I did a cool thing last week: I wrapped up a 23 session Call of Cthulhu campaign that was entirely set in Arkham. The PCs ran an antique/book shop called Astral Antiquities and Appraisals but spent most of their time investigating weird and terrible events in and around Arkham, never straying too far from their store in the merchant district. Over the course of a year in real life, I ran the group through four scenarios but there was enough customization to keep me on my toes, and I want to discuss not only those scenarios and the campaign framework, but also what worked and what didn’t.

Accounting: the RPG

One of my all-time favorite TTRPG books is Bookhounds of London, for Trail of Cthulhu, and I love it for exactly the reason this campaign was successful – whether in London or elsewhere, the book creates a framework of the people and things necessary to make running an occult bookstore (or antique or oddity shop or anything other business focused on buying and selling the weird and esoteric) interesting and gameable. Now that I’ve finished this campaign, I can say that my own two favorite campaigns that I’ve run have been based on this framework of running a shop, and so clearly it works for me in a few ways.

First, it quickly and easily gives the players and GM a framing device to build their stories and characters around. I offered many options for a PC group, but they all wanted to run a store, and we ended up with a fun and eclectic mix of PCs: an ex-con turned shopgirl, veteran turned accountant, forger and second-story man, and failed astronomer turned business owner. They all used opening the store as a reason for their PCs to have gone through a recent personal transformation (a question I asked them up front), and I gave them Connecting Cards (I’ll have to write these up at some point) that loosely tied their backgrounds together.

Running a store that sells weird stuff is really easy for people to understand thematically, and within 2-3 sessions we had a clear picture of Astral Antiquities as a business in Arkham’s Merchant District that had been open for about a year after Wesley the Failed Astronomer inherited the store from his mentor Ruper Merriweather (more on them later). It snapped into place quickly.

Another reason I like having PCs run a store is that it gives the PCs’ universe the center of gravity for framing new scenarios and adventures, which players and GM must have bookshop or not, and it just skips past all the awkward conversations around why the group knows each other and allows the GM to easily put interesting situations in front of the party. Much like Delta Green or the Advocacy (my own contemporary horror sourcebook – more on that in later post for sure), providing a reason for the investigators to explore mysteries gets to the heart of running investigative horror quickly and cleanly.

Building a store in a static location such as Arkham or San Francisco also allows the group to explore that location more deeply, as opposed to globe-trotting campaigns such as Masks or Eternal Lies that drag the party to many locations. With the static location, everyone gets to feel more verisimilitude and connection to the world and the discrete stories and stakes feel more real. Now I love globe-trotting campaigns, but there’s something special about digging into a location and making it your own, finding out what you like and hate about it and giving its characters reasons to be. It’s true escapism.

Connecting the Mysteries

Over the course of these 23 sessions, I ran four scenarios, three of which are in print: The Haunting, Edge of Darkness, Dreams and Fancies, and Queen of Night. I had plans to later run Crimson Letters, also set in Arkham, and then maybe head to Innsmouth for my white whale scenario Escape from Innsmouth. But those last two will have to wait.

Two important things about these scenarios (let’s replace Dreams & Fancies with Crimson Letters to make my point): they are all in print and they all take place in Arkham (well, you can easily put The Haunting there instead of Boston), meaning that running a year-plus campaign like this is really easy and relatively inexpensive to do (as opposed to tracking down either the Innsmouth or Kingsport books if you don’t already have them).

I also used the new Arkham book quite heavily, especially relying on the descriptions and stats for the witch coven (spoilers! There’s a coven in Arkham!) and just getting a great vibe for many locations. We figured out exactly where the PCs lived and what building on the map was the store, and used NPCs from the book for many great encounters – Abner Wick is a gem!

It was very easy for me to string together these scenarios, as well as tie together two early scenarios with Queen of Night at the end for deep thematic call-back and resolution. The Book of Eibon, found in The Haunting, holds many secrets to communing with Tsathoggua (which I’ve written on), which is the Old One I ended up using as the Dark Master for Queen of Night; and then I threw in Bertrand Merriweather, scorned son from Edge of Darkness, to continually harass the PCs until he eventually hired a gang (no Mythos, just fists, bricks, and blackjacks) to beat up PCs, smash shop windows, and generally confuse the plot until he messed up and was chased and tackled by the ex-con shopgirl who it turns out was as fast as an Olympic runner. It really came together nicely.

Between these scenarios and the Arkham book, I found it incredibly easy to string together a cohesive campaign in a way that I had never done before. Yes, at times it did take me a bit of effort to create episodes but building the three fronts for Queen of Night was a very worthwhile investment that paid out multiple dividends later in the campaign.

I am confident that I could run the same scenarios (with Crimson Letters instead of Dreams & Fancies), buy no new books, and even provide the same frame of “you are running a business in Arkham” (which could be books/antiques or detective or?) and run 20+ sessions again with the same factions and have the game be totally different but just as successful.

However, there was one key learning (aside from all the above) that helped me tune the game and find its groove for everyone at the table.

Favored Play Style

As I discussed on MUP 320, I ran Dreams & Fancies from the Kingsport book and it did not work for my table at all. I misjudged how the PCs should engage with the scenario – it should be on top of another scenario for ideal effect – and so everyone was lost on how to really dig into the scenario, including myself.

I pulled the plug on it early, after messing around creating The Door in the Floor (which I need to write up) and thought about what the table (including myself) needed. Remember, all my players were new to investigative horror, and they really jumped at the clues/mysteries presented in both The Haunting and The Edge of Darkness. Yes, they ran a store, but they were never there, which created an ongoing joke of “who’s tending the store?” and “well, I came by but the store was closed, again,” that pointed at the table’s greater interest in mysteries than accounting.

Also, I don’t have a lot of time to create new content for my games, which is why I ended my Bookhounds of SF game in the first place. I’m really working hard at writing consistently and continuously, building up momentum to set my attention firmly back at novels, and while I love to mess around with scenarios and customize them to fit the table, using my own understanding of storytelling and character arcs to create a very bespoke and deep story for my table, I just don’t have the time for it.

So I rely on published scenarios to help me – whether running Masks over three years or Edge of Darkness over three sessions, sadly my writing doesn’t pay me enough (yet) to playtest new materials all the time.

When Dreams & Fancies spun out, I realized that it was not a very clue-heavy scenario, and that it asked the players to be very curious in a way that my rather new investigative table was ready for. I think really understanding how investigative games work takes time to learn, and while a more mature table (like my Masks game which is comprised of veteran Cthulhu players and GMs) might know how to scratch at thinner clues, my table of new investigators needed (and liked) a clearer, more concrete set of clues and mysteries.

And I was right. Holy smokes was I right.

Queen of Night (found in Arkham Gazette #3 which I can’t recommend enough – do you already have a copy?) starts like the best of mysteries – with a murder – and tips sideways fast. It has plenty of research to do, with a good collection of clues and props that help the PCs dig into the lineage of a long-time gestating Arkham witch cult. There are multiple dead bodies, plenty of NPCs to engage, and lots and lots of weird and spooky moments to throw at the PCs. It really is a smashing scenario.

And the players LOVED it. By the end of the first session, the confusion and incomplete conclusion of Dreams & Fancies had left us, to be replaced by a haunting and terrible murder mystery. Then I stacked on the extra details and mysteries of not only the Merriweather Gang but the other Arkham coven (the one in the Arkham book), which stirred the clue-pot considerably and really had the players scratching their heads for a long time.

By the time we were a few sessions into Queen of Night, it was clear that I had found a style of game that worked for everyone. I still had to do some work to get the factions up and running (which I’ll write more on in a later post), but once I did that work my job at the table was very easy.

One of my favorite moments of the game, and a favorite moment in 35+ years of GMing, came toward the end, when my players were, once again, sifting through the clues and trying to pick out the narrative. They did something similar every couple of sessions after they got a couple new chunks of clues, but this time it was different. They had met and faced down the threat of the Merriweather Gang, figured out that the Arkham Coven was different than the Queen of Night coven, and begun to understand who each of the NPCs were.

The grand moment came when a player said, “I think there are three different groups here…” and listed them out and all their relevant context. This was a stark difference from 4-5 sessions earlier when they were conflating all the factions into one with wide-eyed confusion, “This witch cult is HUGE!” Now they had sifted through all the clues like the thorough investigators they had become, and had been able to arrive at thoughtful and well-researched conclusions based on the myriad clues I had thrown them over multiple sessions. And they got it right.

It was beautiful.

I Would Do it Again

Now that I’m here, I would totally run this campaign again, even if I took out Dreams & Fancies and didn’t replace it at all. Bookstore, Detective Agency, Florist, really it doesn’t matter. Running a campaign where the PCs are business owners in Arkham is just so easy and satisfying. And those scenarios are all well-constructed and easy to use as building blocks to create a deep and fun game of exploration and investigation in and around Arkham.

It would totally do it again.

Earlier this month I attended 1d4 Con held in Charles Town, WV and, for the most part, had a smashing time. I just attended one day, but I played in three games, including running my Alien game “Games without Frontiers” (more on that below), met old and new friends, including James who runs the con, ate amazing tacos at a roadside stand, and generally just had a pleasant time hanging out with other gamers for the day. All great except…

Except the one player who came really close to ruining my Alien game (and my second ad-hoc game of Into the Odd/Sytgian Library) – he has triggered numerous conversations about how to set up convention games for success, as well as getting me to sit down and write this post where I’ll attempt to put some new rules in place for when I (and maybe you) run convention games.

The situation is not new – you sit down to run or play in a convention game and while most of the table is collaborative, friendly, and focused on creating a safe and fun space for everyone else, there is one player who starts sending up yellow and red flags early that they are not willing or able to think of anyone but themselves. Maybe they are extremely juvenile in their humor or engagement, maybe they are super-distracted with their phone, or maybe (like in my case) they quickly show that they are at the table to highlight themselves, their character, and their fun – at the expense of everyone else.

I have discussed table safety extensively on MUP (especially in these two episodes that I’m very proud of) and how safety tools make sure that everyone at the table gets on the same page at the start of a game to have a fun time. But what I’ve never really discussed or even thought about was what I’m calling “table fun rules” – a set of upfront expectations detailed at the beginning of a game that give the GM and table clear boundaries and actions to take to make sure everyone is supporting the table and the collaborative story that we build together.

(This topic also merges with something I’ve wanted to discuss for a long time around building a “Gamer Hierarchy of Needs” and I begin to wander in that direction, turning this into a multi-part post and helping me realize I do need to put down those thoughts. Warning – this post goes long.)

So I want to develop a set of tools that GMs and players can bring to their tables that bring the necessary conversations front and center to the table, just like Table Safety, and start weeding out troublesome players up front.

Let me use my Alien game at 1d4 Con to illustrate why we need these tools.

Our table of five players – all of whom were new to the Alien RPG – was very dynamic and different, with widely varying player personalities, styles, and experiences. The first yellow flags came early when our troublesome player Larry (not his real name) took the one PC that holds a key narrative element and began using that narrative to set himself apart from the other PCs (to my later point – I need to take care in who takes this PC because they own an important part of the story and they need to be willing to share the story).

While there was a little friction with him setting himself apart from the rest of the table, I let it ride because the first hour of the game is really just warming up. I re-greased the narrative skids and kept the story moving until, at the halfway point, things went sideways – fast.

I have run GWF about a dozen times, including multiple convention runs, and I’ve never had anyone ruin the narrative like this – I was caught off-guard so dramatically (and I continued to trust the player to do the right thing) that I let it go too far without correcting and that ended up really challenging the other players to play their own roles.

Larry jumped past any “figure out what’s happening” actions and directly tried to instigate combat between the other players and NPCs multiple times, attempting to use his PC’s in-game authority to basically upturn the whole narrative (literally saying “Kill him,” “shoot him,” and “take this gun and destroy him”). There wasn’t discussion with the other players, there wasn’t discussion with the NPCs, there wasn’t consideration for what the purpose of the agenda was that he was using to attempt to instigate combat – he just tried, repeatedly, to get PCs to kill the NPCs, and when that didn’t work, tried to get the NPCs to kill each other.

The table was very unclear on where to go with this – mostly because I was unclear on where to go. I had never had someone take the agenda so literally, so quickly, and try to get into combat in the second act. Technically the PC was following his secret agenda, but it really went against the spirit of the game, and I worked with the other players to bring the narrative back on track – offering many options that did not include killing the NPCs – but Larry wasn’t having it. He tried every way he could to instigate combat and was visibly frustrated when everyone else at the table worked around it.

I even mentioned at some point as the table was getting frustrated, “He is technically working within the bounds of his agenda,” which he was. But – and this is the important part – he was wayyyyyy outside of the bounds of the table’s fun, and his continued efforts really challenged the rest of the table, including myself, to have a good time. (Also – very important – this is where I should have said something more direct to Larry, but did not. More on this below.)

All of this friction took time, and the table fell behind the allotted pacing for fitting into the four-hour slot. I pushed the group to engage with the final act, but Larry would not follow the very clear action his PC needed to take to move the story into its final stage. Every single player that has played this role has moved the story into its third act because that’s what the story expects you to do – because they were playing with the table’s story and not their own. I even explain this goal multiple times as part of the mission briefing. This is not a matter of miscommunication or unclear agendas – this became a player refusing to play the game in front of him.

It all boiled over when, about 15 minutes from the end, as the final scene spun out of control (with gunfire and panic in the true Alien way), the PCs began to retreat – because Larry’s PC has not done was is needed for the group to be successful – and another PCs runs past Larry’s PC (who has been critically injured and is having trouble moving) and Larry says, “I shoot her” (meaning the other PC). There was no narrative reason to do this – Larry was just frustrated that all of his shenanigans have spun the narrative and table against him and got him injured.

I said, “No. You can’t do that.”

That’s a really big deal for me, and that’s when I realized that I let the story get too far out of sync and that Larry was now ruining everyone’s fun. I told him he needed to do something else other than PvP –it was now acceptable to shoot the NPCs per the narrative – and I pushed the story hard back on track. But the damage was done.

Shortly thereafter the session ended, and the players left, except Larry who asked to play another game with me later. (To which, strangely, I said yes. More on that later.) And with that, my table walked away frustrated and confused with a game that didn’t need to go sideways.

All of this drama has led me here, and I needed to write down what happened to give detail and merit to the idea that Larry never wanted to be a part of the group, and never had collective story in mind during those four hours. I talked with other players at the table, as well as players who were frustrated with Larry’s behavior in earlier games, and all of these discussions lead to the idea that I needed to do something earlier about making sure the table – including myself – had the right guardrails needed to keep one player from ruining everyone else’s game.

Because that’s what happened, and it’s not fair to everyone else who shows up to do that, including me.

And while this is not something that happens to me regularly, it’s enough of a thing that anyone who goes to cons has experienced this in some way or another, and it’s bound to happen again. I think it’s time to set some ground rules to help myself and other GMs prepare for it.

But this means we need to do some real work on ourselves and be willing to have hard conversations. Like Safety Tools, though, it’s really important to get this right. More in Part 2.

Note – this post does NOT count for my monthly blog-post commitment. However, I am spending more time here, and I wanted to share a brief note in case you wanted to ask “Dave, why is your website so goddam ugly?”

In brief, this site is broken in a few ways, and I need to fix some things under the hood before I spend any time on a redesign. I don’t like to spend my time figuring out technical problems (that’s how I spend my work days), and so the idea of sitting down and using up many writing sessions to fix my Google analytics makes my heart sad.

(I also have some of the same challenges over on the MUP-side, so it’s just one more unpleasant technical task in a long list of those sorts of things.)

But it needs to happen some time, hopefully in the next couple months. If I can get some of the technical issues taken care of, then I’ll try to get some graphics on here and redo the wordpress so it isn’t so… nothing.

So that’s what’s going on. Thanks for your patience.

Hello and Happy New Year! Meaning, this is my first post of 2022 and in ten months, so hey! Welcome back to me!

This blog is definitely stale but it is still my online home and I appreciate you stopping by to see what I’m up to. While I have not self-published anything in a while, I am still very busy, and I didn’t want to let more time go by without updating my various comings and goings…

Most importantly, I have been a co-host of The Miskatonic University Podcast for about two years now and that really takes up a bunch of my time. We have an amazing discord community (link from the home page), a Patreon (also link from the home page), and are humming along quite nicely toward our 250th episode. That’s been most of my time these days, so stop on by the discord to say hi.

A scenario I wrote way back in 2018-19 was finally published as part of the Apocthulhu line, specifically in the Terrible New Worlds book. The Cthulhu Reborn team was incredible to work with and I learned so much about writing scenarios that it changed my game forever. The Apocthulhu line will continue to grow but more importantly the Cthulhu Reborn folks are building out their own d100 system and publishing it as an SRD that can be used by anyone. I’m looking forward to seeing their entire line expand and become a regular system for more and more horror game settings.

Finally, I am nearing completion on my contemporary horror setting and campaign book based here in Washington DC. I finished the final playtesting back in January and have everything I need to finish. I have about 30k words written but there are at least another 20k to go. It is my main creative focus now and I look to hand it off this summer.

Of course, real life keeps on getting in the way of all the fun stuff. We moved to a bigger house back in December, which has been fantastic in many ways, but also totally exhausting. I changed jobs in October and am just now getting into the groove. And of course between Covid and Ukraine it’s just a heavy time that brings a lot of general anxiety that I’m working hard to manage.

But I’m still here. I would love to write more on this blog, so hopefully once this modern DC book is done I’ll have time to write more. And also actually put some graphics and cool stuff up. This site is boooooooooooooooooooooring!

Thanks for stopping by. Drop me a line if you need anything!

Or at least that’s my hypothesis. We’ve got plenty of reason to believe that the Walkin’ Dude is Nyarlathotep, and it seems, though I can’t find any direct quotes, that King, as a Lovecraft fan, always meant Flagg to be N.

Let’s go with the assumption that Flagg is an avatar of Nyarlathotep, which, with him/it as the lead antagonist of The Stand (apart from, I suppose, Captain Trips), makes The Stand a Cthulhu Mythos story. What would be needed to make this the “greatest Cthulhu Mythos story ever” then?

Definition of “greatest” then is:

greatest

• adj. not to be surpassed.
• adj. largest in size of those under consideration.

I’m sure there are Mythos stories where the world gets destroyed, or large populations go mad and self-destruct, but I’m at a loss to identify other stories by mainstream writers where an avatar of N is used so prominently to wage a war in such a long and detailed story.

Let me clarify one point first: Flagg (Nyarlathotep) does not cause Captain Trips, nor is he responsible for the downfall of civilization. That’s a key part of this investigation that I want to call out. We, meaning humans (and more specifically the military scientists that are part of Project Blue), are responsible for Captain Trips, which is responsible for ending civilization. Flagg then enters with the specific goal of leading the remaining humans into a world of authoritarian rule and selfish enterprise.

But with Flagg at the front of the “bad guys” (insomuch as The Stand is a tale of good versus evil), he/It becomes the main antagonist responsible for gathering and encouraging the antagonists in the story. He leads the efforts, initially in grim and dark nightmares, to antagonize and terrorize the protagonists, and as civilization attempts to rebuild itself, he works specifically to tear down the good guys’ efforts with violence and terror.

So, yeah, the story is Flagg’s to tell, at least after Captain Trips does its work and takes care of 99% of humanity. If The Stand is an epic tale of Good and Evil, and if humanity’s hubris, fear, and greed are a stand-in for Evil in the first part of the book, then at the end of Part I it’s Good-0, Evil-1.

Now, it’s Flagg’s turn to pick up the ball and finish us off. I’ll report more as I get further into the book, but for now, I think I’m onto something.

Note: I’m reading and reporting on Stephen King’s the Stand, Complete and Uncut, for the Miskatonic University Podcast, and you can catch my episodes over at our Patreon. Drop me a line in the comments!

Well shit, here we are, finally nearing the end of the blazing train-wreck of 2020, and really, there’s no end in sight for either Covid or all the political bullshit that is slowly tearing apart the United States. Good times indeed. So why not take on a new and possibly mind-bending project right out of the gate to keep me distracted? Sounds good!

I have to admit to feeling what might actually be anticipation for the upcoming TV adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand. If you’ve not seen the trailer, go see it now — the cast looks amazing, and I must admit to never thinking I would utter the words “Whoopie Goldberg, fuck yeah!” but here we are.

The Stand is my favorite King book, at least of those that I’ve read. I should do an analysis of all his works that I’ve read, but for a good chunk of the mid-80s he was all that we knew. Before I even heard of Lovecraft, I knew King and all that he brought in the first ten years of his career, which even then was vast and influential. The Stand, then, as its Tolkien-like epic battle between good and evil, also stood above the rest as the best King gave.

I read The Stand sometime in high school, and then he went and re-released it with an additional 400 pages, making the long version his longest book. And sometime in ’90-91 I read that whole thing as well — I was in college at the time but it must have taken me a couple months. My ADHD helped me become a very fast reader, but only in short bursts, and while I don’t have a specific memory of reading it for a second time, I know I did.

And now suddenly it’s 2020 and not only has CBS redone the series but somehow presciently finishing it right on the cusp of the worst global pandemic in 100 years. So yeah, I gotta read it again.

Now that I’m all tied into MUP and doing a lot of individual podcasts for them, I’m always looking for the next set of projects, so why not re-read The Stand but but take a new and perhaps fresh look at it. The Nerdist wrote a great piece on King’s Lovecraftian villains and Flagg-as-Nyarlathotep is right at the top.

With that correlation, The Stand becomes a Cthulhu Mythos story, perhaps the greatest one ever. In the reality of The Stand, Nyarly-Flagg is successful in bringing down the downfall of humanity, or at least wallowing in it once it’s done. So what better way to re-read The Stand than through the lens of the longest single Mythos story ever told?

I didn’t mean to buy the whole Complete and Uncut version of The Stand, which rolls in at ~1200 pages in a massive FUCK YOU to my unwillingness to read books more than a few hundred pages long. Now that I think about it, the last long book I read was The Great Influenza, which is so ironic I need to take a moment and reflect on that. I read it way back in 2013 and I can distinctly remember understanding the impact of a) that another massive pandemic was bound to happen sooner or later, and that b) we were nowhere near prepared for it. Heyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy. I was right. Golf clap and death for everyone.

This plague-thing then starts to hit on many lenses, and it just seems right that I would start reading The Stand again now, taking a much different path for the process. Rather than just cracking open to page one and losing myself in the story, I’m going to take it to the next level and also:

• Perform an investigative analysis of the story of Randall Flagg through the lens of Flagg-as-Nyarlathotep and ask the question: is The Stand the greatest (by which I mean longest and most impactful) Mythos story ever written?
• What is it about the story that makes it my (and legions of King fan’s) favorite King story? Is it just the scope and scale? Or is there something else that works alongside to hold it together? 30 years after the Uncut version was released, does it still hold up? And will I literally die reading The Stand (by which I mean get Covid and die from it)?
• And how does it work as a parable for our modern times, because, hey, we’re living through a plague right now and how can we reflect this story to our own? Fortunately (if that’s the right word) Covid-19 is nowhere near as lethal as Captain Trips, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t seeing correlation between The Stand’s world and our own. How does The Stand’s world relate to our own and what does that mean for us?

So yeah, let’s do this. I’ll be not only blogging here but also recording small podcasts that will first be available to MUP Patreon backers and then eventually come out to the public at large. I’ll post links here as they come out, but a good way to get front row seats is to back MUP Patreon.

I’ve got front row seats to the worst disease in a 100 years, and I’m going to spend the time during the third and (so far) worst surge nose buried deep in what could very well be my last book, that was written by a fellow alcoholic and Lovecraft-fan, and tells the story of the last plague and the ascendance of a God-like man to extreme power over his cult-like following… what could go wrong?

Pookie has reviewed the Sun Spots GM Kit and so you can certainly go and check out his take on the product.

I only have 20 of these left, so drop me an email at David AT Weird8 DOT com if you’re interested.

After cleaning out my gaming closet, I found and organized 30 or so GM Kits for Sun Spots that I’ve made available for sale. I’ve already sold 10 of these, so there are 20 left, and when these are gone, they will be gone forever. If you’re into actual props and enjoyed Sun Spots, then check these out.

The kits have three maps, including a large print out of the map/menu from Red Valley, as well as a set of hand-written diary entries.

I will ship one to you either in the US or UK for $25, and you can email me at david AT weird8 DOT com.

And whew do we have some amazing ideas and crazy inspirations, just around the corner. Stay tuned…