Timeless Undying Love

 As I mentioned the other day, I've now played 4 games of Thousand-Year-Old Vampire, a solitaire journaling RPG, where your character is a Vampire, and game play covers centuries at least. You come up with a brief sketch of a historical figure, and the vampire who converts them into undead, and then the game provides random events that bounce you forward in time. You create a big weirdly-sprawling timeline of experiences and memories, many of which get lost of mutated such that by the end of it your character is grappling with uncertainty or insanity.

Today I'm going to list my full game logs from the 2nd session I ever played of TYOV, which was probably more than a year ago, maybe even from the early parts of the pandemic. I didn't think to put a date on it.

This playthrough was a bit longer than one I posted this weekend, and as I recall it entertained me for several nights of play. As a result of the length, and how that interacts with experiential limits hardwired into the game,  the vampiric main character had a lot more memory issues. They kind of lost all sense of self before the end. Their fragmented timeline runs from pre-Roman Etruria up through an unspecified modern conflict that was probably World War 2. The usual Stoker-and-Hollywood vampire tropes are here, but supplemented by characters inspired by Etruscan Mythology, and some uniquely weird textile-arts and sutured-wings nonsense conjured from my own demented psyche (or, I guess, from the intersection of vampirism with an Etruscan goddess best known for her love of scissors).

Trigger Warning: Again, this is the play log from a horror game about weird vampires. This log will elude to violence, body-horror, sexual predation and literal carnivorous predation. While I don't go into a lot of detail, it does get kind of gory. If you've got a weak stomach, easily-offended sensibilities, or just horror's not your thing, you should turn around now. 

Full game log can be found beneath the fold:

Cyclopean Viking Vampire Horror

 What follows is the play log from an entire solitaire game of Thousand Year Old Vampire. Sort of a weird fragmented non-linear short story of the unlife of a vampire.

I have played three games of TYOV before this one.  This time, I began the game in pagan Scandinavia, with a young man named Torgny Hjalmerson who dreams of being a successful viking raider like his father was before him. He descends quickly into madness and villainy, and makes especially horrible relationship choices.

There's no default setting for TYOV, so I'm blending Norse Myth, a few standard vampiric themes from elsewhere in folklore and mythology, a bit of the trappings of sensationalized hollywood-style satanism, and some weird new stuff unique to this tale. (Not to mention anachronism and historical inaccuracy.) 

This was a ton of fun, and definitely a game I'd be happy to play again. It also works well as character-building exercise for Vampiric NPCs in other RPGs. (That's actually what I did with 2 of my 3 previous plays of the game.)

Trigger Warning: This is a log from a horror game. There's a good deal of violence in what follows, including mutilation, body-horror, blasphemous devilry, and violence against women. While I don't get overly lurid with the details and everything is kept kind of brief, there's some seriously awful stuff in what follows.  If you've got a queasy stomach or are easily offended, you may want to skip this post entirely. 

Full log follows below the fold:

The Great Pumpkins

I played in an 11-hour halloween one-shot last night, run by my friend Jeremy Hill. It was a solid game, lots of fun. Every player had 2 PCs, college students who were going to a Corn Maze and Pumpkin Patch. Each of your two PCs would arrive in two different car pools.

Scenes bounced back and forth between these two groups. One group ran into bloodthirsty ghosts at the pumpkin patch. The other group's car broke down, and they ended up asking for help at a creepy old house a few miles down the road... a house full of cannibal cultists. They seemed to be two entirely separate adventures taking place on the same night but just a few miles apart, but we eventually learned that the cannibal cult were actually the ones responsible for stirring up the ghosts that the other groups was battling.

It was pretty nifty way to tell the story. Jumping back and forth between the two groups allowed some cool "cliffhanger" cuts. Because each player had a two characters (one in each group), every time we hit a dead end in one mystery investigation, we could cut away to the other group for a little while.

When we'd come back to the previous "dead-end" later, in the intervening break one player or another would always have come up with another option that we hadn't tried before. I feel like there were places where we would have otherwise gotten frustrated or locked up, but the scene-hopping just naturally shook us free of that every time. It organically encouraged us to think outside the box. What's more, switching between our two characters worked to give you a break, so the nearly 12-hour session seemed to flash by super fast. Without exception, each player chose radically different personality and character types for their two characters, which probably amplified this rejuvenating effect. It worked really well.

I'm seriously considering stealing this trick for my own games going forward. 

The Last GwenCon

Gwen Con X, the last Gwen Con ever, was this past weekend. After some troubles with a bus Friday night, Sarah and I were able to make it over there for 4 RPG scenarios and a couple short games of "Are You The Werewolf?" Overall, it was a great weekend, and I'd have been happy if any of these games had run twice as long as they did. All the games had some meaty in-character inter-party-conflict, with PCs arguing with one another in a way that echoed the bittersweet dissolution of our favorite Con. Happy to be there, saddened to go, there was a real sense of "let's go out with a bang" which manifested in some delightfully dysfunctional scenarios. Here's some highlights:

• We played in both of Tim Beach's lego games this year. Tim does these bizarre RPG mash-ups, with light rules so you can ham it up in-character. One of the games was a blend of several sci-fi franchises, with bits of Star Trek, BSG, Firefly, Terminator, Dr Who, and Galaxy Quest. The other was a "best of" game featuring characters and lego sets from the past 10 years of Tim's games at Gwen Con. Pretty crazy stuff, revolving around the love affair between Ash (from Evil Dead) and Catwoman (from DC Comics), while Dragons attacked Fort Legoredo and Zorro's horse played charades. In a lot of ways, Tim's games sum up the heart of Gwen Con for me, being scenarios you'll just never find anywhere else.
• For a more conventional RPG experience, I played Vampire: The Requiem for the first time. I've done lots of Masquerade in the past, but this was my first actual test of the "new" system. The rules are really a streamlined improvement over the older system, and it looks to be relatively easy to house-rule back in the setting elements of the previous edition that you might feel are missing. I took to it far better than I thought I would. Session was too short, but with solid character acting all around, and the most "personal horror" I'd seen in 10 years or so. My character nearly shot himself in the head, and three out of the 4 PCs really struggled with the beast within. The fourth quickly embraced that beast and became a real monster, which served as a great roleplaying foil for the other three.
• The academy award in the disfunctional party category was taken in a Cthulhu-meets-Cloverfield game that Michael Lee ran on Saturday night. It certainly wasn't a subtle scenario, and he really could have used a back-up character for the PC that died early, but it was a great game none the less. Two PCs were treasure-hunting archaeologists in it for the fame and glory, two were the Miskatonic University biologists who'd screwed them over, and two were the FBI agents investigating the other four. The scenario itself was short and sweet, and mainly just a pretense for the 6 players to bicker and threaten one another while a monster rampages in the background. You'd hate to have that conflict for a long-term game, but as a one-off it was a pretty clever device.
• The two games of "Are You A Werewolf?" were likewise short and faux-argument-laden, but extremely enjoyable as a result. One of them was the most ridiculous game of Werewolf ever, with literally zero normal townsfolk, and special identities for everyone.

A great send-off to the Con series that first caused my wife and I to move to Seattle. Saying "good bye" to dozens of "once a year friends" was hard, but in several cases it at least motivated us to finally exchange contact info and make some efforts towards seeing certain people more frequently.

We'll miss Gwen Con dearly, but at least it rode off into the sunset gracefully instead of burning out or imploding.

Arkham Horror meets Brotherhood of the Wolf

Arkham Horror meets Brotherhood of the Wolf, only a lot less fiddly and complicated than that implies. That's how to best describe "A Touch Of Evil", a relatively new boardgame from Flying Frog Productions. The plot is very reminiscent of Brother of the Wolf, complete with muskets, tri-corner hats, an evil monster, and conspiratorial noblemen. The main game comes with four big villains - vampire, werewolf, headless horseman, and evil scarecrow - each with it's own minions and events to shape the play experience of that particular session.

It's got all the flavor of a game like Arkham Horror, without the maze of rules to wade through. The turns play out faster, and there are fewer counter-intuitive rules ripples to have to sort out. It's got the same "build up your character so you can defeat the big bad" dynamic of Runebound or Talisman or Arkham, but without the 3+ hour play time that those games demand. It's got scenario variety, unlike Arkham Horror where every big bad uses the same chaotic pool of events. A Touch of Evil doesn't feature as much as scenario variety as Betrayal At House On The Hill, but then it doesn't suffer from Betrayal's completely random balance issues either.

Overall, A Touch Of Evil is a triumph of storytelling in a boardgame. Despite having lighter rules than the aforementioned games, it's got more flavor, and tells a better story. As much as I love Arkham, it's such a chaotic mess of monsters and gates that there's rarely a coherent story out of it, and Allies are mechanically indistinguishable from Guns or Skills. Not so in A Touch of Evil, where the "NPCs" have secrets, different from session to session, which you must ferret out lest they stab you in the back. Will the Reverend be a stalwart ally, a craven coward, a book-burning demagogue, or a traitorous pawn of evil? That varies from game to game, and has a lot more impact than just being "+2 vs Vampires".

The game has Competitive, Cooperative, and Team options, depending on the play style you and your group prefers. Team up to defeat the monster, or seek to impede the others and get all the glory for yourself.

Have I mentioned that I really like the game? 'Cause I do. The gameplay is sweet.

It is not, however, completely without flaws. So far I've found three, none of which is major. Here's the problem areas, and how we dealt with them in the two games we've played so far:

1. Tide of Darkness: This Mystery Card can be interpreted in one of two ways. Either you place one monster in 1 space, and some investigation points in three spaces; or they might mean you place both a monster and investigation points in each of three spaces. We were playing the cooperative game, and wanted the bigger challenge, so we placed three monsters. It worked well, but that interpretation seems like it would be a very swingy card in competitive play, shutting off half the board to the player(s) who were already behind in the arms race.
   
2. Muskets: There's no rule stopping you from using 2 muskets at once. Setting this up is relatively difficult (much easier in cooperative than competitive play), but seems cheesy. It'd be easy to house-rule this for the sake of reality, but the absence of fiddly corner-case rules about item stacking is part of what makes A Touch Of Evil so much more elegant than Arkham and it's ilk. Since the musket bonus isn't huge, we chose to just hand-wave it and assume the die bonus didn't represent actually shooting, so much as the fact that you were equipped and ready to take a second shot if the opportunity presented itself. The first musket's bonus is the potential damage of a gun shot. The second musket's bonus represents the reduced psychological pressure of knowing you aren't screwed if your first shot misses.
3. Lair Cards: You can only have one Lair Card, which makes sense, since it represents tracking the Villain to their den of evil. But there's this unfortunate sentence in the rule book that heavily implies you can buy another lair card and discard whichever is worse. Late in the game, the Lair Cards are cheap. In our second game, Sarah discarded about 6 Lair Cards in one turn. Nothing in the rules stopped it, but it felt lame. If swapping Lairs is that simple, you'd never use the more harrowing lairs, at least not in Cooperative play, because someone will always have the spare Investigation points to keep discarding till you get an easy Lair. So we house-ruled this for all future sessions: you can't buy a second lair card, but can still get a second one via the particular Event that gives you a free Lair, which shouldn't come up too often.

If you like flavorful, story-driven boardgames like Arkham Horror, Runebound, or Betrayal at House on the Hill, you should check out A Touch Of Evil. I don't know just yet if it has as much replayability as those games ('cause I've only played it twice), but it's faster and more approachable, which is a huge plus. It strikes me as being the best of the bunch thus far.

Two comments on Wraith: The Oblivion

Last night, my weekly one-shot group played Wraith the Oblivion. Two observations:

• I really like the concept of you playing two characters: your main character, and the shadow-self (like the devil on the shoulder) of another player. It was really flavorful, and it meant every player always had something to do.
• Both the mechanics and the setting were probably more fiddly than is ideal for a one-shot. (Having now played the old Vampire, Werewolf, Changeling and Wraith, I have to say that Vampire is the most accessible and newbie-friendly of the batch.)

Bride of Stankenfreen

On vacation a few days ago, I found myself GMing some improv roleplaying. Since I'd had some fun with my recent Stankenfreen's Monsters one-shot, I reprised it for a different group. Much as with the first play-through, it proved to be great fun, but somewhat hobbled by utterly flawed mechanics.

Before reading further, you might want to view my post from the first game of Stankenfreen's Monsters.

---

Bad Mechanics:

Weird thing is, the mechanical flaws were different this time. In the previous play, the PCs were under-powered. Their skills didn't overlap much, and it was a rare roll that got +4 (the bonus from two bodyparts/skills on a single card). In this second game, the opposite happened. Most of the body parts were really broadly or metaphorically defined. As a result, nearly every roll a PC made had +6 or higher. Stop to consider the odds of rolling 11 or higher on 2d6+8... roughly a 97% chance of success. I'd say at least a third of the rolls were at those odds. Meanwhile, human NPCs were rolling 1d12+2. In all our various conflict scenes, I only managed to hit like four times.

The crit system for the game is flawed as well. In both sessions, curiously enough, double 1's were rolled twice. In the first session, John rolled double 1's twice. In the second session, Rob rolled double 1's twice. In neither session did anyone roll double 6's. For this second game, I increased the penalty of the critical failure, but it proved to be no better - despite getting two ticks on every card he had, Rob never lost a part.

I even tried to make the final conflict more interesting by putting them up against a boss monster - a rogue Stankenfreenian creation that had turned evil. While he took two parts off of one PC, he lost all 9 of his body parts before he could get a third action.

Beyond a doubt, this is the worst set of mechanics I've ever crafted. Yet both games have been incredibly fun, and the character creation process is a winner. One of the players told me this session was the most laugh-out-loud fun she'd ever had roleplaying.

I'm thinking that I may run it again sometime, but if so the die mechanics would need a major overhaul, probably a complete replacement. I'm thinking F# might be the way to go - but with Stankenfreen's character creation system.

---

Amazing Characters:

The real joy of the game was, as with the first session, the player characters. I sadly don't have character illustrations this time, but here's the lists of bodyparts.

April's PC:

• The Feet of the Waiter
• Legs of a Dancer
• Vulcan Brain
• X-Ray Vision
• Hitler-style Face w/ Mustache
• Tusks of a Woolly Mammoth

April went to a great deal of trouble trying to get rid of her Hitler face. She kept trying to justify using it on rolls, so that she could assign ticks from rolled 1's to it, but never ended up with enough ticks to lose the face. The tusks apparently annoyed here as well, because she had one of the other PCs trim them. X-Ray Vision, on the other hand, was definitely appreciated and utilized.


Carrie's PC:

• Trunk of an Elephant
• Wings of a Bumblebee
• Vampire Fangs
• The Mustache of Luigi
• Heart of a Lion
• Lion'sheart

You'll note that Carrie was given the heart of a lion by two different players. Parts were created and assigned blind - nobody knew what anyone was going to get. Since she got two Lion hearts, she got +4 at a minimum for every roll where bravery or predatory instinct were beneficial.
During this session, I reused the Corwin-in-the-dungeon gimmick 'cause I thought it was cute. Carrie ended up using her Vampire Fangs to drain him, so I gave her the new part "Blood of Amber" which was rather potent.

Jeremy's PC:

• Lizard's Brain
• Toes of a Chimpanzee
• Breasts of a Prostitute
• Hands of a Pointilist Painter
• The Teeth of John Tesh
• Weight of a Feather

Poor Jeremy had probably the least-useful set of parts, and the least focus/overlap, but he was able to make them count in the final battle. Weight of a Feather was fun, even if rarely useful. He was constantly being blown around by the other PCs.

Sarah's PC:

• Elbow of a Tennis Player
• Amazing Spring-Like Jumping Ability
• The Spleen of Roger Rabbit
• Raven's Tongue
• Voice of the Siren
• Tentacles of a Squid

Jumping Ability wasn't really a body-part, but I was cool with it. It combo'd well with Squid Tentacles for acrobatic tricks. Voice of the Siren combo'd with Raven's Tongue (since Raven is a Trickster God) for potent crowd-control and smooth-talking. As a result, it won her:

• Ears of the Romanians (as in "Friends, Countrymen, Roman...ians, lend me your ears")

She then got in a fight with a crazed townsfolk that was trying to burn down the castle. From him she got the:

• Singed Scalp of an Arsonist

but lost her squid tentacles in the conflagration. In the final battle with the Big Bad, she lost her Voice of the Siren as well.

Christie's PC:

• Lips of a Latin Lover
• Super-Strong Hair
• The Claws of the Sloth
• Legs of a Giraffe
• Princess Sparkle Pony's Horn
• Owl's Eyes

Princess Sparkle Pony is this Unicorn that keeps showing up on Blank White Cards at Jeremy and Christie's house, so she was able to use the Horn to magically heal people (but not the Undead). One of my favorite images of the game was the idea of this 12-foot-tall giraffe-legged unicorn-horned character constantly leaning in with her lush latin lover's lips to make the other PCs a little uncomfortable.
At some point, the tips were trimmed off April's "Tusks of a Woolly Mammoth". After that happened, these tips were braided into Christie's Super-Strong Hair. It was part Wilma Flintstone, party improvised weapon.

Rob's PC

• Ears of a Bat
• Hyper-extending fully-controllable Tongue
• Hyena's Jaws
• Buddha's Knuckle
• Eye of the Tiger
• Eyes of a Child

Most of us pictured Rob's character with 4 eyes. He described himself as just having 2 - the eyes of a tiger cub. Turning a critical eye at the card now, I realize by the rules he'd have 3 eyes - two children's eyes and just one eye of a tiger. Speaking of Rules, Rob can rules-lawyer and munchkin-out like no one else I'd ever willingly game with. He makes it entertaining enough that we tolerate it, even appreciate it, at least in one-shots. I mention this because Rob was the only person I had to say "no" to during the game - he kept coming up with spurious ways to use 4 or 5 bodyparts on a single roll. The justifications were entertaining, so I usually let it fly.

Gene's PC:

• Skin of a Chameleon
• Legs of a Centipede
• Arm (just 1) of a Body Builder
• Liver of a Drunken Japanese Stockbroker
• 360-degree swiveling Neck
• Pouch of a Kangaroo
• Moebius' Splint

Moebius' Splint needs a bit of explanation. Moebius was the brand-new puppy that Jeremy and Christie got a few weeks ago. Within half an hour of getting this puppy, he'd broken his arm. The free puppy has cost them $1,500. Currently, Moebius is wearing a bright purple cast/splint. It makes one of his legs seem longer than the others, and it's a rigid object that smacks into people when climbs into their laps. All day, we'd been referring to it as his secret weapon. Gene interpreted this combination of cards to mean that 50 of his character's 100 centipede legs were in splints.

In addition to the PC's parts listed above, someone got this off an NPC:

• Strong Arms of a Pitchfork-Wielding Farmer

but for the life of me, I can't remember who got those arms.

The Big Bad
At the end of the game, the PC's had to do battle with Dr. Stankenfreen's Most Evilest Creation EVER. So, I gave everyone another blank card, and had them generate the body parts of the Big Bad. Thus did they face:

• Dragon'sbreath
• Vader's Helmet
• Mouth of an Asp (poison included)
• Picasso Face
• Blowfish-like Inflating Body with Spikes
• The Black Sulpherous Void That Was Dick Cheney's Heart
• Hung Like a Walrus
• Whiskers of a Kitten
• Will of Oberon
• Soul of Evil Incarnate

Despite having 10 body parts (3 of which overlapped - Evil, Oberon, and Cheney), and initiative, he went down in the second round. I got to deliver a post-modern monolog and use the dark sides of both the Force and Cubism, but to no avail. He went down with only minor injury to the PCs.

---

Link to photos from the game. Probably not of interest if you don't know the players.

Stankenfreen's Monsters: More Than The Sum Of Our Parts

Last Thursday I ran a one-shot that started with something to the effect of: "You awake strapped to a laboratory table, having been shocked into life by the Lightning. In the distance, you hear your creator shouting 'My monsters! Come alive and rescue me!' as the angry mob of villagers drags him out of the room."

I used a home-brewed system for it, which was literally made-up on the walk to the game. I had a pile of index cards. Each player designed a body part for each other player, on cards which were then given out face-down so you didn't know what your monster looked like until you looked down at your body in the first scene.

The body parts were bits from people and animals. "Hands of a concert pianist", "heart of a lover", "eye of the hawk". That sort of thing. Here's the actual PCs, as drawn by their players:

	<- Sarah's PC, "Polly" Parts: Antlers of a Buck Hands of a Speed Typist Arms of a Wood-Chopper Voice of a Parrot Nose of an Ant-Eater
Laura's PC, "Cookie" -> Parts: Shell of a Snail Left Foot of a Great Tapdancer Bill of a Platypus Tongue of a Chef Claws of a Wolf
	<- John's PC, "Joe" Parts: Spit Glands of a Camel Hands of a Surgeon Hands of a Strangler Eyes of a Lecher Throat of an Opera-Singer Added via Surgery skills mid-game: Snout of a Pig (on the elbow) Hide of a Blacksmith
Mark's PC, "Jack" -> Parts: Jack Ass (Butt of a Donkey) Mouth of a Super-Salesman Tongue of a Snake Legs of a Can-Can Dancer Monkey Feet Added by feasting on an NPC: Evil Laugh of an Executioner

The best part was the parts. Everyone else made body parts for your character, and did so blind without anyone knowing what other parts you were going to get. We ended up with some pretty bizarre PCs as a result.

Beyond those parts, they also ended up with a set of "Eyes of a Curious Child", but instead of installing those on a PC, they used them to fix some blind NPC in the Vampire's dungeon (his name was Corwin, not that it matters).

The title of the body part functioned like a skill. Every time you took an action, you'd roll 2d6 and +2 for every body part you felt could help. ("Tongue of a Serpent" might help for sensing heat and scents, but also for tempting people like in Eden.) If your roll plus modifiers totaled 11+, you were successful.

If either die came up a "1", you'd make a tick-mark on one of the body-parts. If a body-part got 5 tick marks, it falls off. Double 1's is a tick on all your body parts, Double 6's means you've developed a soul. A soul changes your dice from 2d6 to 1d12. That means it doubles your odds of accomplishing unskilled rolls (2 in 12 instead of 3 in 36), and cuts your odds of taking tick marks by about a third.

Attack rolls were super-simple. A success killed a townsfolk, or ripped one part off a monster, depending on who was being attacked. The dice mechanics weren't amazing, but they worked well enough for a one-shot. In retrospect, modifiers didn't end up stacking as much as I'd imagined them to, so I probably should have had a lower difficulty. Dead townsfolk, by the way, became one body-part each, which basically made them into treasure.

The plotline involved rescuing the "good" Doctor Stankenfreen from the townsfolk. When that proved too easy, I added a second plot about the Vampires in the next castle over. Once you're a vamp, you're a vamp all the way. It was goofy fun, and not too deep.

Azathoth Upstairs, Cthulhu Downstairs

One of the other players in Fordyce Hall (a Cthulhu by Gaslight scenario I played in at Gwen Con) put up this lovely picture of me about to bash another PC's brains in. They put up a short video clip as well, and a brief Live Journal entry about it, too. Click here for their full coverage. Pretty sure that's the journal of a person named Erik, who was playing the character of the Housekeeper (or head Maid or head Cook or something along those lines - in charge of the female staff of the manor house in the game).

The big blur in the photo is me, suddenly swinging an imaginary shovel at Gwendolyn Kestrel, host of GwenCon. (In the background are Stan! and Sparky.) This image was prior to Gwen's reaction. She apparently wasn't expecting my bit of LARPing at the tabletop, and jumped. You would too if the crazy guy sitting next to you suddenly swung an imaginary shovel within a couple inches of your face. Sorry, Gwen!

The game was great fun - everybody's roleplaying was top-notch, with lots of accents and affectations, appropriate levels of in-party conflict and good humor. We were the servants of a nobleman who had just inherited some creepy old manor. It was our job to prepare the house for his arrival. It was Cthulhu, though, so only about half the staff escaped with their lives and sanity. I started the day by saving Gwen's character from an ice-cold demon-filled well, but by tea-time I'd had a full transformation. I went crazy, nearly killed Gwen's character, and ran off into the woods never to be seen again. One of the other PCs (played by Genevieve, not pictured above) ended up taking bad advice I gave her, and got captured or possessed by some powerful evil entity. All the PCs lost their jobs, at least.

My only misgiving about this very excellent and enjoyable scenario was that there was an awful lot packed in for a mere 4-hour block. By my count there were at least 7 supernatural fiends - a ghost in the manor house, a hob in cat form we managed to placate, a second hob that killed one of our horses, the clawed thing in the well, the tower-creatures that dragged off genevieve, the dark presence in the woods, and the thing at the center of the hedge maze. And I'm not sure if that list counts whatever it was that tried shoving Mary into the oven, or whatever reanimated the dead horse. The property was huge, as well, with carriage house, collapsed woodshed, hidden well, underground tunnels, hedgemaze, woods, free-standing tower, and a 3-wing 80+ bedroom manor house. Then there was a mystery about a suicide off the grounds, our surprise that the realtor wasn't awaiting us at the train station, and the fact the townsfolk wanted nothing to do with the manor. It was a pretty amazing example of highly-detailed verisimiltude-rich sandbox gaming, but there was no chance in heck of us accomplishing or unraveling anything. Luckily, it was Cthulhu, where resolution is more likely to involve madness and death than victory. Had we serious intentions toward the goal of solving or winning the scenario, it would have been way too much plot for the time.

Fourth-Dimensional Lifeforms

I just finished a big page on 4th-Dimensional Lifeforms over at ArcanaWiki, and I'm kind of proud of it. It took a little bit of library research, and a lot of brainstorming / extrapolating. I'm definitely going to have to work a 4th-dimensional monster into a game sometime soon, or maybe run a one-shot based on Flatland.

One reason why I did this reading and made the page was because Trail of Cthulhu mentions that the Titans / Great Old Ones may be higher-dimensional beings, and I wanted to know what implications that would have.

I'm putting the text of the ArcanaWiki page here, as a back-up. However, the formatting is a lot nicer over at ArcanaWiki, and the links will work there (whereas here, the links just look like random capitalization mid-sentence) so it's definitely the better place to peruse this. Go There Now. Thank you.

---

Fourth-Dimensional Lifeform


This page is about creatures or intelligent beings native to the Fourth Dimension, particularly the spatial interpretation. Read that page too, as the basics it gives you on how the next dimension up works may prove helpful in explaining why the Fourth-Dimensional Lifeform can do what it can.

We Live In A Fishbowl. Let's hope the cat doesn't notice us.

That is to say, our three-dimensional universe occupies only a tiny sliver, infinitely thin, within the greater fourth-dimensional context. For the sake of this page (and the fun implications for gaming), we'll assume that there are life-forms that exist naturally in four-dimensions. We may be beneath their notice, thinner and less pesty than the tiniest ant in comparison to them. Or, they may turn their microscopes upon us, and mess with our reality. We may be more noticeable than we imagine as well, being as obvious to them as man-sized paper-thin silhouettes pressed between two mile-wide planes of glass would be to us.

So one day, they may take note and decide to intrude on our reality. If we're lucky, they may be smart and compassionate. Alternately, they might regard us the way a cat does a goldfish in a bowl.

Either way, by virtue of being fourth-dimensional, it's going to have some creepy powers over us.


SuperSenses

The fourth-dimensional lifeform has a better vantage point. At the very least, it can rotate around our little slice of reality in the same way a cat can maneuver around the outside of a fishbowl to get a better look at the helpless little swimmer. Now give that cat X-Ray Vision, and you'll begin to approximate the way in which a 4D critter will be able to spy on us. It can see around corners. It can look through walls. It can see what's in your belly. [1][3] [4]

Even if it's got no greater intelligence than a germ, it's likely to sense us before we detect it.

Out-Maneuvering

It has the ability to move via the fourth dimension, to step out of 3-D space, and then re-enter it somewhere else.

If there's a 4D thing coming after you, don't rely on walls or obstacles to protect you. You can run, but you can't hide, and you can't take shelter. Three-dimensional prey trying to flee from a fourth-dimensional predator is going to have a very hard time.

This isn't quite the same as Teleportation, but it may feel like it. It will have a few restrictions on the 4D movement that might save you:

• It won't be as fast as teleportation. It can pop in and out of our reality pretty quickly, but still has to move through the 4th Dimension to get to the vantage point from which it will step back into our reality. On open terrain, or sliding down an embankment, you'll be able to keep pace with it - unless it's also a speed-based predator back home, or has a fourth-dimensional motorcycle, or some similar speed boost.
• The main advantage it has is the ability to sidestep three-dimensional obstacles and hazards. While it wouldn't be able to materialize inside solid matter, but it would be able to step out of our reality, move beyond where a 3D wall is, then reenter our reality on the other side.
• If fourth-dimensional space is made up of infinite sheets of tightly-packed parallel 3D universes, then this movement may be slowed significantly. It may have to move through hundreds of parallel worlds to find one without the wall that you just "took shelter" behind. As it moves through these parallel worlds, it may become distracted or choose to dine on a parallel you instead of returning to our universe.
• If, on the other hand, 4D space is as empty as our 3D universe, then there may be a large void between us and the next nearest 3D world. in that case a shift out of our reality and back again is like leaning or sidestepping to it, much easier than using the door or climbing a cliff. It could choose to move 50 feet to the door, a foot through it, and then 50 feet back to where you are. But why not just lean an inch perpendicular to our plane, then a foot parallel to our plane, and an inch back perpendicular to just suddenly appear between you and the wall?

Should you try to stand your ground and fight it, it won't be easy. It has the ability to remove itself from the 3-D frame of reference. Probably pretty easy, as instinctive as a dodge. A bullet may be fast enough to hit it, but if it understands the significance of you drawing a gun, it'll just vanish and watch from outside our plane until you let your guard down. See Fair Escape.

There is some small chance that if you can get it into a freefall, it won't be able to move into or out of our reality. Maybe. Assuming the freefall extends to it's whole body, the majority of which will already be outside our reality. Not really the sort of thing you want to test by jumping out of an airplane without a parachute while a monster from beyond is chasing you.

Variable Size and Mass, possibly even Shape-Shifting

To us, the fourth dimensional being will have variable size, and thus variable mass. The 4D character won't perceive any change, it's just a matter of how much of it's body extends into the 3D frame of reference. There's a number of tricks this allows:

• By reaching just a couple limbs or digits into our reality, it may give the impression of being more than one creature. We see half a dozen wormlike creatures intruding into our reality, but they're actually just its fingers.
  
• What you're seeing, by the way, is just a 3D cross-section of the creatures body. Or maybe even a cross section of its' clothing. Depending on the size of the thing in the fourth dimension, it may be able to radically change it's appearance and coloration, which you'd perceive as a limited form of shapeshifting. It may or may not be aware of what is visible to you, depending on how clearly the boundaries of our three dimensional space are demarcated from its point of view.
• Assuming it's intelligent and has knowledge of its own anatomy, it can keep its vital organs outside our reality, making a critical hit impossible. Our weapons may pass right through it from our point of view, looking like a mighty cleave, while making only a shallow wound as far as the creature is concerned.
• It was pointed out that it can see inside us. It can probably reach inside us as well. It may get automatic critical hits.
• Even an unintelligent 4D beast might be lucky enough to have the metaphysical blubber to be Immune To Bullets, especially if it's body extends a great distance in the fourth spatial dimension.
• If tool-using, it may only extend weapons or probes into our reality. Especially if it hunts 3D prey, what we encounter might in truth be no more than the point of a spear or fishhook.
• Likewise, it can "shrink down" to an unnoticeable size (from our point of view) for stealth purposes. It may have enough energy to exert great force even when manifesting only a tiny presence in our reality. Or, it may be limited to only having the force derived from the portion of it's mass that is in our frame of reference. The GM has some flexibility here: either it gets tiny but is weakened (so it will choose to manifest as largely as is practical), or it has a tiny stealth mode (like pushing with just your fingertip) where it can pull all kinds of poltergeist nonsense.

Plucked from our own Dimensions.

The 4th Dimensional being may have the ability to yank us out of our frame of reference and out into the greater reality. This could yank us into parallel worlds, or just a big void outside our universe. An angry 4D Being might maroon us in a radically different environment. Our senses won't be adapted to it, and we'll have a hard time figuring out what we're looking at.

It may even throw things at us, knocking us out our frame of reference. Or it could anchor us, leaving us rooted between worlds or fixed in space. And what if it just exhales steadily into our 3D space? Can it blow us loose without ever setting foot in our reality? Can it scramble our organs with a trans-dimensional bronx cheer?

Let's say the 4D being is kind enough to put us back. There's still some ways this could mess you up.

• It can pluck people and things out of our dimensional plane, flip them, and put them back. If it did this to you, your left-right symmetry would be reversed. Your face would look just a little different ("Is that a new hairdo?"), your heart would now be on the right side of your chest, and your handedness would change.
  
• Whether or not the flipping of the right and left hemispheres of your brain has other effects is pretty much up to the GM. You could ignore it, or it could justify some major personality alterations.
• Rather than a full flip, it's possible it might be able to just tilt you out of sync with our reality. You'd be facing handicaps that were inversely related to the fourth dimensional beings advantages. You might be split between multiple worlds, each cross-section facing a different parallel reality.

Fun With Forces.

The fourth dimensional being may be able to bend or ignore various forces and properties of the natural world. It may resist gravity, electromagnetism, and/or the strong nuclear force or weak nuclear forces. For an explanation of why, see Riemann's Bookworms.

If light is is a fourth-dimensional vibration, then it's possible the 4D being might appear as if it were made of light, or it might emit light with every motion it makes. This would be consistent with theories that it takes a lot of energy to breach dimensions. While I mentioned the ease with which a 4D critter can move into and out of our reality, there is the high likelihood doing so will take enormous amounts of energy. It's 4th Dimensional nature may give it that power, or it could be an extreme effort for it to interact with our reality.

If light is instead cast from some higher dimension, or cast from a different source withing the 4th Dimension, then we can assume a 4D object will cast a 3D shadow over three-dimensional space. In fact one way scientists attempt to visualize 4D objects is by contemplating their 3D shadows.

Time Travel

Because of how vanishing and reappearing dodges 3D understanding of Causality, it may seem that the 4D creature is a Time Traveler, moving into the future when it's actually just stepping outside our reality. Relativity and Spacetime are full of weirdness like that.

It's also possible to have a creature that moves freely in the Temporal Dimension instead of (or in addition to) a spatial dimension. Such a creature would combine the advantages listed above with genuine Time Travel, for a truly superior foe that kills you before you're even aware of it.

One other notion involves parallel universes and branching time. Let's assume the model of temporal physics where every action or decision creates multiple parallel worlds, one for each possible outcome. The Fourth-Dimensional Lifeform may drift between them freely, and it's actions may create such alternate worlds. In fact, it may have an infinite food supply made up of a single person (or a specific animal) that it likes to eat. Each time it snatches up that meal, it creates another world just like that one, except where the favorite meal hasn't been taken yet. If you think about it, our world could be just the latest variation on another - one that's identical except it's version of you is now a missing persons report. Meanwhile, just out of phase with our reality, the thing that eats only you is napping. Should it awake and grow hungry, it will hunt and devour you. Doing so will create a new reality, where a duplicate you exists, who's read this paragraph, and laughed it off, and another world with a duplicate you who read this paragraph and started trying to figure out how to fight back against the fourth-dimensional horror. Which you do you want to be?


Psychological Impact

Trying to anticipate the actions of a fourth-dimensional foe will be mind-bogglingly difficult, testing the limits of even a battle-hardened warrior with a degree in astrophysics. It's enough to drive you batty. See Alien Geometries and Go Mad From The Revelation for more ideas on how unnerving it would be to be hunted by a time-traveling dimension-hopping Eldritch Abomination.

Always A Bigger Fish

For added fun, there may be Fifth Dimensional creatures that can do to the 4D beasty all the nasty things it can do to us.

Sources
Wikipedia on the Fourth Dimension
Wikipedia on Spacetime
Hyperspace by Michio Kaku
Flatland: A Romance Of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbott Abbott
Some of the works of H. P. Lovecraft, in particular From Beyond, depict creatures that might be Fourth Dimensional

Since very few resources exist that give serious thought to what the ramifications would be of a 4th Dimensional predator, I've had to extrapolate a bit. I feel pretty confident that I didn't mess anything up, but I should mention that I don't have a degree in physics. The parts I extrapolated are mostly couched in terms like "it may be possible", or "if light works this way", so that I don't pass off my own conjectures as certainty or scientific theory. Things I've read as bonafide scientific theory are phrased (above) more like "it can" or "you can't", more definitive than my own speculation, even in cases of theoretical things that haven't been proven yet. In other words, if a scientist tells you something on this page is just wrong, be inclined to believe them over me. If they claim something is wrong that I foot-noted, it may be time for someone (me? you? them?) to read up on the subject. Luckily, Hyperspace and Flatland are both quite enjoyable reads as well as being highly informative.

The version on ArcanaWiki has citations embedded indicating which source contributed or corroborated which ideas.

Game and Story Use

• To make a Monster or Alien really creepy or, well, alien, make it fourth dimensional.
• In Trail of Cthulhu, it is suggested that the Eldritch Abominations, or at least the really nasty ones, are fourth (or higher) dimensional beings. Not all of Great Cthulhu is shaped like a cross between an octopus and a dragon, just the part of him that passes through three-dimensional space is. See also Alien Geometries.
• Shadow People might be the sentient shadows of greater 4-D creatures that look down upon our reality, but never enter it.
• Alien Greys might be 4th Dimensional. It could explain UFOs that vary in size or vanish suddenly. They'd be able to abduct you without a trace, and you'd be powerless to move against them. See We Live In A Petri-Dish.

Don't Try This At Home

You know it's a good Cthulhu session when, 15 minutes after the session wrapped up, your wife takes great pains to specifically spell out, without prompting of any sort, that there's no chance of any amorous contact that night because she's way too creeped out.

The session in question had featured a sequence where her character went to great efforts securing her home from intrusion, only to discover that the crazed cultist / would-be rapist was already hiding in her bedroom. She fought him off (and eventually got to her gun and put two bullets in him), but I sure didn't make it easy, nor sanitary. The light mechanics of Trail of Cthulhu helped keep the battle narrative, and the scene really captured the feel of a horror film or urban legend. As I said, it made for a great Cthulhu session, and it was a worthy experiment in staging a scene. Mind-rending horrors from beyond time and space just aren't as horrifying as the threat of the fate worse than death.

Just the same, it's probably not something I should ever repeat. Also definitely a no-go if you don't know your players really damn well. Some players get very caught up in their characters being an extension of themselves - and it's really easy to misjudge where someone's comfort zone ends. Having explored it once, may advice is don't try this one at home, kids. Luckily, I knew exactly where to draw the line. That sofa gets cold and lonely at night. :)

Dreams In The Witch House

My Trail of Cthulhu game is chugging along full speed. We're four sessions in, and 3 of them have been fantastic (the initial session was a little wobbly). Last night, I had this lengthy dream about the campaign, just a dream about how much fun the campaign is. A dream about the excitement and energy of the campaign. It was one of the best dreams I've ever had, but words can't seem to do it justice.

It's weird that we're enjoying it so much, because Life is starting to imitate Art... in some fairly eerie and un-enjoyable ways...

• In one session, her investigation took my wife's PC to Arkham Asylum, where a rather creepy patient started stalking her, and had to be beat up and sedated by the orderlies.

A couple days later, in the real world, my wife was followed around the Hospital she works at by a guy just creepy enough that she ended up calling security.

It didn't stop there.

• In two of the sessions, there have been appearances (fleeting glimpses out of the corner of the eye) of The Black Man - an incarnation of Nyarlathotep with ebony skin but Anglo features, and dressed all in black from hat to cloven foot. When I'd described him, I'd added the detail that his eyes were extremely blood shot, as if the darkness were trying to occlude the only light color on his entire body. In one scene, I'd also described him not in the formless wizardly robes Lovecraft mentions, but in fashionable (but all black) attire for the period.
  

Yesterday, when she got home, she told me that she stood next to a man at the bus stop near her hospital that was dressed in all black, from black fedora and black suit coat on down. He was African American, with really rich dark skin, but she ended up not really examining his features beyond his eyes. He had clearly sustained some sort of recent eye trauma that was healing, as his eyes had virtually no whites and were almost entirely blood-colored. Once she noticed that, she took pains not to look at his face or feet.

If this were a horror DVD, we'd be at the point where the viewer shouts at his TV:

"Quit reading the creepy book, you idiots! It's not a source of clues to what's going on, it's what's causing your situation! Dumbass unbelievable characters - no one in the real world would keep poking at the bear like that..."

I'm pretty sure we're gonna keep playing Trail of Cthulhu, despite the way life keeps imitating the game, and the very in-genre implication that such parallels will only grow worse over time. I guess that means horror films aren't that unbelievable after all.