#crowmurder

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.

and I am so fucking excited.