Summer Disruptions - and OMG the summer is over, isn't it?!?

Back in Albuquerque, the summers were so hot that they had no impact on gaming. Sitting inside with a cold drink and few friends under the "swamp cooler" is a great way to spend a weekend when you live in a desert where there's next to nothing to do.  We gamed all summer long, and rarely missed a session.

It's just not like that here in Seattle. There's a million things happening in town every weekend, and you desperately want to get outside for the couple months where it's not necessarily raining. Even if you do feel like being indoors and geeky, there's usually some sort of major geek-friendly event going on in town, many of them based out of air-conditioned hotels and convention centers. Which meant that all my RPG campaigns went on hold for a couple months as everybody had scheduling conflicts. During that time, I served on the staff of two gaming conventions and then headed up the coast to a hippy-gypsy-circus near the border. Crazy times.

But now it's mid-September, and... Holy Crap! I need to be ready to GM Warhammer 3rd again on Sunday! Two months without building a dice pool, micromanaging A/C/E, or pouring over my copious notes about the plot...  I fear it's gonna be a painful session trying to get back into the swing of the rather crunchy system. We're deep into Book 3 of The Enemy Within, and I have to be ready to run the climactic final battle should my players push in that direction this weekend. Eek!  If you need me, I'll be buried under the cards and tokens having a last-minute panic attack. Which one of these NPCs was The Black Cowl, again?

Contact With The Enemy, Zombies, and "Detect Plot"

As they say in the military, no battle-plan survives contact with the enemy Player Characters. I'm running a home-brewed zombie game called Death Warmed Over, and week after week, it has repeatedly proven that old military axiom. To be clear, I'm enjoying it greatly, but it's not at all the campaign I imagined it to be.

My favorite zombie films include quite a few where the characters are holed up somewhere, turning a house or shopping mall into a fortress.  Classic Romero stuff. They're nailing boards over the windows, improvising weapons, and finding clever ways to sneak in and out of the property without getting grabbed by the thousand arms of the nameless horde. These sorts of films tend to be slow-burning character dramas where the zombies are the external source of tension that occasionally kills characters but mostly serves as a backdrop for the inevitable collapse of the social unit. These sorts of films appeal to the parts of my brain that really appreciate greek tragedy as well as problem solving.

I've always wanted to play a game that catches that feel, but no one's ever been interested in running it as anything more than a one-shot. Two main mechanical hurdles traditionally stand in the way of this sort of campaign:

1. Such a game requires eventually the GM must play out scenes with hundreds of zombies, and most games just can't do that elegantly. No game I've seen really has the rules for the makeshift barricades. The handful of games that have rules that could be used for determining how many zombies it takes to topple a home-made wall are either so detailed you can't run 50 zombies in a scene without every turn taking an hour, or so abstract and random that one bad roll will result in a single zombie toppling your house.
2. Items, and resource management. You don't particularly want to make a list of every single item in every single house or business, as that takes far too much time and effort from the GM. Yet to stay faithful to the genre, scrounging for equipment, ammo, and food needs to be important. There needs to be a balance, where the presence or lack of an crucial item is meaningful, but you don't have to constantly define what's in every room of every location.

You can hand-wave that sort of thing for a session or two, but any sort of lengthy campaign needs a solid foundation of rules that reinforce the genre. Based on that, I decided my best bet was to custom-build my own set of rules, and run the darned game myself.

My design goals were as follows:

• Fast and light combat rules, because zombies really aren't that dangerous unless they show up in numbers. At the same time the rules had to be tactical enough that players could make meaningful decisions.
• High base odds of success for the PCs, so I can throw in some big swingy penalties for psychological trauma whenever things go more wrong than they had been before, without it completely nullifying the players ability to accomplish something.
• An abstract system for resource management so I didn't have to stat out every single item everywhere or dink about with encumbrance, but could still give both in- and out- of-character motivations for the players to make scavenging forays outside their makeshift fortress.
• Timelines as well as a few simple random charts for figuring out how bad the zombie infestation is from block to block and building to building, so that if the players suddenly decide to make a supply run to the sporting goods store in the middle of a session I can run that on the spot without having to pause the game for 20 minutes.
• A system for handling how likely zombies are to smash down or climb over a makeshift barricade. This needed to involve as little randomness as possible, because if the system was "roll a die per zombie" that would be wretchedly painful to play through when the zombies were in quantitity.
• Emulating a large number of classic zombie-genre tropes, but yet still having a few surprises and curveballs to throw at the players.
• Suspension of disbelief. The idea of the dead rising up to devour the living is far-fetched enough, the players shouldn't be scoffing at any of the details that come up later, so I really needed to think things through and do some research.
• In-character mystery in the beginning as the players are trying to figure out how the disease propagates, leading into a gradually unfolding understanding of the new state of the world.
• A flowchart or simple rules for zombie behavior, not just so I can run dozens of zombies at a time, but also so that they really come across as beasts of instinct and behave with a herd mentality. Additionally, this means that once the players figure out how the zombies "work" they can out-think and out-maneuver them.

I feel like I hit all of those goals. Not that there weren't any hiccups along the way, and I recently had to make some props/tools to simplify the tracking of the psychology modifiers because it was a little fiddly and opaque in my first draft. Overall, I'm pretty pleased. I did a lot of research to figure out how the infrastructure would fall apart, on what day the power goes off, when the food rots and the bugs move in, etc. I came up with a fantastical yet logical progression for my virus that would allow it to spread quickly and not burn itself out.

I started the PCs out as neighbors in a gated apartment complex that was initially a bit vulnerable to zombie infiltration, but which could be readily fortified as long as the PCs were willing to nail a few tables over their windows and what not. I used a complex I'd once lived in so that I knew the layout and the neighborhood intimately and could answer any questions that might come up. I printed off floor-plans and maps for the apartment buildings at combat-map scale and laminated them. I was ready to dig in for a siege. This was going to scratch my itch just perfectly.

And that's exactly where I come back to the first sentence of this post… no plan survives contact with the PCs. While I love the tragic siege sub-genre of zombie film, it's a forgone conclusion that things fall apart, the center does not hold. Staying in one place always gets you killed, and while very few zombie films end happily, those that do usually involve escaping to somewhere else. My players are, of course, motivated by survival. From session one, they just wanted to get the heck out of the populated areas and head for places with fewer potential zombies. Even though I set the game in the middle of a desert (Albuquerque, NM) so there's really nowhere to flee too, they just had to head out of town at the first opportunity. Trying to head them off, I throw a military quarantine up as one more obstacle in between them and anywhere else, but of course this just encourages the players to try to sneak past soldiers as well as zombies. I cut off every escape route and leave them a brightly lit Tram back down to their fortress, and they instead choose the arduous overland trek in the opposite direction, across mountains and deserts where there are, of course, no zombies.

Silly me. It should come as no surprise, as that's just how gaming works. Players cast "detect plot" and then take a hard left to steer clear of it. :)

Familiar Territory

Yet another post about my current Deadlands campaign.

Given my druthers, I'd have been happy to have the answer to "Where is Shallow Gulch?" be answered with no greater level of detail than "In the (Weird) Wild West". After all, when you watch a bunch of westerns, you realize one town is pretty much like another. If a western isn't in Deadwood or Tombstone, it's set in Generic Western Town #187. And that's just fine with me.

One of my players, however, appeared to need more detail than that in order to enable willing suspension of disbelief. During character creation and the first session, he kept asking questions about where Shallow Gulch was, what the nearest big city or army post was, etc. I tried to dodge such questions at first, but it would have been a mistake to ignore his repeated requests for verisimilitude, especially in a game with a chase plotline where knowing the terrain ahead can be beneficial. So, Shallow Gulch was placed in the Dakota Territory, rather West of Fargo. Cobb's trail was leading into Indian Territory.

Somewhere along the way, a card got played (by a player) that turned an old Indian burial site into some sort of spatial portal. Cobbs trail lead into it, and following in his wake meant the PCs didn't lose the time the NPCs had spent cracking open the gate. It being a magical portal, I wanted things to feel like they'd gone a good distance, which meant environmental changes. That left 3 options. We could leave the Wild West completely. We could end up at the shore, still within the Wild West, but now in California or the like. Or we could end up in the desert of the American Southwest.

So I start describing cactus and hot sun, 'cause I know that kind of terrain better than California, and because I didn't want to stop the game while I read up on what The Big One did to Cali in the official setting. I'm relying on visual cues from the area around Albuquerque, 'cause I used to live there and can improvise it well enough.

Players see Cobb from a distance, a card gets played that makes him mistake them for someone else and set up a parley. Two sessions ago, that's where we ended. The next scene was pregnant with possibility. There was a good chance a fight would happen, and a very good chance that fight would result in one or more players needing new characters. Which meant I needed to be prepared for how they'd draft new PCs. The existing ones lacked the money to hire mercenaries. They were chasing after death himself, which takes a particular breed of character to do. I didn't want to just wreck another town to make more embittered survivors. So I needed a place where fearless monster-hunters would logically congregate.

Conveniently, I'd just described visuals based off Albuquerque, and I used to run a LARP set in Albuquerque over a 60 year arc (from 20 years before to 40 years after the Deadlands era). A version of Albuquerque frequented by monsters and monster hunters. Familiarity with that Alb on the part of 4 out 5 players meant if things went badly, they'd be able to easily whip up replacement characters with established backgrounds by just referencing the old campaign. No need to pull my punches when Cobb regrows his body and round two of the showdown starts up. The benefits go beyond that...

When Sapphirra Cobb's last words were "the Clock Tower might be able to stop him" my players didn't stand around scratching their heads. They knew that old LARP had a creepy magic Clock Tower (which the real Albuquerque lacks) that was known for sucking souls, entrapping ghosts, harboring a torpored Salubri Methuselah, etc. Instant recognition, even though they'd only ridden through the tower's shadow but briefly in Deadlands.

Likewise, they knew the names Jean Luc Martell and Cristos D'Anconia. Both bore the same weight as if I'd told them "On behalf of Lord Dracula, Mayor Renfield welcomes you to Albuquerque, affectionately known as Little-Transylvania-On-The-Rio-Grande".

Things were just falling into place, and I am pretty pleased with myself. There is, of course, some danger involved, as I mentioned in the previous post. That old LARP:

• Was set in the World Of Darkness (well, an alternate World of Darkness), not the Weird West. Deadlands Vampires are far less numerous, but also more powerful than caitiff neonates. The political system will be rather less complicated here.
• Had two thirds of it's plot set after the 1870s. The players may make assumptions based on things that haven't happened yet, and/or which likely won't in Deadlands.
• Lacked many details that Pinnacle's Weird West brings along. New Mexico is part of the Confederacy. House Iron Horse was a big player in the Railroads of HOD LARP, but it's not one of the major lines in Deadlands. Fear and rumors manifest, and a place like Albuquerque's gotta have a pretty hefty horror level.

So, yes, this alternate-alternate-Albuquerque has got some drawbacks. From a certain point of view, however, those drawbacks are advantages. I get to try out elements of an old campaign a second time, and do differently the things I made mistakes on in the first pass.

It also means that I have my answer to "What do I do when and if they beat Cobb, and the main plot of the campaign is resolved?" They don't have to wander the wilderness anymore, as they've stumbled across a place that has a two campaigns full of evil for them to put down.

Hindsight is 20/20 and Amber-ranked

Counting off the top of my head, I've run 5 Amber Campaigns and 1 Amber-Everway CrossOver Campaign (and 5 one-shot ThroneWars) since first being exposed to the game in '92. Campaign #2 of 6 was pretty much the best campaign I've ever been involved in, or even heard of - and, with 5 years of gamestore retail under my belt, I've heard the details of more campaigns than you can shake a big glass dice cabinet at! That one had intense long-term plotlines, intricate mysteries, and character-development that transformed how individuals approached familial relationships in the real world.

Interestingly enough, the two most recent of those 6 Amber-related campaigns were the weakest. I've run excellent campaigns on either side of them, so I'm not sure why I'm having the issues I've been hitting recently. Perhaps I'm all-Ambered-out?

The Amber Campaign I ran in Albuquerque in early- to mid- 2007 was a major let-down after the Continuum campaign that went before it, and in hind-sight not at all the style of game I should have run just before moving away from that group of friends. I also did a very bad job of controlling the pacing. It was intended as a 6-session mini-campaign, but bogged down into 13 or 14 sessions and never wrapped up the major plot point. But, apparently it wasn't all bad, all the time. What Silence posted this list of memorable quotes from the game. Follow that link to read a few of the better moments.

In more upbeat news, all the throne wars have been immensely enjoyable, including 3 that had a dozen or more players. (If I recall correctly, participation was 12, 17 and 24 players at those three events, with 1, 3 and 4-and-a-half GMs respectively, myself being Head GM each time) I handled the crowd control and pacing elements just great those times.

I'd planned on running another large Throne War at the store before I moved, but I was so burned out from beating my head against that campaign (and in denial about moving until it was too late) that I just missed the opportunity. I really regret that. I was the biggest fish in Albuquerque's very small pond - here in Seattle, I have yet to establish myself outside a very select (and thus: small) group of friends.

Heart in a Box (Previously posted to a forum)

This post is a follow-up to my previous post about the city beneath Albuquerque.
Other than one brief, half-hearted, return trip, the underground city was largely left untouched. However, for the rest of the campaign, the main villain was the various incarnations of the kingly ghost and the other blights and horrors they'd set loose upon the world.

I recruited Micah, a buddy from work, to play the big-bad. His character sheet was just a possessed human with no pulse, tons of Willpower, and immunity to Dominate. Purely defensive capabilities. Incredibly weak in combat. Any player character could have torn him limb from limb at very little risk to themselves.

He crashed Elysium and they all accepted him as a recently un-torpored Caitiff, thinking he was a PC not NPC. It was fairly big news because this game was set in the late 1800's, and he was the first vampire anyone had met that didn't have a discernable clan. But Caitiff is a normal part of the default World of Darkness, so everybody assumed that's what he was.

I told Micah:

"You don't get XP normally. Instead, every session that you do something patently evil in front of at least one PC and live to tell the tale, I'll give you another power appropriate to a Baali or Demon. We'll start with a single level-one discipline and move up if you last."

"If they're smart, they'll ferret you out and grease you in a session or two. If not, you'll eventually grow powerful enough to destroy them all and end my campaign."

After a few sessions, Micah brought a small wooden box to the LARP and started carrying it around, in-character, every session. He refused to say what was in it. Everyone who was on to him now assumed his character's soul must be in the box, but it was just to distract and divert them.

When finally they took action against him, he was so sickly overpowered. He flung green demon fire all over the place, and used uber corruption powers to make them fight themselves or hit a fear-frenzy. In the midst of this very lethal battle PCs blew actions trying to capture, destroy or steal the meaningless wooden box. That fact alone bought him at least 3 more rounds of combat. He was doing Agg damage left and right and holding his own against 12 or 15 PCs till finally he ran out of Willpower to fuel his big Disciplines. Without the big flashy powers, he went down very suddenly and (to the PCs) unexpectedly.

In the free dialog accompanying his last few actions he revealed that he was the spirit that they'd set free months ago. At the end of the night, we made it painfully clear they could have nipped this in the bud before he ever became a threat.

Digging (Previously posted on a forum somewhere)

I ran a LARP long ago in Albuquerque. Within the game, there where the ruins of an ancient civilization buried far beneath the city that the game took place in. PCs playing the Nosferatu in the sewers figured this out, and thought it might be Enoch, or some other city of the Antediluvians.

So they kept digging. Despite cave-ins. Despite random follower deaths. Despite followers suddenly getting religious and deserting them.

Eventually, they found a cavern with a black river that killed the ghoul who touched it. At the opposite bank was what looked like an old city wall.

So they hauled boats down there. Undead monsters attacked and tried to pull them under. They fought them off and crossed it. The gates were sealed. They get some other PCs to help them, and came back to smash the gates open. I ask "Who has Awareness and Auspex. Okay. You get a creepy feeling."

So folks activate Auspex, and they can see ghosts escaping the city through the newly broken seal. Not sure what to make of it, the PCs head further in, Auspex still going.

After a few blocks, there's another gate, also sealed. They break it open. Now a powerful-looking spirit struts forward, all dressed in kingly regalia. He non-chalantly grabs other ghosts every few steps, rips them open and sucks out their juicy ectoplasmic centers. The PCs try to interact with him, but can't. He walks out of the city and across the surface of the black river without a word.

The PCs keep delving deeper. Gate after gate, seal after seal, getting deeper into the city, and then into a huge temple, and then into the temples inner chambers. There was lots more detail, but let's skip ahead. Eventually I said "So, now you're standing before the 6th Seal. Do you open that one too?"

Everybody swallows hard. They ask, "Did you say THE SIXTH SEAL?" All but 2 PCs immediately flee to the surface.

The other two break open this seal. "Behind it is a room lit by four flaming pillars, angelic in their beauty. Since you can see them, take a level of Agg and make a Courage test."

One PC passed the test and stood his ground. "Behind their heavenly trumpets, you can see a 7th gate with a 7th Seal. Take another Agg and another Courage test. What do you do?"

Eventually, he bails. With a lot of Agg damage and no Willpower left. If he'd made one more courage test, it could have been game over. I love giving players more power then they can handle.

Emperor of All Mexico

Several years back, I was the Head Storyteller of a long-running vampire/historical LARP in Albuquerque NM. The game was set in the late 1800's eventually skipping to the early 1900's. Every 3 or 4 months, when a story arc would wrap up, we'd move the game ahead 10 to 20 years. We ran story arcs: 1)just after NEW Mexico had been seized from OLD Mexico, 2)during the civil war, 3)Lincoln County "war" with Billy the Kid, 4)turn-of-the-century hysteria, and 5)just prior to the start of WWI.

Sessions alternated: every-other-session was Elysium, with the in-between sessions being built of various scenes derived from player's actions.

In addition, we started every session with "Story Time", short vignettes to illustrate plot points that might have otherwise occurred off-camera. Major NPC comes to town - herald the arrival in Story Time. Important character died where only a couple players were witness - restage it in Story Time. More craziness unleashed at the evil haunted clock tower - Story Time it is. We also let players run Story Time segments, which was a delight but also a double-edged sword.

The game was a lot of fun, and way too much work. So much work, in fact, that I have a file on my computer full of ideas for things I'd do differently should I decide to start a LARP again. The name of that file is "If I Am Ever Stupid Again". It was like a second job that only paid in Clanbooks.

One of the hallmarks of the game was that we were always throwing curveballs and willing to take the story anywhere. We intentionally transformed nearly all the secrets of the Vampire: The Masquerade setting. That way the players would never be tempted to use out-of-character info gleaned from reading every WoD book ever published.
The Salubri were the badguys, Tremere had hunted them down to stop their apocalyptic magic. The Giovanni were possessed pawns of their ghostly masters. The Camarilla and Sabbat did not exist - there was a Guild that brokered passage between city-states, but a Prince was truly King of his city. We used old-school pre-Viccissitude Tzimisce. European Werewolves were Mad Scientists and Rail Barons, laying down track to steal the Chi of the new world. Native American were-coyotes were pretty prevelant, and at war with the European weres.

The players kept disregarding the masquerade, especially around the haunted clock tower in town square. One session, after a particularly bad breach of the masquerade (involving vampires, werewolves, ghosts, a kholdunic elemental, and a machinegun), the people who actually tried to solve the problem didn't coordinate and used such conflicting methods that they just made things worse. What to do?

We didn't just send hunters after them. We'd done that before, it would have been stale.

There was no Camarilla, so there was no one to enforce the Masquerade, either. The Guild could cut all Vampiric transit to the city, but that limits the concepts available for new PCs. And it's just not as scary as Anathema and Bloodhunt, or being judged by your superiors. We needed something new, and every bit as scary as the Camarilla "breathing" down your necks. But I also wanted it to empower the PCs as much as it punished them.

Instead I interrupted their next Elysium with a pre-recorded "radio" broadcast from the Prince of Mexico City.
He said "In light of the newspapers coming from Albuquerque, there's no use pretending Vampires don't exist anymore. Therefore, I am declaring myself Emperor over all of Mexico. By the power of my blood I have raised a shroud over Mexico City. The sun will never rise on my beloved home again. People of Mexico fear not, I will protect you from the mad monsters of Albuquerque."

The one player whose character was the Ambassador from Mexico City had a very rough night.