End Of An Era

So last week I sat with the two people who showed up to the (delayed) Delta Green session and we decided that the game wasn't doing it for anyone any more.

It was agreed that if we had more interested people it would still be a going concern, but with only two players the pacing was not as good as it might be, and the mix of player styles wasn't working with our established milieu. We had enjoyed it more when there was a crowd, with all the churning of ideas that brought.

And so, I reluctantly put the campaign to bed, with the players stipulating that if interest should pick up I should run it again, which was kind of them but we are done.

It had a very long run, more than eight years of (mostly) monthly play. I didn't count the sessions but I would be surprised if we hadn't convened the game more than 90 times.

This game brought me into contact with some of the best RP gamers with whom I have ever had the pleasure of playing. Their buy-in and keen participation drove me to the limits of my creativity when trying to devise suitably convoluted plots, schemes and double-crosses. It has been the most enjoyable of all the games I have run.

So I should thank those who made it so much fun, starting with the seven people who sat in the very first scenario, at a small convention called RetCon. I don't know all their names, so they'll all stay anonymous. I learned a lot from devising and running that one session.

Mark, Jay, Melanie, Kevin, Mike, Justin, Chris, Dan, John, Matt, Stephen, Daniel, thank you all.

I shall remember forever Kevin's radio kluge that saved the day, Melanie's cunning "Almanick deception ploy", Justin's tiny hand and later inadvertent bloody sacrifice, Jay's leadership and knowledge (along with his gobsmacked reaction when he found out about Melanie's perfidy and his loud refutation of personal cultism while his character stood naked in a field chanting a spell with a bunch of other naked , blood-soaked "non-cultists"), Mike's re-entry to the game after a short spell away, Chris's telephone pole climbing stunt and his mix tapes, Dan's close encounters with mythos stuff that somehow didn't kill him or drive him insane, Matt for his gleeful playing of insane characters ("The Frogs! Aargh!"), Stephen for his attempt to psychoanalyze someone going mad in a submarine via radio and his love of ridiculously large caliber guns, John for destroying the known universe for no good reason, and Daniel for his powers of deduction and the spaceship incident.

Thanks to all those who participated in single games whose names are too numerous to mention, too.

I hope everyone had fun. I know I did.

We took a vote and decided to switch to a monthly game of Space 1889:Red Sands, which can be played with fewer players owing to the ease of use of NPC "extras" in the Savage Worlds system.

Thank You, Ralph.

A shout out to my friend Ralph, who has lived far away from me for Lo! these many years.

We vacationed in the Poconos this year on account of a hurricane wiping out our Florida plans (hence, no reports of an expensive visit to the local friendly game store this summer) and managed to swing by Ralph'n'Cate's place in Pennsylvania before departing for home. They have a beautiful house in a wonderful neighborhood, but that's a subject for a different blog.

What gets a mention here is that Ralph was extremely generous as we left for home, gifting me with two fine game products: the remade Horror on the Orient Express campaign for Call of Cthulhu ¹ and something I hadn't seen before: Gumshoe: Cthulhu Confidential , which is a special rewrite of the Trail of Cthulhu rules for one player and a GM.

These fine gifts shall not go unappreciated, and Cthulhu Confidential is scheduled for a detailed reading in a couple of weeks, after the Planet Mercenary RPG playtest.

So now I need to find a platform that will support Ralph and my long-distance gaming interests. I'm thinking Google hangouts.

1. which I'd seen but steered clear of on account of having the original and not believing Chaosium would ever deliver on the Kickstarter² ↑
2. And in fact they almost didn't but for the intervention of some "angels"↑

For The Tainted

On the first day of Christmas my true love sent to me
A statuette of Thatte Whych Shoulde Notte Bee!

On the second day of Christmas my true love sent to me
Two yellow signs
And a statuette of Thatte Whych Shoulde Notte Bee!

On the third day of Christmas my true love sent to me
Three hellish chants,
Two yellow signs
And a statuette of Thatte Whych Shoulde Notte Bee!

On the fourth day of Christmas my true love sent to me
Four blasph'mous tomes,
Three hellish chants,
Two yellow signs
And a statuette of Thatte Whych Shoulde Notte Bee!

On the fifth day of Christmas my true love sent to me
Five Squamous Thynges,
Four blasph'mous tomes,
Three hellish chants,
Two yellow signs
And a statuette of Thatte Whych Shoulde Notte Bee!

On the sixth day of Christmas my true love sent to me
Six Leng-ground lenses,
Five Squamous Thynges,
Four blasph'mous tomes,
Three hellish chants,
Two yellow signs
And a statuette of Thatte Whych Shoulde Notte Bee!

On the seventh day of Christmas my true love sent to me
Seven scrolls from Xiccarph,
Six Leng-ground lenses,
Five Squamous Thynges,
Four blasph'mous tomes,
Three hellish chants,
Two yellow signs
And a statuette of Thatte Whych Shoulde Notte Bee!

On the eighth day of Christmas my true love sent to me
Eight runes from R'lyeh,
Seven scrolls from Xiccarph,
Six Leng-ground lenses,
Five Squamous Thynges,
Four blasph'mous tomes,
Three hellish chants,
Two yellow signs
And a statuette of Thatte Whych Shoulde Notte Bee!

On the ninth day of Christmas my true love sent to me
Nine servile shoggths,
Eight runes from R'lyeh,
Seven scrolls from Xiccarph,
Six Leng-ground lenses,
Five Squamous Thynges,
Four blasph'mous tomes,
Three hellish chants,
Two yellow signs
And a statuette of Thatte Whych Shoulde Notte Bee!

On the tenth day of Christmas my true love sent to me
Ten Tcho-Tcho rituals
Nine servile shoggths,
Eight runes from R'lyeh,
Seven scrolls from Xiccarph,
Six Leng-ground lenses,
Five Squamous Thynges,
Four blasph'mous tomes,
Three hellish chants,
Two yellow signs
And a statuette of Thatte Whych Shoulde Notte Bee!

On the eleventh day of Christmas my true love sent to me
Eleven cultist henchmen,
Ten Tcho-Tcho rituals
Nine servile shoggths,
Eight runes from R'lyeh,
Seven scrolls from Xiccarph,
Six Leng-ground lenses,
Five Squamous Thynges,
Four blasph'mous tomes,
Three hellish chants,
Two yellow signs
And a statuette of Thatte Whych Shoulde Notte Bee!

On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love sent to me
Twelve Brides of Dagon,
Eleven cultist henchmen,
Ten Tcho-Tcho rituals
Nine servile shoggths,
Eight runes from R'lyeh,
Seven scrolls from Xiccarph,
Six Leng-ground lenses,
Five Squamous Thynges,
Four blasph'mous tomes,
Three hellish chants,
Two yellow signs
And a statuette of Thatte Whych Shoulde Notte Bee!

So What Am I Playing These Days?

I'm GMing Delta Green once a month.

On the first Saturday of any given month I gather with a few people (currently down to 3 others, but there have been as many as 8 others at the table in bygone days)  and we play out a modern day, conspiracy-theory heavy cross between X-files and Cthulhu Now using the D20 version of Call of Cthulhu.

I picked D20 in part because I wanted an action/adventure feel for the campaign, but mostly because I was using the whole Delta Green thing to challenge my assumptions.

Call of Cthulhu GMs tend to be reactionary sticks-in-the-mud who cleave to the BRP or Nothing mantra. BRP, or Basic Role Playing, is the system from which Call of Cthulhu is adapted and it is a simple-to-use game engine that lends itself to quick uptake.

A character has less than twenty attributes to take care of, most of them derived from the core attributes generated by rolling dice in the familiar RPG manner, and a list of skills he/she selects to reflect competences in various disciplines. The list can be a tad arbitrary depending on the published version you are using, and GMs are encouraged to use it as a springboard rather than a finite limit on what can and cannot be achieved by a character.

BRP advancement involves identifying the skills used "successfully" by characters and allowing attempts to increase these skills at an adventure's end.

D20 is a rather more complex affair, adding (some would say "larding") to the richness of the player character build-outs with experience-earned "feats" that give characters special abilities above and beyond the skills the system also offers. D20 also has the hated "levels" that are a legacy of the D&D RPG that started the ball rolling and which drive the BRP or Nothing Brigade to apoplexy.

Advancement in D20 involves the use of "Experience Points" that are collected until one has enough to "level up". Once a player increases a character's level, that character gets more hit points, gains increases in various bonuses (to attacks and various "saving throws" that grant reprieve from pitfalls, mental attacks and poisons to name but three) more feats and points towards the purchase of more skills and so forth.

I picked D20 and Delta Green five years ago as a way to open my mind to two things I'd always turned away from without really thinking about it. I didn't care for the incredibly detailed background of Delta Green, never really found that end-of-the-millennium paranoia to my taste to be honest, and had the standard BRP or Nothing GM's stance on Call of Cthulhu.

But I had the books, and the D20 book had some rather good ideas in it. Moreover, it made the whole business of players being able to access the ancient and maddening books of magical lore much more like the original first edition of the game. Later editions had strived to make the business of reading a magic book and being seduced by the lure of power something that took so long no player would ever consider doing it. One book famously takes over a year to read!

I had long held that the model for this nonsense was "obviously" derived from the story The Dunwich Horror, but that story is really detailing the process of Magical Research rather than a straight reading.

The BRP way of dealing with books is also intended to be a "between sessions downtime" thing, something I hadn't realized until I read John Tynes' way of doing things, which is not only an in-game affair but is more evocative and just all-round better in every way than the stilted and rather pedestrian BRP loss of sanity between sessions method.

A few games saw players being lured in and coming, inevitably, to bad ends for the best reasons and doing so from the most altruistic drives. It was wonderful, and the sense of wonder was back in the game. I was happy.

I also liked having the possibility of mass combat with modern weapons actually be manageable. I wanted to be able to model 50 debased inhabitants of Innsmouth chasing panicked investigators armed with Glocks through the streets at dead of night with the fog rolling in off the ocean.

BRP GMs scream another old mantra "If you are using combat you are doing something wrong" but that is an overly broad interpretation of the game's reality and contradicted by the content in the published scenarios and campaigns, just about all of which feature combat prominently.

There is a school of thought that the reason people don't fight in Call of Cthulhu is tha the combat system doesn't work very well. It is derived from a rather persnickety combat system intended to model hand-to-hand combat with edged weapons and shields, and really doesn't port well into a "scared academic with a pistol" scenario, let alone the "four ex-marines with advanced tactical training and mac-10s" scenario.

D20's combat system addresses those concerns by providing a robust combat system that can be played out on a grid (BRP Call of Cthulhu didn't even specify the speed character could move, making a mockery of the old joke about Call of Cthulhu player characters having higher "flee" rates than shooting skills - everyone moved at the speed of plot.)

It turned out that just about all the concerns BRP GMs were using as places to stand and dig in their levers were non-issues.

The hit points thing ("The PCs end-up being God-Like") is simply not true. The D20 rules have and always have had something called a Massive Damage rule, which is a level of damage inflicted at which a character must take a Fortitude Save - Difficulty Check 15 - which if failed is instant death. The monsters have the same rule, but the damage threshold is 50.

This means that you would have to inflict 50 points of damage in a single attack to stand any chance of killing a powerful thing from hell, but it would only have to cause ten points of damage to you - and almost forgone conclusion and one that had people dropping like flies until they learned to keep their distance from the nasties. Just like they do in BRP.

As for the levels, well, the players tend to be irretrievably mad or so fragile they'll go mad at the drop of a tentacle long before they become "Godlike". There are only so many things man was not meant to know you can look at before you are about as stable as a three legged cow.

And the game has become fun again. If you check out the forums you'll find them depressingly full of people claiming that their players "don't get" Call of Cthulhu and that they can't seem to scare up a game these days. The evidence is right there in front of these GMs - no-one enjoys the rather sterile experience of Call of Cthulhu as it has become. I also couldn't scare up a trad Call of Cthulhu game, but people were eagerly waiting each month for the Delta Green game. I had players who fell into the lure of Eldritch Power with predictable results. I had players gleefully treading the path to madness. All having fun doing so.

And that game has generated more deep immersion "buy in" than any other I've run. The sheer effort the players drove me to at times to provide them with challenging and interesting mysteries was exhausting. I've throttled back a bit, running some published scenarios rather than home-brewing them, because I couldn't sustain the mental effort any longer.

All from a setting and rules-set I had initially thought worthless.

New Arrivals

The Stripey Hole by Inner City Game Designs is an old-school indy boardgame in a bag, with pages and pages of rules. The basic idea of being cons in the slammer planning to be the first out either by serving out one's sentence or bustin' outta the joint is a nice one, but to pull it off and include activities like tunneling, crawling through sewer lines and/or air ducts etc requires a bunch of rules I doubt I'll get anyone from today's audience to sit still for.

I found this one at Men at Arms in Center Island and couldn't resist it, or another Inner City game Gargantuan which is an attempt to survive a sinking ship as the decks flood under one's feet. Both these are sold in 8x5 baggies like the old Task Force Pocket Games used to be, have components that must be cut out and eschew color - actually, the standees for Gargantuan are in color, printed on photo paper.

If I said I had a weakness for games produced on a shoestring in someone's front room would I be surprising anyone? Anyway, if you are in New York of a weekend and want to play an old-fashioned board game of easy-to-moderate complexity, give me a shout.

Back in 1977, as my college days were coming to an end, I remember playing a wargame set in South Africa in which players took the part of Black South African rebel forces and White South African government forces as the two sides fight for control of the country still at that point being run under apartheid. I was the rebels. I lost.

The game in question had been given away in Strategy and Tactics magazine. This was an every-two-months publication from Simulations Publication International (SPI) and I often wondered what it would be like to replay it. The nature of the changes in South Africa would lend the game a surreal feel, I thought.

And so it was with some surprise that I found a copy of said magazine c/w an unpunched copy of the game inside on Amazon for a reasonable price. The game is now mine and I await the discovery of a worthy opponent so I can wreck my investment's collector value by punching out the components and playing the game with them.

I miss SPI wargames something fierce. Some of my best friendships were born over those four color maps, including that with Paul, the globetrotting wargamer of previous mention in these e-pages. But most of today's kids are scared of anything with more than a page of rules and won't try such games out.

Also scored a decent copy of Avalon Hill's Starship Trooper, a game put out in the early 1980s depicting the action from the Heinlein book. Like all Avalon Hill games it features a proper ("mounted" in game parlance) board in place of the paper maps of SPI. The humans get to fight two different sorts of alien (not at the same time), and the insectile sort have a hidden tunnel mechanism that looks like it will generate much fun for all.

Assuming I can find a player who isn't frightened off by the rulebook of course.

I picked up a digital handful of pdf game publications too.

More Lankhmar products for Savage Worlds including Savage Foes of Nehwon, a book of characters and adventure seeds featuring them - I have a similar book for Solomon Kane and it was great value for money - and Lankhmer Archetypes, a sort of quick start for players wanting to get a character up and running in double quick time.

I kickstarted into the Weird War I product launch and have a bunch of pdfs for that setting, including the GM and player handbooks and some scenarios, maps, archetypes and so forth. The product seems to be well worth what I kicked in and I can recommend these quick-delivery e-product kickstarters from PEG without reservation. I've been a part of two PEG kickstarters and each delivered in about a month or so.

Lastly, I grabbed me an e-copy of The Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition. Expensive at about $25 plus tax etc but people were singing up the changes, which for the first time since second edition were more than a cosmetic change in the rulebook and some tweaks to make the mythos bits even more unplayable.

I've some very strong opinions about what has been done to the game over the years. I honestly believe that by 6th edition what had been a very simple and easy to play game had become a nightmare of contradictory nonsense, mostly concerned with implementing rules that emphasized a certain set of "realistic" views on certain crucial factors in the game that sucked all the fun out for everyone except for a few moody teens.

But 7th edition was written as an attempt to drag back an audience lost to Trail of Cthulhu and Realms of Cthulhu and umpteen other game systems' <Insert Verb> Of Cthulhu offerings. It has been back to the drawing board and emerged a different beast (or so they say). I haven't gotten too far into it, but already I'm gritting my teeth over certain pesonal hot buttons.

However, I've cut the vitriolic story-so-far I wrote and I'll post a more considered view when I've read it through again.

New Arrivals

So I went a bit crazy on the PDF acquisition front in the last three months or so.

I began the slow process of converting some paper resources into more space-saving and generally more useful for my commute-friendly RPG research needs by buying Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown pdfs for Lamentations of the Flame Princess, an "old school" RPG very much in the vein or White Box D&D that bills itself as "Weird" while having absolutely no in-game mechanics I can discern to bring on the weird tone at all. I also picked up Hammers of the God, The Grinding Gear and The Random Esoteric Creature Generator. I already had the rulebook. Not sure whether I'll run LotFP. To be honest the game is aspiring to be Solomon Kane is as many ways as I care to notice, to judge by the suggestions in the rulebook itself. The artwork is both disgusting and awesome by terms.

I picked up a metric tonne of original GDW Traveller books in a "Bundle of Holding". Traveller is a game close to my heart and I'm dying to run it in campaign mode again, but I cannot get anyone interested in playing. In any event, the bundle provided the three rulebooks, five expansion rulebooks and a selection of the supplements. Not as complete a set as I would have liked, but not bad at all for what it cost me.

I picked up Stone and a Hard Place and a collection of Trail Guides. These represent episode three of a four part campaign of campaigns for Deadlands reloaded, and a collection of one-off adventures. Stone also contains rules re-introducing the long-gone Deadlands "Hexslinger" character type, and expanded rules that allow a player to play a so-called "harrowed" character. I am still mulling over the content of this volume, and can't say more without spoiling anyway, so perhaps I'll keep a detailed discussion of Stone for another time. In any event, after my attempt to run Last Sons hit player fatigue I am disenchanted with Deadlands campaigns for a bit. Hence the Trail Guide adventures. I'll review those as we play them.

Rippers also arrived, in record time for a Kickstarted project too. Not bad, and people will definitely take to the Gothic Horror/Victorian Steampunk Super Hero aspect of the setting I imagine. There are a few small changes to the original rules (which were included in the bundle but which I had bought recently anyway) alson with some modification of the settings backstory. The ancilliary products that were bundled in, like maps and adventures, were a welcome addition. The usual high quality graphic design is front and center but to be hinest I preferred that used on the older version. The deal included a set of inserts for the GM screen too. Nice.

I picked up a copy of Microscope, a co-operative game involving RPG elements in which the players work to build a history of, well, whatever they decide. It has an innovative approach to what would seem to be an anarchic process, and it can be used to play just for its own sake or, perhaps more interestingly, to arrive at a setting in which to place a home-brewed RPG, especially one in which the players share GMing duties. I'm looking forward to trying out this one, though th eidea is harder to convey as an exciting prospect than I imagined it would be.

I bought Weird War II after ignoring the Savage Worlds setting for years. I was trying to build my own setting and realized I might be re-inventing the wheel, so decided to take a look. The pdf is a far more lavish affair than the last paper copy I had in my hands, with color illustrations to boot! I'll be reviewing this one in more depth at a later date. Given the way the Weird West caught my attention after years of "meh" I may have a new fad on my hands.

While on the subject of Savage Worlds I decided to buy a pdf of the Kerberos Club setting, which I have in paper form and have not really taken much a liking to, but on re-reading find a little more interesting. The setting is Victorian England (my original reason for buying was to increase my library of Space 1889 resources) and the conceit is that of the Victorian Costumed Hero. Think League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and you are in the right neighborhood. The paper copy is of rather indefferent quality to be honest, far below the general Savage Worlds accepted standard. In pdf these things matter less. More to come later.

I finally weakened and bought The Vorkosigan Saga, a self-contained RPG set in Lois McMaster Bujold's "Barrayar" universe and a gorgeous production. It took so long to bring it to press it became that rarest of things, a fourth edition setting book for GURPS (for the rules in the book are GURPS-Lite). This is a great thing if you are a buying in hardback (I was an early adopter). Buying the pdf perhaps will inspire me to run a GURPS game for a bit, though I find the though terrifying. It's like trying to interest people in tax instructions. The base rulebooks are hysterically funny, insisting on the essential symplicity and stripped down feel of fourth edition GURPS in a sidebar on a page containing dense type explaining how to calculate fractional characteristic values. But nobody does a setting book like the GURPS guys do, which makes the idea of porting the thing wholesale to a different engine if not easy, at least not a herculean task.

Please note that while I find GURPS unattractive for many reasons as a GM I do acknowledge the awesome flexibility of the engine itself and also the people who built it. An achievemment that is underappreciated by many, including (of course) me.

Perhaps the most unlikely new purchase for me has been that of the Firefly RPG and a couple of scenario books for it. I got one of these in a "for charity" bundle I coughed up for, and was intrigued despite never having been a fan of the Firefly series or the Serenity movie. Some reading, and I was hooked. Hooked enough to start planning a game and start researching by buying and watching the series and the movie on Blu-ray, both soundtrack albums for planned background music (I rarely use music in my games as it usually becomes a distraction, but the "feel" I got from my reading was that it might work positively here. And I buy and listen to soundtrack albums anyway. I also felt the need for a small model of the ship as a focus item for the table. The cheapest way to that goal was the Firefly Yahtzee set, which has a very nice model of the Serenity as its dice cup. So yes, I bought in to the FIrefly game bigtime and can't wait to run it.

And despite my feeling that the Sixth Edition of Call of Cthulhu is the least accessible rulebook for the game ever published, making what should be a simple and quick assimilation by a new GM a tortuous trip through contadictory and confusing nonsense, I bought that in pdf too. I was about to start running Call of Cthulhu again from the BRP rules (I've been running a Delta Green game using the much-maligned D20 rules for more than five years for perhaps the best Call of Cthulhu gamers I've ever had but missed the 20s and BRP experience) and needed an electronic form of the book. I'm using 5.2 for the game itself, but couldn't source that as an e-book for luvner money.

This brings me to the lamentable quality of comparably high-cost Chaosium e-books. Chaosium have been coasting on their quality for some years, with customers acting as appologists for the horribly dated look and the fact that the lack of production values has resulted in every case I've paid for in a book that is functionally useless as an in-game resource.

The products are consistently higher priced than lavish equivalent products from other publishing houses, lacking any sort of relief from the tedious greyscale. Compare, for example, the monochrom but much more interesting Trail of Cthulhu with Call of Cthulhu and you'll come away with a sour taste in your mouth.

Forget the artwork for a moment. Let's look at the way a pdf is navigated. Hyperlinks from the table of contents to the content itself is best, but not essential. Bookmarks are absolutely essential, the more granular the better. These become most useful if they approach index levels of depth, but don't have to go that far, as long as they can be used as anchors in which to page back and forth as a game progresses.

Not one of my Chaosium pdf products has bookmarks, meaning that one is reduced to using "search", just about the lousiest, most useless way of using a rule or setting book in-game. And I'm not talking about old products here. Gold Book BRP, Cthulhu by Gaslight (the latest one that was delivered by the author as an electronic version for Hastur's sake!), Beyond the Mountains of Madness (a magnificent but most of all HUGE book that cries out for bookmarks), House of R'lyeh and, of course, the Sixth Edition Rulebook. All came without bookmarks.

And Chaosium are not alone in "not getting it" when it comes to how pdfs get used by GMs. Wizards of the Coast finally published pdf versions of their D&D 3.5 core books. As locked-down pdfs.

Now you may be wondering who would lock down a pdf of an obsolete version of an RPG which for all intents and purposes is available at a fraction of the cost under a different name in an unlocked format, and so am I. The locking of the pdf means that the GM cannot annotate the rulebook they have just bought (and not cheaply either I might add; Pathfinder is a better buy on cost grounds too). So no highlighting and no post-it notes, something I have come to understand is more than just extremely useful to me as a GM, it is essential. Way to protect your IP, Hasbro. On a game nobody wants to buy anyway. Pfft!

I am told that the Seventh Edition rulebooks (plural, there are now two sold for the game) for Call of Cthulhu do have bookmarks, but I am not remotely tempted to pony up almost thirty dollars for the GM manual to find out. Chaosium have burned out all the customer brand loyalty from me with mediochre and half-hearted attempts to "serve" their audience. There has been a change of management there of late in an attempt to revitalise the company still reeling after a financial misstep in the 1990s (!) but we can still see self-defeating behavior such as floating the Seventh Edition Kickstarter before they had fulfulled the long over-running Horror on the Orient Express Kickstarter, with predictable results wioth respect to both products and unhappiness in the backer ranks.

Oh, and I picked up Legend, the pdf that replaces Runequest in the Mongoose line of products (lapsed licence) so I could contemplate running an Elric or Hawkmoon game, but that is way off in the nevernever future.

Going The Extra Mile

So I have a player who may be relocating out of state in a few months, so I asked him if there was anything he'd like especially to do in-game and he immediately said "I wanna go back to Bonshonce".

Bonshonce was a scenario I ran about four years ago, for what was then six guys and a girl, three of the guys first-time RPG-ers. I wrote it myself, and it featured The Deep Ones, an aquatic race that has a special place in the Cthulhu Mythos and in the history of my BRP Call of Cthulhu games. They are nasty, capable of inter-breeding with humans to produce hybrid offspring. The canonical story is "The Innsmouth Horror" and it is a scorcher.

The basic story line of the game scenario, set in 1987, was that there was a degenerate community, a place I chose to call "Bonshonce" deep in the Louisiana bayous that had "an arrangement" with the Deep Ones going back into the early part of the 20th century, but the breeding lines had become too corrupted and so the Deep Ones needed fresh blood. The humans of Bonshonce (actually, hybrids) came up with a scheme to kidnap girls from around the country, but one of their victims was the relative of a Senator and so the team were detailed to find out what happened (they being FBI officers in "real life"). The players followed the clues of this "mundane" kidnapping case into a hellish situation that cost the lives of two of the player characters' lives almost as soon as they arrived in Bonshonce. It got bloody. It got seriously weird and it got very creepy.

Everyone had a ball and this adventure set the pace for what came after. I soon found myself spending hours writing plot arcs and manufacturing hand-outs to be used as clues to whatever the mystery of the day was. We play once a month and one scenario took the best part of a year to conclude, and required a portable white-board so the players could untangle the web of clues and lies and monstrously suggestive hints.

And I burned out.

When a major campaign plot point was reached I switched to running only published scenarios, and we lost a many players to real life, some of whom were replaced by new gamers.

When I was asked to take the team back to Bonshonce it actually tied into something I'd been mulling off and on for, well, years. I'd hinted and outright stated any time anyone asked that the Navy had taken over at Bonshonce. Well, in my head, a super-secret department of the Navy had cordoned off Bonshonce and established a number of facilities in order to secure the area, study the hybrids and look for Deep Ones.

The new scenario is set in '97 and the Hook is that the Navy project has been off the radar for years and in fact seems to have gone silent. Extreme compartmentalization, paranoid or simply self-serving information hoarding by those in charge, sudden and drastic changes in budget and an unfortunate death have prevented anyone who would have noticed from being aware of the issue. I had used a major character from the original game, now a high-up in the secret Delta Green conspiracy, as the NPC "feed" who gets the player characters involved.

Can't say much more as the player characters are only now finding out what's what.

I invested about four hours in producing the initial batch of paper-trail clues (partial logs, diaries and so forth), and about the same time in figuring out who was there and what they were doing and where they are in 1997¹.

One set of logs were from a burned-out site, with the log itself badly burned with only a few partial pages surviving. These give a fragmented narrative of the Navy project from one point of view and give an insight into the truly nasty person who wrote the log. I printed the pages on my laser using a distinctive script font, stained the pages with highly diluted sepia ink and then burned away the edges of the paper almost up to the text. This gave a very good illusion of a salvaged text block from a larger page.

I also made a bottle of pills from an old plastic vitamin bottle, a fake label and some salvaged BBs from my Airsoft tommy gun (for rattle), and added an Airsoft .22 automatic labeled "rusty"² which would reinforce a written clue from the log.

Long story short, one of the old group saw the game description and wanted "in", and I naturally welcomed him. We had a ball the first game session which took place mostly in Washington DC, Michigan and Florida.

The second session had the player characters moving into Louisiana and finding Bonshonce, or what was left of it, planning the mission in detail and approaching the town by Zodiac boat after a short recce of the Cannery. The team had to wade through head-tall grass and weeds to approach some sort of encampment in what had been the waterfront/main street part of town, and were more than a little put out when one of them saw a sign with "MINEFIELD" written on it. There followed a nice tense walk to the fence, a short debate and then they climbed the electric fence (long defunct).

The camp was a mess, large parts of it burned out with signs of multiple explosions having ripped through the staff quarters and laboratory building and signs of freed captives and assassinated captives in what was obviously some sort of detention dormitory. All good stuff that allowed the players to reconstruct a picture of what went down, with enough wiggle room for misconceptions and alternate explanations. In the last half hour of play they found the burned log and I gave them the burned, stained pages.

And there was my payoff for all that work. The look of sheer joy on everyone's faces at the look, feel and smell of the clues, obviously salvaged from a fire. And then they began reading and their buy-in increased tenfold. The players had their characters bed down for the night in an armored car they found in the motor pool and we closed the session. I felt it had gone well, and everyone was smiling and talking about how they would start the next session.

And the next day, as I was settling in for my bi-weekly Pathfinder game³ I got the nicest bit of feedback over the 'net from one of the players saying how much he'd enjoyed the game, which probably made my face light up the same way theirs had after finding the log pages.

Players like this group are rare in the gaming world. They work well together, play off each other well and have so much willing buy-in that they encourage me to outdo myself each session, upping my game. I like to think this in turn ups their game, a synergy that ramps up the energy and immersion for all concerned. Either way I've already invested about ten hours in yet more immersion-enhancing stuff, from paper clues to learning how to use Blender so I can model parts of the coming experience in 3D. Hope they get as much fun from this session as they did the last.

I'll keep you posted.

1. I'm sorry about the tense changes but it is easier to think about this stuff as if '97 is the current year↑
2. I didn't have time to distress it for real↑
3. I play this one, someone else runs it↑

The Last Of The Summer Whine

Things in the official Call of Cthulhu publications that ruin the atmosphere and make the Mythos more ordinary at a stroke:

Calling members of the Great Race of Yith "Yithians".

"The Great Race" a) is more authentic - that's how Lovecraft referred to them, and b) retains the overblown ponderous pomposity of the background. "Yithian" sounds more 1970s than antediluvian, robbing the race of all it's mystery. I might fear a member of something everyone calls "The Great Race". A "Yithian" is as scary as a "Smurf".

Calling The Insects from Shaggai "Shans". It seems obvious to me the plural of Shan would be "Shan" - as in "Fear The Shan". I don't know precisely why, but pluralizing "Shan" makes it ordinary and unscary. Probably because is sounds less pompous.

Calling a Hound from Tindalos "A Tindalos". It should be "A Hound" or, if one absolutely must trivialize the most dangerous thing you could ever have tracking you "A Tindalosi". Again, it has to do with the pompous sound of the name.

Trivialize the name and you trivialize the monster and the threat it is supposed to pose. That is why we routinely make the first order of any war the coining of a dismissive diminutive for speaking of the enemy.

And the Threat of The Mythos should never be trivialized.

Islands of Ignorance - TheThird Call of Cthulhu Companion

I kickstarted into this project about six months or so ago.

I happen to be acquainted in a small way with the project leader, Oscar Rios, and was very excited to see what he was planning, and so reversed my "never again" policy as far as game kickstarters go.

I'm ambivalent about Kickstarter and it's imitators. Crowd-sourcing is a very oughties touchy-feely-web-2.0-ey thing that sometimes gives me stomach ache when I see it "abused" by people who have avenues of funding and support that means they don't need to use crowd-sourcing.

However, Rios is Old School Call of Cthulhu enough that I couldn't resist helping out and helping myself to a first edition into the bargain. Besides, I have the other two companions, one of which was the second published accessory to Call of Cthulhu and such a high quality item it (along with Shadows of Yog Sothoth) changed my feelings about after-market publications for RPGs completely.

You'll find me in the backer's list in the publication, when it becomes available, under my web moniker "Roxysteve" (a name chosen during my AOL years when I found my first and last names were an unbelievably common combination in the western world).

If you are in there, shout out.

Visionaries should stick together.

It's a Deja Vu Reboot All Over Again Once More

Okay, time to do some game talk.

It's been a while and I've done quite a bit of gaming in the year and a half I've been gone from here.

I started running Masks of Nyarlathotep a newly reprinted campaign for Call of Cthulhu that my wife bought for me for Christmas, but the campaign has stuttered a bit this time through, with players dropping out before I can kill their characters or drive them mad. Oh well. The advantage of running the game in a Game Store is that there is always an audience, and that audience has recently been knocking on my door asking if they can join in. Naturally I say "Hell yes!" I'll be starting a thread for this game and the observations that arise from it from now on.

The monthly Delta Green campaign sessions are as popular as ever, over-subscribed now with eight players sometimes at a sitting. I enjoy running for this group very much. Their buy-in is atypically fervent and they are a total joy to GM. This game will soon be kicking into higher gear and I will be threading this game in it's own subject too. I have a lot of thinking to do when it comes to D20 Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green.

The recent (read: end of last year) launch of the Savage Worlds Space 1889 setting and my love affair with all things Savage Worlds has resulted in my convening not one but two separate parallel campaigns, each being an iteration of the Red Sands campaign from the eponymous setting book. I'll be threading these games both together and individually for pontification purposes.

I've also begun playing Solomon Kane, another Savage Worlds-derived game setting (though in this case one that is self-contained and that requires no additional purchase of a Savage Worlds rulebook). It looks to be a very interesting way of presenting a nuts-and-bolts action-adventure/horror game and I love the rulebook.

My attendance at this year's RetCon was a success, with all four of my games subscribed to the right level. I ran a Realms of Cthulhu scenario set mostly in the Peruvian Rainforest, A Deadlands:Reloaded game set in Great North Woods, A Space 1889 scenario set in the Martian desert at the juncture of the English and German fields of influence and a Call of Cthulhu session late on Saturday night which was a shortened version of A Cracked and Crooked Manse. It was a great success and greatly simplified by the decision to this year go with an all-Savage Worlds program (with the exception of the Call of Cthulhu session).

There were some failures to aviate.

Notably, my friend of many years decided that he no longer wished to play Call of Cthulhu since he did forensic paperwork for a living and was not keen on doing it in an RPG for relaxation, and an attempt to start the D20 Conan campaign Trial of Blood fell flat. That was sad because I was hoping the milieu would appeal to my friend so we could game together again, but it was a total non-starter.

Then there was the Paranoia game I tooled up to run only to find that no-one who had said they wanted to play was actually prepared to turn up. Fiasco! drew no players at all in three weeks of advertizing the session.

And a Dresden Files RPG campaign I was hosting every other Friday, and for which I was taking vacation time to be able to do so, eventually resulted in an evening where I and one other were the only people to show up after a dozen sessions.

Lessons learned:

Dresden Files has taught me to be absolutely without compunction when it comes to giving away a players seat if they haven't RSVP'd for the game (all the store's available slots are booked using Meetups). My campaigns sometimes feature a floating cast list these days but I don't get messed around by losers.

Paranoia taught me that people talk a lot on the web but often don't follow through, even if you know them personally. Don't spend money on rulebooks unless you have at least three "I'll be there's".

Conan taught me that sometimes it is just that the right mix of people isn't there and motivated to play. Two of those who did show interest found they didn't like my style and rather than say so simply faded from sight.

But all this has also shown me that the facts of life are that there are four to eight times as many people who want to play a given game than are willing to sit the other side of the screen and run the bugger. The GM in my neck of the woods who is willing to bide their time will end up beating them off with a stick when word gets around (and if he is any good).

My problem now is time. I don't have enough, otherwise I'd be playing in at least two more games (One Ring and Eclipse Phase) and running even more, like Deadlands:Reloaded, and Slipstream, and Sundered Skies, and The Laundry, and Amber, and Traveller, and Dresden Files - which I dislike the complexity of but feel there's a great game in there struggling to get out - and that doesn't even mention the board games

Why Kids Are Sometimes A Good Idea

I've been running this Call of Cthulhu campaign for about a year now, extending the Keith Herber classic "Dark Carnival" (from the Chaosium publication "Curse of the Chthonians") to incorporate a saga of horror and venal goings-on involving the Wyatt family and the Corbitt family in a twisted conspiracy stretching back into the early 18th century, and it's been going well for the most part.

Last SaturdayI was looking to add Teh Awesum to my next session (which was due the next day) and I decided a nice bit of art with a given theme would do nicely, and I ordered said art from my extremely talented daughter, giving her just a few ideas and a motif that had to appear. She got right down to it and I, tired from all the management duties involved, went to bed early.

I had envisaged the art as being depicted on a monolith the players are looking for, but what she delivered up was so good I decided that it would be a wooden plaque hanging on a wall in a secret library.

It was a great hit with the players, and a great hit to the SAN scores of the PCs, driving one mad with the terrible insights it gave him into the chaos of the outer void etc etc etc.

A corespondent suggested I post it here, and I thought that was a great idea.

1D3/1D6 SAN loss for viewing the Gharne Panel.

In case you were wondering: Copyright on that image is held by the artist and all rights are reserved.

More on Massive Damage in Modern D20 Games

A brief note after a long hiatus to say that I've been running Conan with the Massive Damage rules switched on and the world hasn't come to an end yet.

No game of D&D that I've played in has been run with the Massive Damage rules in effect, and when I've asked why I've been given a variety of reasons which boil down to "the game will be far too deadly with Massive Damage". I should mention that the D&D Massive Damage Threshold is 50 points (if I'm not mistaken).

The Massive Damage threshold for Conan is 20 points, so one would have thought that if a D20 game could be made ultra player-unfriendly by Massive Damage, Conan would be the one to show that, but you know what? The monsters are the ones having the hard time of it. So much so I'm having to gently tweak them to make them a challenge. Perhaps I'm doing it wrong.

I'm now contemplating going "off the reservation" and running a Delta Green game under the D20 Call of Cthulhu rules (as opposed to the more usual and generally more well-thought-of in the Call of Cthulhu community Basic Role Playing rules aka BRP). One of the first things I checked up on was the Massive Damage Threshold for the game.

Call of Cthulhu uses a variant of the D20 rules that differs in detail in many places from D&D, even more so than Conan does, and one of those changes is that there's a different Massive Damage Threshold for the human players than for the non-player Mythos Monstrosities.

A player has to Fort save vs 15 after 10(!) points of damage are dealt in a single attack. A monster does so after an attack deals 50 points(!!).

It would seem, on the face of it, to be a recipe for player death on a grand scale, but then again, that's pretty much in the Call of Cthulhu mold, so I'm leaving it in as written for the time being.

This should sort out the men from the shoggoths.

The Call of Cthulhu: Problems Posed By Tomes In The Game

Disclaimer: Ever since Sandy Petersen left Chaosium, the rules for the Call of Cthulhu have been undergoing a shift towards a "more realistic" way to present the game. I have many observations, reservations and - let's be honest - plain old fashioned whinges and whines about that. This post is certainly coloured by my feelings and I make no attempt to be neutral in my tone. I care about this stuff. All comments refer to the Basic Role Playing (BRP) rulesset unless otherwise indicated.

One of the puzzling things about the attempt to reface Call of Cthulhu with a more "realisitic" stucco over the years has been the matter of the Mythos Tome in the game.

A lot has changed since the Petersen days. The books now take unfeasibly long times to read - I seriously doubt that any Keeper¹ uses the suggested times as written in the latest version of the rules², where a copy of Al Azif - aka The Necronomicon - can take sixty-summat weeks to digest. It simply isn't feasible for players to become conversant with such volumes within a campaign structure, where they always have better things to do with their time.

Which raises problems when success hinges on the learning and deployment of a spell from such a book (which it often does in published scenarios). The hapless Keeper is faced with having to come up with a jury-rigged kluge just to make the game "work". This is unsatisfying to me. Of all the things that need fixing in the game, decent, workable rules for how to put these books to use in the game need to be worked out.

Part of the problem is an overly slavish dedication to the Lovecraft canon, or rather, certain select pieces from it. I don't know for a fact that this is the case, but I have surmised over more than three decades experience with the game the following: The game structure is largely drawn whole from the novella "The Call of Cthulhu", The campaign template from "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" and the rules for reading tomes from "The Dunwich Horror". The problem as I see it is that "The Dunwich Horror" concerns a wizard searching for the means to craft a spell, a very specific spell, from hints inside the book. He already has a debased copy of the book itself and spends a lot of time correcting it from the copy in the Miskatonic University Library. From this one rather specialised case, which is in fact more a classic example of D&D style Magical Research than an attempt to read and understand the book per se, the general rules for reading tomes seem to be drawn, and drawn so as to make the books an unattainable resource in fact, if not in spirit.

The arguments for why this should be so include the abtrusness of the material, the insanity of the author and the ancient idioms in which they are couched - all good points. But they make the tomes unplayable. If the point is that players should not have first-hand knowledge of these things but should rely on NPC intermediaries to supply tome-contained information, then why include them as player-attainable assets in the game at all³?

It is telling that no sooner does one read and absorb the Tome Times (my term) than there is a sidebar in the rulebook desperately suggesting ways to override them in specific cases. Rules that have to be overridden to become playable should never have seen the typesetting machine in the first place in my opinion.

In this search for "realism" one aspect of the whole business has remained, puzzlingly, rather abstract and unrealistic, and that is the Sanity Loss mechanic with respect to Tome reading. You read the book, taking a year or so to do so with no adverse effects or incremental benefits, and then, when it's all over, you take a sudden kick in the SAN nodes and receive a Cthulhu Mythos skill powerup. You'd think that if the editorial staff at Chaosium were going to tackle the issue of "realism" in The Call Of Cthulhu, this would be one of the places to start, but no. For some reason, this odd little mechanism has been left unchanged since the first edition.

Now it has to be said that none of my players have ever worried about this, and truth to say neither did I until I read the Tome reading rules in the D20 version of the rules, in which there is an attempt to at least represent the months-long research as an incremental process. Indeed, the BRP Keeper is well advised to take a long, hard look at the D20 rules even if he/she/it is never intending to run a game under that system, just for the fresh ideas that the authors bring to the business of presenting the game to the players.

How to "fix" all this, if indeed it really needs fixing at all, is something for another time after a lot of careful thought.

Probably the reason that players (and I) have not worried about the issue before is that reading a Tome is akin to attempting to use a one-off experience-boosting magic item in D&D, something you do for the obvious benefit and then get on with the real business at hand - whatever the campaign is calling for you to do. The rules seem to suggest that Tome Reading should be an adventure in and of itself, which isn't a bad idea per se, but the BRP rules have never suggested guidelines for doing that. In fact, they only talk of the ways that reading a Tome can be fitted into other in-game activities, which seems to be conveying the message that Tome reading is not all that important other than as background scenery.

I don't know what I'm going to do about this, or even if I'm going to do anything. I ran from first edition rules and everyone had a blast without sweating these sorts of details. It's true that the perception of how the game should be played has changed. It used to be an action/adventure game with Lovecraftian overtones. The emphasis was on the search for truth, and the almost inevitable trip into madness usually marked the end of a PCs career. Now the emphasis is on the deep immersion playing of insane characters fighting a doomed battle against unbeatable forces. The madness is seen to be the point now.

But I think I need to think it out again.

1. Call of Cthulhu speak for "DM"↑
2. 6th edition↑
3. Not an idle question. The D20 rules for Call of Cthulhu state outright that the Great Old Ones should never be met by players.↑