Second-Fiddle to the Urchins

The Urchin RPG is weird. It’s not just because you’re playing crazy homeless people living in the tunnels beneath New York. The mechanics of the game upend the usual power-structures, leaving the GM the person at the table with the least control of the plot and world.

A week and a half ago, I played Urchin during one of the midnight time slots at the Dragonflight convention in Bellevue, WA. Two days ago, I GM’d urchin for a group of 6 that included 4 new gamers with very little (1 to 5 sessions each) previous RPG experience. Seeing it from both sides of the GM screen in such a short time has convinced me Urchin is a game where the GM has the least interesting job, and the least narrative power. The GM is at best second-fiddle to the urchins, but even that probably over-estimates the GM’s importance in this game.

At the game where I was a player, I absolutely dominated (and created from whole cloth) the plot. At the game I GM’d, I couldn’t make my pet plotline materialize no matter how hard I tried to push it.

Band On The Run, aka Let Me Tell You About My Character:

At Dragonflight, I played a has-been failed punk-rocker with dreams of getting his band back together.

In the real world, I (the player) once (many years ago) met a friend of a friend who claimed that they’d accidentally left a diary at a bus stop and a year later one of the poems they’d written in that lost journal was now a top 40 pop song. I was skeptical, but, whatever, the truth of their story is beside the point. The idea at least has dramatic potential. I’ve always kinda wanted to use that notion in a character (in an RPG or a piece of fiction) but never got around to it… until the game at Dragonflight.

My character, Rory Wanker (of the once-almost-famous “Rory Wanker and the Bloody Stickahs”) took that diary story and dialed it up to 11. He also had serious psychopathic delusions, and was convinced that he had previously killed Sir Paul McCartney four times and They just kept replacing the blighter with clones. I was basically claiming to have written the lyrics to every Lennon-McCartney song ever, and also claiming to be the cause of the “Paul is Dead” meme. I just riffed off that nonsense all night long.

Every time it was my turn, I pushed the rest of the our group of punks and bums towards tracking down Sir Clone McCartney and offing him again. As a group, we raised the Kill Cartney Count up from 4 to 6 over the course of the session. At least one of those two kills was deliberate misdirection from my fellow PCs, but who was I to quibble over the identity of the body they’d shivved? So our characters invaded the random hotel that I, in my delusion, insisted was where Sir Clone McSongthief was staying while he was in town.

So there’s this major player-driven plotline that served as the backbone of the session. About the only decision left for the GM was whether Paul McCartney was actually staying at that hotel - but from my crazed perspective it was irrelevant because no matter who was in that penthouse, I would fill in the connection to make them part of the Clone McCartney conspiracy. That’s kinda the point of playing a crazy person.

Long story short, I jump off the roof of the pent-house where we just killed McCartney #6. I did this at the end of somebody else’s scene that I happened to be present for. I chose my timing because I’d get to Kick the next scene:

Fade to black. Fade in to a fancy office with a huge desk, and framed gold records on the wall. Rory is there with his agent. “And that’s how the concept album ends, hence the name ‘Paul is Dead’. I’ve got most of the songs written, I’m ready to go to the recording studio.”

That’s a complete dick move, right there, narrating that the session only existed in my character’s album pitch. I tell myself it’s okay because my character is nuts enough that if anyone has an issue with my ending, they can just write it off as the crazy thing running through my head as I fall 20 stories. I was being a bad player, grandstanding and spotlight-hogging, then invoking my own Deus Ex Machina after I made a bone-headed suicidal move. That's totally the sort of nonsense I engage in as a player, especially in a rules-light "hippy game" like Urchin.

In any normal RPG, it’d be appropriate at that point for the GM to say “No, you’ve jumped off the roof, and now you’re dead.” Or at least roll damage or call for a saving throw vs falling or something.

Mechanical Failure:

Urchin’s mechanics aren’t really set up that way. PCs don’t die unless the player wants them to. Instead they end up “in the gutter”, which is just this unfun quantum state where your turns are skipped until a fellow PC brings you food, then you’re magically all okay. With the rules as written, the only way your PC can die against your will is if all the PCs end up in the gutter at the same time… or if all your fellow PCs hate you so much that no one will bring you a candy bar to save your life. You are expressly granted the narrative control to set your scene where-ever you want, and the GM’s main job is say “yes” repeatedly.

I feel urchin is broken. The rules are flawed. Every time I enjoy the game (and I usually do) I feel simultaneously guilty and lucky. The game is a house of cards that could topple over at any moment, but more often than not we get to the end of the session without bumping the metaphorical table.

In Urchin, players go around that table taking turns. Turns are entire scenes that could last anywhere between 10 seconds and 10 minutes. You can either “kick” a scene, or “grab” a scene. Kicking a scene is where the player narrates the situation and what their character is trying to do, and the GM just adjudicates the rules (and maybe sets the difficulty and results if the player chose to do something that’s not covered by the rules). When you Kick, you as player are usurping at least 80% of the power a GM normally has. A good game of Urchin is one with colorful PCs who take the initiative to do interesting things.

The other option is Grabbing a scene. Grabbing frees up the GM to narrate and frame the scene (giving them back the power most other games assume they always have). The rulebook also provides a chart the GM can roll on if no obvious scenes spring to mind. The Scene Grabbing Chart ranges from absolutely devastatingly terrible (attacked by multiple bad guys that each individually outclass you), to just mildly better than the average turn. Once the players have been bitten by that chart once or twice, they’ll stop grabbing and start kicking hard.

There’s only three ways a session of Urchin can end:

1. Agharta — Someone raises Mind up to 10 via the Blessing, receives a quest, and follows that to fabled hobo heaven. This is the intended ending the rulebook sets you up for.
2. Total Party Kill - Usually the result of failing to pay the light bill. Sometimes the lights are covered, but you still get a TPK when somebody grabs a scene after they or other players have stirred up the sort of trouble that could logically draw a police response.
3. Fizzle — The party splits and rambles, having some good flavorful scenes but never really engaging in anything that smells of plot. You eventually call the game because you’re getting tired and the game is growing old.

Of the three ways the game can end, two are generally undesirable. The occasional TPK or plotless rambling can be fun, but more often than not most players prefer some sort of dramatic arc and some chance of success. If you’re actually getting a group to play Urchin a second time within a few months of the first, there’s a good chance they’ll be on-task for the whole Mind 10 trip to Agharta thing.

Sadly, the path to Agharta is mathematically solvable. Each time around the table, one scummer needs to collect money to pay the lights. Everyone else can focus on the Blessing. You can scavenge for the raw materials, which you’re guaranteed to find, and if you’re willing to Push you can even ensure nothing bad (other than Mind Rot) happens while you’re searching. So Scummer A finds the components, and passes them off to Scummer B. Scummer B brews a few hits of the drug, pushing the roll if needed, and possibly suffering some Mind Rot. They pass the finished blessing to Scummer C who sells it to meatheads for 2 to 3 cash tokens per hit. In a four (or more) player game that can be done in one round. In the second round (or the same round if you’ve got a lot of players) you spend the cash buying more blessing from NPCs, and then selling it to other NPCs. It’s a goofy loophole that lets you, once you’ve got the initial investment capital, generate a feedback loop that slowly inches towards infinite blessing. Even if the GM plugs that rules-hole (and they might not want to, as being able to buy the blessing from NPCs is a nice safety net for low-mind PCs struggling with Madness), it’s still pretty easy for a 4-scummer circle to generate large amounts of blessing in just a couple low-risk rounds. Ultimately, Blessing is easy to come by.

Lots of blessing = lots of money and a high mind score = the lights never go out, and somebody becomes Captain. So if you’re concerned about winning the game, and willing to cooperate like a normal RPG party instead of struggling like scummer nutjobs, “winning” the game becomes a trivial exercise. The only thing that can trip up a coordinated party is rolling a 3 or a 5 on the Quest chart (but even that can be solved by aiming the blessing machine at a second player to generate a new Captain and a new Quest in the next round).

About the lights and turn order: 

It’s vital that the turn order get shaken up from time to time (don’t always start the round with the same player) or else the player at the end of the line usually gets stuck having to chase Cash Tokens every single turn. That player is left feeling like they have no freedom (as their only choice is whether to panhandle or mug from turn to turn), and probably won’t enjoy the game as much as the others. They may be tempted to not pay the light bill. The Lights Out Table is certainly fun, but it has at least a 1 in 3 chance of producing a TPK. I'm happy when that table gets action on in any Urchin game I'm involved in, but I can understand how it may not be some scummer's cup of tea.

The more I play the game, the more strongly I feel that Urchin desperately needs a 4th ending scenario. It could really use a little more narrative structure in case the players scatter, but that would require rules revisions, since the rules-as-written keep the GM from introducing any sort of plot at all.

Curse of the Were-Gator:

When I was GMing Urchin on Sunday, I tried to work in this oddball subplot about a were-alligator in the tunnels. In a five-hour game with 6 scummers, they Grabbed a scene exactly twice. Every time I could get away with narrating a background detail in somebody else’s scene, I mentioned the beast howling in the distance or causing problems with the subways, but nearly every time the players Kicked a scene they (wisely) narrated themselves far away from my were-villain. Most of the group individually chased after the Blessing right away, but weren’t very cooperative or coordinated about it early on, so they doubled-up on redundant steps and never actually got enough of the drug to boost someone to Captain status. Along the way, they mugged a rich person just outside an opera house, and drew police attention. Immediately afterwards they neglected to pay the light bill and rolled a Meathead Invasion that resulted in a (police-based) TPK that had nothing to do with my alligatanthropic monster.

The one time I got people to interact with my were-gator, the player Kicked his next scene by narrating that he was searching for ricotta cheese. Because “everyone knows” that ricotta is like wolvesbane for were-crocodiles. In a normal game, the GM would have control of whether or not this ludicrous notion was valid or just going to endanger you further… but in urchin searching for a piece of gear that gives you +1 die on rolls vs the crocogator is an automatic success and the player gets to narrate what that found gear is. In later turns they can even DIY themselves a better version of the object (maybe a cross-shaped cheese-log?) that gives even more dice. That’s cool. Bizarreness like this is at the heart of Urchin, but it does illustrate what I’ve been saying about the GM having very little power. I leaned hard on my big threat, and all it got me was one player spending one action to invent it’s weakness while everyone else just steered clear.

Everybody had fun playing weirdo nutjob scummers, so it all worked out for the best despite the relative lack of plot and the the TPFM (Total Party Ferguson, Missouri-ing) ending. Urchin is broken, but it’s not unplayable. It’s like the first edition of Og - you can run it as a one-shot and have a lot of fun, but consecutive plays in a short time frame are less fun and become increasingly focused on the mechanical failings. Urchin could really use a revision with the same goals as Robin Law’s “Unearthed Edition” of Og (which is to say a rewrite that preserves all the best bits of the current game but fixes core mechanics and gives you more reason to play a second time). I’ve got a couple ideas towards rebalancing it, and I may type them up in a future blog post, but for today I’ve probably rambled on long enough. There's blessing to brew, and somebody's gotta pay the lights around here.

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...

Burying 3:16

Friends, Terrans, Troopers... I come not to praise 3:16, but to bury it... and I say that with slightly less irony than Marc Antony.  Our campaign of 3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars has come to an end this past Sunday. It was a good game, it was a crazy game. I'm a little sad to see it go, but also very happy to have played it through to a logical conclusion and gotten clear without the rules collapsing too badly. In retrospect, it went about as well as anyone could hope for.

For the first few sessions, the weirdness of the rules were a huge source of delight. The narrative freedom granted by the combat system was a nice change of pace from more crunchy systems, and the gung-ho military setting was sufficiently unlike anything any of us had played recently. It took just half a session to get the hang of it, and then everyone was having fun. I'd planned to run a short campaign of 6 to 8 sessions, but we enjoyed it enough to play 17 sessions.

Ultimately, though, the weirdness of the rules was exactly why the campaign could not be sustained any further. I find myself very skeptical of the notion that the later stages of the campaign-game had ever been playtested, as I found numerous problems that needed attention. Here's a few specific nits to pick:

• When PCs are 90% likely to succeed at anything, kill hundreds of aliens per action, and never take any damage, the game gets a little weird.  And since you roll so few dice per session or combat, there's often 1 player that gets punished by the randomness while everyone else flies uninhibited. You just don't roll enough dice for "the Law of Averages" to ever kick in.
• The game has just two attributes, and they are completely unbalanced. For a one-shot, FA is the be-all-end-all bomb. In campaign play, however, FA is a far distant second-place to the NFA that gets you promoted and keeps you equipped. Early gaps in stats or firepower can make someone feel useless until they fix it... which takes about 10 sessions' efforts to level the playing field.
• Since stats can be so low at the start, you're inclined to keep the modifiers small and sparse. (-2 is pretty hefty nerfing when your stat is 3.) Due to the competitive nature of the game (kill count gets you levels and promotions), the GM has to be very careful with applying such modifiers fairly and evenly. My wife was playing, which makes fairness (and appearance of fairness) trickier, so my solution was to almost never called for modified rolls. But late in the game, that lack of modifiers means the PCs can shoot for the moon and hit it 90% of the time. 
• The jump from 3d10 kills to d100 kills is huge. Once one player has it, everyone else will rush to catch up, but for some characters (ironically, those with the highest initial Fighting Ability) bridging that gap can take nearly a dozen frustrating sessions.
• Most alien abilities are useless, but the few that aren't are positively devastating; Most sessions have an utter lack of tension, but then a killer power comes up in the next session and you have a pressing imminent threat of TPK in scene after scene. 
• Planets can have raging volcanoes, toxic environments, and electrical storms that provide plenty of flavor but no mechanical effect. And they have to have no mechanical effect, because some of them would otherwise be instant killers if the PC's armor got a single crack.
• Speaking of armor, the health levels are wonky too. Power armor protects you just once per planet, while the flesh of your body can take 2 or 3 times as much damage as the armor did and heals between fights even if you're captured or isolated. 
• The APC and the Dropship do basically the same thing, but use none of the same rules to accomplish it. Ultimately the preference between them comes down to flavor text for everyone but the one PC who's driving, and that PC would much rather be firing their own heavy weapon.
• Kill counts are hard to grok when the aliens are swarms, incorporeal, giants, sentient planets, etc, all of which come up pretty often. Just as bad is when the alien power is "Stop Technology" so the gun-cams and computers you'd been narrating for 15 sessions suddenly stop working, but the mechanics and medals still need an ongoing count. Down on the planet, I'm killing as many as 4d100 aliens per turn, but if I collapse a star with a missile and wipe out a civilization it only nets d10,000 kills? 
• The math works well enough to sustain the game elements, but not to suspend the disbelief.

Despite all those complaints, we had a blast. Not just one blast, but 17 sessions of repeated blasting.  We ended on a high note, with everyone enjoying themselves (and all agreeing and intuiting this was where it had to wrap up).

So how'd I make it work in the face of all that? I just dialed the weirdness up to "11". Once it was clear that things were going to get hard to swallow, I started putting in little hints that things were not as they seemed. I made the game setting as surreal as the rules were unbalanced.  For a while, the PC's theories were that maybe they were being drugged or tested on VR by high command, or they'd been captured by aliens and put into a hallucinatory mindscape for brainwash or interrogation purposes. And then slowly they came to accept that maybe the PCs were just crazy. I structured a scene or two as if they were playing Power Kill instead / in addition to 3:16. I stole ideas from Shutter Island, Suckerpunch, and Lost Highway. I made overt references to 60's and 70's acid rock, and to the works of Lewis Carrol. That provided plenty of cover to hide the stranger properties of the game system.

Our final scenes were taking place on several different realities. They were simultaneously killing aliens, getting therapy in a 20th Century mental hospital, and being interrogated by a Jack Bauer type from the Department of Homeland Security who wanted to know where they'd hid the dirty bomb in downtown LA. The PCs faced off against the Brigadier (and each other) for a final confrontation in the launch bay of a Starkiller Missile. When one of them made an NFA roll to launch the missile into the nearby star, we all wordlessly knew this was the final combat of the game. The fight morphed into a car chase on the streets of LA with a mushroom cloud in the background.

At the end of that fight/chase (which ended with three players using Weaknesses, and one using a Strength), I let everyone narrate their own epilogue about how things resolved in whichever reality (or realities) they wanted.  A few of these epilogues strongly contradicted one-another, which we all decided was perfectly as it should be.

Stability Chart for Gumshoe Continuum

My Monday and Wednesday game is a Continuum campaign, but using the Gumshoe mechanics. Which meant that I incorporated stability from Gumshoe, but had to come up with values for stability losses for all sorts of Continuum-related scenarios such as the Time Combat Stratagems. Here's the modified version of the Stability chart that we use for that campaign.

Most entries come from the Trail of Cthulhu or Esoterrorists rules, duplicated here without permission. You would need one of those books, plus the Continuum rulebook, to use the following. I'm listing it here to save some work for other GMs that might want to try out a Gumshoe/Continuum hybrid game.

Incident	Stability Loss
You Frag someone (Accidental or deliberate)	1
Reveal to a friend where and when you Hide	1
View a particularly shocking work of art	1
A nasty argument or social drama, unexpected stress	1
You see a fresh corpse, or witness a killing	1
Fragged (Accidentally or unknown cause)	your Frag total
Dream Haunted	1d6
Isolated by 3 or more foes	1d6, plus effects of fragging
Attacked with evident intent to do serious harm	2
Car or industrial accident imperils you	2
Witness to acts of torture	2
Unexplained phenomena and sensations	2
Caltrop Stratagem foils and frustrates you	2
Fragged deliberately by an enemy	2 + your Frag total
Attacked with evident intent to kill	3
You kill someone in a fight	3
Reveal the time and place where you Hide to an enemy or rival	3
Harbinger threat made good against you	1d6+2 initially, subsequent efforts just 3
See a particularly grisly murder scene, accident, or battlefield	4
Learn a friend or loved one has been violently killed	4
Invitation To Dance	4
Attacked by a friend or loved one	5
Committing murder or torture	5
You Fragged someone to Lost Cause or worse	5
Unnatural and threatening phenomena - witchcraft, haunting, etc	5
Learning of your own death via Iron Man	1d6+4
Fragged deliberately by a friend or loved one	5 + your Frag total
Discover the corpse of a friend or loved one	6
Tortured for an hour or longer	6
Spanning for the first time	6
Attacked by a T-Rex or Alien	8 minus your Span, to a minimum of 3 stability
You see a friend or loved one killed	7
You see a friend or loved one killed in a particularly gruesome manner	8
You kill a friend or loved one	8
Fragging a loved one out of existence	9
You witness your own Elder death	9
Realizing you are a Lost Cause	9
You witness your own Junior death!	8 + your Frag total (so, 10 at least)

With the exception of the modified chart, we use the Stability rules from Esoterrorists, as opposed to the more complicated Stability-and-Sanity rules from Trail of Cthulhu.


Looking over the chart, I realize that I probably need to add an entry for when someone is rendered Graceless. Having that happen to you is probably worth a 2-pt to 4-pt test. Hasn't happened to PC in my game yet, so I hadn't considered it.

Hmm... I could probably reorder that a bit. In general, it's in order from least impactful to most devastating, however, the way the  d6 for Isolate is added to whatever other fragging stability loss happens, making it a lot more potent than it's placement on the table would suggest. Most typically, frag loss from an Isolate is going to be at least 5 points and could easily hit 10. 1d6 + 2 + Frag total, at least. That's why the narcissists call us The Swarm.

Azathoth Upstairs, Cthulhu Downstairs

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

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

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

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

GwenCon RPGs - Pure Evil

The second RPG one-shot I played in at GwenCon was Pure Evil. It was a very unique Cthulhu scenario run by Mike Lee. Rules were BRP - that is to say, he was using Chaosium's Basic RolePlaying system, not technically their Cthulhu rules. I've played a fair share of Cthulhu before, and I had a hard time telling what was different mechanically. The sanity rules were a little off (but I think that was house-ruled, not a BRP change) and the skill list was more extensive, but beyond that I couldn't spot any differences. Oh well, the system wasn't the main selling point of this particular one-shot...

We were all members of a Death Metal band called Pure Evil, playing a concert at a creepy mansion near Shreveport, Louisiana. Our last album had flopped, and we were likely going to break up after this one last pathetic little gig. While our albums were packed with satanic iconography, none of us had any reason to suspect the supernatural was real, nor any reason to approach the "mystery" from the angle of trying to solve it. Those of you with Cthulhu experience are shaking your heads already, and with good reason. Our sinister patron was using our music to summon up some horrible body-warping entity from non-euclidean space, and there wasn't a chance in hell of us stopping him.

Out of 5 PCs:

• 1 went insane.
• 2 died.
• 1 went insane, and then died.
• Only 1 PC escaped with his body and mind mostly intact.

Meanwhile, some unspeakable crystaline "god" awoke, ate 200 concert goers, and then rampaged across Louisiana, ushering in a new era of terror on the bayou.

What made the game fun was the PCs. Figuring we were doomed from the get go, we just chewed the scenery. The lead singer was constantly chasing tail, and spent half the scenario in his bedroom. The lead guitarist was a Prima Donna, constantly beleaguering us all with bitchy tirades about artistic integrity. The drummer was continuously drinking and/or snorting coke, and/or brainstorming ridiculous ideas for stage shows. The bassist was just the replacement bassist, and no one could remember his name nor give a damn what happened to him - and the little bass-playing puppy loved us for it. I played the bitter, jaded, artificially sleazy manager of the band, who was secretly siphoning the books and gambling away all the band's profits.

Everyone's character sheet indicated that they hated all the other PCs, and gave good reasons why. On some level, we felt more like a Paranoia party than a Call Of Cthulhu party.

In the end, I switched sides, sold my soul (and the band) to "The King In Black And White", and delivered the PCs up for sacrifice. They knew it both in- and out- of character, but we were all more or less okay with it. I had a blast.

My wife didn't enjoy it nearly as much as I did. She played the lead singer, doing a understated parody of lusty juvenile gamers of the "if there's any chicks there I do them" sort, without ever delivering the too-often quoted line. Watching her chase skirts made me giggle. She repeatedly put character before plot just like the rest of the band did, however, her heart really wasn't in it. She'd signed up for this event expecting a more traditional Lovecraftian problem-solving/mystery game. She'd played in two such games last year, and really enjoyed trying to puzzle them out in time to save the world, but this just didn't have the same taste.


One small criticism on my part, which despite it's seeming triviality, I just cannot stress it enough. When making a one-shot scenario, it's a really good idea to trim down the character sheets to the bare minimum necessary. The character sheet for this otherwise excellent game was a maze of tables and boxes. My character had a 17 intelligence, and I didn't notice till more than 3 hours into the scenario 'cause the sheet was too obtuse and crowded. I'd played him as kind of weak-willed weasel, when in actuality his stats made him sharp and intuitive with double the sanity points of any other character. Oops.

BRP has a ton of skills, and technically you have default ratings in things based on your ability scores. This meant that I had listed values of 30% for Artillery and Martial Arts - and no clear indicator whether or not that meant the character had some sort of military background. I had three skills listed as "Pilot", "Pilot 2", and "Flying" with no clue what the difference was - not that it mattered since all were in single-digits in a game that uses a percentile system... I wasn't about to fly anywhere even if we'd had a plane. But seriously, if there's no plane available in the scenario, why do I need to know if I have a 1% or 4% chance of flying one? Trimming about 40 skills off that list (and alphabetizing those that remained) would have made the relevant items far more noticeable and minimized player information overload.