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.

What Am I Playing These Days (A Ransom Note Test Of My CSS Code)

So, let's inventory the regularly scheduled games I'm involved with, just for fits and wiggles.

Friday nights alternate. Last week I ran Gamma World, this week I'll be playing in someone else's Dungeons & Dragons game. I'm having more fun playing in the Dungeons & Dragons game than running the Gamma World one, but the Gamma World players are reportedly having a ball. I'll run the scanrios in the set until they are played out and then will happily drop Gamma World like a radioactive spud.

Saturday, being the first Saturday in the month, I will be running Delta Green, continuing a campaign set in the mid '90s using the D20 rules for Call of Cthulhu that has been chugging along claiming PC sanity and lives (and in one case the entire observable universe) for around five years on a once-a-month basis. This can be a lot of fun, but it is always a lot of work. I'm having difficulties with the current plot instalment but it should all smooth out and run better after a couple of hours of Investigator Effort.

Sunday evening will be the next installment in the Deadlands:Reloaded game I'm having so much fun with. This is another game in which I'm a player rather than the GM, and I haven't had quite so much fun in years.

Candidates being considered for the Friday slot when I'm done with Gamma World include Solomon Kane and Space 1889, both of which I've had a lot of fun with in the past, but that is way off in the future. I've probably got enough Gamma World stuff to take us into the summer.

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.

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↑

Rediscovering The Joy Of Home Brewed Adventures

For just about three and a half years I've been running a Delta Green game once a month, using the D20 Call of Cthulhu rules and the dual system sourcebook.

It all started as a one-off game run at RetCon 1. The players were all younger than me and were eager for more so I began crafting adventures kindasorta X-Files-y in nature set in the mid to late 80s, an era which we called "Delta Green: The Cowboy Years".

The players responded with outstanding role-playing and general enthusiasm for what we were doing, and I felt moved to outdo myself with each new adventure, culminating in a months-long story arc that had so many plot elements I designed a portable whiteboard so the players could do the Police Procedural thing with dry erase markers to sort it all out.

I recommend this, by the way. It is a great way to get the players all on the same page by their own efforts, and the GM can see where they might be about to make a colossal mistake and gently guide them back onto the path - or not, as the mood suggests. I'll do a mini instructable later on how to go about it.

Anyway.

The players began dropping out, with real-world concerns taking priority for some and general burnout doing for the rest. The core player set went from seven down to three, then back to four and is currently at five.

Worse was my own burnout. I pulled out all the stops for that aforementioned scenario, crafting clues that pushed my photoshoping skills (nonexistent at first) to the limit as I created photographs of locations and crime scene elements (I was proud of several of those), age-worn signposts, plans of extensive abandoned army bases etc. A five hour session could eat several days of clue manufacturing and plot tweaking.

By the time it all ended we made an agreement: The player characters would become major NPC movers in the newly reformed and reorganized Delta Green and we would for the foreseeable future be playing published scenarios.

A couple more players dropped out and a couple of new ones joined. My load went down to about a half of what it had been. I was surprised it took so long to prep for published scenarios but they turned out to be full of holes and mis-steps that needed patching before play.

One player announced he was probably going to be moving out of New York in a few months, and expressed a desire to return to a location I had used for the first adventure he and the others had experienced - I had said that when the original team had left there was a continuing story evolving there that would require a revisit by a Delta Green team at some point.

So I started writing the scenario I had had buzzing around in my head for a couple of years.

And two of the drop-out players immediately asked if they could rejoin the game (of course they were welcome) and we were off.

And once again I find myself madly building clue trails of memos and logs and newspaper articles and Azathoth-knows what else when I should be doing other productive stuff.

Example: The scenario calls for a submerged modular laboratory/base. I sketched out the first draft using Flash, my preferred drawing tool. There has been no tool to equal Flash in terms of usefulness and intuitive interface in my opinion.

But I found myself wondering if I couldn't do a bit better than a simple plan. You see, I can picture what it is supposed to look like, would look like if it were in, say, a first person computer game.

So I downloaded Blender, a 3D workbench and rendering tool that is truly amazing in what it promises, and have spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to get to grips with its "unique" interface. Nothing works the way a seasoned GUI user would expect and a lifetime of mouse habits have to be unlearned. Thank Shub-Niggurath for YouTube, where people, some of them articulate, can be found showing us all how to do various simple things you should be able to figure out yourself were it not for the godsawful Blender user interface.

It's not the tool designers' fault really. They have to cram so much into so little real estate. But some of them don't do themselves or us any favors either. It's as though the ability to code the amazing capabilities of the program comes at the cost of knowing how to communicate how to use their code to the world.

Anyway. You really have to look at Blender to see it for yourself. It is a gobsmacking achievement.

After three days cursing and fumbling I finally have a single module that renders the way I want in greyscale. I spent most of my trip in this morning trying to understand how to put a rusty metal skin on the basic cylindrical core of the thing.

Why am I doing this?

It started out as the idea of making a 3D picture of the entire shebang, but I'm thinking I might try and make a short movie of a swim-past. The movie part looks like it works much the same as Flash does.

I hope I can get it all done before they visit the place and abandon it, but it will be good practice anyway.

And the payoff will be the satisfaction of the players as they once again try and make sense of my deliberately obscure scenario.

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