

Shane regrets leaving Rick behind in the hospital to die. Michonne feels instrumental in the death of her child, partner and friend. Rick looked for every other way out other than killing Shane.

As an example, let's stat up Darryl as a starting character

Darryl Dixon

Concept: Badass biker

Sources of Stability: Carol, Being a Badass, 

Risk Factor: Gung Ho

The Worst Thing I Ever Did: Kill my brother, Merle

Academic Abilities: Natural History 1

Interpersonal Abilities: Bullshit Detector 2, Interrogation 2, Intimidation 2, Reassurance 1, Streetwise 2

General Abilities: Athletics 8, Driving 4, Filch 2, Health 8, Infiltration 4, Mechanics 4, Sense Trouble 6, Preparedness 4, Scuffling 6, Shooting 8, Stability 8

Hit Threshold: 4

By Season 2 Darryl is a General Abilities badass, with extra points in Sense Trouble, Preparedness and Stability (he does suffer a considerable Stability loss during the second season and hallucinates a conversation with Merle). The skills that Darryl Dixon really stockpiles are Shooting and Scuffling, both of which he has in spades by the attack on Woodbury.

Rule Amendments

Simple, really. Walkers are the only supernatural creatures in this setting, and are both common and familiar. 

As such, I would reduce the potential Stability loss of exposure to Walkers by 1 point, and only apply it if the character is taken by surprise or if the Walker is someone that the character was close to whilst alive

Walker

Also, you need Walker stats to run a Walking Dead game

Hit Threshold 3

Perception modifier 0

Health 15

Scuffling 6 (Fist -2, Bite -1)

Tireless. Walkers will doggedly pursue prey until they are destroyed. If the prey is no longer visible, a Walker will continue walking in the direction the prey was last spotted in until they find new prey to distract them

Biter Fever. A bite from a Walker means blood poisoning, septic shock and a painful death, unless the bitten limb is amputated within a number of minutes equal to the characters Health rating. If the limb is not removed before this time has elapsed, then the victim is infected and will perish within [12+ Health Rating] hours.

Headshot. Walkers can only be 'killed' by severing their head or destroying their brain. Targeting a head adds +2 to the targets Hit Threshold, whereas aiming for the neck or eye adds +3 to the Hit Threshold.

Meet the team / Ready to play Esoterrorists 2nd Ed characters

This post makes three in a row about Gumshoe games, and in rapid succession as well. 


One of my Christmas presents was the new second edition of The Esoterrorists by Robin D. Laws. 
I'd already got the 1st edition (reviewed here), which I got after having a look at Trail of Cthulhu. 
The second edition polishes the rules up a little, now that Gumshoe has been used to power a subsequent seven games (including the forthcoming TimeWatch and Gaean Reach), adds more detail to the Ordo Veritis and Esoterrorist organisations, has an expanded bestiary and includes an alternate setting - Station Duty.
It's still very affordable, and great for quick play at short notice.

Which brings me to the official point of this post - Recently a member of the Pelgrane Press Google+ community put out a call for some ready to play PCs for an Esoterrorists 2e game.
I, not having too much work that I wanted to avoid doing, knocked some up.

If you would like to use them, then they're here:
Esoterrorist 2e Characters

What have prehistoric butterflies done for us recently, anyway? / TimeWatch

TimeWatch main rules

I've been playing a lot of Gumshoe recently, so much so that I've failed to post anything to this blog of any import. 
One of the Gumshoe games that I have been playing has been TimeWatch, written by Kevin Kulp. 
It's not out yet, I've been taking part in the playtest cycle for the game, running it for my weekly group and laughing my ass off. 

Now it's gone to Kickstarter, and I have broken my KS virginity on this book. I even paid $40 for the privilege. 
I don't regret it. 
I feel more of a man now. Like I can look other men in the eye...

You can go on the Kickstarter page and see why the author and publisher think you should back TimeWatch... In fact, do that. Watch the video and read the updates and consider the cost. 
Now, let's talk about cool shit. 

Ezeru - Shapeshifting mutant psychic
radioactive cockroaches from a false future

Cool Shit
I like cool shit. Love it, in fact. And this game has so much cool shit in it that ... um... look, I'm not going to dive deeper into this metaphor. You'll thank me for it. 

Instead I'll put this into context... I, as a teenager and as a 30+ year old 'adult' have spent actual hours discussing the temporal paradox resulting from the Terminator movie. 
How can Skynet possibly think that ganking Sarah Connor is a good idea? If John Connor isn't born, then a there will be no resistance so Skynet won't need to send a Terminator back in time, so John Connor will be born...
Then Terminator 2: Judgement Day introduces the fact that Cyberdyne Systems used tech from the T-800 to create hardware that would later be used to create Skynet, meaning that Skynet propagated itself.

Any game featuring time travel is going to have this problem - players or NPCs change history, a paradox results and people start getting shirty just because they've ceased to exist or are now their own father. 

A TimeWatch agent activates an Autochron
by Andy Mason

There are ways to approach the problem:

• Ignore it, like Dr Who normally does and like Terminator did
• Have history slowly assert its new form by deleting people like Marty McFly in Back to the Future
• Have people go a bit mad as their memories change, like Bruce Willis in 12 Monkeys
• Go completely the other way and revel in the possible chaos like in the Futurama episode Roswell That Ends Well - become your own grandfather, blow shit up and screw with people

TimeWatch wants you to screw with time - either to fix it or to make it better. It wants you to alter events that you have just seen happen, to appear next to yourself in a fight and help defeat the foe, to save a colleague from death by flying in the opposite direction of the Earth's rotation at  the speed of light, to murder Hitler or convince him to breed hamsters instead of go into politics.

To do this it gives you three pertinent stats:

• Chronal Stability - How real and stable you are. If this dips below zero you start remembering alternative histories or fading into nothing
• Reality Anchor - The ability to focus yourself and others on 'reality' and restore lost Chronal Stability
• Paradox Prevention - A technical skill that allows you to mitigate paradox through cunning and knowledge. 

A TimeWatch team - a gunslinger, a neanderthal, a Mongol princess,
a psychic Sophosaur and a 22nd Century space pilot

The game takes the stance that due to an infinite number of branching timelines, alternative realities, parallel dimensions and sentient beings with time travel capability screwing with stuff, anything can and has happened. 
Therefore you can play just about anything, and the rules support them. 

My players chose:

• A Wild West Gunslinger
• A sentient cyborg T-Rex (Prof. Doctor Thaddeus Rex M.D.)
• A Viking
• DB Cooper, posing as a legit TW agent
• An evolved, sentient mathematical algorithm housed in an artificial robot body
• A 1930's wise guy 

I've run four sessions with these characters, with the fifth due on Monday, and they've all been hilarious, tense, challenging and creative. 
In the first session, in prohibition era Chicago, one of the players opted to use time travel to move all other cars out of a street two minutes before they arrived 'in game time' to ensure that they got the best parking spot outside of a speakeasy. Later on in that session another player teleported to five minutes ago and just outside the back entrance to the speak easy so that he could catch the bad guy by surprise as she made good on her getaway sticks.
As soon as you introduce time travel into a game you force everyone participating to think in an additional dimension, and that makes for some weird and unusual fun. 

What would be the repercussions of going back and stopping the villain from killing that small child just now? Maybe they were 'supposed' to die...
Maybe there's a whole moral quandary to work through before you kill an infant Hitler.

Maybe you should fund the book and find out. 

Night's Black Agents / Tap That

I continue to enjoy Double Tap, the Night's Black Agents expansion from +Pelgrane Press Ltd

By 'enjoy' I mean 'be continually inspired and engaged by'
It is one hell of a book.

The first half (90 pages) is player facing, and expands on the wide range on cool things that players can do, use or blow up.
The book would be worth the cover price alone for this section.

The second half (30 pages) is director facing, and offers a range of pre-made people, places and perils (OK, monsters) as well as story ideas and tips.
I would probably have paid money just to get 30 pages of quality this high.

If you play Night's Black Agents, I urge you to get this book. There is not a wasted word or filler paragraph in its 120 page count.

Excellent work +Kenneth Hite, +Will Hindmarch, +Kevin Kulp, +Christian Lindke, +Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, +John Adamus, James Palmer, Will Plant and Rob Wieland.
Please keep producing work of this calibre and then take my money.

Allow your darlings to be murdered / Knowing when to let an NPC go

There's a decision that shapes a GM, one that separates the men from the boys, the wheat from the chaff, the good from the bad.
You've put in time and effort creating a Non-Player Character for your game. You've not just statted them, you've woven them into the very fabric of your game world. They have a name, a back story, concerns, interests, a personality, goals, hopes and fears.
This is a recurring antagonist. A nemesis. Someone who your players love to lock horns with, who they curse in the day and ally with in darkest need.
Then the players just kill them. Usually in a summary fashion that in no way hints to the greatness of this character.

What do you do? Let the character die? Move on? Start again?
Or snatch them from the jaws of death, resurrect them off screen or retcon their survival?

This is the test.

I recently had to make this decision, twice, in my weekly Night's Black Agents game.

I created the first actual vampire the players were to meet, who was supposed to thrash them within an inch of their lives before dying himself or fleeing or driving them off.
They pretty much cut his head off in the first round of combat with him, dropping him instantly.
OK. That's fine. He has healing powers and is supposed to be hard to kill and fucking scary. Fair enough. Let them have their victory.
Their surveillance cameras picked him up walking around and killing Mafia henchmen with his bare hands some ten, fifteen minutes later. That put the wind up them.

The next time they meet him, some four sessions later, they were sufficiently wary of his recuperative abilities to nuke the site from orbit. They wheeled a bomb disposal robot, packed to the rafters with C4, into the building he was in and remotely detonated it.

I spent the next week agonising over what to do.
He was a vampire with supernatural speed, reflexes, resilience and healing. Of anyone could have survived, it would be him.
But that would be a spit in the face to the players. They'd put everything they had into making sure that they killed this guy dead. It would be unsatisfying to deprive them off that kill.
But what about the narrative function that the NPC was supposed to serve? And what about all the effort I put into building him?

Let me tell you a story.
Back in the late 90s I played in a Vampire: the Dark Ages game. I was playing a 7th Gen Brujah based on the Crusader Tancred de Hautville, who was a lot of a bastard. One of the other players was a 7th Gen Tremere who specialised in the Thaumaturgical Path of Fear. This becomes important shortly.
For some reason we were fighting a horde of flesh eating zombies in a tunnel network beneath London. It turned out that the source of all of these
Undead was a Celestial Chorus mage (don't ask me why, I still don't know to this day). He told us to stop killing the zombies, or he'd have to stop us.
So we attacked.
Our tried and tested tactic was for the Tremere to use the Path of Fear, which reduced the targets dice pools by a sizable amount, often preventing them from acting, and then the rest of us would beat the shit out of them.
So, the Tremere used Path of Fear and rolled well, reducing the Mage's dice pool by 9 dice. This pretty much guaranteed his death. The rest of us surged forward.
At this point the Storyteller starts panicking and tells us that the Mage is teleporting out of the tunnels.
Well, this is patently impossible, not unless the Mage has an Arête score of 10 (Arête is the measure of a Mage's magical might. A score of 3 let's you throw fireballs. A score of 10 literally makes you an actual God), which is highly improbable.
But the Storyteller informs us that, yes, the Mage is a God and can create a fully functioning universe in 6 days or less.
He rolls his one dice, gets a success and has the Mage escape.
Fucking atrocious! 

To this day I find this deeply unsatisfying. I'm getting that empty, gnawing, hollow feeling in my stomach just thinking about it.
If only I could roll back time and punch the storyteller in the gut and shout "how d'ya like them apples?!"

Back to Night's Black Agents...
Should the vampire escape?
No.
They found his severed arm in the rubble of the building, and the rest of him stuck in a collapsed bolt hole in the cellar.
Their play paid off. They get the rewards. My NPC gets to be interrogated, and if they're sloppy he may escape (sans arm). He'll probably die. That's fine.

Horror tropes / Cabin in the Woods and Fear Itself

Once again I'm late to the party - I watched Cabin in the Woods for the first time last night.

The thing that makes it an enjoyable film, in my opinion, is the clear love of standard horror movie tropes throughout. My wife and I were both delighted by the gas station in the beginning and it's treasure trove of creepy genre signposts: fish hooks, bear traps, animal skins, pickled creatures, hunting goods etc. I wondered aloud if they'd modeled the cabin on the one from Evil Dead. The scene where the victims choose the transgression for which they'll be punished is wonderful, as is Fran Krantz' line "I'm drawing a line in the sand, no one is reading any fucking Latin!"

The part that tied the film up to Fear Itself, for me, is the statement of specific roles within the genre:
The Whore / slut
The Scholar / egghead
The Warrior / jock
The Fool / burnout
The Virgin / good girl

Fear Itself uses these stereotypes to define character roles within the game with much the same effect as in Cabin...

The overall plot of Cabin is a nice fit with the classic Fear Itself Ocean Game setting: a mysterious and incredibly powerful consciousness horrifically manipulates reality around unsuspecting stereotypes for their own amusement and benefit / a mysterious and technologically advanced organisation manipulates unsuspecting teens into falling into stereotypical roles and controls the environment around them for their own amusement and benefit.

You could run a straight Cabin in the Woods game using Fear Itself with zero effort or adaptation, and you could overlay the Mystery Men and their Ocean Game onto Cabin with only a few tweaks.

Games of Future Past / Planning my next game

I'm running a successful campaign at the moment, which obviously means that I'm thinking about what I want to run next.

I've been toying with a few plot ideas and potential settings for different games for awhile now, and suddenly have hope that I'll be able to run them.

I'm probably getting a bit giddy...

The games are:

Trail of Cthulhu
The first Gumshoe game I bought, and a work of beautiful genius. It successfully evokes multiple interpretations of Lovecraft's work, from the pulp two fisted tales of dark adventure to the doomed and weak minded soul not long for this world with the tenacious and fearful academic somewhere in between.
I have an idea for a game that draws upon The Mountains of Madness and Call of Cthulhu for mood and theme and a real life lost Arctic expedition for setting. I've already started mentally mapping out this idea. It's a strong contender.

Trinity
Originally released as Aeon and soon to be re-released under that name, Trinity is the game from the Aeon Trilogy that I have played the least and have the most books for.
I think I ran a short one shot game for two players back in 2001/2.
It's a game that deserves another crack of the whip - a mix of epic sci-fi, space opera, cyberpunk, post apocalyptic wasteland, Starship Troopers, intrigue and horror. You can set the equalisers to any level you want just by varying the locations and organisations involved.
I'd run a vanilla Aeon Trinity game with a mix of investigation, combat and political manoeuvring.

Hunter: the Vigil
I think of all the World of Darkness games, H:tV has the broadest appeal. Used to playing the monsters in the other games? Have fun playing the other side for once. Never played a WoD game before? Here's a no nonsense gateway to the setting. Not sure about playing a monster? Play a legit human instead.
I was running a nWoD cops game when Hunter: the Vigil announced, and it quickly became apparent that I was running a proto hunter game.
When I finally got it I ran a short introductory story arc for my gaming group, then promptly got my wife pregnant again so had to scale back my gaming for awhile.
I've still got a load of unused ideas that I'd like to try out, and my wife bought me the Compacts & Conspiracies splatbook for my birthday, so it's fresh in my mind.

Ars Magica
My first gaming love. The second game I ever played, the first game I ran. Over the years I've built up and lost a sizable ArM library. I had about 20+ books for 2nd, 3rd and 4th edition, some of which are probably worth a bit of money now, and stupidly gave them all away to charity when the 5th edition came out. To make matters worse, 5th edition wasn't what I wanted it to be, and I gave up on it.
A few years and a bit of perspective later I realised that I wasn't giving it a chance. Different doesn't mean bad. And it couldn't be as much of a disappointment as Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition.
So I'd like to run Ars Magica again.

Changeling: the Lost
Look, this game is fucking brilliant. Really. It's the most well rounded game that White Wolf has ever produced. It's beautiful, horrific, terrifying, paranoid, innocent, brave, redemptive and compelling. It's everything good about folk tales and myths and everything good about modern horror.
It's the best Slender Man pictures meets Pan's Labyrinth meets The Evil Dead.
As I see it, Changeling: the Lost is a game about self discovery and personal agency - freed slaves learning that they can do anything they want, and trying to work out what that actually is, whilst fighting to preserve that freedom.

Mage: the Awakening/Mage Noir
It's hard to get a grip on Mage: the Awakening, to definitively say "this is what the game is about", especially when compared to its predecessor, Mage: the Ascension.
In Ascension it was explicit within the setting that you were caught up in an ideological, metaphysical war with clearly defined sides and an achievable goal. Awakening lacks this direction and forces the players to determine what they want to do and who they have to fight to do it.
The rules are great though. They allow the player characters to bend reality to their will and do a truly impressive range of miracle working.
If running Mage: the Awakening I'd use the Mage Noir setting and play in post war America, late 40s to early 50s, with the players hunting down magical artifacts like an arcane Maltese Falcon.

Pathfinder
Every now and then I have an urge to run a good old fashioned high fantasy dungeon bash.
So far I've primarily used Pathfinder to run Goblin games, because Goblins are ace. The Goblin games I've run so far have been independent of each other but set in the same game world, so the events of the first game (slaughtering a farmer and his family, burning their house down and eating the livestock) informed the second (humans try to drive the Goblins out of the area, Goblins retaliate by setting fire to what they think is a religious monument but is in fact a signal beacon) and the second will inform the third (possible war due to the sudden amassing of an army after an invasion has been signaled).
In every game, though, the players have basically been looking for food and tribal status.

And Fear and Paranoia will be out watchwords / Disturbing players sleep with Night's Black Agents

I'm currently running Kenneth Hite's Night's Black Agents, a Gumshoe game focusing on investigation, spy thriller tropes and vampires, over Google Hangouts. It's a fantastic game.
It sounds a bit weird at first: Jason Bourne alikes vs vampire conspiracy in a high octane thriller setting that focuses on investigation. Actually, it sounds a bit confused.
It doesn't run like that. It runs like a classic spy thriller, with an added level of scary shit at every level.

The core book is mostly a toolbox with every component needed to build and run a custom game.

• Design your own vampire - satanic, supernatural, alien or mutant
• Build your own conspiracy, with a step by step guide on how to move from street/gang level to world spanning mega conspiracy
• Move through Eastern Europe like Liam Neeson through a gang of human traffickers
• Support and ultimately betray your friends and allies
• Different modes of play from ultra realistic Dust to hyper paranoid Mirror, psychologically damaging Burn to high action Stakes

Sofia, the capital city of Bulgaria

I've set my game in Bulgaria, one of the poorest and newest members of the European Union. It's an ex Communist state once part of the USSR. It's a gateway to Asia, Europe and the Middle East. It's government is incredibly corrupt. Border controls are virtually non existent. Organised crime is unchecked and run by ex members of the Communist Olympic Wrestling Team who found themselves suddenly unemployed and with the only marketable skills of being able to hurt people. Assassinations are common in Bulgaria, often happen in broad daylight in public places and can involve rocket launchers.
Honestly, as a setting, it's a gift.

I'm loving the creativity and verve that my players are bringing to the game. It's the first time that I've played with four of them, so there was a lot of unchartered territory as far as the group dynamic goes.

So far the team have:

• Extracted an informant and hurt a number of Bulgarian Mafia goons in the process
• Watched a human trafficking deal go bad, killed a load of surprisingly agile and hardy Germans and crashed out a bit when one got up again after having his head virtually severed
• Blown themselves up when they placed a propane canister and an M60 in the same confined space they were in
• Followed a trail of death and destruction as they played catch up to a sadistic killer who was tracking them down
• Blown up some cop cars as they fled from the scene of a brutal murder they didn't commit

A genuine Bulgarian Mafia
boss and ex wrestler

The players have been writing up the sessions as In Character journals, which I'm very happy with.
The notes of paranoia in there make me feel like I'm doing a good job.

We're seven sessions in now, which is much further than I thought we'd get. Often these things lose momentum, but we still seem to be going strong. It'd be really good to see this game through to the bitter end.

Sunburn Notice / Nights Black Agents game pitch

Somewhere in Eastern Europe Matt Damon, Liam Neeson, Daniel Craig and Tom Cruise have just been burnt out by their employers and left to die.
They're suddenly on the radar of a powerful and malevolent international conspiracy who will stop at nothing to silence them. Permanently.
All they have to keep them alive is their years of specialised military and espionage training, a network of informants and a cache of weapons and equipment.
Running isn't an option. They've got to take this fight to the very top of the conspiracy and bring the bastards crashing down.
The only problem, the bastards might be vampires. Or something worse.

Nights Black Agents is a game of hyper capable spies, secret agents and military specialists thrown against a horrific conspiracy. Maybe it's the agents of Satan, or aliens. Maybe a supernatural curse or genetic mutations from unethical experimentation.
Players take on the roles of these super spies, caught in between their old agencies, local law enforcement, organised crime gangs and the shadowy conspiracy. They must uncover a trail of clues and follow it to the top of the conspiracy before the conspiracy gets them.

It's kind of like: Taken, Mission Impossible III, Bourne Trilogy, Casino Royale/Quantum of Solace, Ultraviolet (UK TV series), the Prisoner, Alias, Prison Break

The NoN List / One shot festive Gumshoe adventure

There's now no chance that I'll run with this idea for the next eleven months, so let's blog it instead.

Before I go on, its probably best if you watch the first Tom Cruise Mission Impossible film, in which Hunt and his team must stop stop a NOC list from falling into the wrong hands.

For a while now I've had a half formed joke rattling around my head about Santa assisting police with their enquiries due to his extensive Naughty or Nice list.
He has clearly established an effective and secretive international intelligence network, and uses the information it gathers to keep records on every person alive in the world today.
Therefore, Santa would possess information valuable to any criminal investigation.

It's a poor joke, but a terrifying espionage scenario.
Especially if that list falls into the wrong hands...

I intended to run this using the Esoterrorists rules with a tweaked setting, although I now think that Nights Black Agents would suit it better, being a Bourne/M:I setting already.
I'll reserve judgement on that until I've read through NBA, though.

The set up is; the players are active operatives for an intelligence agency - CIA, NSA, MI5, MI6, MOSSAD, KGB, etc.
They have been tasked with retrieving an encrypted hard drive from a defector. They are briefed that the hard drive is infinitely more valuable than the defector.
The deal goes bad; a third party intervenes, the defector is killed and the hard drive lost.

Information points to a mole within the players own agency, and they are implicated in the conspiracy.

You'll need to decide who the traitor is, who he works for and how the players can track him/her down, retrieve the hard drive and clear their names.

So, what's on the hard drive? Only the previous years Naughty or Nice list.
This is best played after Christmas Day, and should be delivered deadpan.
The Hard Drive contains one, massive, rich text document - a seemingly endless list of names, ages and addresses in table format, with three extra columns.
The columns are headed Yearly Average, Nice Deeds, Naughty Deeds.
It covers the previous Dec 25 through to Dec 24.
If they specifically look, the players can find their own names with a scarily accurate summary of their activities for that year, including details of any covert, top secret missions they undertook.
They can also find the names of their immediate family, their superiors, known operatives from rival agencies, world leaders and celebrities.
The list could topple governments, compromise national security and ruin lives.
The players may even question whether or not their own agency should possess the list.

It's important to play the game as straight as possible. The only joke is the origin of the list, everything else is deadly serious.

For a supernatural element, you can include disturbing midgets with twisted faces, high pitched voices and bleeding edge equipment who are competing against the players. 

Conspyramid / Designing your insidious plot of evil

Pelgrane Press Ltd » Blog Archive » Night’s Black Agents Competition

The link above takes you to an article at Pelgrane Press's See Page XX, about the forthcoming Nights Black Agents and a tool for designing a Conspyramid - a hierarchical structure chart depicting a supernatural conspiracy from the ground level cells up to the vampiric menace organising it, that can have in game effects.

I absolutely love the idea behind it, and how it can be used in game. The concept itself isn't just limited to Gumshoe games, it can be applied to any conspiracy based story.
It's a beautiful idea.

I encourage you all to read it, and invest in NBA's when it comes out.
Actually, you can pre-order it now and get an advance pdf copy for free.

Piper in the Darkness / Trail of Cthulhu One Shot adventure

I ran a One Shot Trail of Cthulhu adventure for my gaming group last month, and have finally gotten round to typing it up. 

Servitor of the Outer Gods

You can find it here.

Doomed Investigators if ever I saw them

I also produced a shit load of pre-generated Investigators for use with it, which you can find here. They're generated with the presumption that you'll have four or more players, but as it's a short adventure, you can get away with not modifying them if you end up with less. 

Miskatonic University Library

Epic Technology Fail / New Adventures in Investigative Gaming

It's been a godawful long time since my last post, and I am pretty much forcing myself to write this one.
My Gaming Enthusiasm batteries have been running pretty low of late, mostly due to Real Life crap, and this blog has suffered as a result.

Which is odd, as I've actually done considerably more in the way of gaming in the last couple of months than I have in the past 18 months.

Firstly, I've run Fear Itself over the internet, which represents two milestone firsts for me:
1) Running a Gumshoe game
2) Running a remote game

I am happy to report that once you get a grip of it, Gumshoe works well. I admit that I was pretty anxious and apprehensive about running an investigative game, to the point that I was sending the Author, Robin Laws, Twitter messages asking for advice.
I'm used to running World of Darkness games, having very rough notes (if at all) and relying on player reactions to direct the story - I.e. winging it.
Gumshoe games require you to plot out a solid mystery, with the discovery of clues being central to the story progression.
I was terrified that I wouldn't have the discipline to follow a set path, or the vision to plot one out in the first place.

Turns out it's pretty easy...

For the main story, I decided to use an idea I'd had knocking around for a good few years, and adapt it to a horror mystery.
I tried to stick to the tropes of slow burn ghost stories and 'classic' horror, like Amityville, Dark Water, Blair Witch et al.

I sketched out a small Scottish village by a Loch, added a sleeping evil in the water, a murder, a growing number of missing people, some animate and aggressive water corpses and threw in a couple if Red Herrings.
I kept in mind what was actually happening and how to stop it, and tried to reveal one key clue or fact per scene.
This, it seems, is key...

I found that as long as I kept to this basic framework, I could still improvise and adapt. Just keep in mind where you're actually going, and how long you want to take getting there.

After about 3 sessions, the game was hovering over the Big Reveal... The players had pursued the Red Herring, refocused back on the initial murder, confronted the (suspected) murderer with the belief that he was behind all the weirdness going on, and just found out that he had killed his wife, but that was it. He knew nothing more.
They were starting to get the bigger pieces to the puzzle, I had an event lined up that would point them towards a solution and more questions....

Then I dropped my laptop, breaking the Motherboard.
As we were playing over Skype, this was a bit of a blow. Not only did I lose my ability to run the game, I also lost my notes.
Bugger.

My wife got a little pink netbook, which she allowed me to use for the game, however it appears incapable of disabling the internal speakers and mic when external ones are attached, which led to impenetrable echo and feedback, so I've had to abandon it for the time being.
:-(

On the upswing, some guys from my old face to face group got in contact, looking to get the band back together.
Our first session is tomorrow night, and I've volunteered to run a one shot Trail of Cthulhu game.

I've opted to focus on stuffy Miskatonic academics hunting Cultists and horrors through the University library stacks, and have knocked up some pregenerated investigators for immediate use.

Which leads me to the second technology fail.

My wife's netbook does not have DVD/CD drive, so we can't install the hard copy of Office we own, and have been using Google Docs instead.

Google Docs is generally fine, but has a habit of randomly changing a documents formatting if you attempt to mix text, pictures and tables.
Which is very frustrating.

Then, when I printed off the pdf character sheets and rules cheat sheet from Pelgrane Press' site, the printer missed off the last 6 lines of text.
WTF!?

Seeing as it took me some 25 minutes to print off 10 sides of A4, I've decided to just live with it.

Gore to Plot Ratio / Fear Itself

Question: In a stock teen horror / slasher movie scenario (Scream, Darkness Falls, Harper's Island, Nightmare on Elm Street et al), what should the split be between horrific encounters/gruesome murder and investigation into the monster that leads to the final confrontation?

I'm thinking 30/70, with most of the screen time being tense, gory action.

I guess there's an argument for 10% of the movie being bare breasts and lustful activity and/or comedy, and about 5% being character development (oh, she's the Good Girl, he's the Brain, she's the Mean Girl, he's the Dumb Jock etc. Or, Alive, Dead, Dead, Dead, Dead, Dead).

I'm plotting out my first Fear Itself game, which uses the Gumshoe system, and I want to get the balance right.

Technology Fail / The joys of remote gaming

I'm pretty pumped. I've just finished my first internet gaming experience, and it went well... sort of.

I'm running a game of Fear Itself for a group of six players, three of which i've never gamed with before, one of whom has never gamed before. Tonight was a dry run for the technology and a character creation session.

The technology was a massive pain in the ass.

I'd committed to Google Talk, because I believed it allowed conference calls. Noooo. One conversation at a time. Fail.
So we tried a Google+ Hangout, which would've worked just fine, except one of the players couldn't get in. Apparently G+ was full. Or so it told him.

So then we switched to BigMarker.com, which is a free web conferencing service, with video cams, 'unlimited' users, text chat, file sharing and an interactive white board.
After five minutes of setting up, we were in, and then my Shockwave crashed. Luckily it didn't close the conference, so I just rejoined. One other player had an issue, so this is what we're using going forward. It worked really well.

Once we were all on, we went through character creation and the basics of the rules. Then we had a fight.

The fight was fucking great.
I've not GM'd or role played for over a year, and by god I've missed it.
I set the players up in a standard tavern brawl, with a last man standing brief, and let them go mad.
It was gratifying that the 'combat specialist' died in only two rounds.
They are so fucked.
We didn't get round to doing Stability loss, however they're most likely to go insane before they die.

I am itching to get into the game, now.
I can't wait a week...

Green Light gogogogogogo / Video Conference gaming update

I have received agreement in principle from my wife to steal the laptop once a week and shout alarming curses into a microphone whilst sat in the kitchen drinking coffee.
In fact, she feels it's quite an elegant solution to our childcare / lifestyle constraints vs my addictive need to geek.

So, win!

I have just sent out confirmation of my commitment to the eight potential players, and we'll see what comes back.
Eight is a large gaming group, but I am expecting some attrition on that number. Not everybody will be available on the same night. Some people will be only passingly interested. It's a system that none of us have played before (Fear Itself / Gumshoe) and is an experiment in gaming media.

Whilst I would like to retain all eight (because they're all good friends who I have confidence in), I wouldn't be surprised or disappointed if we dwindled to four.
If it dropped to less than that number, I'd probably have to rethink some elements.

For the play medium, I want to try Big Marker, who provide a free conferencing service that includes video, voice and IM chat, as well as the ability to upload and deliver presentations on a virtual white marker.
I'm hoping this will allow me to upload text, images etc that can be used in the session.
http://www.bigmarker.com/help/manual

I've also got myself on Google+, which is showing some potential for virtual gaming. It may be a fallback position should Big Marker go down or prove to be utter wank.

I've set the players some homework. Now to see what comes back.

• Confirm that you want to and are able to play
• Let me know what days are good / bad for you
• Read the rules
• Think about your character concept. I'll be using the basic character stereotypes presented in the rules, although this is not a high school game. There will be only one character with specific combat and investigation experience (who will be fated to die heroically near the end), and if anybody wants to play one, only one Psychic. If anybody wants to play one of these, then shout out asap. If multiple people want to play one of these roles, then we'll resolve that as it arises.
• Try out BigMarker.com and make sure it works on your PC, and that you're happy to use it. http://www.bigmarker.com/ 
• Read up on Fear Itself at Pelgrane Press's website or my blog.
• Ask questions.

First combat drop / Advice for new players

I'm currently exploring the possibility of running my first long distance game over the internet.
One of the logistical challenges I have is making sure a couple of new players are fully engaged and involved, and that they get all the guidance they need. One has never played before.
I'm a little concerned about remotely guiding a new player through the first few sessions. I've decided to use Fear Itself as the first game because its a low rules game and uses a d6, which everybody has.
I had looked around the internet for some new player advice, and worryingly came up short.
There's loads of 'getting started' advice for online video games, but nothing for pen & paper RPGs.
WTF, people. For shame.

So, OK, we need to fix this, like yesterday.


Total Party Kill advice for new players

- Stereotypes and stock characters are good. You'll hear a lot of talk as you get into the hobby about how everybody's character is a unique and precious flower amongst the weeds of predictable and dull average characters.
The people that say this are usually elitist ass holes, who are just apeing a character from an obscure book, film or comic.
As a new player, you shouldn't be pressured into creating a dramatically poignant homage to existentialism, rather you should be given the freedom to play Han Solo, Aragorn, Indie or Neo, if that's what you want to play right now.
Stock characters are classic, timeless and easy to portray. You'll be busy enough keeping up with the rules a d action without having to wade through obtuse characterization and motivation.

- Have a flick through the rulebook to get the geist of the setting and system, by all means, but don't for a minute think that you're expected to memorize it.
You'll probably get a good grip on the basics of a game if you read Wikipedia and its official web page.

- Talk to the other players. Hey, have a beer with them before and after. They'll happily give you advice and tell you about their character. This introductory period is the only time in your life you will genuinely be interested in hearing about somebody else's character. Enjoy it. Let their enthusiasm rub off on you. Look forward to the day you have such hoary war stories under your belt and can regale young pups with tales of your glory. Oh yes.

- At the gaming table, caffeine, sugar and trans-fats are your friends. One or two small beers may be good buddies as well, just pace yourself and be sensible.
If you turn up at a session with any combination of: soda, pizza, chips & dip, cookies, donuts, candy and ice cream in enough quantity to share, you will be a king, my friend. A king.
I tells ya.

There's obviously a hell of a lot more in the way of genuinely useful advice out there, and I invite all and sundry to either add it here, or to blog about it yourselves.
We, as a community, need to build up a greater repository of knowledge for those new to and interested in the hobby.

The best advice I have for players new to the hobby

Plotting Cosmic Dread / Designing a Trail of Cthulhu adventure

As an intellectual exercise I've started writing up a Trail of Cthulhu story idea I've had.
It immediately went through two revisions as I realised it was too complicated and over ambitious, and pared it down to the core concepts.
I really want to do something with monsters, rum-runners and prohibition, so my original idea was to have the players be Feds and investigate some liquor smuggling on the Canadian border, get stranded in a remote hotel during a snowstorm and get caught up in a play off between the Mi-Go and the Cult of Hastur.
It sounded great, but I struggled with working out how to introduce the separate plot elements.
My usual downfall as a GM is to be too ambitious, and then fail to deliver, so it really makes sense to reduce the concept to a simple premise and develop that. I can always include other bits as I go on.
Remember, you can always add, but you can never take away.

So, with this in mind, I threw out the Cult of Hastur, and focused entirely upon the Mi-Go. In a further effort to simplify, and to try to keep the game as Purist as possible, I decided to cleave the structure of the story as close to the structure of The Whisperer in Darkness as possible, although told from the more immediately horrific perspective of Henry Akeley.

This seemed to exclude the originally intended setting of a secluded hotel, so that's been replaced with a Rangers Station instead. More Wrong Turn than The Shining.

So, with this revised story in mind - Federal Agents, whilst investigating a distillary in the Vermont hills, are trapped at a Rangers Station during a blizzard along with some Rum-Runners, and are menaced by the Mi-Go, who are mining nearby.

The next challenge, the one I specifically set myself, was to write a ToC Gumshoe adventure, with Core Clues, Investigative Ability matrices and a coherent narrative thread that leads from the initial set up through to the Horrible Truth.

After a failed attempt to organise my thoughts on paper, I've now turned to a flow chart app on my phone; Thinking Space.
Whilst its still a work in progress, my first 'mind map' is below.

From this base I intend to tie together the intended events, locations and characters with a network of clues.

How this will translate to an actual game is yet to be seen, as the last time I used a flow chart when plotting a game, the results were fairly pedestrian, and involved a fair bit of rail roading, which I'm against.

Gumshoe / Setting a trap for the bad guy

I like Gumshoe games. I own Trail of Cthulhu, The Esoterrorists and Fear Itself, and plan to invest in Mutant City Blues at the very least.
I like the investigative slant to the games, especially as the systems provide a fit for purpose medium for playing games that ape popular TV shows: CSI, Criminal Minds, The Mentalist, X Files et al.
I really appreciate a good cop drama / murder mystery, especially the quirky end of the spectrum.
I do have a problem, though, and its nothing to do with the system. It's about how you play the game.
Many crime dramas, at one point or another, will set a trap for the bad guy. The trail of clues has led as far as its going to, and the detectives are now at a loss.
Enter the maverick investigator, who creates an elaborate and entertaining trap for the killer, one designed to identify the perpetrator and separate them from the pack of suspects. This device is used almost weekly in The Mentalist.
How could you do this in a game? As a device, its fun, dramatic and rewarding, and a massive narrative contrivance.
For it to exist in a game, a number of things need to happen.
The plot must have presented enough clues and detail to allow the set up.
The GM must be willing to run with such a device, and able to think on their feet fast enough to do so
The players must be creative enough to coke up with a workable model, and have gathered enough evidence already to create such a trap.
As it stands, the missing ingredients that prevent such devices occurring in my games are, unfortunately, my ability as a GM to line up the clues and run with such a high degree of player creativity.