Shock & Awe: How To Do A Decent Benedict

 A second installment in my takes on how to do justice to Zelazny's NPCs. In my first installment I talked at great length about how tricky it is to capture the feel of Corwin, and discussed the methods I use to prep for any scene or session I know he'll be in. 

This time, I discuss Benedict, the first bloody bastard of Amber.

"...the old arguments were resumed as to who was more legitimate. Of course, you and Eric are both my elders, but while Faiella, mother to Eric and myself was his wife after the death of Cymnea, they-"

"Enough!" cried Benedict, slapping the table so hard that it cracked.  The lamp danced and sputtered, but by some small miracle was not upset. The tent's entrance flap was immediately pushed aside and a concerned guard peered in. Benedict glanced at him and he withdrew.

"I do not wish to sit in on our respective bastardy proceeding," Benedict said softly. "That obscene pastime was one of the reasons I initially absented myself from felicity. Please continue your story without the benefit of footnotes..."

-Corwin and Benedict, in The Guns of Avalon by Roger Zelazny

 

Benedict boils down to three main traits in order from most to least: Short-Tempered,  Erudite, and Laconic. He's the eldest of the family, meaning that he's had the most time to accumulate a sizable vocabulary and extensive education. A particular set of skills, if you will. Also, it means that all the other NPCs seem like squabbling children from his point of view. Depending on how deep you want to stare into the implied Abyss, you may or may not also see Benedict as Oberon's enforcer or enabler: The big bully of the family. We're sort of told by Corwin that Benedict's amongst the moral best of the siblings, or at least the only brother likely to be above suspicion. Despite that praise, he's clearly a murderous bastard with serious anger management issues... even more so than his siblings. He's not above suspicion because he's a good guy. He's above suspicion only because if he was the secret villain, he would have already killed everyone by now.

We are told that Benedict spends millennia practicing warfare, running the same campaigns and battles over and over again with minor changes. Actively sacrificing countless lives to find the most effective solutions and the most efficient methods. I put forth that he treats the language with the same martial determinism. He has figured out the best words to use, and the sharpest way to wield them. He moves to convey his meaning quickly and precisely, and remind the listener that he's better than them. Shock and awe.

So when I know that there's a big scene coming up with Benedict in it, I try to think ahead (between sessions) to the sorts of things he's likely to say, and write them out. Then I run them through a few "algorithms", I guess:

1.) I crank up the volatility a bit. Figure out how might he say it with an air of menace or insult. The man does not hesitate to throw his weight around, and he does not suffer fools.

2.) Then I break out a thesaurus, and upgrade my native vocabulary with a few $5 words. Terminology that I can mostly follow the gist of when they came up in conversation, but which I'd be hard pressed to give a nuanced definition of without a reference.

3.) So armed, I pare it back down, so that there's not a lot of wasted words, nor time for people to interrupt. Benedict is lean, and so are his paragraphs. His sentences certainly aren't short or simple, but he doesn't pause to let you process, and he sure as hell isn't going to elaborate or repeat himself if you weren't quick enough to parse it the first time.

For example, in a recent session of my current A Horse Of Another Timbre campaign, Benedict and Random were talking, and Ben said:

"Your first duty as sovereign of Amber is to demonstrate the immutability of the realm, NOT the pursuit of your cornucopian fantasies of libertine socialist reform! Your overly egalitarian reign has fostered the appearance of caducity. This weakness will not be allowed to persist. You will end it, or I will end it, before our enemies can!"

Obviously, that leans most heavily on steps 1 (volatility) & 2 (vocabulary), and could arguably have benefited from a bit more of step 3 (brevity).   I delivered the lines as quickly and sternly as I could, though, and it made all the players flinch on Random's behalf. That's Benedict for you.

How To Do A Decent Corwin

 This was sort of buried in my recent campaign log post, and I thought it was worth breaking out and elaborating on.

Corwin is the hardest NPC to improv in Amber, by a long shot. Probably the hardest NPC I've ever had to portray in any game. Why? Because it's deucedly difficult to catch his voice, but anyone who's read even a single Amber novel will notice if you get your Corwin wrong.

We spend 5 novels inside Corwin's, so his personality is well-rendered. Corwin is sly and snarky, but also poetic. What's more, he has this amazing ability to make deep literary references off the cuff. I'm sure Zelazny cheated, by looking things up, and editing the hell out of every paragraph, so I cheat too.

Corwin is hard work. Before every session, if I know or suspect Corwin is likely to show up, I search quote sites on a variety of topics that seem relevant. The goal is to extract a couple of "clever" things that I can slip in and make them look like they were improvised. Shakespeare references are the gold standard for Corwin -- but you don't just literally quote ol' Billiam. You never just take an entire line of Shakespeare, or Tennyson, or Coleridge. You twist it around some way. You want it to sound familiar, and make the players nod along like they're in on the joke, or they at least found the easter egg regardless of whether they understand it or not. It's like Corwin really wants to show the other characters how smart he is, all the time, but he thinks the copyright police are going to burst in at any minute if every sentence isn't transformative. 

In the State of Denmark, there was the odor of decay...

So like I said, every session, if I plan on using Corwin, I brainstorm some topics that might be relevant to, or parallel of, the plots and themes and imagery of the game. Then I go looking for quotes that I can fold, spindle or mutilate into Corwinisms. I check quote sites on the internet, for sure, but I also check Zelazny's work. Sometimes there's already a Corwin line in the Amber novels that'll work perfect in this situation, which then feels genuine and immersive, like the way each of us have our favorite jokes and anecdotes we over-use.  And sometimes I do deep dives into Zelazny's non-Amber novels or his poetry. I have a dogeared copy of his "When Pussywillows Last In The Catyard Bloomed" poetry collection that I've riffed on or stolen from a few times. It's unlikely those will trigger the lightbulb over your players head the way that classical references will, but it definitely gets you thinking in Corwin/Zelazny's tone and style. 

We circulate,

the arm descends,

the diamond finger writes. 

That's three lines from a Zelazny poem, "LP Me Thee", which had on deck for when Corwin talked about how he felt like he had no control over his life and had to just sound the groove that had been carved for him. (With Corwin, there's always this tension of will he do the thing that loyalty and decency need him to do for the good of others, or will he choose this moment to seek personal goals at the expense of the universe. That makes him a good NPC, because him chafing at the need to be a hero and walking off in a huff means an opportunity is open for the PCs to step in and be better than him. But I digress...)

Having done a bit of this now, I feel like the "correct" amount of Corwinisms to drop into a session is two, or maybe three if he's really center stage for a long time. Less than two runs the risk of not feeling like Corwin, especially if the players don't catch the reference. More than three starts to come off as too gimmicky, and runs the risk of making Corwin less suave than he should be. Yeah, Corwin's a huge nerd, but he can also charm the seal-skins off a Rebman monarch. So I'll usually prep three or four especially Corwinian things to say, and just have them ready on deck with the plan to drop whichever pair fit into conversation the best. The ones I don't use can be stoppered and saved to decant some other evening.

Needless to say, running the game online makes it much easier to be Corwin. I've run a lot of Amber over the past two decades, but I feel like this campaign I've done my best Corwin. I can have my three or four prepped references and metaphors visible at the edge of my screen, so I only have to look left for a split second to harness the Corwin. 

But that also makes it tempting to go overboard, which is why I settled on prep 3 or 4,  and plan to just use the 2 that best fall into place organically. It seems to be working quite well, and it's not a particularly arduous burden on the GM to do before most sessions.

A Sneaky Little Thing With The Birds

 I should have put this in the Amber post last night, but forgot to mention it then. It's okay, that post was mostly about how great my players are, and in this post I'm going to beam some arrogant pride about a fun thing I did.

When I got to first scene for one of the players, I told him that he'd just gotten back to his office from a short vacation, and asked him to tell us what he'd done to relax on that trip. He said that his character, who does falconry and raises birds, had found a wild bird of a species he'd never seen before, a big hawk with a beak longer than any he'd seen before in a bird of its size. He then a few moments later showed the bird to a minor improvised NPC who shared his love of birds. I had that NPC gush over it, and reinforced his description by having them say that its beak was at least a full inch and a half larger than he'd ever seen on a bird of that size. I put just a little bit of extra emphasis on the words to make them stand out.

I did this, because I knew that I was leading in to a scene later where someone else was going to receive a messenger bird. In Amber, these are usually a semi-magical "bird of my desire" found via the use of the Pattern, they don't have to be a species you'd normally use for sending a message. 

So when a messenger bird arrives in another scene, for another player, with a note tied around its leg, I describe it as a large hawk, "with a beak a full inch and a half larger than you've ever seen on a bird of that size". Suddenly, the fun little detail that the player had improvised to describe what their character did on their vacation became invested with extra meaning and connection. Does this mean the message-sender was in the other character's world? That seemed clever, but too easy to get forgotten. Thankfully, I had another plot element ready in my toolbox.

Earlier, in a previous scene that neither of those characters were in, a different PC found a black unicorn, that was wounded and being chased by nasty cat-monsters. They saved it from the creepy cat-monsters.

When I got back around to the PC who introduced the bird again, I now narrated that one of these same cat-monsters had somehow managed to get into his building, and tried to get to his new bird. Thereby making the detail the player introduced somehow now tied directly to three characters' plots, one of them by way of a thing that happened before the 1st player improvised the bird detail. It's a little thing, but I'm really proud of myself for weaving this together like that. The birds are clearly linked, the cats are clearly linked, but how does the unicorn tie in?

The players picked up on it, despite the three characters having not yet met, and therefore not had a chance to compare notes. I'm looking forward to that connection in a future session. It feels like something straight out of a carefully structured novel, not stitched together in largely-improvised RPG sessions, so please allow me a moment to show-off and gloat about it. 

Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha! 

Thank you.

Deals With Devils

The theme of my RPG GMing in recent weeks has been "deals with the devil".

In my Savage Worlds / DramaSystem / Deadlands / Brimstone campaign, the PCs have been interacting a lot with a literal snakeoil salesman. Mr Melchizedek's Traveling Emporium of Miracle Cures, Mystic Artifacts, and Scratch-Built Devices. They met him at a crossroads, and the character wasn't on the screen for more than a minute before the players started making "Something Wicked This Way Comes" references, and trying to get him to take off his hat to check for horns. One of the PCs had an in-character reason to want to learn French, and voiced this in front of him. The next morning, when that PC woke up, he spoke perfect French, but no longer understood English.

In my Gumshoe / Night's Black Agents / Dracula Dossier campaign, one of the PCs has recently learned Goetia, the demon-summoning magic (from the Gumshoe Zoom supplement). The PCs did a mini-op to steel the Munich Manual of Demonology from the state library archives, so he can eventually do a deeper-dive into the demony fringes of the occult. Meanwhile, the PCs have also infiltrated one Vampire's web of conspiracies, and (going undercover) have begun taking missions from that Vampire against Edom and other Vampires. So there's a supernatural war going on, and the PCs are helping one particular Evil get one up on other Evils. They seemed a little too eager to get in bed with this particular darkness, so I've taken every opportunity to remind them that he's just the worst. First there was that whole blood sorcery ritual he involved them in with only the faintest nod towards concent. Then the first mission he gave them was a straight-up assassination. When the PCs asked about pay, he produced actual bars of Nazi gold... which, I should mention, he apparently magically summoned to the negotiation by butchering rats in front of the PCs. There's just nothing good about this situation... but, being PCs, they went ahead and did it anyway.

Man, I just realized that "Deals With Devils" would be a great name for an Everway character.

The PCs Have Sold Their Souls... Again

Quick update about my Night's Black Agent's campaign. I am a bastard GM. This weekend, I got two of the PCs to sell their souls to... well, not quite the devil, thankfully. They sold their character's souls to Graf Orlok (of the 1922 silent film Nosferatu). Still pretty bad. It was kind of surprising just how easily they went along with it. Player Characters do the darnedest things.

To be fair, there was an element of trickery on my part, in that the Renfield who brokered the deal over-acted and hammed it up so much they kind of took him to be a buffoon, and as a result the PCs under-estimated the entire situation. The cartoonish nature of the ritual's trappings made them lower their guard and play along when they should have been "nope"-ing the hell out of there.

I once had the opportunity to be within earshot of a real-life Masonic initiation ceremony when a friend who used to be a Mason took me out to a campground on a weekend when he thought there wasn't anything going on out there. I remember hearing the ruckus from across the park, and thinking: "Man, paranoid conspiracy theorists imagine that's some globe-dominating cabal of the Illuminati, but it's clearly just a bunch of goofy middle-aged white-guys LARPing in aprons. It would really suck if you drank the kool-aid, and psyched yourself up for selling your soul in exchange for the Higher Mysteries, only to get that silliness instead. What a let down that might be." And that germ of an idea stuck in my craw for years until I finally got a chance to use it in a game this weekend.

If we're hanging out some time, hit me up for the details. It's a pretty good yarn, but full of idiocy that would get taken out of context and offend or frighten someone if I threw it up on the interwebs.

(To explain the "...Again" in the title: about a year ago, one of the other PCs in this same campaign basically invited Mina Harker to attack her, and inadvertently gave the 100 year old English vampire bride the keys to her mind. They've been dealing with the fall-out from that ever since, but apparently didn't really learn from her mistakes.)

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. 

4 reasons to visit Whitspur

In a recent D&D session, the players arrived in a new city.  I didn't want to just give them a giant exposition dump about the city at the get-go. Exposition is dangerous -- if it goes on too long, the players will tune-out while the GM rambles. If it's kept short and sweet,  it tends to give the players a razor-sharp singularity of purpose that can strain verisimilitude or rail-road.  I wanted to provide the facts on the ground in a way that would give the players a personalized window into the setting, get them engaged, but not necessarily all on the same page from the first scene.

So I made four note cards. On one side they listed a nutshell reason why the PC would be coming to town, just buzz-word summation, for the players to choose from: "Glorious Adventure", "Conspiracy Theory", "Paycheck, then a Vacation", and "Family (Is Thicker Than Water)". Based on just those titles, the players split them up between themselves. Once everybody had chosen, they were allowed to read the other side quietly. The idea was to internalize some facts and goals to inform their roleplaying, rather than just blanketing the party with all the info at once. Everyone knew a different unique thing about the town, and had a slightly different reason for being there.

Here's what the other side of the cards said:

Family (Is Thicker Than Water)

I have family that lives in Whitspur. Cousin Edreth and Cousin Bjarne. They work at the Whitspur Mill and Grainery (like their fathers before them). I haven't seen them in a couple years, but we used to visit their family every year when we were kids.

On those visits, us kids would sneak out at night and climb the silver steps on the outside of the giant white stone tower. It must have been 200 feet tall, at least. For fun we'd knock on the silver door at the top, and sometimes something behind it would knock back at us. We used to make up horror stories about what was inside.

One particularly windy night, Edreth's best friend, Krisjof, fell off the steps and died. That was the last time my parents ever took me to Whitspur. 

Glorious Adventure

Whitespire is named for the white marble tower at it's center. They say it's a mile high, and no one has ever been inside the tower! The only door is at the top, made of indelible Electril (an alloy of Silver and Mithril) and magically warded.

There's a riddle carved into that door, known as “The Riddle of Blood”, that's never been solved. They say only the cleverest adventurer of them all could solve that riddle. Whoever does will find untold riches inside that tower.

Other rumors say The Riddle of Blood is just a euphemism for human sacrifice. There's a noble family of Paladins, the Elfenbeinspeers, who have guarded that tower for hundreds of years against all evil that has tried to release it with human blood.

Whichever story is true, I'm confident a great adventure awaits me in Whitespire.

 

Paycheck, then Vacation

The Duke owes me 20 gold, and 2 weeks vacation in a room with a view of the gleaming spire of Whitspur.

Last spring, I helped drive off some bandits from the township of Thegdress. Despite being far to the east, Thegdress owes fealty to the Elfenbeinspeer family of nobles, who summer in Whitspur.

This payment letter I've got here says that I can collect my reward from the Innkeep and Paymaster at Duke Elfenbeinspeer's family Inn in Whitspur. For my past service to Thegdress, I will receive 20 pieces of gold, a “Magic Lantern in a Bottle”, and 2 weeks room and board with the “full Elfenbeinspeer Elegance Experience”. It's gonna be a good two weeks.

Conspiracy Theory

Whitspur has a famous impenetrable tower made of white marble, with silver stairs running up the side of it. It's over 100 feet tall, and covered with runic sigils. I haven't seen the sigils yet, but I suspect they are runes from the ancient Authrek civilization.

The Authrek reigned in the Age of Madness, more than a thousand years ago. They were powerful necromancers who worshipped Orcus, with human sacrifice. Most Authrek ruins are deep beneath the earth, which is why most scholars don't realize Whitspur's climbing tower to be one. I suspect the foundations of that tower reach deep into the underworld. I believe this site is the epicenter, the great temple where the Authrek sacrificed millions of victims.

There's an order of Paladins that guard that tower, led by Duke Elfenbeinspeer, and I bet they know dire ancient secrets they aren't telling us.

It worked pretty well. All the players internalized their little bit of unique info, and only shared it via in-character dialogue when it came about organically. A few subplots kept them from just rushing straight to the tower -- there was some shady business going on at the Inn, and cousin Bjarne was in the stocks in town square -- and they rode into town in the middle of the night. When the first light of dawn showed them that the cursed tower was physically missing and the white stone blocks from it were being used in new construction at the edge of town, everyone felt the tension level rise real suddenly.

Exit Through Reprisal's Mouth

For X-mas, my girlfriend got me this cool little notebook called a Rocketbook. It uses a special erasable pen, and comes with an App. The App makes it easy to use your phone to Scan in whatever you draw on the page, and it runs Optical Character Recognition to scan all your writing into text. Then it automatically shoots that over to whatever inbox or dropbox or data cloud service you prefer. It's fast and easy, and totally should have resulted in me posting a bunch of stuff about my D&D games here the day I got back from the trip. Should have, but I procrastinate quite well.

The photo to the left is the scan of one dungeon map. I brought my Dwarven Forge stuff, so in play this map was a tactile 3-D thing that I built on the table as they explored. It was pretty cool. I had never before tried taking Dwarven Forge on the road, but in practice it was less of a hardship or hassle than I had imagined it would be to haul this stuff down to Portland.

The OCR function got most, but not all of my words:

##New Years Map 2018-19 ## Exit through Reprisal's Mouth? Blood Recepticals Blood stocks Iron Maiden B Box Barricade Portculis Butcher shop Log for Bridge DC 12 to cross 3 feet of water at the bottom of a 12 fost pit Stairs Down from Whitspur mu Rubble/cave-in all Digging 

For future reference, it seemed to capture words written horizontally, or sloping downward at 45 degrees. Words sloping upwards to the right did not scan.

Whitspur is the town that is mostly addicted to undead meals.  (Described in my previous post from a few days ago.) The blood recipticals are part of the mechanism that turns a little bit of blood into a full undead ghoul. Parts of the dungeon is an ancient temple of Orcus, and other parts are a ill-considered butcher shop set-up by the chef of the Inn upstairs. It's a long story.

Reprisal was this evil little Quasit that the PCs had defeated the previous time I ran D&D in Portland many months before. He was the demon-familiar of an NPC Sorceress, who used him for reconnaissance and to lead her kobold minions. The PCs murdered him half a dozen times, but due to ways of demons and familiars, the Sorceress could manifest him anew with a 15-minute ritual every day. No matter how often they killed him, she would send him out again to be her eyes, ears, and mouth. The PCs really responded to this, and tried to fool, manipulate or bargain with Reprisal several times, and then killed him again whenever his presence was inconvenient. When they solved the dilemma and completed the mission, the PCs thought for sure they'd never see Reprisal again.

So this session, when they arrived at the Inn they'd been traveling to, Reprisal was waiting for them. That was not good. After a bit of banter, they determined that he was no longer working for the old villainess, and was now a free agent roaming the countryside. Rather than murdering him some more and testing whether or not he could still reform infinitely, they decided to point him in the direction of someone else they thought could use some annoying. I think they were a little surprised and lot pleased when this worked and he took off to hassle some sad-sack NPCs  they'd left behind down the road a ways. Better them than us.

Not that you asked for it, but here's a little more detail on that: The NPCs were a group of incompetent orcish merchant-bandits that the PCs had scattered to the winds but been unable or unwilling to hunt down and destroy to the last. So it was feasible that Reprisal would harry them into a more permanent defeat or frustration that would make the Orcs stay away. Worst case scenario, if he joined forces with them, it was basically just combining two negligible minor threats, that might rolled together be a single speed-bump added to the adventure. This seemed mostly harmless at the time.

And then, roughly 48 hours and 2 marathon D&D sessions later, they're exploring this subterranean temple of Orcus, and they see this giant archway in the shape of a green demonic head. If you're familiar with some of the oldest Dwarven Forge sets, you may know the piece I used. I tell them it's the spitting image of Reprisal the Quasit, just blown up to epic proportions. This is in the room with the magical mechanisms that summon an infinite army of undead if you know the right ritual.  I tell them there's lots of Abyssal runes carved into the walls, and as they read them, it talks about how the army can be summoned up, belched forth from the mighty jowls of Orcus, before his triumphant return to conquer the world.

So now the players are left with a troubling mystery. Is it just that all Quasits are formed as miniature versions of the Great Demon Lord they serve? If so, that's nothing to worry about - there's just a minor link between Reprisal and their current Dungeon by way of Alignment. But there's a chance, at least a small one, that maybe this annoying little Demon they've been playing Cat-and-also-Cat with for the past few sessions is actually some sort of Avatar of a pretty serious big-bad with outsized ambitions. Maybe sending him to the local Orcs wasn't such a great idea after all. They all started debating what their next move needed to be.

And then, because I'm a dirty GM, I chose that moment to crank up the pressure. The City Guard unit that was tracking the PCs (it's a long story, but hinted at in that post I linked to earlier) started clumsily probing the dungeon and setting up an ambush. Not wanting to be identified and captured or exiled, the PCs felt they had best flee deeper into the dungeon, by walking through the Mouth of Reprisal.

7 recent sessions

I haven't been keeping up on the old gaming blog much. Since my last post, I have run 2 sessions of 7th Sea, played in 1 session of Ravnica-flavored D&D, and run 4 consecutive marathon sessions of D&D. Here's a bit about each:

7th Sea 2nd Ed: Thus far, the PCs have fought Ghouls, saved a woman from a lynch mob, investigated a supernatural murder scene, and navigated the social strata of a nobleman's court function. We left off last session with the PCs transporting a body on a boat in occupied territory during a storm, and just noticing that the Ghouls were sneaking aboard for a rematch. Next session should be exciting. (That session is scheduled for tomorrow,  but it's probably going to be cancelled on account of an ill player. It's a small game with just 3 PCs, so being even 1 PC down on a session has a pretty big impact.)

Ravnica: Using the new-ish D&D book that is based on the coolest world in Magic: The Gathering. I usually GM (and none of my frequent players would really be into Ravnica) but then a work-friend invited me to this, and I just couldn't turn it down. I was so certain I was going to play a Goblin Izzet Guild Mage, because, after all, this is likely the only time I will ever get to RP in Ravnica. Goblins as RPG characters can be hella fun. Then I get to the character creation session, and two other players also want to be Goblin Izzet Guild Mages. Three goblins of the same guild struggling to carve out sub-niches while stepping on each other's feats (pun intended) seemed less than ideal for everyone. Plan B then, is as follows Class: Druid / Background: Simic Combine Scientist / Race: Simic Hybrid. Essentially a fusion of elf and Blue Bottle Jellyfish (aka Portugese Man'o'war). A mutant who strives to mutate others. The first session was short because it came on the heels of character gen, but it was highly entertaining. The two goblins were hamming it up, so I get to enjoy over-the-top Izzet antics while embodying an entirely different style of mad scientist myself. I think it's going to be good.

D&D Marathon: Every time I make it down to Portland to see my old high-school buddies, we pack the evenings with copious amounts of alcohol and D&D. We introduced a new player this time as another old friend who's usually absent was able to join us for the festivities, and he played a Minotaur Bard. (We needed more cowbell.)  I had great success with a complex no-easy-answers storyline the last time we'd been in Portland, so I went for similar damned-if-you-do-or-don't material this time, too. The first encounter was a group of traveling merchants who just so happened to be orcs. The PCs of course went the full murder-hobo route, for which I made them feel guilty even though it was totally what I expected them to do. I'm kind of a bastard GM sometimes. The rest of the story had to do with a city where everyone was addicted to the newest menu at the largest inn. The players did some investigating, and then broke into the dungeon beneath the inn, accidentally alerting the unit of the city watch that keeps that dungeon sealed up tight. The ruins below has an evil altar that supplies a never-ending supply of undead if you know the correct dark ritual. Yep, the whole town is addicted to delicious ghoul flesh. (I cast "Purify Food and Drink". It should be safe to eat now.) At the end of the session, the PCs were sort-of-trapped. They're behind a secret door that the guard unit doesn't know about, but the guards do know they broke in, and could potentially reveal the gruesome secret to the town. So they need to either find another exit, or else fight their way through a couple dozen policemen on their way out. I don't get down to Portland often, so they've got some time to think up a good plan.

Night's Black Agents: Ideally, this game would meet once a month, but it's a tricky group to schedule sometimes. We're all frequently busy elsewhere. Hopefully in February I'll have another session to tell you about.

Middenheim NPC Cards

SPOILER ALERT: This blog post reveals plot points and NPC stats for The Enemy Within for Warhammer FRP 3rd Edition. If you're a warhammer player and haven't already completed Book 2 of that adventure, you should probably skip this post.

This weekend my play group reunites for some more Warhammery goodness after about a month-long break. We're on Book Three of The (New) Enemy Within, which takes place in Altdorf. Since we've left Book Two behind, I can safely post a few GM's aids I put together for the Middenheim section.

The rest of this post is mostly NPC stat cards for plot-relevant characters (plus a few other related bits). The adventure really should have come with cards for all of these characters, but (probably for budgetary concerns) didn't. It's especially annoying because the index of monster and NPC stats at the back of the adventure doesn't include them either. For reasons that completely boggle my mind, it only includes stats for NPCs from Books 1, 3, and 4. As a matter of fact, many of the important NPCs in Book 2 lack stats entirely, or list only the difficulty to sway them with a Fellowship check and leave any further interactions up to GM improvisation.

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NPCs for "The Wizard's Task" in Book 2
Let's start with a gaggle of Ulrichian Priests:

 Acting High Priest Weiss is the guy you really want to talk to.  He appears on pages 89-90 of The Enemy Within, but doesn't really have stats there other than those specifically pertaining to the social rolls needed to sway him to the cause. I filled in the rest of his stats as befits a career official in one of the most macho cults in the empire. The art for the card I screenshot-ed out of some fan supplement for Warhammer Fantasy Battles, but I'm afraid I've lost track of where that came from or who the artist was. My bad.

 Unfortunately, getting to Weiss is complicated because he has a number of gatekeepers in the way.  Priest Frost is the more capable and sympathetic of the two. I based his stats on the generic Priest card, which I then upgraded a little to represent that he was an up-and -coming Priest before his tragic accident (the lingering effects of which I loosely based on the rules on page 14 of Liber Carnagia).

Priest Albrecht, the first gatekeeper the PCs encounter, is not sympathetic at all. He is likely to be played as either annoying or farcical, depending on the GM's whim. Correspondingly, he's actually a down-graded version of the NPC Priest card. I never saved nor used the art for the other side of the card, as it was far too manly and competent looking for the character as written up. Instead, when I went to introduce the character to the players I used a Paizo Gamemastery "Face Card" that showed some old fat guy in robes.

To even get an audience with the Priests the PCs first have to meet up with Professor Robertus von Oppenheim. There's a good chance the players will haul him off on a wolf-hunt, so he needed stats and again the adventure doesn't really provide any. I considered giving him some dreadful "2" ratings in attributes, but was worried it would make him too likely to die and stall out the plot. I decided instead to simply make his stats very average with modifiers depending on his access to reference materials. This resulted in the PCs carrying around an amusingly large stack of books to help him out, so I consider it a success. Again I used a card from Paizo as a visual aide for the players. I find their face cards extremely helpful as reminders, especially when running a complicated scenario with as large a cast as The Enemy Within.

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NPCs for "The Noble's Task" in Book 2

 One of the other major plotlines going on in the adventure involves the trial of Graf von Aschenbeck, so I made cards for him and his daughter. His cards (and most of what follows) are devoid of artwork, because by this point I'd decided to just use Paizo cards for all my remaining major NPCs. I made the Graf's stats deliberately underwhelming since he's effectively just filling the "damsel in distress" role. The rules for Noble Rank presented here aren't technically correct (or at least are a liberal interpretation), but they're close enough for NPCs and somewhat more elegant than what's in the Lure Of Power rulebook. The other special ability is of functionally identical to having socketed one of the least practical Talent cards in the game.

Chances are I'm mistakenly applying the Freiin title to Margarete, I don't claim to be an expert on the noble titles of Germany, the Holy Roman Empire, or the Warhammer Empire. Sadly she's a relatively minor bit of set-dressing / clue-giver / damsel-in-distress / red herring, without much depth. In retrospect I wish the scenario did more with her.

The red image here is my interpretation of the von Aschenbeck crest as described in the book, useful for marking the Graf's properties and businesses, and for marking the Bravos when they first show up.

The lives of those poor nobles above are being ruined by this fellow. He's the weaker of the two villains of Book 2. He's also rather less dangerous than the thugs and mutants he can throw at the PCs if he realizes they're on to him. The adventure is heavily stilted towards him escaping in the night, and I imagine if the PCs got their hands on him it would be a little anticlimactic, as he's a pushover in combat. Good thing there's bigger fish to fry and a Book 3.

Ilse the con-woman is a minor criminal caught up in Markheim's scheme. I only used one of her prepared scenes, personally, as my players were pointed straight at Markheim and the Bravos without her testimony. I was a little torn about whether or not to include the bit where the villain tries to tidy up loose ends. The Bright Wizard in my party could have used the spotlight moment, but stopping the arson/murder would have taken exactly one easy die roll (he has the spell that controls fires and renders them harmless) and thus had zero dramatic tension. For the record, one of the Paizo decks has a perfect Ilse card, but I never used it because it was only going to draw attention to her before the PCs learned she was a baddie. I wanted her to feel improvised and unimportant until the PCs had reason to suspect her, which is probably a dirty meta GM trick on my part. So sue me.
 
The Aschenbeck Bravos are the most legitimate set of goons that Markheim can send after the PCs.
 
The adventure says to use the generic Soldier card with a couple modifications based on equipment and (for the officers) skills trained. I didn't want to have to consult both a card and a page in a book at the same time to run the scene, so I made cards out of them. For all the cultists and mutants I could basically just use pre-existing cards (though I did stack the "Monstrous" Upgrade sheet under the especially leggy Mutant boss), so I didn't feel the need to make cards for them.

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NPC for "The Captain's Task" in Book 2

Gregor Helstrum is a potential ally for the PCs, and an escape hatch / safety valve for the GM if things are getting out of hand with Adele or any of the other plots. But again, like so many of the NPCs in Book 2, he has no stats. That's fine if you plan to use him as a Deus Ex Machina, but I wanted to make sure the PCs could fight at his side should that be their intent. (In the end I didn't really need stats for him because the PCs at my table are pretty badass in a fight and also did a good job of following the clues. They put down two entire cults that the adventure script didn't really expect them to get anywhere near, so I was quite proud of them. But, I digress...) His "bad eye" isn't in the book at all. It corresponds to the eyepatch of the Paizo Face Card I used for him, and I think was based on a Critical or Serious wound card, but I don't remember whether I chose the image first and picked a wound to match or dealt a random serious wound and found a face to match it. Either way, GMs who want a less grizzled version of the character can freely ignore it. It's not present in the official picture of Hellstrum on pg 79 of the adventure, but that page has serious spoilers on it so I didn't want to flash it at my players anyway so a Paizo card was in order. Exactly which 2 insanities you attach to his NPC card will greatly color the character. (The same can be said for Adele Ketzenblum, for that matter.) I played Gregor as very shell-shocked and burned-out in the one scene I used him, which probably contributed to the PCs deciding not to ask him for additional help.

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In closing:
I think that's all the official Enemy Within Middenheim NPCs that I made cards for. Hopefully they'll save some other GM a bit of work. I clearly had too much time on my hands.


I also made this Talent-sized card based on the Middenlander rules from Hero's Call. In practice it was rarely relevant or needed. I present it as a possible upgrade should the GM desire making the fights a little tougher, or if you really want to emphasize the differences between the various Imperial Provinces.

Beyond the above, I made stat cards for a few more NPCs that weren't in the adventure as written, introduced to give my PCs some spotlight moments and interesting subplots, or to build out the city into something a little more sandboxy and show more of the greater Storm of Chaos metaplot. That's probably worth a whole additional post some other time, as there's a lot of backstory to convey if I want them to be useful to other GMs.

The Enemy Within - Campaign Log, Part 3, (Session 3) (Day 2, and bits of Day 5)

SPOILER ALERT: This is the campaign log for the new The Enemy Within for Warhammer 3rd Ed. These events are from our third session. For the most part they are events from the 2nd in-character day of the campaign, except for one conversation that normally wouldn't happen till at least Day 5 of the scenario as written. By the end of Day 3, my PCs had actually done parts of Day 9 as well, though I may not get to that in this post. Proceed with caution if you think you're ever going to play this campaign, as events discussed here include MAJOR SPOILERS.

This could easily be a long post. I was really on-fire this session, and packed a lot in. The players were very much on their game as well, and gathered some info I'd planned to hold back till much later. We ran over our time slot by at least an hour. In fact, we hit so much in session 3 that I'm only going to cover half of this session in this post, for time and space reasons.

PC List/Reminder:

• Burgolt the Nobleman Pistolier
• Hrulgar the Dwarven Runesmith
• Ninewise the Initiate of Ranald (Priestess of the God of Thieves)
• Lina the Bright Wizard (Pyromancer)

Early Evening of Day 2: When last we saw our heroes, they had just saved the family of a merchant, Adolphus Starke, from arson (and probably attempted murder).  The PCs killed one arsonist, captured the other and delivered him to the city watch, and did it all in very direct defiance of a man named Bischoff. Bischoff is the main enforcer for The Black Cowl. The Cowl's organization (using the Criminal Empire nemesis card) was dealt it's first set-backs by these developments.

The PCs spent a little time talking with Starke. His boat was almost entirely ruined by the fire (the fire got to the 8th space of a 9-space progress tracker that would have ended in 3 deaths and a sinking) and will need major repairs before it can leave town. The whole point of him being here was that he's awaiting a delivery of exotic Cathayan silks to arrive, a shipment that is now overdue. He's in very dire straits, and deeply ashamed at his own responsibility for what has happened.

A few days ago, upon arriving in Averheim, he was approached on the docks by a gang of racketeers and thugs. They demanded protection money, by Starke refused. Not on principle, nor even because of any amount of personal courage. He refusal was simply because he had a previously standing arrangement with another racketeer. A man named Klaus Keller had been accepting Starke's protection moneys for years, and Starke had credit to spare. "Go talk to Keller," he told them. Klaus Keller was, of course, the very same racketeer whose body the PCs had found in an alleyway the previous day.  Bad news for the merchant.

Our heroes are heroes indeed, though, and they weren't about to leave Starke and his family vulnerable on the docks where Bischoff and crew might do them in. Burgolt offered that they could use one of the guest rooms in one of his family's smaller properties for a few nights. This was a very generous offer from a nobleman of Burgolt's standing, and Starke took him up on it at once. 

The party heads to Burgolt's house, has some dinner and debates their next options. The rain that started earlier in the day (while they were trudging about the riverbanks looking for Jurgen's hat) continues and gets quite nasty, so they decide to stay the night in the property. There's not actually enough beds since Starke's family is there as well. The dwarf is short enough to sleep on the fainting couch in the foyer, so they make do.

Off-Camera Sidebar: The decision to stay at Burgolt's to avoid the worst of the rain causes the players to miss on several events, but none of them were vital for PCs to attend, and most could be learned later from witnesses (or bodies). Those who have read the adventure will know most of them, but I had also prepared a few special events as reactions to the confrontation with Bischoff.

Chromatahaus, the multi-Order dorm where Lina usually bunks, is surveilled by two of Bischoff's thugs. More on that below, and again in Session 4.

Meanwhile, Bischoff and Gerd Knakk (the docker foreman that Ninewise accidentally caused to join the Cowl's group) organize a mob of Fish to go to the guard house and demand the release of the "wrongly accused" arsonist. More on that in a future post, as well. 

Morning of Day 3

Breakfast is quite nice. Burgolt's servants whip up something special… but after the meal,  the cook and butler take him aside. They let the young nobleman know that with all these extra houseguests, the pantry is all but depleted. Burgolt dips into his piggy bank and forks over several coins to restock the larder.

The PCs have a variety of tasks they wish to accomplish this morning, so they scatter a bit. Burgolt goes to his father's house to collect his daily allowance (he gets a stipend of 3 silver per day from his father's money-keeper). Ninewyse goes shopping for a detailed map of Averheim, as her previous map had spent rather a lot of time in the river yesterday. Lina kills time in some way that completely escapes me now, but does not involve going to the dorm at all.

Hrulgar heads to a meeting at the Averburg Palace. He'd sent word at some point the previous day (a message carried by a soldier from the arson arrest, if I'm not mistaken) requesting an audience with his old war-buddy Marcus Baerfaust. Since the poor dwarf had to sit around waiting for other people the previous session, I was all too happy to give him some spotlight time.

Baerfaust and Hrulgar Sidebar: Marcus Baerfaust is the Captain of the Averheim Garrison. He is of low birth, but was granted a very minor title (Edler) for his command of the troops at the Third Battle of Blackfire Pass. His immediate superior (the Elector, Marius "The Mad Count" von Leitdorf) died in the battle, and Baerfaust managed to keep the lines from collapsing when it happened.

Hrulgar was also present at that battle. The dwarf was actually part of the impromptu militia unit that was emergency deployed to the center of the fighting in an attempt to reinforced the Mad Count's overwhelmed guard. Hrulgar took a bad head-wound in that fight, and passed out from it. He remembers awakening in the Shallyan hospice, his wounds being tended by a charitable noblewoman (Gravin Clothilde von Alptraum).

Those details are all content generated by the player's responses to the "Battle-Scarred" background card for The Enemy Within. As part of character generation, the player is given the opportunity to color Baerfaust as hero, coward, traitor, etc. Our player decided that (from his perspective, at least) Baerfaust was a hero and capable commander who did what he could to save the Count, but was unable to do so because of the harrowing realities of battle. He also indicated they were friends and comrades, which was a particularly potent decision.

These questions and answers are also where Ingo Baerfaust (see my previous posts, and below) came from.

Captain Marcus Baerfaust is very busy and somewhat stressed, but he's able to find a little time this morning for his old friend. When Hrulgar arrives, Baerfaust sets aside his paperwork and pours them a few drinks. The Dwarf fills in the Captain about the arson on the docks, and the new crime boss. Baerfaust listens intently, but says that his hands are largely tied. His authority as commander of the garrison comes directly from the Elector of Averland, but in the two years since Marius von Leitdorf died in battle, that position has lain vacant. Money is tight, and the squabbling nobles and burghers rarely back his plays.  What if this new crime boss turns out to work for some nobleman, who demands his servant be set free? Baerfaust's political situation is precarious.

Criminal Background Sidebar: One of the PCs, Ninewise the Initiate of Ranald, was created with the Criminal Background card. Her answers to the questions on that card made it clear that she was arrested by Captain Baerfaust himself within the past few years. The Captain was forced to acquit and release her due to sworn testimony of a businessman named Friederich Grosz who honestly believed Ninewise to be innocent of the crime (though in truth she wasn't). Ninewise is a bit of a local hero amongst the underclass because of it, as acquittals by any means short of trial by combat are extremely rare in the Empire. Being unable to successfully prosecute a criminal of relatively low stature definitely undermined his position within the city. That said criminal is, perhaps unknown to him, a friend of a friend, just makes it more complicated.

Talk turns to Ingo, who is Captain Baerfaust's nephew, gone missing these past two weeks. Hrulgar was friends with Ingo, and noticed his absence almost immediately because they'd had plans for dinner or some such the day after he was last seen. He'd checked with a few other war buddies since then, and no one knew where Ingo had gone. The Captain doesn't know either, but suspects foul play.

Ingo Baerfaust had been aware of the rumblings about the changes in the criminal landscape of the wharf district. He was doing some "unofficial" investigating around the docks, and had promised to report his findings back to his uncle. On the night he was last seen, he'd left a note for Marcus in the Captain's office. Unfortunately, Ingo's handwriting was notoriously bad, he'd barely learned his letters within the past few years. The note was almost entirely illegible, except for one word that seemed to be written with great deliberation. "Jade". It meant nothing to the Captain. He planned to harangue his nephew about it the next day, but had not seen him since.

Hrulgar asks if the note is available for him to look at. Alas as parchment is expensive, and Marcus thought for certain he would see his nephew again soon, the letter was thrown in the palimpsest bin.

Palimpsest Sidebar: Palimpsest is the common middle-ages practice of bleaching the ink off of a parchment so that it can be used again. The document had no doubt already been recycled before its was ever known that it might well contain Ingo's last words.

At that moment, there is a rap at the door and a female Lieutenant in full-plate enters. "The powder count, sir," she says, handing a document to the Captain.  Baerfaust frowns at whatever it says, but doesn't go into the details. It's called foreshadowing.

The woman is introduced as Arta Schaeffer, and she is the Captain's right hand this past year or more. Marcus introduces Hrulgar, and when he does so, Arta's eyes light up. "You're Skullsplitter!? THE Skullsplitter?" she asks. "It's a pleasure to finally meet you! The Captain has told me all about you, and you were truly a sight to behold at Blackfire…"

Hrulgar corrects her, his last name is Steelheart, not Skullsplitter, but she won't hear it. There's discussion for a bit about how Hrulgar's performance at Third Blackfire was so impressive. Hrulgar has barely any memory of it, and modestly replies that "Skullsplit" would be more accurate given that he got near as well as he gave.

Marcus Baerfaust intervenes now to reign in Arta's fanboyish enthusiasm. When Skullsplitter - I mean Steelheart - was convalescing after the battle, he was clearly embarrassed whenever the troops called him by that name, so Baerfaust had ordered them not to do so. Arta's just really pleased to meet him. The scene gets intentionally awkward (the GM is up to something), and Baerfaust stops Arta short. Pulling rank and being quite curt with her, the Captain insists Lt Schaeffer has more important duties than to attempt to seduce her commanding officer's friends.  (Yep, the GM is definitely up to no good here. I wonder what it means.)

And with that, the blushing Dwarf decides it's time to go. He promises to report back to Baerfaust anything important he learns about Ingo or the Black Cowl.

Wow, I really packed a lot into this session. This was just the tip of the iceberg. There's still another 3 or 4 really good scenes left to describe, including my favorite of the campaign so far, but I've run out of writing time today.  I'll have to finish this session report in another post later this week.

TROOPS: Cloud City

Last night I ran a one-shot based on the cool old Star Wars fan-film TROOPS. This was the second time I'd run such a game, but the last time was way back in February of 2009.  For last night's reprisal, I moved the game from Tatooine to Bespin. Filmed live on the platforms of Cloud City.

Here's a link to my post about the old game.  For those unfamiliar with the general TROOPS concept, here's a link to the very entertaining video that inspired this madness.

We used the classic d6 system, with the PCs assembled quick and easy via the game's template system. The PCs were mostly Stormtroopers, plus one contract Bounty Hunter (an Ewok of all things) and a probe droid operating as embedded journalist / camera crew. Surprisingly likeable PC Stormtroopers, as in the video, with completely dysfunctional shady NPCs. "All NPCs are Guilty - Otherwise they wouldn't be NPCs." A few of the PCs were reprised from the other scenario two years ago, but any who got promoted had since been busted back down to no more than junior officer status so it would still feel like TROOPS.

This time I ran them through the background events of the last third of Empire Strikes Back, explaining why the 'Falcon's hyperdrive is deactivated, how C-3PO got shot, and what kind of trouble you can get into when someone's severed hand lands on your back porch.

At the start of every scene, I handed a random PC a short written script. This was their narrative monologue to the camera, used to set up and lead in to the next scene, and establish background details. For example, to start the session, I had someone read:

We’ve just been recently stationed out here on Cloud City in the Bespin system. I know, you’ve probably never heard of it, neither had I. It’s one of those fly-by-night corporate towns, mining Tibana gas out of the sky. Not sure you can even call that mining, it’s more like sucking. Can I say that on TV?

The local governor is kinda shady, 'cause the place is almost small enough to not be noticed. He’s not even enrolled in the Mining Guilds, and he owes a lot of back taxes and gambling debts. Anyhow, the citizenry aren’t too pleased with the way he’s running things, and there’s been some disturbances as a result.

That’s why we’ve been called in, to bolster the local police force.

Sometimes that ruffles a few feathers with the local big whigs, of course, but in the end everyone agrees quality of life improves once the Empire gets involved, and that’s what really matters. 

"Cloud City, Bespin, 7:00 am local-time" scrolled across the screen. Then the camerabot turned to another one of the TROOPS, who said (read from the telepromter, no doubt) this:

We’re responding to a call from the local Port Authority, seems they need a bit of help here.

There’s a ship that came in for repairs, had a malfunctioning hyperdrive or something, Put it in to dry dock at the local shop, and there’s some sort of animal problem. I’m guessing the owner left his pet on board, and forgot to tell the mechanics.

Normally, this sort of thing would be handled by Animal Control, not by the Emperor’s Finest, but apparently these here Gas Giant planets don’t have much in the way of wild life, so this town doesn’t actually have an Animal Control Guildhouse.

Looks like that fellow over there works here, we’ll start by asking him if he knows what kind of animal we’re looking for.

So the PCs enter the shipyard, where a pissed-off mechanic is bandaging his hand. He explains the owner of the ship has a real menagerie on board, some big fuzzy thing, a bunch of droids, and whatever it was that bit him. For a couple minutes I managed to imply it was Chewbacca that bit him, which was a total miscommunication red-herring. The players were wondering what the guy did that would provoke Chewie to attack, but had to proceed as the arrogant Imperial pigs they were.

The Imperials head over to the ship to check it out. One officer leans into the open hyperdrive port and bangs on it to scare out whatever the animal is, and ends up with a Mynock wrapped around his helmet.  There's a couple more in the engine block, and they start flying around.

It wasn't much a challenge for armed and armored troopers, but I broke out the Star Wars miniatures anyway and dipped our toes in a combat system none of us had used in a long time.. The first two Mynocks went down in the very first round, but the third one was surprisingly resilient. No one could get a decent damage roll on it, and a missed shot with a "1" on the wild-die left the NPC lying dead on the floor.

After the Mynocks were dealt with, the PCs put a "boot" on the Falcon's hyperdrive, broke one of it's tail-lights to justify a few extra tickets, and searched the holds. They confiscated the boxes full of money that Han was going to use to pay off Jabba. Aside from a little trouble with that little zappy ball that Luke used to practice his sabre work in the first film, the scene wrapped up without incident, and without the PCs ever meeting the main characters from the movies.

Next scene. One of the PCs reads:

This part of town has a bit of a reputation as a “red diode district”, if you know what I mean. That is to say, prostitution, mostly droid-related.

We’re just gonna do a little sweep through the neighborhood, mostly chase off the hookers and johns. Let them know the Empire is here now, and that sort of thing won’t be tolerated anymore.  They shouldn’t be out on the streets lookin’ for droid love, that’s what the Twi’Lek Dancing Girls Guild is for.

Of course, if any of the pimps, hos, or sexbots get uppity with us, we are authorized to use whatever force we deem necessary. That’ll send a message, loud and clear. To protect the decency and social welfare of the city, of course.

This lead to a small scene with an "obvious prostitute", I said as I placed a minature R4 astromech unit on the tabletop. When they eventually blasted the sexbot, it responded in the typical R2D2 method, rolling back, head spinning, and dozens of tools and attachments popping out of all the hidden compartments. So now the corridor is littered with vibrators. They question the other nearby bot,  PI-MP, who claims to know nothing about "that slutty little bitchbot".

"You want me to backhand her for you officer? I'm fluent in over 6 million forms of bitchslapping."

Surprisingly, PI-MP doesn't get blasted. He managed to convince them that he was innocent. Some random protocol droid came walking in at that moment, and PI-MP pointed at him. "Look, that's gotta be the pimp you're looking for officers. Look how much bling-bling he's made out of." So they let PI-MP go, and blasted poor C-3PO who just happened to wander in at the wrong time.

Meanwhile, the dirty little Ewok bounty hunter wasn't at all interested in cleaning up the prostitution of Cloud City. Since we were in a bad part of town, he went looking for other entertainment. Before long, he was involved in some illicit gambling with a bunch of Ugnaughts and Jawas, playing some high-stakes game called "Utini!" As their game wrapped up, his fellow little people said they were off to some big protest that was going on.

Which lead right into this scene:

There’s a lot of labor disputes going on lately. Not being affiliated with the Miner’s Guild, the local government is ill-equipped  to deal with it.

An informant told us that there was going to be some sort of protest going on, an attempt by the workers from “Deck Twelve an’ a Half” to unionize or something.

On the one hand you want everybody to be able to speak their mind and improve their lot in life, but at the same time... well, we all know that protests are often just the first step towards Rebellion and lawlessness. We’re gonna see if we can’t get them to disperse, kinda nip that in the bud before it gets too troublesome.

Ah, jeesh, look at all those little guys. They’re kinda cute. Hope we don’t have to disintegrate them. Set for stun.

I got out an actual map for this one, and set up a big cluster of ugnaughts, ewoks, jawas, and various short droids in a picket line. They were complaining about the working conditions on deck 12 & 1/2. Poor lighting, no safety railings, and the terribly low cielings. "First off, who are they trying to kid here? We all know deck '12 & 1/2' is really unlucky number 13. Secondly, why the low ceilings? Are they trying to say we're short? Just because we're not 2-meter tall freaks doesn't mean that some of us don't get claustrophobic! And what did Baron Calrissian do to 'improve' our lot in life? Longer coffee breaks and freakin' door to the brain of Moff Malkovich. I don't think even Moff Malkovich wants to see what happens inside Moff Malkovich's brain. I sure don't!"

Lucasfilm purists might complain about my bizarre choice to work in numerous references in this scene to Being John Malkovich. I know, it was silly, and doesn't quite fit in the Star Wars universe - not even the Expanded Universe. Just like the cameo by Tom Servo in the background in the TROOPS film, so I feel justified. And lets be honest, it's not like you would have been any happier if my references were to Willow or Howard the Duck, so cut me some slack.

The PC Imperial Officer starts making rolls of his command skill, threatening to blow up the protesters if they don't disperse. This gets rid of most of the crowd, except one little power droid who stands his ground shouting "Gonk no, we won't Go(nk)!" Time for some good old fashioned police brutality. The PC AT-ST Pilot chose to have her walker kick the Gonk Droid off the platform. She failed, with a dismal low roll and a spectacular "1" on the wild die.

So now the AT-ST scout walker is lying face-down on the terrain (a parked Imperial Shuttle on the platform, as a matter of fact) and the badly damaged Gonk droid is ominously whistling as if it's going to blow.

It ain't easy justifying this much SteamPork.

That's not nearly dire enough, so I chose that moment to have some of the other protesters return. Including several ugnaughts in a mecha war machine. I put my "Uggernaught" miniature on the table. I've been itching to use this mini in a scenario ever since I opened it in a booster of Star Wars minis a couple years back. Look at that thing, ain't it just ridiculously cool? Usually hard to justify, but this was no doubt the perfect game for it.

So now the PCs are pinned between the fire of a crazy ugnaught death machine, and the whistling overload of a malfunctioning power droid. Now that's drama!  :)

While most of the squad was pinned down, one of the Troopers did manage to use the cover of the buildings on the map to advance without incident and take out the rebel ugnaughts by means of a well-placed grenade. The whistling Gonk droid on the other hand was beyond their ability to multi-task, so most of the PCs took wounds from shrapnel damage that penalized their rolls the rest of the night.

The PC Imperial Officer went to fetch a change of uniforms, and came back with a new mission (and thus another of my short scripted monologues).

We’re responding to a possible domestic dispute. Neighbors called, said there’s a lot of yelling and the sounds of dishes shattering coming from one of the homes here.

I don’t expect too much trouble, though, as you can tell we’re in a nice part of the city. They’ve got a beautiful view of the bottomless shaft, there. That’s a doozy.

 If need be, we can take one or both of them down to the Detention Center till they sober up or calm down.

Dispatch says its the address is the home of one of the local city administrators, so chances are they’ll quickly calm down just to keep up appearances. These local government types are kinda slippery like that.

As it turned out, the home was that of Mr. and Mrs. Lobot. For those of you who don't recognize the name, Lobot was Lando's right-hand man on Cloud City. The bald guy with the computer sticking out of his head who follows Calrissian around, wordlessly directing lesser minions. He holds a position of importance, but he's very formal and not a particularly warm or communicative individual. So, it's no surprise that his marriage is a bit strained. Probably works late nights and weird back-room business deals with his shady boss in gambling dens and strip clubs. Who's to blame Mrs Lobot if she suspects her husband is secretly some sort of mob boss?

Lots of hysterics follow. The place has been trashed. She's in tears, crying and screaming, and he's standing there stoicly telling the troopers that everything is under control. Amidst all her sobbing, they eventually figure out she keeps repeating "it's on the balcony!" There the PCs find a severed hand. Mr Lobot swears he had nothing to do with it, that it must have fallen from somewhere further up the bottomless shaft. Mrs Lobot, however, is certain it's some sort of creepy mob signal, like waking up with the head of a Bantha in your bed.

While they're all out on the balcony trying to sort things out, the rest of a body falls past them. They look upward, and see this narrow promontory extending out to the middle of the chasm. There's someone else up on the damn thing, too, some black-clad Emo kid. Cut to narration:

We’re heading up a few levels, there’s a crisis situation, looks like a Jumper. It’ll be our job to talk him down.

We don’t get these suicide calls too often since most citizens of the Empire are so darned happy. You sure do see it more often out here on the Rim, though.

I remember a couple of planets back, there were these Jumpers just hanging from the ceiling! Hanging there. Wouldn’t come down. Stayed up there so long, they caught their death of cold.

Man, that place sure was chilly. C - O - L - D! You can ask my wife. On a frosty night,
laying in bed, I still say to her “Well at least I’m not back on Hoth!” I’ll remember that place for the rest of my life.

Hey, if you forgave a Being John Malkovich reference, I figure you won't mind me stealing a Bastogne line from Band of Brothers.

In the movie, after Luke throws himself off the ledge, Vader just heads back to his Star Destroyer like its no big deal. That of course is not what the PCs find when they get up there, though. No, I have a "fine tradition" in my TROOPS games that every session must end with a Drunken Darth. So Vader's out on the far end of this narrow ledge over a huge pit, all sad and depressed because his son just jumped. The Ewok bounty hunter walks out there to talk him back in. They end up sharing a few drinks - all those buttons and switches on Vader's chest plate are controls to his built-in minibar.

"I'm not a bad father, am I? I know I wasn't ever really there for him, but lots of people have workaholic absentee dads, right? That's no reason to shout 'you're not my father' and jump off a cliff, is it? I mean, it's not like he didn't know I exist, I left him with family after all. That's better than I had. You know what my mom told me? She said my daddy was a magic space virus!! You know what that does to a kid? Teaches him his mommies a damn liar, that's what it does! So at least I didn't lie to him like that..."

The Ewok tries talking him back in off the ledge, but without a lot of luck. In retrospect, I should have called for some sort of social roll to give him a shot at success, but it was a surprisingly complex scene and I was pretty deep in character, so I dropped the ball there. Not that I wasn't pleased with how it all turned out.

He's out there, waxing suicidally, and would rather down a six pack and a few bowls right here at the cliffs of doom than go back to work or blow off steam at some nightclub.

Someone suggests that the one female Stormtrooper in the squad try to coax him back to safety. She's rather reluctant, because the other time we played this, he made her be his date to his High School Reunion... and let's face it, Darth Vader is kind of a dick. Speaking of which, it's not long before she's ordered out on the ledge, pole-dancing on that vertical pipe or antennae or whatever the point of those weird bits on the bridge to nowhere are. This took a fairly difficult climbing & jumping roll, especially in the armor, but as it turns out she was up to the task.

As Vader is talking about what a great kid he had before he threw himself off the ledge, the PC Imperial Officer steps forward with their evidence baggie from the previous scene. "This son of yours, was this his by any chance?" he asks, handing Vader the severed hand.

I tell everyone that this is too much for Vader, and he feints. Everyone should roll initiative. I'll roll 3d6 for when Vader falls, only people who roll higher than him can act before he falls off the ledge. The first PC to act is also the only one who's too far away to do anything more than shout. The next two PCs try Brawling rolls to grab Vader, but fail and have to make a Dex check to keep from falling with him. The Ewok bounty hunter attaches a grappling hook to Vader, but there's some doubts as to how well a lone Ewok can belay the descent of a rather tall human in battle armor carrying a well-stocked wet bar. Yet another PC rushes out on to narrow promontory to try and grab him, and they also fail, this time with a "1" on the wild die.

Time for some final narration, this time improvised, by the GM:

There's a scraping metallic sound, and the camerabot pivots to see several bolts of the superstructure pop as the narrow platform buckles under the weight. With a sudden lurch, the entire promontory breaks loose and tumbles far down out of sight, taking Vader and the whole squad with it.
"TROOPS was filmed live in Cloud City." The theme music plays as the credits roll. "Bad Droids, Bad Droids, whatchyagonna do?"...

So I guess technically that's a TPK, but I've never seen a group quite that unanimously happy with a Total Party Kill before. TPKs don't usually get applause and laughter.

A good GM can save a bad system.

A good GM can save a bad system. I played several new (for me) RPGS this weekend at the Emerald City Game Fest, and I had a ton of fun. In spite of the mechanics. These games had ridiculous off-kilter mechanics, but the GMs kept the games rolling and provided more than enough color to overcome the flaws in the systems.

The first game was octaNe. The scenario was a riff on Big Trouble In Little China, and I gather that's not the usual setting for the game, but it was a lot of fun. Towards the end, the silliness meter cranked up higher than it goes in Big Trouble In Little China (and that's saying something, isn't it?). Ranma and Sailor Moon both showed up in the final scene, a couple PCs got replaced by their evil twins, things just got... odd.

All of which certainly justifies using some light-weight system (instead of, say, Feng Shui, or d20). Yet, I can't say I cared for octaNe. The mechanics were very unbalanced. The pregen I was playing had a Daring rating of 2, and (since the other pregens didn't) that meant I almost always acted first, almost always succeeded at every task, and ended every conflict with more plot points than I started with.

I can't imagine building any sort of dramatic tension in this system, given that on any die roll the PCs have at least a 71% chance of winning... the whole conflict. Because I was going first every round, I was constantly having to reign myself in, force myself to leave something for the other PCs to fight (or do). It was not easy.

I feel particularly bad for one of the players in our group whose best stat was Magic. Magic goes last each round, _and_ you have to pay plot points to activate it. In theory this is somehow compensated for by being broadly applicable and open-ended, but given the level of narrative freedom that any of the other stats already has, I can't imagine how that could possibly compensate for such drawbacks.

To add insult to injury, his second best stat was Charm... which sits in the middle of the initiative order. Ever try to make a social roll in the middle of the round, _after_ you comrades have already killed half the enemies? Oh, sure, on a success the rules let you narrate a sudden peaceful resolution, but it will rarely pass the disbelief test. "After you ambush and behead most of them, I convince the survivors that there are non-violent solutions to our disagreement." Sure.

Painfully bad system. I think the exact same scenario would have been far, far better with Wu Shu, Risus, PDQ, 3:16, F#, or any of a dozen other "fast and fun" systems. I can't think of any reason why I would want to use octaNe's system. Admittedly, I've never read the rulebook, so maybe there's something I'm missing here... but I doubt it.

Honestly, I'd rather just have everyone roll a single die at the start of a conflict and highest roll narrates how the entire conflict wraps up. It'd honestly be better balanced. As it was, I'd always go first, and nearly always had the freedom to end the entire encounter on that one roll, so spreading that around to the other PCs would have had to be an improvement. I have never, ever in my decades of gaming experience, had to fight so hard to keep myself from abusing a system. The flaws in octaNe are so obvious and horrid, it's amazing it ever made it into print (and even more amazing that there are supplements and expansions out there).

And yet we had fun. The GM did a few really interesting things outside of combat that really saved the game from its own conflict resolution system. His previous plays of the system had indicated that there'd be a plethora of plot points sitting unused, so he came up with a way to make them meaningful. He got these really fancy chinese envelopes and stuffed them with "fortunes". Clues, plot hints, solutions to puzzles, revelations of background info, and some real game-changers like "your character is actually a ghost". So, between scenes, we cashed in excess points for clues, and they really helped coax us along several possible plotlines. He also prepped color photos of all the locations alluded to in the clues (and many of the villains), so there was plenty of instant flavor and atmosphere, and a sense that we were "on the right path" even though it was free-form. Without these clever structural cues being available, I imagine our narrative freedom would have imploded the plot before the end of the second conflict scene. Well done, Mr. GM! I may just have to steal your red envelopes for my own future campaigns.

Driving Your Players Crazy

Lately, I've been having a lot of experience with PCs going bonkers. There's a couple different ways to handle it, depending on what your goals are.

In 3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars,  I just drove the whole group crazy. Hallucinations, multiple realities, glaring inconsistencies, characters and situations that obviously couldn't exist, etc. It was almost all improvised, and I made no efforts to correct "mistakes" or obvious contradictions. Each week I just dove down whichever rabbit hole struck my fancy. This works really well when you're okay with the game not being taken 100% seriously, and when you're not really focused on long-term viability of the campaign. Honestly, I never expected that campaign to run as long as it did.

My Gumshoe Continuum campaign, on the other hand, is one I take very seriously, and hope to be running for a couple more years at least. We're about a year and a half into the campaign at this point, and just last Wednesday, I finally revealed that one of the PCs was crazy. He'd technically been nuts for about six months, but we played it real subtle. There was a scene where he nearly got Fragged Out (think of Back to the Future when Marty's hand starts to fade away: Frag's kinda like that, but it'll drive you crazy, too) , took a lot of mental Stability damage and snapped. So, the other players and I (as GM) decided on his specific brand of insanity, and warped the campaign around it. (That is, after all, the way the Gumshoe insanity rules work.) There was a minor NPC, who (coincidentally) had only ever interacted with his PC. So we decided she didn't exist.

Her name was Beverly, and she would eventually be nicknamed Beverly the Wallflower. When she was first introduced, I had every intention of her being a real character. The PC, whose name is Declan McGee, met her at a speakeasy in 1928 New York. She was just a bit of local color, introduced to establish a scene and was but one of like 50 details added just to make 1928 feel really different than modern day. 1928 was the PCs first major trip back in time more than a decade, and so I put some effort into making it interesting and "real". I had Declan run across Beverly the Wallflower a couple times, and was considering introducing a subplot where she starts stalking him, but hadn't really put much work into it yet. Like I said, none of the other PCs had met her yet (though one had most likely seen her across a crowded room).

Shortly thereafter, Declan failed the big Stability test after being Fragged (zapped by paradox), and the rest of the group got to conspire behind his back about what manner of madness had afflicted him. My wife suggested the awesome notion that perhaps her character hadn't actually seen Beverly across the crowded room, because maybe Beverly didn't exist. It was brilliant, and especially devious because it's not something anyone would see coming. If I introduce a character in September and in December your PC fails a stability test, you don't expect the consequence to be that the scene back in September didn't happen. But indeed, that's what we ret-conned behind the delusional character's players back. Effectively, we decided that he'd dreamed up an imaginary friend. He met his imaginary friend this one night in 1928 at a bar where he was feeling a little left out. From there it followed that every time the PC felt left out, lonely, or imperiled, Beverly would show up out of no where to make him feel safe and loved, even if he wasn't.

What can I say? I'm a bit of bastard (and while I'm at it, I'll add that the Gumshoe insanity rules rock). After a few sessions, good ol' Declan McGee was alone for a bit chasing a personal project while far away from 1920's NYC, and Beverly showed up to keep him company. Of course this was a shock to him, as nothing in those first few scenes with her indicated she was a Spanner (time-traveler). So he of course asked about this, and so she (or rather, his subconscious, played by me) filled in details of how they were being kept apart by her direct superior, Alexander Graham Bell. Yes, that Alexander Graham Bell.

Why was Bell keeping Beverly away from Declan? There's a minor rule amongst the Continuum that Spanners are not supposed to procreate with one another. Imagine a small child with the power to invert causality, or worse yet a baby that can teleport out of the womb. Scary stuff, so the rule is fairly reasonable. Beverly explained to Declan that Mr. Bell, her mentor, was concerned at her obvious affection for Declan, and feared she lacked the willpower to keep things platonic. This is why should could only visit Declan rarely, and on the sly.

To his credit, my player chased after this plotline with gusto. He started up a relationship with Beverly, and would tastefully ask to skip ahead to the next morning whenever they were alone together. Which is something I'm very thankful about, because it means we aren't left wondering what was really going on in any compromising scenes. They snuck around outside of the watchful eyes of The Continuum, made secret dates, and complained about how A.G. Bell was forcing them to be all cloak & dagger.

As GM, I just kept upping the dramatic ante. Beverly eventually showed up (all in Declan's mind) as an Exalted (one of the top ranks of the Continuum) based out of Atlantis (a big floating prehistoric battle platform to protect mankind from the time-traveling bad guys). Or so she said. There were a couple bits that didn't quite add up, and so Declan decided to get Further Information. I believe the player wanted to make sure that his sweetie wasn't a Narcissist (essentially a temporal terrorist), but the in-character motivation was basically to confront A.G. Bell and get everything out in the open. You know, pursuit of maximum drama. :) So he tracks the inventor of the telephone down, and starts interrogating him about Beverly.

"Who?!" Alexander Graham Bell asks.  "Young man, I'm afraid I have no clue of whom you speak."

So Declan goes off on him. Lots of in-character yelling, and then a couple sessions dedicated to proving that A.G. Bell was lying to him. As that seemed to fail, he asked some NPCs for help spying on Beverly to make sure she wasn't up to no good. As you can imagine, hiring private eyes to investigate someone who doesn't even exist eventually lead to help of another sort. Some Psyches (time-travelling psychiatrists) caught up with Declan and took him somewhere remote to get some much-needed rest and counseling.

One of the awesome things about a time-travel RPG is that you can advance the plotline or timeline for one PC without it affecting the others. If you were playing some other RPG and one character went nuts, you'd either have to retire the character, or come up with some miracle cure. Instead, Declan spent 3 years in therapy in a Boxed (really really really remote, both temporally and physically) facility, conquering his own inner demons. We talk a bit about therapy, introduce a few NPCs he meets at the asylum, and then, 3 years older and wiser, he spans right back down to just a couple seconds after he left the party. That's a useful tool / implication of time-travel that has never before proven as immensely useful as it did last session. What could have been a campaign-wrecker instead became a puzzle with a quick and painless solution.

Now, it occurs to me there's a lot more I could have done to keep the truth from him. As I understand about schizophrenic delusions, most people inflicted with them go a long ways towards rationalizing and justifying their visions. Anyone who tries to tell them they're crazy stands a good chance of being labeled "part of the conspiracy". But ultimately, that would make this entire campaign a game about how this one PC went nuts. I just recently did a game (3:16) about people going nuts. I didn't want to tank or warp this campaign entirely around it, unless it was really an exciting concept to the players.

So, rather than come up with more convoluted defenses for Beverly (as if "I've been spending time in Atlantis because Alexander Graham Bell doesn't trust me around you" isn't convoluted and ridiculous enough), I decided to just throw things in the player's court. If he wanted the quick 10-minute solution, which he did, it would just cost a couple years of his character's life. If he'd instead told me "No, I want to be like Baltar", then I would have continued to play his imaginary friend on-and-off, but kept it secondary to the plot, just a minor character quirk. In the real world, when you can't tell reality from imagination, it's all but "game over", but this being an actual game, I need to make sure it only enhances the fiction. This may be Gumshoe, but it ain't Trail of Cthulhu, and I feel no need to ride the road to madness and despair in a streetcar named tragedy... at least not if it's not what the whole playgroup thinks would be the most fun. When the insanity is over, the game must go on.

Meanwhile, one of my other PCs is busy having The Last Supper with Christopher Marlowe and Derren Brown, but that's a tale for a whole other blog post some other time...