Save vs Facemelt

I ran a game of Wanderhome that wrapped up about 6 weeks ago, and I've constantly been putting off the bit where I write up GMing notes and reflections here on Tumblr.

Today, I finally realised that that's because I don't want to do this any more.

Like, not the gaming. I'm gaming all the time! But the part where I write up notes and breakdowns for an audience that's at best tiny and more likely imaginary... I think I'm done with that.

Twitter dying has encouraged me to step away from social media, and the performative posting of my thoughts, and I think I'm much happier that way. I'd rather just keep them to myself, and keep my GMing attention firmly on the specific players who share that experience with me.

So, um... yeah. If you exist, and you read this blog, thanks! Go play more games, they're fun! That's what I'll be doing too.

Back in December, when talking about Scum & Villainy, I said that I was also running a slightly intermittent game of Heart.

Well, 'slightly' became 'very', and 'intermittent' became 'sporadic', and faced with the campaign continuing to not happen for the next few months, I decided last week to pull the plug. It's a bummer, but that's how 90% of RPG campaigns end - not with a bang, or even a whimper, but the nagging whine of incompatible schedules and commitments slowly grinding into each other just below the waterline.

...but what the heck is Heart, anyway?

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Heart's great: This game? This game fuckin' rules. It throws wonderfully evocative classes (Wizards made of bees! Train paladins! Debt priests! The Crow, from the movie The Crow!) into a nightmare world of meat dungeons, subterranean moons, gangster druids, blooddrenched angels, electronic hells and interdimensional subways. The art's great, the writing's great, the setting's crammed full of evocative ideas, and the system... reads slightly better than it plays, and the exploration subsystem needs clearer explanations for how to make it work at the table, but it's still pretty bloody good. If the opportunity comes up to run/play Heart again, I'll do it in a, well, heartbeat.

Meaty beaty big and bouncy: The strongest element of Heart are beats, which are the core of both its experience system and its approach to GMing. At the end of a session, each player picks two beats - events, consequences or choices - that they would like to happen (or at least start happening) to their character. These range from the minor ('kick someone off a roof') to the major (''convert an important NPC to your cause') to the extreme ('take final revenge upon your secret master'), and the character gets a corresponding minor/major/extreme power-up when the beat is fulfilled. The GM's job is then to set up all those beats in the next session - and that's how you design scenarios and sessions. No maps, no scripts, no big plans, but a focus on giving the players what they want while building on what came before.

Planning is my heroin: I, of course, fucked that up immediately. Not by pre-planning a big story arc or dropping in railroad tracks, but by getting caught up in the coolness of every character. I wanted to see where they would end up, which meant I started getting ideas about where they'd end up, which meant I planned (rough) arcs for each character and dropped hints and foreshadowing and plot threads for players to follow those arcs. And my ideas are good! The players seemed to like them! But they're my ideas, and I struggle to put my ideas to one side even when a game pushes the players' ideas to the forefront, or to let myself take a reactive GMing role rather than actively driving things. The sweet spot is somewhere in the middle - me riffing on player inputs, the players riffing on mine, everyone being happy - and maybe that's how the game would have turned out in the end, who knows.

Everyone's busy again: Look, I'm not saying pandemic lockdowns were a good thing, but at least they meant everyone was home, bored and desperate for online interaction on a Thursday night. It was a good time for gaming - I think I was running 4 games a fortnight (via Zoom) at one point. But that's over now, and folks have a lot of things on their plates again, and I'm back to competing with things like jobs and children and sex for attention again, and I tend to lose those competitions.

Am I advocating for another pandemic? Yes No. But sigh.

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What else is happening in gaming land?

I tried to get a Lancer campaign off the ground, but I have a limited number of friends interested in a tactical-combat-focused RPG, and most of them were busy, so I'm putting that off until autumn.

I've just started running facilitating guiding a Wanderhome game, and it's got lots of promise, but it's a challenge in some ways. A game with no conflict, no plot and little-to-no external drama? Just vibes? That's not my strong suit - but then again, it's been a long time since I had to learn new gaming skills, so I’m into it.

And I should (fingers crossed) be running a one-shot, maybe even a 3-shot, of Achtung! Cthulhu next month. That'll be fun.

People are starting to follow this Tumblr.

That's weird.

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If you are a new reader, can I suggest scrolling back a few years? That's where the good entries are.

And maybe go check out my Obsidian Portal page, which I no longer update - I stopped doing session-by-session game writeups - but that still has like 10 years worth of campaigns to explore.

Quickstarts! You know about them, right? Small, usually free products that package up game rules, pregen characters and a short scenario to run at a convention or the like?

I have like 80 of these things, and have run approximately zero of them. But it's time to change that - yesterday I took one out for a spin, and I plan to run more in 2023.

So with that agenda, and in the general spirit of blogging about literally all my gaming, even if nobody cares, here's a short roundup/review of that quickstart that also sets up a framework of how I'll (probably) write about them in the future.

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THE QUICKSTART: Conan: The Pit of Kutallu

THE SYSTEM: A moderately crunchy implementation of Modiphius' 2d20 house system. It didn't take too much time to explain the basics and get started, though we needed occasional (but short) breaks to explain new elements. The strongest aspect was the back-and-forth trade of meta-currency that encouraged players to make interesting decisions; the weakest was the need to keep referring to tables to work out how to spend those currencies.

THE SCENARIO: A straightforward action-adventure piece, as you'd expect - some barbarian heroes escape from slavery, explore a swamp and rescue a noblewoman from Cthul... sorry, Kutallu. Very much a 5 Room Dungeon structure, which is a good model for this sort of thing. The strongest bit was the escape-from-slavers montage scene, which encouraged player creativity; the weakest was the over-reliance on fight scenes. It also took me a bit of work to scale things down for a small (2-person) play group.

THE CHARACTERS: The quickstart comes with four PCs, and there's a PDF with two more. The characters are probably the weakest part of the package; they're fine but a little bland, without distinct schticks. Some are better integrated with the rules than others - 2d20 ties special effects to weapons, but several PCs have weapons with no effects, making them less interesting/effective in play.

THE PRODUCT: A 32 page booklet, free in PDF, probably costs something in hardcopy. It's attractive enough, and looks good at first glance, but it was harder to find rules and information in play than I expected. The Conan RPG books I've skimmed all seem a bit overwritten, and this was no different; another couple of editing passes, and some thoughts about instructional design, would have improved it a fair bit.

NUMERICAL RATING: yeah nah those are bullshit, we're not doing that

NON-NUMERICAL ASSESSMENT: Pretty good overall, and a fun way to spend an afternoon, but it hasn't really fired me up to run/play Conan again.

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Hi, yes, I know it's been like a year since our last entry. Life is... complex these days. Nobody trusts anybody now, and we're all very tired.

But a lack of blog entries doesn't mean I haven't been running games; it just means I've stopped writing and reporting on session writeups that no-one bothered to read. It's a new paradigm, people - evolve or die.

And speaking of dying, let's look at the Scum & Villainy game I've been running all year! No-one died, that was a lie to support a segue, I have no regrets.

What's Scum & Villainy? It's a science-fiction game based on Blades in the Dark, in which the characters are freelance criminals (or at least crime-adjacent-independent-contractors) flying their spaceship around a setting that's a bit Star Wars, a bit Firefly, a bit many other media properties and doing heists & odd jobs.

What do I have to say about Scum & Villainy after 9 months of play? A few things, actually.

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Scum & Villainy is a pretty good RPG. Not perfect, but pretty good! It takes the Blades in the Dark formula and mechanics and does a solid job of translating them to the sci-fi genre. The best bit of new design is adding a floating pool of extra dice ('gambits') for improving rolls, along with unique ways for different playbooks to use them. The weakest parts are that the spaceship-improvement minigame isn't as engaging or useful as the turf-claiming minigame in Blades, and that the Heat mechanic becomes a bit toothless when the party can just fly to another star system where they aren't wanted. But those qualms aside, the setting is fun and full of things to do, the rules work well and everyone had a good time.

It can take some getting used to, though. Some of my players weren't that conversant with non-D&D/trad-style games, and it took a little time to adjust to how S&V allocates narrative control vs mechanics. Downtime tends to be loose and narrative in trad games, but it's codified and mechanised in S&V; meanwhile, S&V uses equipment mostly as fictional positioning rather than giving it mechanical heft like in D&D. The biggest adjustment might be just the approach to dice-rolling & action, though. Modern D&D play tends to involve lots of low-stakes, low-impact dice rolls, little moments for players to grab attention when success and failure are both fun and largely meaningless. In S&V, almost every roll has the potential to break bad in some way, so you only want to roll when necessary, and to find those spotlight moments some other way. It's also an adjustment as a GM - learning when to call for a roll, rather than just say yes/no to things, is a key skill and one I'm still honing.

Pacing is as pacing does. Both Blades and S&V try to minimise player planning and push fast-paced play. My group would have none of it. They absolutely wanted to spend time (even complete sessions) talking about plans and contingencies, and to take their time before, after and during jobs. At first I felt the urge to push back against this, and ask them to keep things moving, but it was quickly obvious that they enjoyed the planning process, even if it wasn't really necessary, and preferred a slower pace overall. And that's fine! That's fun! That's a sign that the game needed to adapt to the players, not the other way around! So I leaned into it by fleshing out interactions with NPCs, and setting downtime scenes that moved slowly but had plenty of texture/flavour, and everyone seemed happy with that.

Telling smaller stories still takes work. I'm trying to move away from big campaign arcs (like in 13th Age) and towards more episodic, player-directed games and plots. S&V's play style promotes self-contained missions, and has tables for generating them, and those let me create multiple missions and let players choose between them. But these small stories sometimes needed more work to flesh out and bring to life than bigger stories, not despite but because of their self-contained nature. The prepared elements for a large arc (situations, NPCs, images etc.) can often be used multiple times as that arc returns to those points, while small stories each have their own bespoke set. A small story may only need half the elements of an arc - but if you run 5 of them, that's 2.5 the amount of overall prep needed for the big story! I could have made this easier by not doing things like finding images for all the factions, locations, spaceships I might potentially use, but of course I didn't do that. Maybe in the next game. (But probably not.)

I miss rolling dice. Like Monster of the Week before it, Scum & Villainy is a game where GMs use their own judgement within a structured framework to decide on outcomes and consequences. And that's good! That's fun! But after a couple of years of such play, I miss the unpredictability and mechanical engagement that comes from playing my own half of the game, you know? The messy uncertainty of mechanics can keep GMs invested in play outcomes in a way that clean-but-predictable diceless decision-making doesn't. Well, for me at least anyway. Time to try something different.

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We wrapped up Scum & Villainy with what felt like a satisfying end to a season; we may come back to it later, we may not. Time will tell.

What's on the cards for 2023? Right now I'm trying to assemble a group to play Lancer, which has all the GM-facing-mechanical goodness I've been craving, and I'm also running a (slightly intermittent) game of Heart, which lets me put mechanical weight on GMing decisions even if I'm not the one engaging with them. Plus it's weird and ridiculous and I love it.

I've also been thinking of running some of the many quickstarts and game demos I've collected over the years. They'll certainly help with refocusing onto episodic play and smaller stories, if only due to changing story and game every couple of weeks.

Back in June I said that our Big Dungeon Energy 13th Age campaign was going on a hiatus until life stabilised enough to return to face-to-face gaming.

Well, 2022 is just over a week away, the world is still a fuck, and I don’t hold out much hope of that changing any time soon. So it’s time to call it a day and get on with our lives.

Am I disappointed? Yes, of course! It was a hugely fun game with a great team of players, and I was very much hoping to bring in some new folks and keep the ball rolling into a big hole in the ground. And it’s frustrating to have a fun campaign get cut short not because of me, or the players, but by forces and situations totally outside of our control.

Still, I can draw a GMing lesson from it, and that’s to start as you mean to continue.

I created BDE because I wanted to run the glorious Eyes of the Stone Thief sourcebook, a huge, weird and over-the-top adventure in an ever-changing living mega-dungeon. But I also wanted to do a run-up to that campaign, building up character development and personal stakes before the heroes delved into the evil earth - and the end result of that was a game that ended just before it reached that part of the story. 

Would the campaign have been as engaging if it had started with the dungeon crawl? Maybe not, but at least the dungeon crawl would have happened - and we would have found other ways to develop character and stakes.

I know I have a tendency to over-complicate games, to add clever elements and slowly build things up around a core. For future campaigns I want to pull right back on that, to focus on the core from day one - or to run games where finding an emergent purpose is the point of play.

(That said, I also plan to do less gaming next year. 2022 might be a good time to focus on my writing rather than on 3-4 Zoom games a week.)

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So anyway - that’s the end of Big Dungeon Energy. At least we went out with a big, feelgood pie-and-parkour bang.

Alright, so we’ve talked about how I conceived and prepared for Crowmurder, and how that concept and preparation changed during play.

Did that work? Oh yeah, it was a great campaign, both for me and for the players. But that doesn’t mean everything went perfectly, and there are lessons to be learned from what fizzled or didn’t really click.

So refresh your memory about the game if you need to, and then come back for the last GMing essay in this trilogy of posts.

Failure! It’s how we learn!

When prep goes bad

I do a lot of prep for some games, barely any for others, depending on the system and the group’s style of play. I’ve done more and more for the last few campaigns, and if I’m being honest, much of that is just needing something to do during these interminable lockdown, something that feels creative even if it’s ultimately just brainstorming things that only matter to me, a light to briefly push back the dark emptiness threatening to hollow out everything around me.

...I digress.

I did a lot of prep for Crowmurder, and as mentioned, I ended up changing much of it during play. I’m 100% fine with that; a lot of that prep helped me get a strong enough grip on my ideas to be confident changing them on the fly. There were also sections of prep, such as a few NPCs, that never came into play, but that’s just how GMing works; you draw 10 rooms in your dungeon, even though the PCs will probably only visit five or six. What makes that work worthwhile is knowing that they could engage with that prep and enter those rooms.

What I realised, as the campaign ended, was that some aspects of my prep didn’t serve an actual function because there was no way they could come into play. A timeline of backstory events, the alien mindset of the daeva, a set of images about 19th century Mardi Gras in New Orleans... I pinned these (and more) concepts down before we started, but never came up with a way to work them into play, whether at the start or as we continued. These concepts were ultimately worse than wasted efforts, because I had to do additional mental labour to move beyond them to create content I could actually use at the table.

The lesson here is not to do less prep - do whatever amount works for you and that you find useful. Instead, it’s to make sure that that prep can actually be used in play (probably by also prepping avenues for introducing it) rather than just sitting in your notes folder and getting in your way.

Respecting ransacking your sources

Adapting other material is a time-honoured tradition in gaming; everyone rips off bits of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, after all, and I’m a big believer in reskinning Shakespeare for your own ends. Adapting/reimagining one game’s adventure into a different setting/system isn’t as common, but it’s certainly not unknown. But as with all adaptations, you need to know what to lift and what to leave behind, and I slipped up a couple of times with my Ravenloft homage.

Of all the RL references in the campaign, the weakest was the Tarot reading scene. This was a homage to Madame Eva’s card reading, which is a cornerstone of the original module. Here it didn’t serve anywhere near as strong a purpose, it slowed the session down and made it less interesting, and it felt out of place given that the NPC giving it was the head of a drug cartel rather than an ethnic-stereotype fortune-teller. Another iffy inclusion was the zombie fight at the church. This was a hugely fun scene, don’t get me wrong, but as the game progressed it felt increasingly out of place to me, setting up expectations about the game’s feel and tone that didn’t properly pay off.

On the other hand, I wish I hadn’t just handwaved away all of the dungeon-crawl aspects of Ravenloft. The final sessions in the Plantation House felt a bit underwhelming to me, too prosaic and too easy for the big finish. It might have been more fun if I’d populated the House with a few weird dungeon rooms, maybe with shadowy psychodramas and oddball monsters for the PCs to overcome. After all, the one RL castle monster I did keep - the ‘Meld Monster’, which became the grotesque Rougarou - became a really compelling part of the game. 

The lesson here is kind of like the last one - it’s to think about how concepts, especially those drawn from another source, might work and feel in play rather than in a vacuum. Will the tone of this idea match that of other game elements? Will it be cumbersome to unpack for the players? Will its effect be the same as it was in the source material, or pull the game in a different direction? The question of how will this work is at least as important as is this cool.

Too many moving parts 

From conceptual issues, let’s move onto mechanical ones, such as the level of cognitive load I felt in busy scenes, specifically fight scenes with multiple opponents.

MoTW doesn’t require much detail for NPCs - harm taken/given for minor enemies, a couple of moves for major ones - but it’s tracked separately for each one, and the numbers are granular enough that handwaving them felt unsatisfying. Add to that the various abilities that players/PCs can bring to bear, and the amount of mental effort I had to apply to fight scenes became problematic - especially in an online environment.

The first group fight scene, with zombies and gators and snakes, wasn’t so bad, although I was losing energy by the end of it. The second involved four bikers, four cultists, an undead wizard and a shadow monster, spread across multiple locations, and by the 2/3 mark of the session I was exhausted and couldn’t keep proper track of what was happening. From that point I only ran combats with 1-2 opponents, which made them more manageable but also less interesting.

There were other issues with cognitive load, mostly due to the complexities of managing four players, with four sets of mechanical/narrative abilities and agendas, in sessions run over Zoom where I couldn’t use most of my in-person social and management skills. 

The lesson here is that running a game is... not hard or special, sure, but it’s demanding in ways that aren’t always obvious. You need to be aware of the mental overheads of both your game system and your play platform, and not develop session plans that push too hard against those parameters.

Adapting for short sessions

Speaking of which, I think we’ve all learned by now that online play demands more energy and focus than face-to-face play, although I still struggle to explain why that’s the case. A two-hour Zoom session on a school night can be more challenging than playing for 4-5-6 hours in person - and part of that is working out how to adjust pace, and GMing, and mechanics, and so on. You have to deliver more story beats in a shorter period of time, make sure fights are fast and don’t flow into another session, compress and/or extend scenes to make sure they fill up the right volume... stuff like that.

And in some cases, you need to check mechanics, which I didn’t do. Like most PtBA games, Monster of the Week has start-of-session/end-of-session moves and rules, and I didn’t examine these enough when we started play. Specifically, I didn’t consider that the end-of-session hand-out-experience rules would trigger about twice as often as expected, meaning that the characters quickly became more effective and powerful than I had planned. The final sessions thus lacked tension because the players knew they had enough safety nets and Luck points to be challenged by what I brought to bear. (I compensated by drilling down on emotional beats for the ending, but it was still a little weak.)

The lesson? Session length can have both narrative and mechanical impact on your game, in ways that aren’t obvious, so think about that before you start play and adjust accordingly. That’s a basic tip, but one that affects pretty much all of us while we’re stuck with shorter, online, socially distanced play.

I did this to myself

There are fewer pop songs with ‘Boys’ in the title than you might think, and finding an appropriate one for each session’s writeup was a pain in the hole.

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Okay, I think that’s everything.

I hope folks found this series interesting and/or useful! I don’t think I’m going to do anything this in-depth in the future, or any session-by-session writeups. The era of long-form RPG writing is coming to a close, and shorter, simpler summaries and articles at the end of a campaign seems like the way to go from here.

Well, like they say - if you gotta go, go with a smile.

Welcome back to our Crowmurder series, gang, using this Ravenloft-inspired Monster of the Week campaign as a case study in my GMing process and practice.

Does that sound dull? There are times I certainly think so.

Does that sound interesting and useful? Awesome! Leave a comment to say so; it’s good for my self esteem.

In the last essay, I unpacked the way I came up with ideas for the game and developed those ideas through research.

Today, let’s talk about how my players led me to throw out half my work.

A family affair

I had a backstory all sorted out, with a timeline and everything, and then my players ruined it by having their own ideas. Because the point of GMing is ultimately to give your players a good time - so when they show you their ideas, ideas that you know they will enjoy, those have to take precedence over your own as-yet-untested ideas.

My group responded to my vague premise - ‘it’s the 1970s, you’re monster hunters coming to a small swamp town’ - by deciding that their group would be a family, weird around the edges but not actively hunting greeblies. That was a big flag that there had to be a compelling, personal reason to draw them into the plot - which, in turn, meant the plot had to revolve around the family’s and character’s history.

I revised the Civil War part of the backstory to incorporate their ancestors, and added some NPCs - a maimed teen, a creepy killer, warring drug rings - into the mix to anchor the PCs in the here and now. This was really easy, because the players had created NPCs, plot events and motivators as part of character generation; all I had to do was a little rearranging in order to plug them in, and throw in an inciting event (a letter telling them to come to the town, and implying that they were responsible for its problems in some way) to get the ball rolling.

The ball went off its rails immediately. Which, let’s be clear, was great.

No plan survives contact with the players

MotW is an investigative game, and I developed the core game situation as an investigative one, with lots of areas to look for clues and pieces of story. The players, however, passed up nearly every opportunity to find clues in favour of exploring inter-personal conflict and DRAMA(!) within the party. Sure, there are zombies and tweakers and past lives and crow spirits, but what really mattered was Duke’s bruised ego and Spencer’s unexpressed anger towards his parents. 

I loved it.

But it did mean my prep just sorta sat there, ignored during all the yelling and feelings. MotW eschews plot in favour of a simple checklist of worse-and-worse things that will occur if the PCs don’t do something about it. Well, I had three such lists, one for each major set of story elements, and if we played the game as written the whole town would have been a smoking, ghost-filled crater by about session six because the PCs were too busy with emotions.

So the story - a somewhat different story - had to come to them.

Alligators and past lives and flamethrowers, oh my

With a set of rough story beats still in mind, I leaned hard into one of the big strengths of MotW - support for improvising plot in the moment, underpinned by player choices both before and during play. Spencer does a flashback to his childhood to help fight an alligator? Okay, his parents knew this was going to happen, make that part of the story. Tony lets his past life take the reins several times? Okay, his past life is the important one in the villain’s plot, not the female NPC’s. Alex’s soul was claimed beforehand? Okay, the big bad is actually that being, not our undead necromancer. Tweaking the premise after each session made the overall story more coherent and more focused on the characters’ decisions and interactions.

Now, that’s not really how the game is meant to be played. Like pretty much all PtBA games, MotW (love these wonky acronyms) has ‘play to find out what happens’ as part of its creative agenda, and tells GMs to ‘always say what your preparation demand’. This kind of approach lends itself very well to, um, a ‘monster of the week’ campaign that focuses on short, fairly self-contained mysteries or situations that may contribute incrementally to a bigger picture. But for a bigger, more complex scenario that had to make sense for months upon end, I think my approach was more effective - and hey, I still didn’t know how the game would end right up to the final scenes. I was really hoping to kill one of the PCs off, but the dice just wouldn’t let me.

(stupid Luck points)

So yeah - it was a story that was written in hindsight, always shifting the goalposts just enough so that the balls the players kicked made it through.

Terrible analogy, I know, but deal with it.

What’s a Crowmurder, you ask? It’s a Monster of the Week campaign I ran online for most of the last year. I blog my notes after each session of some games I run, but not all of them; with this one, I decided to write about it once it was over, because it’s a good case study of the way I develop and run campaigns/stories.

I also thought it would run 6 sessions, not 15. My bad.

Anyway, this is the first of three essays about the game, looking at my planning and brainstorming before play started. To make sense of it, you might want to first read the adventure logs on the campaign’s OP page.

Ready? Let’s begin.

The core idea

It may not seem obvious - none of my players realised it - but Crowmurder was conceived as a homage to/recontextualisation of the classic D&D adventure Ravenloft, transplanted into a modern-day milieu.

...okay, that begs the question of why I wanted to run such a game, but I don’t have an answer for that; I got the idea one day and it stuck while many others didn’t. It stayed in the back of my mind for several years, until the interminable lockdowns of 2020 prompted me to run more games to keep myself busy and my friends entertained.

Pinning down the basics

It would have been pretty easy to run Ravenloft as-is, just transplanted to modern-day Romania or something, but that was too obvious and dull to consider. Instead I wanted to completely change its context, while retaining an action/horror feel - which meant I needed a setting and a system that would retain and support that genre of game.

Picking Monster of the Week as the system was the easy part. I’ve run it before, it has lots of fun character abilities, I’m very comfortable with the Apocalypse World system - or so I thought. (We’ll talk about that in the last essay.) A recent supplement included some more character playbooks and solid GMing advice/options, so this was the perfect chance to give them a try.

Picking a time/place was harder. My immediate impulse for modern-day games is to set them in Melbourne - I did that the previous time I ran MotW - but that wasn’t a good fit for Ravenloft, which is set in an isolated wilderness. I needed a rural setting, one that could hold natural and unnatural dangers; that tone of isolation also suggested a pre-internet/smartphone time period. Eventually I decided the mid-1970s would be an interesting time, and that an American swamp would be a good replacement for the forests of Barovia.

Now I had to work out what to do with them.

The main elements

I read the original Ravenloft module several times, working out which elements to keep and which to lose. The main thing I wanted to excise was the dungeon-crawling element - which is pretty much 80% of the adventure! But that still left a number of key points:

a wilderness with dangerous wildlife

an isolated town cut off by mists

an vampire noble in a castle

a young woman who was the reincarnation of a lost love

monsters and mortals in service to the undead lord

a group of wanderers who played both sides

Lots of stuff there to base a game on! I sketched out some simple recontextualizations of those points:

a swamp full of snakes and gators

a town cut off by storms and rain

an undead businessman in a decaying mansion

the wanderers could be Cajun ‘swamp folk’

The reincarnation angle, and the monsters/servants, could stay roughly as-is.

With those fundamentals down, the next step was (ugh) research.

Research and rethinking

I don’t love doing research; it’s the primary reason I write stories/run games in fantasy/SF settings, so that I can just make shit up. But modern-day games gain verisimilitude and flavour from being anchored in real details, so it was time to break out the books. Or at least Wikipedia.

I had two main angles of research: interesting supernatural stuff to populate the game, and details of ‘70s swamp life. I started with the mundane details, because anything I found might help inform the supernatural details.

What I found was that many pop-culture depictions of life within American swamp regions are shallow and racist. Most of these regions are in the South, and those communities were disproportionately poor, black, and still shaped by the racist legacy of the Civil War. Stories set in those regions tend to ignore the real issues of race and power in favour of cheap, hurtful tropes like ‘Cajun thieves’ and ‘voodoo witches’. I quickly dumped all the rough ideas I had along those lines, and decided to develop a setting/story anchored in the history and social impact of the Civil War. Picking Louisiana as the state, and reading up on its history, I revised my ‘undead businessman’ into an undead Antebellum aristocrat, his mansion an old plantation house, and the reincarnation plot thread would tie back to the crimes he committed during the Civil War.

Switching over to the supernatural angle, I wanted to emphasise motifs of crows and darkness. Online searches of regional myth didn’t offer much, and I wanted to avoid overused or problematic tropes so I hit up one of my favourite reference books - Theresa Bane’s Encyclopaedia of Demons in World Religions and Cultures - for ideas. My search terms (crow, raven, darkness, shadow etc.) threw up a few demons from goetia and medieval writings, which had possibilities but didn’t thrill me... and then I discovered Nai-Batar, a daeva from Zoroastrian mythology. That diverged hard from expectations, so hard that I dismissed it at first, but the idea got its hooks into me - the daeva had great story potential as out-of-context monsters that could make the story weird and fascinating.

The plan comes together

After some more research (and a bunch of image searches), I had the core of my story plan. An aristocrat occultist (named Corbeau, which is French for ‘crow’) brings Persian artefacts to his plantation home, unlocking the arcane secrets of the daeva. He uses them to become a lich or revenant, and now he builds up his swamp fiefdom while lusting after a local woman who’s the reincarnation of a slave. His efforts to control her would be the major plot driver, and prompt some questions about slavery and power.

It was a rough core, but I fleshed it out with enough colour and detail to work as the underpinnings of a short game.

Then my players created characters and changed everything.

Hi friends (assuming anyone reads this, which is unlikely),

It's been a while since the last update, and a few things have happened, so it's time to get you up to speed.

TL;DR - the campaign is still going, but I'm putting it on hiatus for at least a few more months and possibly until next year.

Now for the long version.

After wrapping up the Pubquest arc - something I had originally intended to only last a session or two - I needed a few weeks of downtime to get my ideas in order, organise a return to face-to-face play and go spend a weekend drunk in the bush for my birthday.

Towards the end of that downtime, two players dropped out of the campaign - which is a shame, but of course I understand and appreciate their reasons. Still, three players is not the best party size for an action-heavy campaign, so I decided to recruit 1-2 more - a process that took longer than I expected, but I pinned a new player down in May. I also used the time to think about where I want the campaign to go next, taking in some feedback from the players and opting to frame the return as a new 'season' that would give the players/characters more control over the direction of play.

Everything was ready to go in early June... and then we got hit with a snap COVID lockdown.

Suddenly we were stuck at home again, with a campaign that I didn't want to run over Discord, a player group that hadn't met in person yet and a lack of certainty over when we could get together again.

And it's that lack of certainty that's led to my decision to leave the campaign on hiatus a while longer, because we now live in a world where planning is unreliable and long campaigns just present more opportunities for last-minute disruption. Better to wait until everyone's vaccinated (at least in the player group) and there's some stability in society before trying to gather up momentum again.

Is this the end of Big Dungeon Energy? I really hope not! I'm still invested, as are the players, and we want to keep exploring this OTT adventure. But we'll have to review engagement and energy levels again once we get to a stable spot, and if things change then I'll accept it and move on.

(I hope they don't though)

In the short term... BDE is meant to be a long-running epic campaign, and that's not what anyone has the time/attention/venue capacity for right now. So I'm going to narrow my sights for the rest of the year and run some shorter (3-10 session) games that can maintain energy and work equally well on (sigh) Discord as they do face to face.

(I've already been doing this, in fact, with a short-ish Monster of the Week game I started running late last year. I haven't mentioned it here, but I'll have a lot to say about it when it finishes soon.)

It’s the pulse-pounding, pilsner-pouring, pie-pursuing finale of the Prince’s Pubquest storyline! Come for the degustation platter! Stay for the fast & furious foot race!

Yes, this arc has come to an end, and a bloody good one at that. I’m feeling really good about the way this one landed, and GOD I hope my players do too.

Session writeup is over on Obsidian Portal; GM’s note are beneath this picture of a pie and a beer, served in a pub, back in The Before Times. And I just want to make it clear that I would kill each and every person reading this for the chance to have a proper pub lunch again, in a bar, with friends.

Maybe with some chips as well.

--

This session was partially inspired by some episodes of Campaign Skyjacks, one of my favourite actual-play podcasts. GM James D’Amato has run a number of sessions involving big, messy events with lots of PC/NPC participants (e.g. a jousting contest), but that also had a solid structure, multiple avenues for player input and fair game systems backing up the narrative. I really enjoyed those events and wanted to try my hand at something similar, and I thought this low-stakes event would be a good platform for doing so. Of course, D’Amato ran those events over multiple sessions, with the benefit of an editor and sound designer to make them pop; I did this in one session over a Discord link too shaky to support video. As always, I have to do things the hard way.

Most of this arc’s elements were created by players, such as the rival pubs, and this session was really the capstone of that process. For the main part of the contest, not only did they decide on the pies, performances etc. from the pubs they created, they also created and roleplayed the judges assessing those creations! They sketched out who those judges were and what they liked, rolled randomly to assess each entry, then adjusted those marks up or down to reflect each judge’s overall preferences. Oh, and they also rolled for the efforts of their own regular characters, then switched over to judge those efforts. This could easily have gone wrong if the players had wanted to break the system - they could have punched up their own results, slammed the rivals’ results and won in a walk. But they didn’t do that; instead, they had fun being in the moment and reacting in ways that made sense for this (very silly) event. It’s all down to my players, who are just the absolute best.

As for the race, that had its own special setup - because again, why would I make things easy for myself? I designed five possible race routes, each with a unique set of obstacles that were assigned keywords. Max’s player rolled appropriate background checks for each obstacle he faced, while I rolled for every other (yes, player-created) rival in the race, modifying results up/down depending on keyword matches. The running total of results determined who reached the clocktower first, and then there were more rolls to see who got to the top first.

Why go through all of this? Because it fostered real engagement from the players and real tension in finding out who won. I could have easily said ‘you win!’ 10 minutes into the game, but that would have felt like nothing at all, a damp squib of an ending. I could have also played out individual scenes and said ‘you win/lose’ at the end of each; that would have made it more granular but no more interesting. Instead, the unpredictable game elements added tension and drama, and put the focus on the players to play to their strengths, explain their losses and really strive for victory. It made winning so much more fun - and, if they had fallen short, would have made that failure feel earned in a way that would have supported the drama and story to follow. It’s pretty much the same reason we use structured mechanics to resolve fight scenes, but without the hassle of working out maps and positioning in online play.

On that note... this feels like the right time to stop using Discord and go back to face-to-face play. A move back to meatspace (ew) is exactly what we need socially, but it’ll also support more plot-focused, get-shit-done sessions and a return to big, tactical action scenes. Can we go back to the pub? I’m still trying to find out, given the current COVID restrictions, but at the very least we can gather in someone’s home and pull out a map, just like in the old days. It’s just what we need to punch up the drama and action again.

BACK LIKE ERIN BROCKOVICH YOU KNOW THAT MEANS APOCALYPSE WAIT I THINK I USED THIS LYRIC ALREADY AH WELL IT WAS YEARS AGO WHO CARES

It’s finally 2021, friends, and your Big Dungeon Energy family is back in the house and ready for adventure!

This session, the Prince’s Pubquest storyline continues to run much longer than I had originally planned, but we are almost at the dramatic(?) climax. Let’s find out what happens just before the big rock finish!

Session writeup in the usual place; GM notes underneath this picture of Babe, the Beggar King’s pet giant mutant dire boar.

He doesn’t like to cuddle.

--

Almost all of the details from the first half of this session came from the players - the smuggler, the parrot, the beggars, the corpse-fruit etc. This arc has had a lot of emphasis on player-created detail, which is particularly easy to encourage in a low-stakes arc when we’re all just having fun goofing around. What I’m hoping is that that encouragement, and that willingness, sticks around in the next arc, and the one after that, because nothing increases player engagement like playing with their ideas as well as mine.

I tinkered with a couple of scene-management systems this time out, with moderate success. The fungaloid scene used the ‘hazard montage’ framework I first tried in Session 15′s big skeleton battle; it flowed well, but didn’t feel especially serious or important (which, fair enough, it wasn’t). The wagon chase used the old 4E D&D ‘skill challenge’ system, with Tibie’s player rolling to collect 4 successes before hitting 3 failures. That worked better than I expected (I think it’s a bit too formal for 13th Age’s freewheeling skill system), but suffered a bit (as skill challenges generally do) from feeling artificial at times. I still want to find a middle ground between ‘roll a single d20′ and ‘break out the combat system’, especially once the game gets fighty again; this arc has been a good opportunity to experiment with systems and see what lands.

Also, while the skill challenge wasn’t quite perfect, it gave us perhaps the most dramatic scene of the session, when Tibie busted out her new fate manipulation ability to rewrite time. It was the perfect moment - the player rerolled the third failed check and turned it into the fourth successful check, saving the day - and I’m really glad to say that it was completely unplanned and had nothing to do with me at all! It was all the player’s work, responding to the natural fallout of the system and her own dice rolls. I feel like the impact of that moment, and the tension in the follow-up rolls, can only happen when players decide to engage with mechanical systems and hope things go their way; it’s why I keep going to rules-medium systems like this, or the various PbtA games, rather than lighter systems that flow easily but can feel a little shallow. Hopefully my players agree.

I’ve made so many characters, setting elements, story hooks and other content for this campaign - but nothing pops with the group like the Eurotrash dark elves. I don’t know if I’m proud or ashamed.

I don’t have a lot of energy in the tank today, fam, so let’s cut straight to the action without the traditional posturing.

Session writeup is on OP as usual; GM’s notes behind this charming selection of piratical false beards, just right for your fantasy brigand cosplay adventures.

--

Okay, GMing notes.

I got nothin’ today.

Not every session is a teachable moment, you know? Sometimes it’s just low-stakes messing about, some in-character chat, a few dice tossed for cosmetic effect and handing around with your friends on a Sunday afternoon.

The next couple of sessions are likely to be a lot more complex, though. So save your questions until then.

Friends, it has not been a great week for focus and concentration, given all that’s going on in the US, but I’ve finally reached the level of almost-positivity I need in order to function.

So of course, I’m writing up crazy fantasy adventures rather than working on a book. Come on, it’s 2020; small victories are all we get.

If you want to experience some small victories - or at least an increasing mass of foreshadowing and half-formed clues - go read the session writeup, then report back for the GMing discussion.

A short session, this one - we were all a bit scattered, distracted and low energy. Real talk: getting through the last 7-8 months of isolation and lockdown has been tough, and many of us are running on empty. Gaming has been something of a lifeline through it all, but it’s also something that requires effort and attention, and there are sessions when that’s a big ask. If you’re running games online right now, cut yourself and/or your players slack some days; just keep it light, end when folks are done and remember that the people around the virtual table are always more important than what’s going on in your pretend elfgame.

This was another session of Icon cameos and plot foreshadowing, and I think it worked a bit better than the last one. The interactions were less tense and confrontational, and the players were more relaxed with what felt like lower stakes and fewer demands. That also made the scenes less dramatic, but that fit the mood at the table. I’m less worried about drama than information - this is an arc full of hints and clues about the future, but I struggle with being blunt and open with plot info, preferring to be a bit oblique even when it’s not helpful. That’s something I need to overcome, especially now that the players are trying to get their heads around the next act of the campaign.

The last two sessions were heavy on the comedy, but not so much this one, as I wanted to have some tonal ebb and flow. The procedural investigation scene was easy enough - that’s standard gaming fodder - but the scene with Lady Swanblood was tougher. I know that I shy away from emotional depth/realism in games, so I wanted to push back on that and present some honest sadness and pain. I hope it worked; it felt pretty good(?) to me, but I don’t know how the players took it. There’ll be more emotional honesty in future, although it’ll never overwhelm the over-the-top nonsense; I just want the balance to be closer to that of a typical superhero movie. Or maybe a supers cartoon. I like them more.

Speaking of Lady Swanblood, she’s an elderly, disabled (getting around in a bath chair), pansexual woman, and I know that sounds kinda like a punchline. Representation within games is important to me, but there haven’t been that many opportunities for engaging deeply with NPCs so far, and I maybe dumped too much onto one character. That said, she feels right to me in a way that some other NPCs haven’t; I hope there’ll be chances to spend more time with her in future, and to show that there’s actual depth there rather than just me ticking diversity boxes. (Also, we need to find out just how well she knew Max’s mum.)

As for the mystery of the missing bard - well, it’s not a difficult one. I’m okay with that. As the Tick said to Paul the Samurai: ‘Mysteries are boring, Paul. Just beat up all suspicious-looking people.’

The Prince’s Pubquest saga continues!

Forget your Thrones, your Witchers, your transphobic boy wizards or I-can’t-believe-they-did-this-to-Terry-Pratchett Watches, this is the hottest storyline in fantasy fiction right now and you are lucky enough to be the audience for this latest episode, in which *checks notes* ...there’s some talking, and some more talking, and then a giant eyeball monster gets drunk on a nightclub dancefloor.

WHERE’S MY OSCAR PETER JACKSON YA BEARDY GIT

Discover all the provocative and edgy details in the usual place, then check check below for the provocative (and edgy!) GM notes!

..let’s put aside the obvious silly bit for the moment.

One of my general principles for longer campaigns is ‘the setting responds to the characters’. In a fantasy game that means that the adventure landscape escalates, the public talks about the PCs’ adventures, the villains acknowledge their prowess in their monologues - and in 13th Age, it also means the Icons show up in person. Sadly, I’m not sure if the Lich King and Archmage scenes entirely landed; they maybe came across as just arrogant dudes making demands - which, okay, they are - rather than signals of recognition and escalation. That’s probably okay for those two, but if more Icons show up AND SPOILERS THEY WILL then I need to do more work on making those scenes feel both important and satisfying.

Another goal for those scenes - and for the Black Meridian goodbye scene last session - was to give the characters communication tools. Fatestones, crystal balls, bone orbs - all of these exist as a way for the PCs to communicate with NPCs across the Empire, thanks to a few narrative handwaves. I threw them in because I suspected long distances and travel delays might frustrate the players - and I knew they would frustrate me as the story stakes increased and travel became more important. However, I’ve again been too clever - the players were suspicious of these gifts and wary of engaging with them. I had to tell them out of character ‘these are for you to use, they’re not ways for NPCs to fuck with you’. Now I just have to live up to that promise.

My dark elves are not dark-skinned - or rather, not specifically dark-skinned, just as other elves are not specifically light-skinned - because that’s kinda fucked up. Instead, my dark elves are distinguished by living underground, having cool tattoos and piercings, and - as established in this episode - talking like the nihilists in The Big Lebowski if they were pitching their own Tiger King-style reality show. I have dug my own provocative & edgy grave, I know.

...alright, fine, let’s address the elephant eyeball monster in the room.

Here’s how other GMs might have approached this:

I should have a scene where the Archmage questions Tibié

it would make sense to include anti-magic precautions

hmm... beholders can do that, but they’re not part of 13th Age

maybe introduce one as an outsider agent of the Empire?

I could call it the Postmaster Specific as a silly pun, because it’s specifically deployed against evil wizards

okay, let’s use this thing to develop tone and setting.

Here’s how I approached it:

I should have a scene where the Archmage questions Tibié

OH SHIT I just randomly thought of the phrase ‘Postmaster Specific’, I’m so freakin’ hilarious, let’s find a way to add that to the scene

what’s a memorable IPS... a robot, a dragon... no, a beholder!

I can make jokes about how it was banished by a horny wizard from a realm that it has forgotten, yes I’m a genius

where’s a good image OH GOD LOOK AT ITS GOOFY FACE

with that expression, the most appropriate voice for this thing is ‘Bobcat Goldthwait swallowed a handful of edibles’

that’s also the best way to play it

huh, beholders have an anti-magic eye, I can probably make that relevant in the scene as a secondary concern, then use that to justify the inclusion of a comic relief murder eyeball

I’m gonna drink three beers before the game starts

okay fine, four beers.

And we’re back!

We had an out-of-character session for levelling up and talking about what people enjoyed and wanted to see more of in the campaign, which was (very broadly speaking) exploring the world, solving weird problems and getting into big crazy fights that don’t eat up quite so much time via Discord.

Weird problems, huh? Okay, I can do that - and I can lighten the mood with a fun palate cleanser adventure before we get back to this whole roaming predatory dungeon issue. (Which is not exactly what anyone requested, but I feel confident that it was subtext.)

With that in mind, head over to the session writeup to find an exciting new plotline set during Shadow Port’s Sea Foam Festival - except that, due to a printing error, all of the posters came out like this:

This is the level of humour I’m pitching; you have been warned.

--

I struggle with comedy, whether as writer or audience. I like funny stuff just fine - people say I ‘hate joy’, but that’s only because, um, because I say that about myself all the time - but comedy often leaves me feeling like ‘you just said that to get a laugh, not because it makes sense’. Which is ridiculous, I know, but this is what I’m like. Anyway, that means that while my games are often fun/funny, because that’s what gaming is like, I rarely set out to make them funny. This session was an exception, with more puns and gags than I would usually countenance, so I was on edge throughout in fears that the comedy wouldn’t work. Ultimately it did (I think), but the core of the session was still exploring character and plot, with jokes scattered around the edges. That’s about as far as I can go into comedy territory; I’m glad the players came with me.

The players also did some heavy lifting on this expedition. I peppered them with ‘what do you encounter?’ prompts while they were travelling across the country and through the festival, to warm up their collaboration engines. (I know these metaphors make no sense, I’m sorry.) Then I hit them with the big stuff - each of them had to design one of the four rival taverns competing in the Prince’s Pubquest! As well as names and affiliations, I also had them choose each pub’s signature elements for the competition, so now we have a pub run by the Beggar’s Guild that serves tripe-and-mushy-peas pie, and a piratical pub featuring tattooing exhibitions and gelatinous cube wrestling. I love this. As well as getting player buy-in to the story and contest - it becomes personal once you name the rivals - I now have all these ideas that I would never have thought of myself! Now I just need to work out how to integrate them into the story, and it’s at this point that I realise I’ve made a huge mistake.

My last big priority for this session was returning to where we started the campaign. It’s been a dozen sessions since we were back in Shadow Port, so I wanted to make the return memorable and to bring some of the huge cast of NPCs we built up early on. This campaign is going to roam around the Empire more in future - especially as players said they enjoyed going to new places - so I want to make sure the characters have a home base that’s interesting, and a core supporting cast that matters to them. That would probably be easier if I didn’t keep adding new NPCs - which, of course, I’ll be doing over the coming sessions of this storyline. Man, I need to get better at character voices...

Originally this plot was just going to be about a flower growing/arranging contest, but then I said something about ‘three orcs guarding a pie’ during our campaign-discussion session and everyone’s ears perked up, so I had to put that into the mix, and then everything just snowballed. I spent like a whole day researching different pies - and brother, I saw some shit that haunts me.