Were-Ostrich and Iguana Boy

I played in a hilarious and completely awesome game of InSpectres last night.

InSpectres is a very light RPG where the PCs lie somewhere in the spectrum between Ghostbusters and Ghost Hunters. It's a very simple system, and allows for a lot of narrative power in the players hands, so I really like it.

An aside about silliness:
I've played InSpectres half a dozen times over the past year, and have come to the conclusion that it handles goofy, almost slapstick, adventures better than more serious ones.

Everyone gets very different ideas in their head about what's going on, and given each players narrative power, it's easy to end up with a disjointed and somewhat contradictory story. If you go in with the intention of being goofy, you're not alarmed when someone pulls a completely random bit of nonsense out and makes the plot take a sharp turn. Scooby Doo endings, Big Bads behind seemingly disparate events, Werewolves in Spaceships, by embracing wackiness you're freeing up the plot (and players) to surprise you. You never know when someone's going to say, "Your stake breaks against his chest, but it does tear open his artificial flesh - it turns out the vampire is actually a robot!"

A more serious game of InSpectres is harder to pull off, because it only takes one moment of wild improvisation for another player to completely destroy your suspension of disbelief, and thus "ruin" the session without doing anything "wrong". Better to go in with your eyes wide open to the truly bizarre nature of the game.

Goofiness all around last night. We were playing the creators and staff of a little monster-hunting show on the internet. I was constantly adding in-character statements like "I know were-ostriches sounds pretty strange, but this is from a reliable source. The same source that gave us our lead on that episode in season 1, remember the vampire armadillos? The same guy. That sounded unbelievably bizarre then, but John's still got the scars to prove it was true. Were-ostriches will play out the same." Other folks started getting in on the joke, though I'd been it's main instigator for the first half of the session. By the end of the night, it was established that our show was in it's 4th season of investigating mostly supernatural versions of otherwise mundane animals.

We ran two mini-scenarios during the course of the evening.

• The first had to do with a possible were-ostrich killing the workers at an ostrich farm. Investigation later revealed it was actually ostrich warriors of some rare African mystical tradition.
• The second scenario began with a Fortean rain of cursed coins from 1923, and ended with Iguana-Human hybrids who were being held captive by a witch. I can't really summarize the plot of the second scenario. You had to be there.

I really liked that the game's extremely light rules and quickly-resolving narrative structure allowed us to pack two self-contained scenarios into a four-hour block. If most RPGs sessions are Novella, and long campaigns like a multi-book Novel series, then last night was a short-story anthology. It's was a nice change of pace, very unlike most other gaming experiences.

Another aside, this time about the sudden resolution of plot arcs:
The hardest part of InSpectres is pacing. There's a mechanism that determines how far you are from completing the scenario, and it's really easy to accidentally blunder into what should be whole-hog resolution while you're just trying to narrate your way past what you thought was just a minor hurdle and unrelated to the main plot.

After half a dozen sessions of the game, I don't feel our group has gotten any better at keeping our eye on that and adapting our narration to match. One of these days I should really sit down and do an exhaustive mathematical analysis of the core mechanics, and different scenario length possibilities.

Paaaaaaaaaan

Last night, Malachi ran a game he called Deospora. It was technically a InSpectres derivative, but didn't feel a bit like the game whose system it used. We were all Gods - and we could choose to be traditional Mythological figures, or make up our own Divine personages. A comet passed near the earth, and we hitched a ride. It took us two a primitive little planet where primitive little people worshiped what seemed like a primitive little deity to us. Turns out it was basically Cthulhu. We whupped his but, anyway.

I played Pan, or rather Paaaaaaan, since I gave him a proper Goatboy voice. I ran around lusting after things - mostly womenfolk, but ya never know with Pan. You know all those Greek myths where Pan chases after various Nymphs until they turn themselves into a tree to escape him? We discovered it's not actually an ability inherent to Nymphs and Dryads. Instead, it's a universal property. Anything, and I mean anything, being lusted after by Pan has the potential to turn itself into a tree in an attempt to dissuade his passions.

The game had a lot of fun moments, many of which had nothing to do with me - while I was the most depraved member of our group, we were pretty much all raucus party gods. The group included Pan and Raven and two made-up Gods (one was God of Beer, the other God of Drunk Driving) and the fifth player started off intending to be God of Sex, Drugs, and Rock'n'Roll, and instead landed on being Arlo Guthrie. All those radio stations that still play "Alice's Restaurant" once every Thanksgiving is close enough to worship for him to get invited to the Divine parties.

The plot:

• We decide to party on a passing comet, which eventually collides on a crappy little planet somewhere, stranding us. The natives worship some nasty dark cthonian Titan, and so we decide to subvert that. With booze, drugs, music, and orgiastic reverie, we convert the local tribes.
• 100 years pass, and I father all sorts of Satyrs and Paniskoi. The formerly barren world now has all sorts of trees - prior to my lusty arrival it was just mushrooms and lichen.
• Tribes of seafaring raiders attack us, bearing marks that they are the favored ones of the Cthulhoid monstrosity. A great Panic descends upon thier beached fleet, and they are stranded on our shores. (I take a bow). With the attack fleet in shambles, the rest of the group sets about converting the stranded raiders.
• Another 100 years pass, and Raven, Arlo and Pan got the urge to take a road trip. Little did we realize, the enemy was still out there and prepping to invade again. While we're off probing the enemy territory, our continent was attacked by a mutant critter very reminiscent of Cloverfield. The Gods who stayed behind managed to handle it, luckily. On the road trip, we bumbled into the dark dank cave that was the center of Cthulhu worship. Arlo and Raven were captured by demi-titans and hauled down to the cavernous orifice of the great evil.
• Now, since this is a mostly family-friendly blog, I won't go into detail on how Pan rescued them. Suffice it to say, it weren't pretty. The entire continent turned into a big ol giant tree, and then got pregnant anyway. There was a quick round of jokes about how I'd just proven true the theory of Panspermia. Somewhere in all the excitement, Cthulhu went missing.
• 9 months later, our child, Shub-Niggurath, was born. This became the creation myth of how this planet got a moon. Pan decided he needed to settle down at that, since he finally had a kid worthy of his being a respectible parent, and the love of a good world tree.
• Another 100 years passed, and by this point we'd set up a ridiculously complex stratified caste system for our chosen people, mostly fueled by the trade of beer, rock-folk music, and pornography. Such were the gleaming pillars of our society. Due to various Godly acts of miscegenation, the population involved little gray people, little tie-dyed people, goat-headed people, tentacled people, tree people, and various cloven-hooved hybrids of the above.
• Then one day, a spaceship landed. It had a US flag with little cthulhoid tentacle clusters instead of stars, to answer Arlo's question of "Hello, America, how are ya?" Apparently, the big bad had decided to do to earth what we'd done to his planet. They came to invade and colonize, but didn't stand a chance. Serotonin, God of Drunk Driving, had a plan to deal with it.
  
• He stole the spaceship (in a hurry, too, like he thought I was going to do something nasty to it if he didn't act quickly) and headed back to earth with all our chief exports. He landed in Japan, where tie-dyed-goat-headed-tentacle-tree porn would be most quickly accepted. Somehow, this resulted in peace between the worlds and the defeat of the big bad. I'm a little unclear on the details, but it mostly made sense at the time.

I'm sure there's plenty I missed there, but you get the idea. All things considered, this summary was quite tastefully inexplicit.

Hobbit Mafia and Blofeld's Cat

We'd all got sick and tired of being cooped-up and snowed-in, so when the weather turned nice for New Years Day, the Emerald City Game Feast group got together for TWO one-shots. Both were really top-notch.

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The first scenario: Goodhobbits
Setting: Freeport (a published Fantasy / Pirate city)
System: Savage Worlds

This was a well-crafted mystery scenario. The PCs were corrupt (is there any alternative?) officers of the City Watch, and the "crime" we were investigating looked to be a death threat on the Sea Lord (Freeport's equivalent of Governor) from a legendary mafia-ring known as The Finger Of Baggins.

As I said, the adventure was well-crafted: there were multiple leads, and even the red herrings revealed information that helped figure out the big picture. There was enough clue/lead redundancy to prevent a couple bad Investigation or Notice rolls from miring us down. Crafting an RPG mystery scenario that plays anything like a Detective novel or film ain't easy, but John did a great job with it.

My Character: Smeagol Fairfoot, more corrupt than his fellow Watch-men, but with an honest face and good family reputation. I managed to ingratiate myself to two different mob bosses in one night, and came *this close* to making away with something like 10,000 illicit gold pieces I would have had to melt down (because they were marked with The Yellow Sign). Despite all my greed and corruption, I managed to come out looking clean (or at least unobtrusive and unthreatening) to my superiors on the City Watch.

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Second Scenario: 007: The Teeth of Fenris
Setting: James Bond films
System: InSpectres (with modifications)

An aside: This is the third time I've played InSpectres, but since every time the games suggested scene structure has been abandoned, so I still don't know how vanilla InSpectres plays. From the reviews I've read, the suggested structure is dynamite. Man, am I ever looking forward to playing it with the default rules sometime.

That said, Peter did an awesome job with the game. He diverted from the suggested format, but did so in a clever and unique way. The players weren't working together, we were at cross-purposes. Two PCs were members of MI-6. Three PCs were villains (and encouraged to backstab each other repeatedly). The last PC was a Mexican Intelligence agent - he was ostensibly allied with MI-6, but had secondary goals that conflicted with them. Bond was a communal NPC - anyone could narrate his actions, as long as they were in-character. The villains would narrate him falling in to our traps, and the heroes would narrate his escapes. Very cool.

The two sides had seperate franchise dice and resource pools. Rather than having a total we were all working towards to resolve the whole story, each scene had a (much smaller) franchise dice goal. Which ever side hit that total first got to narrate the conclusion of the scene as they wished. This worked beautifully - the villains won every scene except the last one of the night. That meant that the plot just continually thickened and got more dire, but Bond triumphed in the end despite phenomenal odds. Beautiful. One of the most genuinely cinematic RPG scenarios I've ever played in.

My Character: Sugar, the cat owned (and pampered) by Ernst Stavro Blofeld. That meant I got to narrate all of arch-villain Blofeld's actions, but had to frame them all as things he did to make his cat happy. Blofeld himself wasn't my character (per se), so I refrained from putting words in his mouth, but I made sure all his computers were touch-screens (so I could brush up against them to initiate or deactivate the automated defenses), and my litterbox was placed in the room Bond was most likely to infiltrate. It was fun.

InSpectres 1889

Each year Emerald City Game Festhas a theme. You get extra raffle tickets for running a game that fitthat theme, and I think there might be other incentives that I'm justnot remembering. This year it was "Steampunk". About a third to a halfof the games in the program were in-theme, as were both of the games I played in.

The first one I played in was Saint George's Arms. It was an InSpectres game, run by Sophie Lagace.I'd played InSpectres recently, with mixed results. That game had fallen flat, but that was largely the players fault, and seemed like the sort of thing we'd not have trouble with on our second outing, so I was tentatively excited to give it another go. We'd gamed with Sophie before, 3 or 4 times before she moved to California. It was pretty cool that she and Edmund drove back up here for the free con they'd helped create, and we were glad to see them.

Standard InSpectres is basically Ghostbusters. This was Ghostbusters in 1889, so we could do some steampunk. We ended up with minimal steampunkishness, but had a blast anyway. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was found dead in his home, with possible occult causes, and so the Queen's own ghostbusters were called in to investigate. Sophie did a good job of creating an opening situation that was easy to grok (some sort of pixies or faeries had killed him) and riff off of. We lampooned the era, the spoiled gentry, the notion that England was the pinnacle of civilization and everyone else "savages". Lots of good tongue-in-cheekiness, and some zulu pixies.

InSpectres GMs get to sit back a lot, providing minimal structure and letting the players chew the scenery. Sophie did a good job of this, nudging us to new scenes when the plot slowed, calling for die rolls when needed, etc. Her administrative skills were showcased well. That sounds like a backhanded compliment, but I mean it sincerely. If the InSpectres GM assumes all the work will be done for them, the game can bog down in a morass of meaningless meandering subscenes or zip to premature conclusion due to a string of good rolls that should never have advanced the plot. For a game that is so player-driven, it actually takes a good GM to keep it rolling, and Sophie was definitely up to the task.

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I played a flamboyant bit of puffery named Reginald Carter Fizzlebottom, Esquire, 58th in line to the throne. He was a talented athlete, a royal scholar, a foppish dandy, and a womanizing rake. Very fun. I'm a little worried that I've given Sophie a poor impression of me, though, as my two most recent characters in games she was present for included this windbag womanizer and a vampire with a host of undead brides. Oh, well...

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As is the case with InSpectres, things can get a bit whacky. Our pixies ended up being zulu-pygmy-pixies. They had glowing teeth that left glowing bite marks. They had tiny blowguns with poison darts, but you had to get hit by several of the tiny darts to get an effective dose. Taking photos of them stole their souls. Killing them by traditional means would actually make them regenerate into bigger, nastier bodies. The sounds that we thought were zulu drums instead turned out to be dozens of pixies beating eachother to death to inspire their own metamorphosis into combat-form-super-pixies.

I'm now sold on InSpectres. I ordered a copy from my friendly local game story (Gary's Games), which should show up in a week or two. I'm even more excited for the third session of the game, since we have yet to really make use of the Reality TV narrative structure the game assumes, or the campaign rules, and I think both will boost the game to a higher level. As with Wushu, InSpectres is a game that needs a good group to make it fly, but if you've got good players it's an awesome little pick-up game. Check it out.

Not as much fun as I thought.

Much to my surprise, I was unimpressed with InSpectres (Sarah, however, enjoyed it, so I will with-hold serious judgment till giving it a second try). The GM also didn't seem pleased with the way it played out. He'd diverted fairly far from the default structure of the game, and I think that hurt it. Since 3 of his 5 players had no experience with the game, it may have been better to try it straight-up and without alteration. There was also an unexpected amount of rules-lawyering going on. It was surprising and weird to see that happen in a game that's so rules-light.

More than anything, I think what doomed it was two early uses of the word "supposedly". Several of us (me included) kept making "supposedly haunted" equate to scooby-doo-ish "turns out it wasn't a ghost afterall". That undermined our fun. Wish I didn't deserve any of the responsibility for that, but I do. I was trying to play sort of a "Doubting Thomas" style of character, who'd be skeptical early on, then eventually become a believer. I gave one thing a mundane "we were wrong"explanation, and everyone else followed suit thereafter. Such a shame.

InSpectres tonight

Tonight at Wayward, I'll be playing in an InSpectres one-shot. A week ago I knew nothing (or next to) about this game. Today, I'm really excited and jazzed to be playing it. It's Ghostbusters meets Ghosthunters. You're a small company of paranormal investigators battling ghosts/vampires/zombies/cthulhu/urbanlegends/etc, and the RPG is structured like a Reality TV show, with side-scenes and non-linear story elements. The rules are uberlight, and a good roll doesn't determine success: it determines narration rights. Lets say you go to the library to research the occult danger you're investigating. Instead of rolling high and getting info from the GM (or rolling low and hitting a dead-end) you're rolling to find out whether you or the GM will decide what info you'll get. Win that roll, and you're free to say the villains are Cthuhlu worshipers with ties to the military - it's retroactively the truth, even if the GM was planning to have the villains be masonic werewolves. To run InSpectres right, a GM needs to be freewheeling and egoless. I think we're in for a treat tonight.