Tag: GMing

6 Inspirations for your Alien RPG

I recently picked up five Aliens graphic novels as I’m a bit hungry for  inspiration for my game. I thought I’d post little quick reviews and recommendations here to guide purchase. The key here is that, as far as the rpg is concerned, these are all pulling from the same canon (six movies), and show a broad set of interpretations of those materials. Mild spoilers here but I’ve tried to stay away from major plot points. I’ve linked all books in the text itself:

Alien 3 by William Gibson

With all the recent uptick in Alien interest, the powers that be went back to the unused William Gibson screenplay for Alien 3 and turned it into a graphic novel and audio play. I remember reading the screenplay itself in the late 90s in the nascent days of the internet and being unimpressed, and I think the feeling is still there. Now, Alien 3 (the actual David Fincher directed movie) is a total train wreck, but the new cut at least pulls it together into something that makes some sort of sense. But for all that Fincher’s 3 does wrong, at least it focuses on Ripley, who is the key protagonist for the series. This makes Gibson’s choice to Anyway, this is still a MUST READ for rpg influence if only because it paints a picture of the UPP and how they might interact with UA forces, as well as WY science vessels. I’ve heard good things about the radio drama of this as well, but for me the graphic novel was easily consumable in an evening, and I was very glad to have that now as a touchstone. Grade A: Highly Recommend

Dead Orbit by James Stokoe

The Heavy Metal vibe in this collection is heavy here and it sucked me right in. The story itself is not that original, but it does put a new spin on the Space Trucker, so anyone planning to run a Trucker game this is a must-read. The art is totally bonkers with a heavy Moebius vibe but also a Dave Gibbons level of detail. I give the story a B+ but the art is A++++. This one is also a MUST READ if you are looking for some new angles on your Aliens game. Grade A: Highly Recommend

Resistance by Brian Wood & Robert Carey

This collection picks up Amanda Ripley’s story after the Isolation video game (which has officially been removed from canon apparently), and is the first part of a two-parter by Wood. I stopped reading comics because I really became attached to a certain style of drawing and I don’t like many overall, but Carey’s art is phenomenal. And Wood carves out a nice little corner of the Aliens universe with this story that involves WY and synths and more bonkers experiments. The story here is pretty clever and could form a whole backbone for any kind Aliens campaign. This one was probably the best of all my reads. So good on so many levels. Grade A+: Must Read

Rescue by Brian Wood & Kieran McKeown

This story is the surprise part two to Resistance, and picks up Ripley’s story for one more go. I am not enamored by McKeown’s art but it’s not bad, just very normal. The story is also not quite as original as Resistance, but since it’s the same characters, there is a strong feeling of continuity. It shows again how WY influence is broad and corrupt, and expands the universe well enough. It’s okay and is not a must read, except that, now that you know you want to read it, don’t you? If you’re going to . Grade B: Solid Copy

Dust to Dust by Gabriel Hardman & Rain Beredo

I am super touchy about using children as protagonists because apparently they’re so hard to do that no one can really do them justice (except Miyazaki, bless him). This story is okay and sheds some dark light on WY’s corruption; it gives some cool flavor to the universe and could even be a cool convention one-shot. But I don’t really like the art, and I don’t like how the 12 year old main character is incapable of actually taking care of himself for most of the story. I would not recommend picking this up unless you’re trying to get everything. Grade C: Only for completists

Sentient by Jeff Lemire and Gabriel Walta

This collection came recommended after I bought all the others by the monster that is the Amazon AI, which is funny because it’s a story about AIs and their capabilities. No spoilers here, in order to preserve the surprises, but while there are no aliens, there are definitely powerful AIs that are central to the plot. This black and white comic is well written and even more beautifully illustrated. The story is dark and scary with only humans and AIs, which is the perfect inspiration for your Alien rpg. Grade A: Must Read!

On Providing Choice to the PCs

I started my 5th Edition D&D campaign last week and am very excited for it. It’s been a while (well, two years) since I started a new campaign, but, more importantly, I’ve invited a bunch of close friends to join me weekly on Roll20, with shorter hours (more on this later), which will make it very easy to keep going on a regular basis. With a consistent gaming schedule, I find I can focus my efforts on prepping and running the game instead of worrying about whether enough players will show.

But for me, running a campaign isn’t just about gaming. It’s about taking an opportunity to flex my storytelling muscles at the same time I’m having fun in a game. I can’t help but use the opportunity for running a game to find the story components and engage with those as much as possible. And it’s even more important in a game like D&D, where the story elements aren’t as pronounced as, say, in a Dungeon World, Fiasco, or FATE game (which are more rooted in story out of the gate).

So if I’m taking the effort to learn and explore storytelling in my 5th edition game, there’s no better place to start than at the beginning. And having just begun my game, I want to identify all the places I can get the team working on these elements, and it starts with PC introductions. But it’s not enough just to make the PCs’ various histories important to the game’s present — you need to make it matter with choice. Choice is one of the fundamental aspects of storytelling in that it fundamentally creates characters — when characters make a choice, they show their true colors and instincts. And the harder the choice, the more interesting the story. Does Luke join Darth? Does Frodo keep the Ring? Does Neo take the red or blue pill? Without choice, story is nothing.

For the first session, I came up with a list of choices for each PC (one each) to make that will inform their own personalities and loyalties. Each choice had something to do with the old world versus the new world. In the campaign introduction, the group has been recruited by Lord Silverhand of Waterdeep, but the PCs also have their own factions and other personal allegiances — will they turn their back on their old world connections or move forward into their new futures? Will they accept their new responsibilities blindly or do they second guess why they’ve been hired? How will they approach this new mission in light of their personal backgrounds? These are all interesting choices that give color to characters.

The best games and campaigns are rooted in choice. One of the most classic RPG campaigns of all time — Masks of Nyarlathotep for Call of Cthulhu — opens by giving the PCs multiple choices on how to approach the game with a large handful of clues and information. Out of the gate the PCs have agency to determine their own direction in the game and I believe this set of choices (which ultimately follows the group throughout the game) helps cement the campaign as one of the all-time greats.

As a game master, it’s your job to set the tone of your game — the earlier, the better. Yes, we’re playing out of the box 5th edition D&D, but we’re also playing in my game, and I like stories, the bigger, the better. I don’t want to just crawl through the dungeons or wilderness and not give opportunity to let the story be about the characters and their choices. Just giving the PCs these introductory choices — just one quick choice along with one scene bringing them into the world — set the tone and gave each player something to latch onto. I think it was a good start.

I’m interested in all the ways we can actively bring storytelling elements into our RPGs. What other ways can we allow players and PCs to make choices?

High Castle Playset for Fiasco Under Development

One of the best parts of living in our Golden Age of RPGs is that the choice of systems to use provides an unprecedented level of game design flexibility. Recently I was watching the Amazon TV show Man in the High Castle thinking how much I liked the story as possible RPG setting. While my first impulse was to develop some system and setting out of whole cloth, I quickly realized that the setting was the perfect candidate for a Fiasco playset.

If you’re not familiar with Fiasco, it’s a GM-less RPG that revolves around high ambition and poor impulse control. Originally seeded as an opportunity to play out a Coen Brother style session, it has evolved into an RPG engine that can provide amazing gaming sessions in myriad different genres, tones and depth of story-telling. The writers of Fiasco have open-sourced the playsets it uses to allow anyone to create a Fiasco session in any really anyway, anytime, with all sorts of interesting gaming levers to pull.
So instead of going and designing a new game based on The Man in the High Castle (both the TV show and novel, both of which I like immensely), I just decided to build my own playset. And, quite frankly, it worked out quite well. This last weekend, at BigBadCon in Walnut Creek, CA, I ran two separate sessions of Return to the High Castle, a Fiasco game set in the world of The Man in the High Castle. My game description was as such:
Canon City, Colorado, 1962: Sixteen years after the Nazis bombed Washington, D.C., the Greater Nazi Reich rules Eastern North America, while the West is governed by the Japanese Pacific States. High in the Rocky Mountains lives the remains of the USA, those unwilling to submit to the will of the totalitarian state, those hiding secrets and their past, and those who are still willing to stand up and fight. The Resistance has a move to make, something to hide and sell, but there are spies, moles, and double agents everywhere. Time for plans to fall apart. Time for a fiasco. Loosely based on the Philip K Dick book and Amazon TV series “The Man in the High Castle.”
I will be writing more on the playset, but for now, I wanted to note some of my thoughts on the two sessions and some give feedback for myself on where to go next with the playsets. Most of my feedback drops into one of two buckets:
1. The Setting Can Be Really Dark… or Not: So just running a game with Nazis and Imperialist Japanese with a modicum of verisimilitude creates problems right out of the gate. Basically, these were horrible fascist regimes that did horrible things to many, many people. The impact of what was done is still being felt today and will be felt for a long, long time. So much so, that there are a lot of stripes to fascism that are still in our public conversation today, in discussions on race relation, immigration, and, oh, I don’t know, the fact that Aleppo, Syria today looks like Berlin in 1945. So yeah, those are still fresh scars.
The first key here is, then, to just talk about it. We had an open conversation at both tables, though one was far more thorough than the other, on where we might cross boundaries and how we were going to talk about it if we did. One observation is that, for both sessions, we limited the action in the game to just the city and area around Canon City, which plays a central part of the TV show. My playset is set there because it represents the perfect arena for plans to come undone, but we also found that no one wanted to play in the either of the occupied parts of the former USA, either the West/Japanese or East/Nazi occupied lands. Not playing in these areas allowed us to stay away from most of the really dark stuff that might come up. We were playing in what was, ostensibly, the remains of the USA, which allowed us freedom that might not be available in the occupied areas. It also kept us at arm’s distance from the fascist regimes that might be able to easily crush the freedom that we, as players, needed to exercise in order to avoid some of the darker topics.
The key component of a good Fiasco game is high stakes in imperfect plans that come tumbling down, usually in a tragic manner. Keeping the action to Canon City, and away from the darker parts of the setting, allowed us to set up some dark comedy and tragic plans without needing to pull in the really, really horrible stuff.
2. Dick’s Split Reality: One of my favorite parts of any Philip K Dick story is his playing with reality and perceptions. All the best PKD stories have characters punching through the veil to realize that things are not really as they seem. It’s very Dickian for the High Castle stories (both novel and TV) to have people realize that their reality, in which the Axis won WWII by dropping a bomb on Washington DC, is not the only reality, and that a reality exists where the Allies won (aka our reality). Not only do the characters realize it, but they travel to that reality at some point, as well as have artifacts (film and book) come from one reality to another. So it’s key to any PKD-inspired story to have shifting realities be a part of the narrative.
Well, in the first game we played, this was only hinted at when one of the PCs (mine) came across a USA flag with 50 stars. Not only is the the flag banned contraband but the USA of the High Castle reality would have never reached 50 states (with Alaska and Hawaii both gaining statehood in 1959). So 50 stars on a USA flag is something strange but not reality shaking. In our second game, as we attempted to raise the stakes, one of the PCs encountered what seemed to be a Nazi listening post (much like the Japanese one in the High Castle TV show), that implied that every place the PCs had been was tapped. This had serious implications for the narrative. Well, we just ran with it, and came up with a very Dickian story with double and triple realities, possible time travel, and maybe even androids posing as PCs. So yeah, Dickian.
Lots of different avenues to investigate then with this playset, and I was amazed and overjoyed with the sessions. Of course, it helps to have high quality players, and I was blessed with eight amazing gamers who jumped in with both feet for this unusual and somewhat risky endeavor. But the session bouyed my intuition that the High Castle is a valid and interesting setting for RPGing, especially in the Fiasco realm. The possibilities and details providing in the playset were more than enough primer to help build a unique, interesting, and most importantly fun Fiasco session.
There is still work to do on the playset, some tweaking and some open questions on organization that need to be answered. I aim to provide this playset free of charge, so we’ll see how that whole thing works out with Intellectual Property and all that. More soon with further developments.

The Companion is Finally Live!

The Masks of Nyarlathotep, if you didn’t know, is often hailed as the greatest Call of Cthulhu campaign of all time, and even gets logged as one of the all time great RPG campaigns of any genre. But one of its problems is that there is a lot of room left in the story — there are so many details undocumented, questions unanswered. It’s a great campaign but could really be so much greater.

More than five years ago, Bret Kramer came up with the idea of building a companion for the campaign, and the Kickstarter for that companion is finally live. Back in 2009 I wrote a number of pieces for the book, one of which was about how to run and organize the massive game. Apparently I had some good stuff to say, because it’s one of the first pieces in the book, and my name ended up on the cover.

There is a lot of vaporware in the tabletop RPG world — material that people write that never sees the light of day. The Companion was definitely heading toward that and I am so excited and proud that it is finally going to be published. I distinctly remember writing my Companion pieces on my deck in Oregon, with my work laptop in front of me and a beer next to me and trying very hard to stay focused on completing what I had agreed to. I was so desperate to complete something, to be a part of a project, and I had no idea it would take so long for it to see print.

More importantly, I really wanted to write something that other people would read and understand and be thankful for. My key contribution for the Companion is the keeper introduction, wherein I try to help keepers wrap their heads around the enormous task of running Masks. I really enjoyed writing the piece because I felt like I had something to say and the writing came easily and naturally. You mean people want to hear what I have to say about how to run a better game? I was glad to step up and write all I could on the matter.

And with the Kickstarter now up to 20k pounds (~$30k), it’s clear my contribution is part of the greater whole that people are excited to support. The project is finally a success, and though my part in the overall book (which is bigger than Masks itself) is relatively small, it’s huge for me.

For me, 2015 is a year of “out with the old” as I not only take care of some health issues that have been dogging me for a while, but also try to clear my backlog of personal and writing projects. That the Masks Companion is finally done and going to print is very cathartic to me as it validates some efforts that have been sitting around for at least five years, and allows me to move onto other pastures.

The timing couldn’t be better.

4 Keys to Preparing for Successful Con Games

This weekend is one of my favorites for the whole year — Dundracon, the longest running gaming convention in the San Francisco Bay Area, is here! I have been attending DDC since seventh grade and, aside from some gaps in the mid-90s, I’ve been to most of them since. I love DDC for many reasons — it’s got all sorts of games, is run very well, and all my friends go there — and every year I run (at least) one official RPG that both keeps my GMing skills hot and gets me in the door for free.

Last year I ran HWLL twice and it was too much. When you’re running your own RPG, especially when it’s tied to an in-progress Kickstarter, there is a lot of pressure to do it right. Running two games last year was too much of that pressure and I promised myself I would run only one official game this year. Well, I may be running only one official game, but I have been pressured into (okay – volunteered, I’m an attention slut and I just love running games too much) running two more games, so now am running three games — one Trail of Cthulhu, one 5th edition D&D, and my own Cthulhu Dark scenario Sun Spots.

The TOC and D&D games are really just for friends, are not “official” games where I have to wonder at what sort of gamers I will get, and will start when I get my friends together, not at a specific time. They’re also written by other people, which is something I don’t normally do but realized that was the only way to run additional games and not lose my mind. But still, it takes effort to run a good game, whether official or not, and I want to cover the things that I do to prepare for running RPGs at conventions.

The feedback I get tells me I run a pretty good game, but not only am I always looking to improve my game, I also hold myself to pretty high standards. I also know some pretty awesome GMs who do many of the same things I do to prep for their games and I like to steal good ideas whenever I can. Here are some things I’ve found are key to running a great RPG at a convention:

  • Own It – First and foremost: be a goddam professional. You need to treat this like your job, and show up firing on all cylinders. To start, whatever it takes, show up 10-15 minutes early, all your materials in hand and ready to go. There is nothing that builds early player skepticism than having all the players sitting at the table 10 minutes early but the GM is 10 minutes late (this happened to me last year). Especially if you are fortunate enough to have people show up early because your game is overbooked, you want to show that this is your game. Then, start on time, unless you need to wait for pre-registered players. Even then, only wait ten minutes maximum. If a player can’t make it to your game by then, too bad. And again, if you’re lucky enough to have a full game and people are waiting to get in (what a compliment!), communicate directly with them on what they can and cannot expect. For me, I take players first-come, first-served, and will take the names of people like waiting for a table in a restaurant. Other GMs randomize. Regardless, communicate what your plan is, how many possible spots you have, and set expectations out the game. Own the game from the go and your players will quickly realize who is in charge.
  • Provide Everything They Need – I know it seems odd, but some GMs barely provide enough to get the game going. You, as a player, must provide dice, pencils, scrap paper, etc. Some GMs may even expect you to bring paper to use for your character sheet. Screw those guys (it’s unprofessional). You bring PC sheets, probably already filled out as pregenerated characters, but hey why not also bring snacks, chocolate or even bourbon. I like my players to use special dice, so I bring those too. If I’m playing in a game I’ll bring the rulebook and other supplements to share. Basically, bring everything your players need to play your game — everyone will love you.
  • Be the Ball, Billy – What does your game look like when it’s a total success? Can you see it in your mind? Athletes have been using visualization for years to win medals, so why can’t you? Days before the con, picture in your mind how the story will go, where the fun/quiet/exciting parts are, and how the whole thing will end. See yourself and the whole group having a great time, see everyone creating great memories and collaborating on an amazing game, one that people talk about for years. Spend some time thinking about your game well in advance and give yourself room to improve and grow. Sure, it may not go perfectly, but the preparation will help you create the best possible experience.
  • Go Big or Go Home – Finally, if you’re running a game at a con, you have all the permission in the world to make your game as memorable as possible (as you’re not restricted by an ongoing campaign or your friends’ pre-existing expectations), so why not make it as great as possible? Just as you’re going to own it and be a professional, don’t be afraid to put all your eggs in one basket (as it were), killing, maiming and driving PCs mad, all with the goal of creating (with the help of your players) the best game everyone had all convention. Nothing bugs me more than a tame con game — people pay good money to come to a con, and it’s your job to make it worth their while. Bring all your best ideas, craziest stories and wild inspirations for your players. Whether this is just from creating cool props and PC sheets (see above) or by killing everyone off in one big explosion in the end, leave nothing out. Give people something to talk about, and they will tell their friends (awesome) and come back for more (even more awesome).

D&D Comes Full Circle

Sometime in the winter of 1980-81, I played Dungeons and Dragons for the first time. I was in fourth grade and Ronald Reagan had just been elected to president. My friend Greg has an older brother who had started playing this crazy fantasy game, and we sat down and tried to figure out what all the Roman numerals meant in the adventure scenario as we fought monsters and collected treasure. It was so easy back then to just jump in and game — you had your character, some basic stats, a couple pieces of equipment, and you just played. Yes, there were a couple charts, but overall it was just easy and fun and you could really play with just the game book, some pencils, paper, dice, and, of course, your friends.

I was hooked for life.

My parents bought me the red dragon boxed set (the one with chits instead of dice – lame), and over the next few years I began collecting RPGs: first the AD&D books and modules, then other games (including Star Frontiers and Marvel Super Heroes), and I even wrote my first RPG: TimeLords. For these first ten years or so (including heading off to college), I played D&D off and on. I ran a short campaign in college, played the Warhammer RPG briefly there as well, and even ran a 2ed AD&D game for kids when I worked as a summer camp counselor in the early 90s.

Eventually, though, I just stopped caring about D&D. I would play it every couple of years at a convention (usually with 1st ed stalwarts), but other RPGs and genres became far more interesting. Superheroes, science fiction and of course the Cthulhu mythos all became much more intriguing worlds to game in — at some point I even hacked together a time travel campaign for GURPS using multiple sourcebooks, which I would never try these days. (Using GURPS, that is; clearly I still have a thing for time travel games.)

The last game of D&D I played was around four years ago when our high school gaming group reunited to play 4th edition. My entire experience with that trainwreck of a game system can be summed up with me attempting to read the flavor text from the spell card and being told in no uncertain terms from my fellow gamers to “shut the fuck up and just tell us what you’re doing.” The complexities and time it takes to move through 4th ed combat inspired, it seems, impatience with the actual role-playing part of the game.

So it was with slight trepidation when, 2.5 years ago (has it really been that long?) my gaming group at the time playtested D&D 5th edition (which was called D&D Prime at the time, I believe). Sure, of course I’ll play, nothing to lose here. We played through B1, the original scenario, and I sat down at the table to be handed a dwarven cleric and a beer.

I was immediately overwhelmed by how simple the game had become. It was like I had been transported 30 years into the past and suddenly I could just play. It’s like the game had circled back around and found me at 9 years old, except that now I have much higher standards to what constitutes a good and fun role-playing game. And yet, this game was good. This game was fun.

Flash forward to just a couple weeks ago and my 9 year old daughter was harassing me to play D&D. Last summer, when she had seen this video on girls playing D&D with boys, she shouted “I want to play D&D!” Since then, every couple of months she had asked to play, and I had continually put her off. Finally, realizing that a) WotC has posted the D&D rules online for free, and b) what the hell was I waiting for?, I got us playing D&D for the first time just two weeks ago.

The results could not be more amazing. Fifth edition is so easy to learn and run that I really have to give it up for WotC, who has done an amazing job at fully rebooting the game. Firstly, giving away a streamlined version of the rules online for free shows they understand how to market games and interact with their customers in the 21st century. Basically, anyone who wants to play D&D just needs the requisite pencil, paper, dice and friends (plus the free rules) to get started. This is a gateway game, folks, and they’re treating it that way.

Second, the rules have *finally* been streamlined to remove so much of the chart-referring, page number memorizing days of old that you sense a full understanding of how RPGs have changed in the last decade. All high rolls are good, all low rolls are bad (not the case with 1st-4th eds); a monster’s armor class is the number you need to roll higher than to hit them (goodbye THAC0!) — these are a couple examples of how much easier the game is to play.

And finally, and perhaps most importantly, the game has really made it easy for the old-school gamers (like myself), to feel right at home with a game world that can be fleshed out as you play. For starters, during character generation, the game helps build out PC backgrounds that not only provide context and history in categories such as Ideals and Flaws, but also tacks on game-world applications to these: character bonuses, special equipment and world-building opportunities (which guild do you belong to?) all help create verisimilitude out of the gate. But the game is also incredibly fun once you get into it. The ease of gameplay lets both players and DM focus on doing cool stuff and not having to refer back to the gamebook all the time.

This is incredibly important for first timers like my 9 year old, (and eventually her friends) who has never played RPGs before. If we tried to play 4th edition or some other new RPG that is more complex or awkward than it needs to be (Star Wars: Edge of the Empire, I’m looking at you), her first interaction with RPGs would just result in confusion and frustration. But with such an easy method for creating fleshed-out characters, with a fun and easy to understand game system, and with some excitement and passion for having a good time, my daughter was hooked.

Just like I was 33 years ago.

It seems far easier for a company with intellectual property, especially something as iconic and old as D&D, to lose sight of what originally made that IP special (*cough* George Lucas *cough*). Greed, ego and laziness can all get in the way of doing the hard work it takes to continually keep the IP fresh and evolving. This is what happened with 4th edition — changing the game system to hook in the “video game kids” is a good concept on paper (and I’m sure was a great pitch to the executives), but it lost sight of what the game really was about. Instead of making the game an easy way for kids to enter a world of fantasy role-playing, they made it about leveling-up your powers and reading really small text from cards.

With this new edition, though, they finally got it right. You should check it out.

Delta Green Conversion Notes for He Who Laughs Last

MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR HE WHO LAUGHS LAST FOLLOW

REALLY, YOU SHOULDN’T

 

 

The following are notes on converting HWLL to the Delta Green RPG setting…

As a contemporary horror story, He Who Laughs Last can easily be integrated into Delta Green, Pagan Publishing’s modern day RPG setting of conspiracy and terror. The scenario needs very little to be inserted into any DG game, but there are two key components that require discussion: the scenario introduction and the use of a green box to distribute clues.

For the scenario introduction, there are a few different ways to bring a group of Delta Green investigators into the story:

  • The most straightforward option is to transform Becca’s father, Dale Kingsley, into a DG friendly who reaches out to the party for help, knowing they are capable in these sorts of investigations. Dale can be a doctor/surgeon who has helped DG in the past but now has nowhere else to turn. A simple phone call from Dale outlines the problem – his daughter has died mysteriously and he is desperate for their help. Or this call could come through “proper channels” to have the PCs reach out to Dale, again, as a DG friendly who is in trouble.
  • Perhaps Dale is a friend of one of the agents. Dale contacts his PC friend (they were college roommates or served together in the same branch of military), distraught and overcome with despair. This is just a slight change from the above suggestion – Dale still reaches out to the PCs, panicked and desperate for help.
  • Another option is to have one or more of the PCs be friends with Becca (through family or work) who are directly impacted by her “suicide.” Becca is in her mid-20s, and if any of the party is generally her age, they could have been friends with her either during or after college. Pulling the party together for this might seem like a challenge (to find a justification for all the agents to travel to LA for a funeral of someone they don’t know), but given the size and scale of the larger LA area, it shouldn’t be too hard to justify a handful of agents taking a vacation for a week to help their friend.
  • One last option would is to have Cell A (or whatever infrastructure your campaign uses) assign the DG agents directly to investigate the mystery.  Just Becca’s suicide alone could be enough to get the party involved, or the investigation could be bootstrapped by having a DG friendly point out some of the irregularities coming out of the coroner’s office.

With the introduction covered, there are still a couple of considerations to make this scenario work smoothly in the DG universe. First is that the PCs probably won’t be from the LA area and so won’t have the Hollywood connections that make it a bit easier to navigate the story (as mentioned in The Industry, pg. 12). They can, of course, play up their law enforcement credentials, or just play it straight as they try to uncover the mystery. The PCs will just have to be a bit more thoughtful and creative as they work to make connections with the various NPCs.

Finally, one easy way to get the PCs the information from David Lee (Package from the Coroner, pg. 29) is to provide it in a green box. While there is no specific need to deviate from the narrative, if the PCs ask about a green box or the party doesn’t end up meeting with Lee, send the PCs a key from a small green box located in a Burbank industrial park. You are free to put any additional information there for the PCs, but otherwise you can just substitute the green box for the the package from Lee as the mechanism to deliver the clues. Instead of receiving the package at the front desk, inside the green box they find a number of boxes, smelly and old from the 60s, 70s, and 80s, stacked in the corner, ready to divulge their secrets.

Those are all the elements that should be necessary to convert HWLL to a Delta Green scenario. Please let me know if you have any further questions on this, and I would love to hear if you successfully convert it to DG.

You can buy the scenario at DTRPG.com here.

Clues in the Dark

Last fall I watched a lot of the TV series Marple with my wife, and there are few better inspirations for writing good mystery than Agatha Christie, who spins quite a ball of yarn only to unravel it with perfect logic just when all seemed lost. It gave me a lot of respect for mystery novelists (a genre I have only a passing interest in, which is strange considering my interest in mysteries), especially good ones who can build layer upon layer of dramatic intrigue and obtuse clues.

There is little difference between writing a mystery novel and writing a good investigative story (whether for the Cthulhu Mythos genre or more specifically for a RPG system like Gumshoe), because, ultimately, you’re building a series of clues for the characters (PCs) to uncover, discuss, and follow to the next scene/clue. Investigative RPGs are my favorite to both write and play because of that clue trail – building an interesting and original set of clues for the PCs to follow is hard, but so ultimately satisfying if done right.

For the longest time, Call of Cthulhu (COC) was my favorite investigative game, though not as a system so much as for the atmosphere and breadth of materials available for it. But over the past few years, multiple new takes on the Mythos investigative game have cropped up, highlighting both the breadth of the market as well as the need for a new take on how RPGs investigations are run.

Cthulhu Dark (a rules-light system by Graham Walmsley) is now my favorite Cthulhu RPG for one simple reason – the rules never get in the way of the story. Ever. I never have to stare down a bad roll and try to figure out how to make it work – it’s all positive creativity. In COC, I am always trying to figure out how to make a bad roll fit into making sure the story moves forward. Even Trail of Cthulhu, which is based on Gumshoe and aims to always make core clues available, can get bogged down in some of the illogical bookkeeping that goes into spending points to expand the clues.

When I play Cthulhu Dark (CD), though, I can use the die rolls (including my own house rules for skill rolls) to judge the varying degrees of success the PCs face when finding clues. This, in turn, puts the onus on the scenario writer to develop an intriguing set of clues for the PCs to follow, which then makes it easy to turn a die roll (whether high or low, as success is guaranteed) into figuring out the best manner for the story to play out. You can use the randomness to add flavor to the story, not determine whether or not the PCs actually succeed.

I know there are still plenty of old-school COC players who live and die by what the dice tell you, and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that providing your players are having fun, which is the ultimate litmus test for a game’s success. But why make interpreting the dice easy (pass/fail) while making interpreting the clues (where do we go next) the hard part? Nothing good comes for free, and the challenge for how to interpret rolls is what makes playing CD fun. The PCs are going to get the clues regardless – what comes next is the degrees of success that follow the roll.

And there’s no reason to make it binary, saying pass or fail – again, make the die rolls interesting and fun to understand. The die rolls are a spectrum to work from, letting you interpret a high, medium, or low roll however the story best needs it, at that moment. Yes, that’s hard, but, again, that’s what makes it fun.

As part of He Who Laughs Last, I’ve written some house rules for using skills in the game. Funnily enough, the rules and skill list mirror the skills listed by Graham in his other book, Stealing Cthulhu (starting page 52 – go get it from the shelf, I’ll wait). In a nutshell, I’ve found that people like the boundaries of having a limited list of skills to choose from. We then use three dice (color coded green, blue, and red) to represent the three types of rolls: general, skills, and insanity. So there’s still some crunch (rules) to the game, but it never gets bogged down in figuring out rules to keep the game going.

Then, if the rules are easy and transparent to the game, the story becomes the platform to run the game, not the other way around. Your job then, as scenario writer, is to write the most interesting, intriguing, and dangerous set of clues your story demands. The trail of clues and how your players follow that trail then becomes the most critical component of your game. Something I’m sure Miss Marple would appreciate.

No Signal – Limitations in Modern Horror Gaming

One of the most compelling and scary components about Lovecraft’s horror is its remoteness. There’s a reason why he set Whisperer in the Darkness in the remote White Mountains – removing yourself from civilization and all its protections is not easy for most people, and certainly must have been unnerving 100 years ago, when still so much of the United States was unexplored.

But finding that level of isolation to use in a modern horror game is a bit challenging. Sure, you can set your game in some actual remote location (mountains or jungle far away from civilization), but not all horror stories take place far removed from people and power lines. And not every critical moment can be born from the device that your character can’t reach someone else, that they don’t have a signal (one of the worst parts of the entire Mission Impossible movie franchise is in MI:III when Tom Cruise is driving around Shanghai trying to get a signal on his phone to make a call – this does not make for good drama).

In fact, I think the more a GM can give PCs access to their everyday technology, the more normal the scenario will feel, at least at the outset. Verisimilitude is a great place to start for modern horror. So what else, besides isolation, can we use to make things scary in modern horror?

Well, a lot of it comes back to all the crazy stuff Philip K Dick wrote about in some of his later works, especially Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and A Scanner Darkly. Well, and pretty much anything he wrote (which is a lot) about identity. One of Dick’s favorite themes is that our reality is not as it seems, that we are not who we think we are. The idea that (SPOILERS HA!) that Deckard and Rachael don’t know that they’re androids, or that Bob’s drug use creates two separate personalities unaware of each other strike at the heart of what identity means. And with identity theft continually rising, and online privacy becoming a larger concern for everyone, we seek more and more to verify that no one is watching, that we are who we think we are, and that our fundamental understanding of who we are has not been compromised. As that gets harder and harder to do identity “theft” (in whatever broad terms) becomes scarier and scarier.

Good art needs limitations, but a good modern horror scenario needs different limitations than our traditional 1920s-30s Lovecraftian story. In today’s world, it’s very difficult to remove all communications and information from people and how they use technology. So one of the things we can do is play with player characters’ identities, and twist their understanding of their world. If you aren’t sure who you are, then suddenly all of your perceptions and perspectives have limitations. This is good gaming material.

One of the main components in He Who Laughs Last is that a PC is not who he seems to be, which is slowly revealed over the course of the scenario. From my playtesting, this sort of twist of identity really freaks people out, which is pretty much the point. But identity can’t be the only component for good horror gaming. What else is there?

Toastmastering and Gamemastering

I have been a Toastmaster since February 2013, and it may very well be the best professional decision I’ve ever made. If you don’t know, Toastmasters International is a world-wide organization dedicated to helping its members develop their speaking and leadership skills. For a relatively cheap price (~$100/year, which most employers will pay for), TM will help you grown your public speaking and leadership skills, yes, but they also develop your ability to think on your feet.

One of the key elements of the weekly TM meeting is Table Topics, in which someone brings a list of questions that you are asked to answer within one to two minutes, without having known the question ahead of time. The first few times can be pretty scary, as you wrack your brain to answer a random question in a thoughtful and organized manner. But then it gets easier, after you do it five or six times, and soon the fear is gone. Yes, it’s always challenging to think on your feet like that, but when you know you can do it without panicking or just saying um over and over again, you become confident in your abilities.

This ability directly applies to Game Mastering RPGs, which is really just a series of answers to other peoples’ random questions based on some loose parameter (the game). When the PCs take your well-planned and strictly-plotted scenario for a ride way the hell outside of where you though it would go (which happens all the time), having confidence in your abilities to go along for the ride without being rattled is a critical skill. And that confidence directly relates to your ability to run the scenario and own the table, allowing the players to thrive in a thoughtful and imaginative environment.

If you are looking for an unconventional way to improve your GM skills, I highly recommend joining a Toastmasters club (there’s bound to be one near you – check the website). For just an hour a week, you’ll be quite surprised.