One-shots

After the Mind the World Again

Disco Elysium

Have you played Disco Elysium from the much lamented Za/um studio, dear reader? It’s one of those seminal, cult-classic games that shifted my thinking on what video games could be. It’s a mystery game but, is it, really? Even if it is, is the mystery the one presented? Is the goal to find out who killed that guy hanging from the tree in the yard behind the Whirling-in-Rags? I suppose it is, but only up to a point. When playing it, you quickly meet and pass that point, much to the frustration of your ever-suffering partner, Kim Kitsuragi. Psychologically freed of the mundane requirements of your character’s job as a police detective, you can finally get to work on the real mystery; finding yourself. In many ways, the game is a protracted character creation session. You have to do everything from defining his political and romantic persuasions, coming to understand his opinions on art, exploring his relationship with vices of all kinds to just figuring out his name. How does the game handle these revelations? Well, largely through the personification of various aspects of your Detective’s personality. These take the form of his stats, Intellect, Psyche, Fysique and Motorics and the various skills associated with them. They speak to you, often in deranged or idiosyncratic voices representative of their own, niche fragment of his personality, and try to get you to look at the world from their highly rarified perspective or to act based on it.

It’s a unique game. It’s also a unique experience that left me with so many interesting thoughts and questions. One such question was, could you make a TTRPG out of this? The answer is, you can certainly try.

After the Mind…

The Character Sheet screen from Disco Elysium. It shows each of the four main stats, Intellect, Psyche, Physique and Motorics and all of the skills that are associated with them in a grid on a black screen with white text. — The Character Sheet screen from Disco Elysium. The TTRPG stats are not as complicated as this.

Last night, I got together with four other members of Tables and Tales to play a session of After the Mind the World Again by Aster Fialla. The front cover of the game uses the tagline, ‘A murder mystery role-playing game.’ This is not an inaccurate description. However, I feel like the subheading on the next page is getting closer to the facts:

A Disco Elysium-inspired murder mystery TTRPG about a
detective and the voices in his head

In this TTRPG, the inspiration comes not from the fascinating world or the city of Revachol, it doesn’t come from the richly drawn characters of the video game, or even its ubiquitous politics. It comes, instead, from the essentials of the gameplay. In other words, the shit that’s going on in the Detective’s head and how it affects the world around him. You see, this is a GMful game that requires five people exactly, one of which is the lone player with the other four acting as GMs. Each GM represents one of the four stats from Disco Elysium, Intellect, Psyche, Fysique and Motorics. They are collectively referred to as the Facets. One of their responsibilities is to describe various features of the world the Detective moves through. Intellect has responsibility for nerdy people, art pieces, journals, etc. Meanwhile, Fysique gets stuff like buildings, a good strong state, and brawny folks.

At the start of the game, the player comes up with a name, pronouns and presentation for their Detective, as well as their role (they might not be a cop, but a PI or an insurance adjuster or something else.) Each of the Facets also gets a turn here, though. Psyche gets to describe the Detective’s face, while Motorics comes up with aspects of their style and an unusual object in their possession, for instance. I found this very fun, as did everyone else at the table, I think. I even commented that having others make your character for you in other RPGs could be just as fun!

Once that’s done, each of the Facets answers a couple of questions designed to form a baseline for their relationships with other Facets at the table. After the Mind the World Again is Powered by the Apocalypse, so this sort of character building question should be familiar to anyone who has played a game like that before.

Then they get started making the Neighbourhood. You go around the table, starting with the person who most recently played Disco Elysium, and get everyone to answer one of the five questions presented in the book that should give you an idea of the type of area this murder has taken place in.

Once you’re done with that, the Detective tells us a little about the victim and then each of the Facets introduces a piece of evidence from the crime scene. Intellect tells us about any Prior knowledge that’s relevant to the situation, Psyche describes a Person of Interest at the scene, Fysique comes up with a Landmark, in this case, where the murder occurred, and Motorics gets to reveal a clue, something tangible at the scene.

From that point, the Detective starts the investigation, describing what they are doing in the fiction, triggering particular Moves, using the Facets’ stats to make rolls and making Deductions in an effort to solve the murder. This is in line with the Detective’s Agenda:

Explore the world to its fullest.

Make the most of your Facets.

Play to find out the truth.

This is complicated by the fact that each of the Facets wants the Detective to act in different ways, offering sometimes conflicting options and sabotaging each-others’ efforts as they try to have the greater influence on the sleuth and the investigation. Facets’ stats can be boosted or reduced in various ways, often by the actions of the other Facets. Its important to note that the Facets’ Agenda is not focused on solving the murder, rather than constructing an interesting experience:

Create an intriguing world for The Detective to explore.

Highlight the differences between the Facets.

Play to find out what happens.

The Detective investigates, and the Facets Declare Evidence as particular features are described in the world. It’s up to the Detective to combine two pieces of evidence to Make a Deduction. When it comes to that point, they ask the Facets for explanations as to how they fit together. Whichever Facet’s explanation is chosen is the truth and the Facet gets a +1 to their stat, while also getting the opportunity to reduce the stat of another Facet by the same amount.

The investigation is structured into a Deduction Pyramid, which is split into four tiers. On the bottom tier, there should be eight pieces of evidence. These should be combined when the Detective Makes a Deduction so that, you end up with four Minor Deductions on the next tier up. These Minor Deductions should then be combined to come up with two Major Deductions on the penultimate tier. Finally, those Majors need to be combined to come up with the Solution to the murder, sitting right there at the top of the Pyramid.

There are several other mechanics in the game, including one to ensure that the Detective does not simply always choose the explanation of the same Facet all the time, which is clever. A Facet’s stat cannot go above +3 or below -1. If that does happen, the Facet gives the Detective a Condition and goes back to the default value of 1.

…the World Again

A screenshot of the aftermath of the Detective from Disco Elysium punching a twelve year old kid. The scene is in the yard of the Whirling in Rags hostel. A man in a green jacket and yellow flares stands over a prone kid who he just punched. Kim Kitsuragi, dressed in an orange jacket and brown baggy, tapered trousers looks on. — A screenshot of the aftermath of the Detective from Disco Elysium punching a twelve year old kid.

None of us had ever played a game quite like this one before. Obviously, some of us had played PBTA games in the past, so the mechanics were nothing frighteningly new. At points, I even felt echoes of a game of Avery Adler’s The Quiet Year that most of us played last year as we took turns describing the world around our Detective. That Detective was an amateur sleuth named Bruce with a fabulous moustache, a flight jacket, an obsession with whiskey and a curious ability to identify any wooden model aircraft he might come across.

But, sharing GMing duties with three others at the table is a unique and sort of chaotic experience. At the start, it’s actually a little difficult to get into gear. I was playing Motorics and I found I had to be constantly checking my playbook sheet to remind myself what features of the world were within my domain, what my GM Moves were and when I should use them. There are features in there that you might not expect so you have to watch it and you can’t use your GM Moves just whenever. Since all four of us Facets were feeling like this, it kind of stuttered into life as a session, once the character creation bit and the initial set-up of the mystery were done. Meanwhile, Bruce, played ably by relative TTRPG noob, Jude, had to come to terms with the fact that, when it came to any of the really important decisions, he had to give up control and ask the Facets for options before settling on one version of the truth or selecting a course of action.

As we got into the flow of it, though, and as some of us became more lubricated by the liberal application of fine Spanish lager, we found the conversation that was the game began to come much more instinctively. We were interacting with the mechanics and deliberately fucking each other over for stat points, while Bruce began to explore the small, dead silent village of Battersfield and investigate the murder of local baker, Barbara Devons. Evidence has been declared in abundance and two deductions have been made! Bruce managed to finally make it out of the Bakery to explore the office, the bare flour cellar and even the gay bar across the road. Unfortunately, we had to leave the case unsolved after the four hour session. Hopefully we’ll be able to pick the trail back up again soon.

We ended up having a really fun time with After the Mind the World again. The stand out scene for me was when Bruce was interrogating Jenny at the crime scene and all four GMs jumped in to answer in particular ways that they thought reflected their own domain within the one NPC. It worked surprisingly well, even though I’m not sure that’s how it’s supposed to work at all.

I would say that there is no way to play a full investigation in a single three hour session without rushing through scenes and maintaining the sort of laser-focus that Harry Dubois does not exemplify in any way. The character creation and making the mystery section took over an hour alone before Bruce ever rolled a die in anger. If you’re going to give it a go, plan it for two sessions.

Do you think you would like to give this game a try, dear reader? Or would you rather go back to Martinaise and collect some tare in a plastic bag while pondering that old wall again?

Games I Got to Play This Year Part 2

Wrap-up

It’s an end of year wrap-up. Everyone’s doing one. Check out the last post for the campaigns I have been playing in the last few months. This one’s for the one-shots.

Pirate Borg – the link above will take you to my post mortem on this one shot. It was a great time, in all honesty. My first foray into running any kind of Borg, and I was pleasantly surprised by how easy and instinctive every part of it was, even the ship-combat, which was new to everyone at the table. If you are interested in pirates, light cosmic horror, or just gnarly old school gaming in an alternate history version of our own 18th century, you’ll enjoy Pirate Borg in all likelihood. By the way, I also did a character creation post on this one.
Troika! – Whalgravaak’s Warehouse – Ok, look, full disclosure, this is supposed to be a list of one-shots but this is technically more like a really spread out short campaign where we get together to play a one-shot of the same game every once in a while when we can all afford the time. Know what I mean? Anyway, in the first one-shot of these two consecutive one-shots, the PCs found two different ways into this warehouse, abandoned by its wizardly owner centuries previous. After crawling this “dungeon” for a bit, they made friends with a thin mutant, and their monkeys got to play with the worm-headed hounds that lived in a nest in the warehouse somewhere. They made short work of the Cacogen they’d been sent to murder and we wrapped up the session. In the second one-shot in this series of one-shots, three of the band decided to continue to explore, making more friends, this time with a large cadre of mercenaries who had been sent to deal with some cultists. They then set fire to some rope, captured some minuscule soldiers in gremlin-jars and climbed a mountain of onions. This is the kind of nonsense the PCs get up to in games of Troika to be honest. This is standard. If this sounds too gonzo or weird, you are in the wrong place. The Eternal City of Troika is not for you. You should probably try somewhere more normal. From my point of view, and, I think, that of the players, if you lean into the bonkers aspects of the setting and you are willing to go along with the more outré elements of the system (the random initiative mechanic stands out) you will probably have a very good time with this game. It’s great for one shots. Or two shots if that’s your thing. Might turn into three shots, actually.
Honey Heist – this was another one of Isaac’s games. He ran it on a night when another game fell through. It was very last minute but we were still able to get a crew together. Jude, Tom and I rolled up some friggin’ bears with criminal backgrounds and went to do a heist at the biggest honey convention in the UK, in the NEC in Birmingham. We tried to do a TED talk, we disguised ourselves as massive bees and we crashed a van. You know, typical bear stuff. Another absolute belter of a one-shot, this one. It’s the definitive one-page RPG by Grant Howitt of Spire and Heart fame. Isaac and Tom had picked up the printed form of a bunch of these one-pagers at UKGE and Isaac had been looking for the opportunity to run one of them. This game was obviously made to create wild swings as you use either you Bear or Criminal stat and try to avoid going too far on the bear side or too far on the criminal side. This forces you to take risks and do stupid things to drive the heist forward or, more likely, sideways. Tom did a brilliant write-up of the session on their blog here.
B.D.S.M. Below Dwelling Sewer Mutants – Yet another game run by Isaac at short notice. It is a mutie-eat-mutie game by Neonrot and you can get it here. The premise is pretty straight-forward. You are a mutant. You are probably unpleasant in some way. At the start, you have a mutation that may or may not be useful in certain situations. You can progress and grow by eating other mutants to gain new mutations along the way. If you like that idea, you’re in for a treat. I think it is probably a game that works best in one-shot play. We had fun with it and I think most tables will.
Cthulhu Dark – Roadhouse Feast – I went into quite a lot of detail on this one in the post I linked above so I won’t go through it all again. Suffice it to say, I really enjoyed running the Cthulhu Dark game for the first time. The scenario itself was great but, to me, it is the simplicity and the ingenuity of the system that really shone. If you are into cosmic horror games and you haven’t tried Cthulhu Dark, you should give it a chance.
Liminal_ – I promised a report on how this one-shot went some time ago and here it is. We had four players (known as the Disoriented) for this one-shot plus me as the the Architect. As I thought we would, rather than have the players play themselves in this Liminal Back-Room nightmare, I had them use the character generation tables in Death Match Island. This worked really well to come up with some distinctive, memorable characters quickly and with no fuss. They started off all in the same public building. Since one of them was a district attorney, we agreed it should be a court house. One of the others was there as a witness in a case and the other two were, in an unlikely turn of events, cousins who had been called for jury duty on the same jury. That is pretty much by-the-by, although it did come up in conversation later. Thy all stepped into a room together and found themselves in a building of nightmares. Now, you have to roll up the rooms as they open the doors. There are a couple of d100 tables in the book that are crammed with inventive and horrific room descriptions. The first door they opened led into some sort of creepy, dank cave system; the next into a mouldering bowling alley that was was canted at a 45 degree angle; the next opened onto the abandoned bridge of a ship, rocking in a dreadful storm and with a trail of blood leading off through one of the other doors. I made a mistake at the very start, where I allowed the players to open a couple of doors and then decide which one they would go through. The rules state that, if you open a door, you have to go through it. This felt a little restrictive to me, in a role-playing game, but we proceeded in this way and the players were good sports about it. As we progressed, rolling on the Room and Entity tables, it felt as though, at times, they really wanted to see what the hell was going to come next. Isaac said afterwards, that it felt a lot less subtle than he had thought it would and I have to agree with that. When you think of liminal space horror, it often is just empty corridors and abandoned hotels and the like. Sometimes a strange entity might make an appearance, but it’s the spaces themselves that are supposed to be innately creepy. Some of these rooms we rolled up on the tables felt that way, like the corridor with missing persons posters of the PCs on the walls but a lot of them were straight-up horror like the one with nurse-entity (I think?) chopping a guy up on a slab (it was ok, he was into it!) Also, I think this is something I would be careful with: when you roll a random entity, they sometimes don’t seem to fit, thematically, with the room that you just rolled up. I think it is ok to re-roll if that happens. I didn’t do that and once or twice, felt like they collided awkwardly. Now, these are nitpicks, really. In general, we had a good time with this, the players loved playing their pretty normal characters in these horrific scenarios, just running blindly from threat to dreadful threat. We used both the regular room table and the guest room table (the entries here were written by some industry luminaries like Johan Nohr and Tim Hutchings.) One of the best things about that experience for me was that I was just as surprised, horrified and disgusted as the players were! One of the challenges then, of course, was that it was my job to quickly read, interpret and present the room to the players without taking too long, stumbling over the words, reading them too much or generally fucking up. Unfortunately, we didn’t quite make it to the end of their mad dash through the back-rooms. The PCs still have a few squares of fatigue to be filled in. Hopefully we’ll be able to pick that up and finish it off someday.
Mothership – Moonbase Blues I wish this wasn’t in the one-shot pile but heigh-ho. Sometimes your GM moves away and leaves your characters stuck on a moonbase that is probably trying to kill them. I mean, there was someone or something there trying to kill us. I was under no illusions that we were likely to all die out there, I just wanted to know how. Anyway, the one session we had of this game was great. Full props to Joel, our GM, for putting so much time and effort into he prep for it. He had a series of recordings that he played for us at key moments, he had handouts and provided us with cheat-sheets. It was a great experience. Also, I loved playing my character that I created in the post I linked above, Victoria Ibanez, the Corps’ finest. I’d love to get to play her again. Mothership is a great system with compelling mechanics and one of the best character creation experiences out there. If you need any more convincing, you should go and check out Quinns’ review of it.

Conclusion

So, that’s it. Those are all the one-shots that I got to play in the last few months. I didn’t get to play many of the games I wanted to, but I sure did have fun not playing them. Next year, I am continuing the theme of not playing the games I listed in that post by starting the year off with a one-shot of After the Mind, the World Again, a Disco Elysium-inspired, GMful mystery game and, Dragon Age, which, I have at least discussed at length on this very blog here and here. Honestly, I think it was useful to set out goals for the games I wanted to play. I may not have gotten to play any of them if I hadn’t done that. So I will continue to write about things I want to experience on the blog and see what happens.

I will be posting more intermittently as we come into the holiday period now. I will be travelling to visit friends and family a lot and won’t always have the chance to post as regularly as I would like. So, in case this is the last post before the end of the year, I wish you the very happiest Winter Solstice/Hogswatch/Western New Year.

BTW

Here are links for where to buy each of these games:
Pirate Borg
Troika!
Honey Heist
BDSM
Cthulhu Dark
Liminal_
Mothership

Games I Wanted to Play this Year

Review

So, how have I done with that list from earlier in the year? At the time I wrote that, on the 28th July, I thought, Time-shmime! Who needs it?! Not me, that’s who. I’ll breeze through this entire list of ten frikkin’ games. But, of course, that was assuming a lot.

Assumptions

The first assumption that was happily crushed was that we had a smaller number of GMs willing to run sessions in our little community, Tables and Tales. Up until then, only three of us had run anything so I assumed that would continue. When a fourth and even fifth GM raised their hands to take the helm, I was delighted. That’s what I had always wanted in our space. From what I can see, if GMs were water, most RPG communities would be dying of thirst. Even in the much larger Open Hearth community, you tend to see the same dozen or so members announcing new games all the time, despite there being a membership in the hundreds. Given the size of Tables and Tales, five active GMs represents a pretty large percentage of our total player-base. On top of that we have had a couple of board game nights too. The long awaited and pretty fun Darkest Dungeon board game is, honestly, very close to the video game (actually, I’m told by friend of the blog, Media Goblin it’s closer to Darkest Dungeon 2 in rules) but also pretty close to an RPG so we gave it a go.

Assumption number 2: I have a pretty stable schedule, which meant that I could run games almost every night of the week if I had the wherewithal. And there were weeks there when I was playing, either as GM or player, in four or five sessions. Turns out that was not sustainable. For one thing, obviously, I started writing this blog, dear reader. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love doing this and it’s not like it takes that long, but if I want to blog, I need to do it in the evening (even though I am typing this on the train to work right now because its a busy week for me and my evenings are taken up with pre-Christmas socialising.) Between that and various other work and family commitments that came up, it was simply impossible to maintain that sort of schedule.

Reality

Even taking these points into account, I managed to play a lot of games in the last few months, just mostly not the ones I expected to. So, let’s have another look at that list:

GM

Tales from the Loop – Mascots and Murder – Short Campaign – Nope, didn’t happen. This one is still simmering away on that back-burner, ready for promotion to the front of the stove-top any time now. It had to be shelved to make way for other games and other GMs. Like I said earlier, I was perfectly happy to do it.
Dungeon Crawl Classics – individual modules – Haven’t managed to get any of these to the table yet, I’m afraid. But, I have a plan for this one. I have had to re-arrange my schedule a bit to allow it. Our local game shop, Replay, has been undergoing a big refurbishment in the last few months. Once it’s done, they will expand their number of gaming tables a lot and I am hoping to get in there on a Wednesday night to run some DCC Level 0 funnels. My preference would be to get some newbies to sign up for these sessions and hopefully gain some new members for Tables and Tales in the process. The new year will be the perfect time for this, I think.

More Troika! – one-shots – Achievement unlocked! Although, technically, it was more like two sessions of the same game, rather than multiple one-shots. I did a blogpost on it! We went to Whalgravaak’s Warehouse, one of the Location based adventures made for Troika. So far it has been very fun. It’s a dungeon crawl, there’s no doubt about that, but it’s a warehouse. And the rooms and creatures and general vibe are beautifully weird in the way only Troika can do it. So far, the PCs, a Monkey Monger, a Wizard Hunter and a Gremlin Catcher (there was also a Landsknecht who has since moved to Spain) have murdered the Cacogen they were sent there to murder, made friends with a thin mutant, captured entire detachments of microscopic soldiers in gremlin catching jars, discovered a desert other-world on top of the warehouse and, um, set fire to a load of old rope. Brilliant craic altogether.
Death Match Island – one-shot – You know what, I just completed a rewatch (maybe not “rewatch” since I never watched the entire thing in the first place) of Lost, the whole thing. All six seasons. All 5000 episodes. I think I was in mourning for the lost Death Match Island one-shot that should have been. This one was a scheduling issue. Those of you out there who play RPGs (and if you don’t and you’re here, welcome! You must be confused…) will be aware of the difficulties one often encounters in getting four or five adults together in the same room at the same time. Honestly, I am surprised this problem doesn’t come up more often in Tables and Tales. Anyway, having just finished that Lost marathon, I am 1000% ready to play this game. It’s not quite the same and it would definitely not run for 678 sessions like Lost would if it were an RPG but it has the same heart and the same mystery box feel to it. And I want that. That’s what I want.
The Wildsea – campaign – Just go read my blogpost on My First Dungeon’s campaign of the Wildsea. I desperately want to play this game. Honestly, whether I got to be a player or a Firefly, I would be excited. But, really? I’m not sure when I was going to fit this one in this year. Another campaign? Dunno what I was thinking.
DIE RPG – one-shot – I finished listening to the My First Dungeon Wildsea campaign and just started listening to the DIE one. They have a great episode that is mainly Kieron Gillon being effusive for an hour about his, admittedly very cool, game and I enjoyed it. But then I got into the Session Zero episode and I immediately wanted to play it. I want to run this for my friends and have them play real-world people with real-world problems working it all out it in a fucked-up fantasy world of their own creation as characters of their own creation. I really want it. Maybe next year.

Player

Old School Essentials – campaign I think – So this one has not happened yet. I think it is, at least partly, due to the fact that Isaac, of Lost Path Publishing has been running other shit like crazy in the last few months instead. I hope it wasn’t my OSE character creation post that put him off running the game (I’m pretty sure it wasn’t. I’d really be flattering myself to imagine I had that much influence on anyone.)

Heart: The City Beneath – Open Hearth campaign – Our GM, Mike, brought a whole bunch of us together (There were six PCs at the start) to hopefully save the landmark known as Nowhere from being consumed by the Heart. This was a real learning experience for me as it was only my second time as a player in the Resistance System (see the section on Magus, Pike and Drum below for my first experience.) I discovered that, if left to our own devices, players (for “players” read “Ronan” but not just “Ronan”) are apt to take the hand when there is no form of initiative to govern the order or frequency of actions in combat. It was a lesson learned early in the campaign due to one player’s proper and timely use of Stars and Wishes after the very first session. Saying that, I had a brilliant time playing my Incarnadine, Priest of the God of Debt, alongside a Heretic, a Cleaver, a Deep Apiarist, a Vermissian Knight and a Deadwalker. We often had opposing desires and drives, which made the role-play fun, and the GM came up with lots of weird and interesting situations, NPCs, enemies and locations for us. Forgotten-Frost-Remembered, my Aelfir Incarnadine, got to reach Tier 4 of the Heart and retire(!) at least in his head.
Call of Cthulhu – Masks of Nyarlathotep – campaign – Not really sure if this was anything other than wishful thinking when I wrote this, to be honest. This post explains that it was always going to be a long shot to get this campaign started again. But someday, I would love to get Grant Mitchell back on the trail of the mystery in this thoroughly classic campaign.
Magus, Pike and Drum – Playtest – This is Isaac again. He has a great basis for a Resistance System game set in the English Civil War that never was, and this is it. There were four of us gathered around the table for this playtest at the end of the summer. I genuinely had so much fun with it. Gráinne was my character. She was an Irish noble and she had some very fun abilities (some of them were a bit too fun with a few too restrictions, it was decided, as a result of this playtest.) What was important in the game is that we solved the mystery in very short order, after scaring the shit out of the mayor and not blowing up the town. But what’s really important is that we provided Isaac a lot of valuable feedback to feed back into his new game. Can’t wait to play this one again, hopefully in the near future. I hope to write a lot more about this game as it develops.

Conclusions

So there you go. Three out of ten. Not great. But! I experienced so many other games instead of the ones I didn’t get to in that post! And I got something out of all of them. I’ll tell you about them in the next post (or the one after if I don’t have time to write the rest of the week and just post some more old fiction on Sunday instead.)

Liminal_

Survivin’

It is the kind of thing people around here might say when you ask them how they are getting on, “Survivin’.” It is the sort of bleak answer to an innocuous question that is probably played for laughs. At least, if it isn’t, you laugh anyway, because, otherwise, you are likely to get drawn into a conversation.

But you know what it means, even if they are being facetious. They are probably struggling in some way. Maybe they are just tired, maybe they have a hang-over, but maybe, the world has been having its way with them. Perhaps their car broke down and they don’t have the money to get it repaired right now. Maybe they were on the way to the hospital to visit their sick mother when they broke down and they missed the visiting hours. And their phone died before they could call someone to collect them and they had to walk for miles along the hard-shoulder. They caught a terrible cold and now they can’t breathe right and sleeping is impossible and they can’t enjoy anything because merely existing has become uncomfortable. All they’re doing is survivin’.

So wouldn’t it be fun to play a game where that’s the only aim? Surprisingly enough, I think it might.

Of course, survival horror is nothing new. It is a major video game genre. People love Silent Hill! The last game I wrote about on this very blog was a survival horror TTRPG, even though it was wrapped in a cosmic horror disguise. But the game I want to write about today feels a little different. Not totally, you understand. It sticks to the same themes of helplessness, despair and terror in the face of an indifferent or downright hostile environment (part of the reason I wanted to discuss it at this time.) But it has a few indiosyncrasies that help it to stand out.

Liminal_

Pretty sure that’s pronounced “Liminal Space.” The name does make it uniquely difficult to google but that is maybe why the book is called Liminal_Survival Guide. I picked it up from Iglootree here. The creative team is Alexei Vella and Neonrot/Willow Jay. The illustrations are fun/disturbing and are all done with ASCII characters by Alexei Vella.

There are elements of the layout and graphic design (also done by Vella) that remind me of the recently released Death Match Island. The liberal use of redaction with the suggestion that parts of this “survival guide” are from some sort of real world manual, written for the employees of some institution or shadowy company is the main through line.

This survival guide is for the eyes of _ personnel only.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Alexei Vella has also contributed to a new island for that game!

Anyway, back to Liminal_. It is a map-making game at its core. You are probably going to be the GM (or Architect) if you own the book. You’ll need at least two other players and a large piece of graph paper. On it, the players (known as the Disoriented in this game) will be drawing rooms as you roll for them. There are lots of rooms to roll from. More than half the book is made up of room prompts!

The basics of the game go like this. The Disoriented start in a square room with a door in each wall. They roll off for initiative and the first one to go decides which door to choose. They can move into it at the cost of Fatigue, their only stat. The first one to enter a room is likely to take more Fatigue than those who follow, but every time anyone takes any kind of action, they are going to incur a Fatigue cost. Once they get 100 Fatigue, they’re screwed, they get Absorbed by these Back Rooms they have found themselves inhabiting.

There are rooms of different shapes and sizes, there are rooms that have items in them. Carrying items adds to Fatigue but they might help the PCs in some way. They might help them get away from Entities that occupy some of the rooms. Like Cthulhu Dark, you can’t fight them, all you can do is run. There is no fighting in this game. The Disoriented make a Fatigue Test to evade them by escaping from the room. They roll a d100 and if they get equal to or higher than their current Fatigue they succeed. If they fail, they take more Fatigue. They might also garner Injuries. Injuries cause a continuous rise in Fatigue and may have other adverse effects.

Sometimes, depending on the room prompt, a room vanishes and you better hope you are not trapped in there when that happens. Other times, you might enter a Dead Room, which is just a room with only one door, i.e. the one you came in. There are, luckily, Rest Rooms to allow the PCs to recover some of their Fatigue. And there are Escape Rooms. If you are lucky enough to keep your Fatigue low enough through your harrowing journey through the Rooms, and you avoid being Absorbed by what must surely be a sentient labyrinth, you might just escape! Seems unlikely…

The entity prompts and room prompts are well-thought out, appropriate and fun in the most despicable way possible. Here are a couple of examples:

Entity prompt: A mass of mulch, organic green material and mosses rapidly grows into a human man, a skeleton briefly visible inside it. The creatures eyes are blood red as it reaches for players, roaring.
Room prompt: Players enter a short, dimly-lit hallway. Yellowing wallpaper covers the walls, and rotting, off-white carpet covers the floor. There are several missing persons posters covering the walls. Some of them bear the faces of the players.

I do not want to give too much away here since I want to play this game and my players read this blog, but, honestly, there are so many good prompts in this book! I imagine a bloody good time rolling up these rooms and horrors.

And, on top of all those, there are even more than a hundred “Guestroom Prompts” written up by such RPG luminaries as Grant Howitt (Spire, Heart etc.), Tim Hutchings (Thousand Year Old Vampire), Tim Denee (Death Match Island) and Chris McDowall (Electric Bastionland, Into the Odd).

One of the more interesting things about the game is the lack of any kind of character creation rules or processes in it. After all, no-one has any particular defining stats. In the Roleplay section, the authors suggest that the players might just play themselves. Now, I have done this before in a Call of Cthulhu game and, while it was an interesting experience, it was, perhaps, just not for me. I immediately considered having my players use the character generation tables in Death Match Island instead. These are specifically designed to come up with contemporary sorts of characters plonked into a desperate, life-or-death situation that they have to escape from. I also considered using at least parts of the methods described in Between the Skies. Finally, maybe the Cthulhu Dark option is the best, just give the poor bastards a name and an occupation and release them into the Liminal_.

Conclusion

This feels like the ideal one-shot to me. It’s rules-lite, with a simple premise and no real character creation to speak of. There is no prep and you only need a few items like graph paper and pencils to play it. Its procedurally generated nature and its absolute mountain of prompts are likely to ensure that you never have the same room twice. My only worry is that it might be a little too one-note, that the singular motivation for the characters to survive might not be enough to keep them interested the whole time. I guess I’ll find out when I get it to the table!

What about you dear reader, do you like the idea of this Back-Roomy, SCP-like game? Have you played it? Let me know in the comments!

Change and the Dark

Another schedule change

They say that procrastination is the thief of time. Nope; its work. Work is stealing my time and there ain’t no time cops coming to recover my purloined hours or to clap Work in cuffs. This is the true crime of late-stage capitalism!

Seriously, though, I have a full time day job that has nothing to do with gaming, writing fun stuff or pretending to be other people. That’s how I can afford this luxury website (ooh la la) and all these RPGs I keep backing. Unfortunately, it does take up the majority of my waking hours. Very recently, I mentioned that I would be posting once every three days from now on. I have found this awkward in a few ways. Firstly, I often get mixed up as to what day I am supposed to be posting on this schedule. Secondly, it has meant a lack of a consistent day of the week that my posts appear. Lastly, it is still a bit of a struggle to keep up with this, I am finding, thanks to work and, you know, actually playing games.

So, instead, I have decided to switch to posting on Wednesdays and Sundays. I love writing this blog and do it mainly for my own satisfaction and I am going to continue to do that, just on a twice-weekly basis. To those of you who are regulars around here, thanks for bearing with my struggle to find the perfect schedule. I think this might be the one!

Anyway, on to the meat of the post. Our Halloween one-shot.

Roadhouse Feast

The trees loom above the rutted country road illuminated only by the staccato shudder of your headlights. This road will be the death of us, you say to your companions in the back seat of your Ford motor car. Just concentrate on getting back to Arkham, you think to yourself, as you trundle past Laura’s Roadhouse. A good, god-fearing woman, Laura. You know the family. You grew up not so far from here. You wonder how they’re doing now.

Crash, badump, badump

You shouldn’t have let your mind wander. You’ve hit something! The automobile! No! The Ford is pitched forward at an unnatural angle. The others have already bailed out. They’ve gone to inspect the carcass left on the road behind. One of them screams.

This is the opening, in my words, of the Cthulhu Dark module, Roadhouse Feast. It was written in 2023 by Linus Weber, with Monster-art by artgeek09 on Fiverr and cover-art by Eneida Nieves on Pexels although, the version I downloaded from itch.io did not have a cover to speak of.

I won’t go into the details of the module, the characters, the plot or the ending. Instead I want to write about our experience with it and general vibes.

The one-shot

There were four of us at the table on Halloween night for this one-shot, including me as Keeper. This was the ideal number, I believe. Numbers for a one-shot are critical to actually getting to the end of it. Any more than four and we would have struggled with that all-important goal. Instead, we played the module from start to finish with a little time over for epilogues. This is what I had been hoping for when I picked this module to run. The author designed it to be run in a single session of two to three hours and that’s exactly what it was. Tick!

The setup is pretty much as I narrated above. The investigators (this is a catch-all term for PCs in Cthulhu Dark. It does not necessarily imply that they are, in fact, in any way, detectives) are driving home to Arkham from a place called Thompson Village, late at night on 31st March 1923. They hit a deer on the road, damaging their car enough that they need to go and get help. This is all classic horror story setup stuff. The 1920s era and forest setting helps by removing the technological advantages of the present day and exuding a creepy, dark, dangerous atmosphere. Tick!

What do you want from a Cthulhu game of any kind? You want your PCs to experience some fucked up shit that has the potential to send them swirling down the plughole of madness at any moment. You want monstrous entities, cultists, forbidden philosophies and the mundane warped and twisted into something otherworldly and inconceivable. Roadhouse Feast has all this in a tidy little package. Tick!

The system

This was our first proper foray into a Cthulhu Dark game. This despite actually owning the book. Since we couldn’t actually find the book in time, I fell back on the original, playtest-style rules that Graham Walmsley published back in 2010 in the form of a 4 page pamphlet. All of the rules fit easily on those 4 pages with room to spare. It is the lightest of systems. I don’t think I have ever played anything lighter. Honey Heist approaches it, but I think Cthulhu Dark wins this contest by virtue of the fact that you only have one stat and no abilities of any kind. The one stat you have is called Insight (although in those original rules that I was using, it was called Insanity.) You can play this game sans character sheet by simply placing a d6 in front of you. It should show the 1 at the start of the game but every time you fail an Insight check, brought on mainly by seeing Mythos shit or using your Insight die to help succeed at actions, you gain a point and flip your die to the appropriate number. If it ever gets to 6, you’re screwed. Your investigator loses their marbles and is removed from the game. We had one investigator hit 6 Insight. She started a forest fire and stood in the road, worshiping the flames. It was a good time.

This mechanic was so good in a one-shot. It works perfectly to keep your investigators worried about what is just around the corner, or about having to use their Insight die to succeed at a check. Of course, the other great strength of the system is that, if they ever face an actual Cthulhu Mythos monster, they’re goners. They will not survive. This gives them the feeling of victims in a horror movie. You cannot fight, you can only run or hide or delay. In this scenario, delaying is a major part of survival and it led to some ingenious moments from the players.

In general, the lightness of the ruleset made for exceptional roleplaying throughout. There were no long breaks to add up dice rolls, no-one ever had to stop to look up rules and there were no character sheets or monster stats to worry about.

All in all, I would recommend the system and the scenario for a horrific one-shot experience, dear reader. Go pick them up if you would like that sort of thing.

Ravenloft

Something’s gotta give

I thought I would play Ravenloft around Halloween this year. My friend returned all my Ravenloft books and boxed sets to me back in the spring after about 25 years, and since then I have been thinking it would be cool to run something in the Domain of Dread as a Halloween one-shot. But, in the meantime, I have played a lot of different games, mostly one-shots, mostly a lot easier to play in that format than any version of D&D. So I did consider starting a campaign or a multi-session adventure, but, to be honest, I didn’t have it in me to do all the reading and conversion that was necessary. I may be playing more RPGs than I ever have before in my life but that has an unlooked for side-effect: I have less time to prepare for games! This is a dilemma that has been exacerbated by my blog schedule and I have been thinking that I might have to make a change there too. I am switching to posting once every three days for the foreseeable future.

The Demiplane of Dread

So, I am not talking about the original Ravenloft adventure from AD&D 1st Edition or the Curse of Strahd released for 5E, but the setting released by TSR for AD&D 2nd Edition in 1990. It is by Bruce Nesmith and Andria Hayday. I think I have mentioned in another post that my friends and I played most of our AD&D in the Dark Sun setting but I would imagine Ravenloft comes a close second. I just loved having them create regular old characters in my home-brewed standard fantasy world and then dumping them, unceremoniously and with no warning through the mists into the forests of Barovia or the mountains of Forlorn and hitting them with monsters that drained levels and abilities and where there was no escape from he darkness and the terror. Although, I confess, the games were probably not very terrifying. I did my best, but I have always found horror a difficult genre to emulate around the table, especially with a system like D&D. The authors did their best to assist the Ravenloft DM with sections in the main book about the “Techniques of Terror,” where they discuss “Assaults on the Mind,” “Assaults on the Body,” “A Villain in Control,” and that sort of thing. But, the fact was, we were a gang of teenaged boys who mostly just wanted to hit things until they died so those were usually the kinds of adventures we got.

Looking at it from a more mature standpoint now, I would love to try to run it with a real sense of gothic horror. I think I am better equipped now to attempt it. Although I still think it would be a challenge and I might refrain from running it in a D&D-like system. Why? Well, the products for Ravenloft, while not all gold, are still some of the highest quality items I think TSR produced. Just look at all these handouts! Each one of them has something useful on the back of a beautifully illustrated card.

5E products are usually produced to a high standard, but they don’t have the variety and versatility that the 2nd Edition boxed sets did. They also don’t have the quality or usefulness of content. These boxes and sourcebooks are stuffed with useable materials; details on lands, villains, monsters, new spells, effects, encounter tables, maps, maps, maps. 5E setting guides of late, excepting maybe Planescape are very short on this sort of detail.

Adventures in Ravenloft

I usually wrote my own adventures back in the day. Or at least I would pick and choose liberally from the pre-written modules and combine them with my own scribblings to make them fit into an overarching campaign. Or that’s what I told myself I was doing. I have a funny feeling that, mostly, I was just trying o murder the PCs. This is another aspect of my style that has, thankfully, changed, since the good old days.

I do have a few Ravenloft adventures that might be fun to convert or even to just run in the original 2nd Edition ruleset.

Feast of Goblyns is a very flexible module that is designed to be run for characters of levels 4 to 7. It is presented in a format that allows many different paths to be taken through it, with the PCs potentially ignoring some major and minor plots depending on how they decide to play it. This one was designed to be the adventure that draws PCs into the Demiplane, which is always fun. I think I remember playing parts of this module but my memory is not good enough to recall which parts. At 96 pages, though, it would require a bit of commitment to play through the whole thing.

From the Shadows is written for rather high level characters, levels 9 to 12. It is based around the plots of Azalin the lich, lord of the domain of Darkon and his eternal conflict with Strahd Von Zarovich, famed ruler of Barovia and OG Ravenloft BBEG. A great deal of it takes place in Castle Avernus, the lich’s home, and that is pretty cool. I definitely played this but I don’t think the characters survived the whole way through.

Finally, I have the Book of Crypts, which is similar to the Book of Lairs but has 8 full adventures in it! This seems the most suitable for a shorter game or campaign and I might just take a look at running something from here before the spooky season is fully through.

Dear reader, have you ever played this version of Ravenloft? Do you yearn for the mists? Or would you rather play a game actually made for horror?

Non-standard Holidays

Celebrations

I’ve begun to realise recently that I would much prefer to celebrate a fictional or “made-up” holiday than a real one. At least a real western one. I have had to interrogate the reasons for that, of course. But, let me tell you, dear reader, it did not take me very long to hit upon the answers.

Religion is, naturally, the top reason. It’s been a long time since the church and I parted ways. We had a fundamental philosophical conflict that was irreconcilable. Anyway, as a result, I don’t feel I’m a part of the religious side of any of our really major holidays. Christmas and Easter are the ones I am thinking of but in Ireland, at least, there are plenty of other saints’ names attached to days throughout the year. Of course, I know that these holidays, and even some of the saints have been recycled from pagan ones by the church. Same with a lot of the traditions. I’m sure dominant religions have been doing that throughout history as a clever way to stamp their authority on a people or place. You can see it happening in real time to our big holidays too, of course, as they are co-opted by consumerism. The original meanings have become mixed up and diluted and lost. What even is the meaning of Christmas? (there’s a saccharine Christmas movie in there somewhere.)

The second reason is related to the first in that rampant consumerism is the focus of these big holidays that we tend to celebrate in the West. So, as diluted as the pagan purposes of the holidays have become, even the Christian meanings of more recent centuries have been co-opted by Black-Fridayism. These times, when families and communities come together, are often the most stressful and worrisome occasions for those struggling financially in the first place. It just doesn’t feel worth it…

So why not celebrate occasions where the meaning is as clear and sparkling as Caribbean waters, and as fun and uncomplicated as a Hobbit’s birthday party? And let’s not forget, themes worthy of really kick-ass RPGs.

Talk Like a Pirate Day

Those of you have been around a couple of weeks might remember that I made a character using Pirate Borg a while back. That was by way of familiarising myself with the game, the setting, the character classes and the general rules. And all of that was in the service of a Talk Like a Pirate Day one-shot on September 19th.

I was the GM for this game so I never ended up using Isabella “Butcher” Fernando, the buccaneer I created for that other post. However, we did have another buccaneer in the party, recently returned from hell, where the devil didn’t want her, was Eliza “Bad Omen” Rackham. She made an incredible entrance (her player was unavoidably detained so she appeared about an hour and a half into the action.) As though rising from Davy Jones’ Locker, she emerged from he water by the other characters’ little row-boat and hoisted herself into it by grabbing their oars, shocking her companions who all knew she was dead. Eliza was, surprisingly enough, the most normal member of this cursed crew. As well as “Bad Omen,” we had a couple of skeletons, one a swashbuckler and one a zealot, a vampiric rapscallion and, a mutant great old one from another reality who also happened to be a sorcerer with a taste for human flesh. So, I decided to skip any town-based interactions with NPCs and start them off in medias res, facing down a British naval vessel who wanted to kill or capture at least three members of the small crew. Raymond, our vampire took the role of captain, despite being disadvantaged by the glaring Caribbean sunlight, while Jolly Roger, the Great Old One Mutant and our skeletons, All Bones McKeown and Hector blasted off broadsides.

After they escaped that fight, we did a smash cut to them rowing ashore, greeting the resurrected Eliza and then to the carved door of a lost temple in the jungles of Black Coral Bay. That’s the island presented in the core Pirate Borg book as a place to start your adventures. I took three of the dungeons (Shrine of the Nameless Skull, Sanctum of Nameless Blood and the Lake of the Nameless One, which are all a part of the larger Temple of the Nameless One but are distinct nonetheless) described in the book and used those for the one-shot. It might seem counterintuitive to use three dungeons where one would have been more than enough for a one-shot, but, for the Pirates of the Caribbean type theme and for the satisfaction it would bring, I thought it was important. So, I did the first dungeon entirely in montage, finally describing how the PCs figured out the way through the temple door and let play begin there. For, the second dungeon I took out all but two main rooms, putting several major items and encounters into those rooms instead. The third dungeon, I left in its entirety and I’m glad I did because it had so many cool moments. These were topped off with a bunch of curses handed out by an ancient golden idol in the hold of a sunken Spanish galleon in an underground lake, the skeletons regaining their flesh, and All Bones McKeown being eaten by the giant Cthulhoid monster from the home-dimension of Jolly Roger. The survivors escaped through a maze of flooded underground tunnels and emerged into the creepy and atmospheric Black Coral Reef.

I loved it. It was a very good time and I think the players liked it too. One of them announced that they would happily play a full campaign of Pirate Borg, in fact. Their roleplaying was fantastic, because, as game designer and mutual on Instagram, sean_f_smith recently commented on one of my posts “everyone knows how to play a pirate.” I was worried about the strangeness of the PCs at the start, but the madcap elements introduced by their weirdo characters only heightened the atmosphere. Add in some pirate tunes and a few glasses of grog and we had a whale of a time. 10/10, might just go back to it before next Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Bilbo and Frodo’s Birthday

Did you know that it was Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday on September 22nd? The Bagginses of Bag End? Well, I didn’t. Not until the day before at least (although, I’m sure a younger me would have known it.) Anyway, I got in the Discord for Tables and Tales, our local TTRPG community and requested a Lord of the Rings flavoured game. It was incredibly short notice but our resident Tolkienite, Isaac of Lost Path Publishing did not shirk. He suggested a one-shot of a scenario that came in the core rules of The One Ring 2E from Free League. In no time at all we had swords, bows and axes being proferred in the comments and a full fellowship was formed.

In fact, we had five players and Isaac in total so it was a very fun table. We started off, on the night, with a spot of light character creation. Now, you need a bit of time for this in The One Ring. It’s not as time-consuming as D&D 5E character creation but it’s somewhat more involved, than say, Pirate Borg. Even then, with Pirate Borg, we had plenty of prep time and we had all met for a session 0 online a few days before so everyone had their characters ready to go. Since I had given Isaac only a single night to pull this together, (sorry Isaac) we had to include it in the session. By this point, we already knew this was going to take longer than one night to get through but we were all alright with that.

Actually, by the time we all had out characters ready we still had plenty of time to get into “the Star of the Mist.” The scenario began with our Player Heroes meeting Gandalf in the Prancing Pony! How my nerdy heart swooned! Isaac, producing an Oscar worthy performance as Ian McKellen as the old wizard, sent us off on a quest into southern Eriador where some folk had been going missing.

Our party consisted of two Dwarves of the Lonely Mountain, one of which was played by me. I said I was going to go full Nesbitt (as in Jimmy who played Bofur in the Hobbit movies) But I think I was more Belfast than that in the end. My guy is Frár, the Champion. The other dwarf is Berfa, a Treasure Hunter. We have a second Treasure Hunter, Porro, one of our two Hobbits. The second Hobbit is, Rollo, a Messenger and finally, our Barding, Dagstan, is a Warden. We set off into the wilds to find the source of the trouble and we managed to get a fair way into the scenario despite our time constraints. I don’t want to give anything away but it has Dwarves ruins, monsters in the water and a mysterious “she” who has so far remained unnamed. That’s a trio of Tolkien ticks right there.

As I said to the rest of the players, this session was special to me. It felt like the realisation of the dream of Tables and Tales; the ability to get a game together at a day’s notice for people to enjoy and to celebrate an important occasion, Bilbo’s onehundredandeleventh birthday!

I’m so looking forward to continuing this adventure. It had been a long time since any of us had played the system so there was a fair amount of scrabbling through the book for rules by all concerned. I feel like next time, we’ll know what we’re doing a lot better and, from recent experience, I find Free League games to pretty intuitive once you grasp the basics.

Other festivities

These are just the latest games played with a particular non-standard festival in mind. On May the Fourth, we played a Never Tell Me the Odds one-shot set during the events of Star Wars Episode Four, A New Hope. The PCs had to infiltrate the Death Star to rescue a certain Princess before the storm troopers got them, or indeed, before anyone else could rescue her!

Obviously, we are coming into the season for horror and spooky games as Halloween approaches. This is one holiday I can get behind. There are so many games that could suit this season that I am excited to start coming up with a few ideas.

How about you, dear reader, are there any occasions, events or holidays that you like to mark with a festive game? Let me know in the comments!

Oh Mother!

Moonbase Blues

New member of the Tables and Tales crew, and experienced GM, Joel, is going to be holding our hands and releasing them when we reach the airlock, only to lock the door and start the cycle sequence while we batter our fists raw on the glass. He will watch us, impassive and seemingly unaware of our distress. Is that a hint of reptilian hunger in his eyes?
If this is how Moonbase Blues actually goes down, I’d honestly be ok with that.

Mothership character creation

Any excuse for a character creation post, eh?

Mothership has a very handy method of guiding the prospective victim through the process. The third paragraph in the Player’s Survival Guide tells you to turn to the sheet in the back of the book as it leads you through character creation. And, guess what? It does! All the instructions are right there on pages 5 and 6 as well though.

Our thoughtful and wise GM has also provided us a lovely form-fillable character sheet. That’s what I will be using tonight.

A screenshot of the Mothership Character Profile. It is a form-fillable character sheet, which also includes almost all the instructions you need to create a Mothership character.

We are five-by-five. Let’s go.

Step 1 – Roll Stats

We have four stats: strength, speed, intellect and combat. For each one we will roll 2d10 and add 25. Just watch me fuck this up:

Strength: 31
Speed: 28
Intellect: 32
Combat: 36

It’s not a total shit-show but it’s not great. I only got one roll above ten and that was eleven.

Moving swiftly on to leave this debacle behind!

Step 2 – Roll Saves

You have three types of saves in this game: sanity, fear and body. I think they pretty much speak for themselves, no?
For the saves I am rolling 2d10 and adding 10.

Sanity: 21
Fear: 14
Body: 25

I feel like having a low fear save score in a horror game is a distinct and unfortunate disadvantage. I just have to remember to milk it for role-playing opportunities, I suppose.

Step 3 – Choose Class

I like the choice of Class you have here. They are the classic Alien archetypes after all:

Marine
Android
Scientist
Teamster

I very much like the description each one gets in the intro.

A screenshot of the "Step 3. Choose Your Class" table from the Mothership Player's Survival Guide. It shows the available classes, Marines, Androids, Scientists, Teamsters, and describes them. — A screenshot of the “Step 3. Choose Your Class” table from the Mothership Player’s Survival Guide. It shows the available classes, Marines, Androids, Scientists, Teamsters, and describes them.

I am leaning towards marine, mainly because my Fear save is so low and there is that crack about marines being a danger to everybody when they panic. Heh. This is why I like one-shots. No fucker is getting out alive.

Yeah, marine it is.

“How do I get outta this chicken-shit outfit?”

You actually do also get some mechanical effects through your choice of class, it’s not all planned panic and movie quotes.

A Marine gets:

+10 Combat
+10 Body Save
+20 Fear Save
+1 Max Wounds

Sounds good.
That makes my Combat now a more respectable 46, my Fear Save a 34 and my Body Save a 35.

Step 4 – Roll Health

Health is rolled with 1d10 and you add 10 to it. I’m sure this roll will go just fine.
It’s a 7! I genuinely expected so much worse.

Anyway, that makes it

Health: 17

So, the way it works is that, once you drop below zero health, you get a wound. Most people start with 2 max wounds before things start getting more permanent. Marines, as noted above, get 3 max wounds. Once you mark a wound, you reset your health to its max minus any damage that carried over.

Step 5 – Gain Stress

What? Already?
I start with 2 minimum.

Step 6 – Trauma Response

“They’re all around us, man…Jesus…They’re comin’ outta the goddamn walls!”

Yep, this is a fun bit of Mothership specific stuff here. The Marine’s trauma response is:

Whenever you panic, every close friendly player must make a Fear Save.

Just stay outta my way.

Step 7 – Note Class Skills and Choose Bonus Skills

So, my class skills as a marine are no big surprise. Military Training and Athletics.
My Bonus Skills, though, I get to choose one Expert Skill or two Trained Skills. There is a sort of skill tree that you can see in the screenshot of the character sheet above. To choose a skill you have to have at least one pre-requisite skill. In other words, if you don’t have an arrow coming out of your trained skill and into the skill you want, you can’t have that one.

I’m realising that Marines have a very narrow range of potential specialities here. But that’s ok, do you really need any more than Firearms and Hand-to-Hand Combat? Nope.
“Check it out. I am the ULTIMATE badass.”

Step 8 – Equipment, Loadout, Trinket and Patch

We have got some tables on page 7 of the Player’s Survival Guide. There is one for each class. I am going to roll on the Marine one with a d10 to see what shit I have.

A screenshot of the "Marine Loadouts" table from the Mothership Player's Survival Guide. It is a d10 table. Each entry has a different set of equipment for a marine character to start with. — A screenshot of the “Marine Loadouts” table from the Mothership Player’s Survival Guide. It is a d10 table. Each entry has a different set of equipment for a marine character to start with.

I rolled a 3. So this is what that gives me:
Standard Battle Dress (AP7 (that’s short for Armour Points, yw,)) Pulse Rifle (3 mags (that’s short for magazines)) and Infrared Goggles.

I’m quite happy with that.

On page 8, we have a d100 table of trinkets. Let’s see what I get.

That’s a 005.
Ok, this guy is a total jarhead. That’s a necklace of shell casings. Cool. Cool, cool, cool.

Page 9 has another d100 table, this time for your patch. And that is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a patch that is sewn into your clothes, somewhere.

I rolled a 72 which means I have a patch of a black widow spider. I’m beginning to feel a character coming on.

I am pretty sure this marine is super serious about the job, really does consider themself a badass and is weird about it. Collects spent bullet casings and makes jewellery out of them, has a patch of the black widow spider because they truly respect her ruthlessness. But they are faintly ridiculous to their fellow crew and anyone who meets them, probably.

I am going to roll up my starting Credits. It’s 2d10 multiplied by 10. Here we go:

I rolled a 3 so that’s 30 credits. Clearly this marine has spent too much money on bullet casing jewellery courses. Should not be in charge of their own finances.

Step 9 – Finishing touches

That means name and stuff.

She is Corporal Victoria Ibanez, she/her.

Despite all those Hudson quotes, I think this marine is more like Vasquez. She knows she is the greatest marine to grace the corps in all the years it has existed and she doesn’t mind letting people know.
She has two brothers and a girlfriend at home on Theseus IV. She keeps promising to send credits to them but she somehow never has any left at the end of the month.
Victoria is 28 years old. She has a shaved head but it shows ginger when it’s growing out. She is stocky and broad and sports a lot of scars that she tells everyone she got in combat.

Also, I have to mark a zero above High Score on my character sheet. That’s because this records the number of sessions your character has survived!

The final chacter profile for Corporal Victoria Ibanez, she/her, my Mothership PC. She has a relatively high Combat score, mostly quite low Saves and is specialised in Firearms and Hand-to-Hand Combat. She knows she is the greatest marine in the corps.

So there we go, Victoria Ibanez, Corporal in the Marine Corps, all ‘round badass and potential cautionary tale. Can’t wait to start playing this PC at the table tomorrow night!

Back to Troika with Tables and Tales

Whalgravaak’s Warehouse

We’re going back to Troika for another one-shot tonight! I’m very excited for a couple of reasons.
The first is that I finished reading through the Whalgravaak’s Warehouse book last night and it seems like a lot of (potentially very lethal) fun. I don’t think it was necessary to read the whole thing before beginning play, actually, but I was enjoying it so I kept going. That can rarely be said of RPG products so that’s a big tick in the plus column already.
How does it play? Only time, and my players, will tell, dear reader. But I will say, I love the setup of it. I think it has done enough, to lay the groundwork for a session full of strange and dangerous settings, fun and dangerous encounters and weird and dangerous NPCs.

They call it a Location-based adventure and, in the intro they admonish the DM to pay attention to
“the classic tenets of danger, resource management, exploration and player agency.”
This says a lot in just a few words I think. But it neglects to mention that it also involves elements of the classic dungeon crawl and a hex crawl in too!

New Tables and Tales members

The second reason for excitement is the introduction of a couple of new members to our little, local RPG community, Tables and Tales. We have been in existence only since February and after a small initial influx, recruitment died down somewhat. Our aim is to be able to have a few different games going on, in person, that interested players can get involved in and to continue to grow in our relatively small local community.
Although our growth has been modest, it has meant a lot to me, personally, to get to play with lots of people I would otherwise never even have games with. As a blow-in to the place I live, it’s also a great way to get to know people with similar interests and meet up face to face.
So, I love when I am able to share a table with some new tablers. Maybe talers is a better moniker? Hmmm. We’ll have to workshop that one.
I met these new recruits at the recent celebrated birthday party of one of our founding members. One was a friend of hers who has never tried TTRPGs before and one was the bar-tender, who just overheard me nerdily chatting about D&D while standing at the bar.

I think that shows that the RPG nerds are everywhere. If you want to find your people, just announce yourself loudly at the bar.

So it’s an exciting evening ahead. I hope I don’t end up frightening off the newbs…

Endings

It’s hard to say goodbye

It’s so exciting to start something new. There’s the anticipation for what’s to come, the tingling nervousness that transforms to delight in the beginning, the wonder at sights never before seen and actions never before taken. Beginnings are full of possibility and the feeling of freedom.

The end of something, though, can be just as exciting, but in a different way. Do you ever rush to the end of a novel when you’re about three quarters of the way through, eager to find out what happens? Maybe you’ve waited on tenterhooks for the final film in a long running series to be released, because you have spent so long with those characters and know their stories so well and you want the best ending possible for them.

That’s a lot to live up to, that pressure. And I think, in an RPG context, everyone at the table feels it to one extent or another. At least in the situation when you know the end of the game is coming. TPKs notwithstanding, achieving a narratively satisfying ending to a game, particularly a campaign that you have potentially been playing together for months or years, is hard. Of course it is. There is a pressure to tie up all those loose threads, make sure that big bad is confronted, achieve emotional closure for your characters and their arcs, maybe even leave a space for a sequel.

Not only that, but the real struggle is making it all the way to the end of a campaign! Sometimes your friends move away or have kids or there’s a global pandemic or whatever. Stuff happens. Understandable stuff, but stuff nonetheless. The thing is, of course, that just means the endings you do get are that much more precious.

How to part on good terms

One-shots

You’re there for a good time, not a long time. But that presents its own challenges to fitting in a great ending. If you have a suitably magnificent finale planned, how do you make sure you get your PCs to it in time?

Time

My answer here is easy; take a reading every thirty minutes or so to see if they are cracking through the adventure rightly or if they haven’t made it out of the frikking tavern yet. If they need it, push them along, end that scene and do a hard cut to the next one, bring in a major NPC from another scene to move things along. And if all else fails? Cheat! One-shots benefit from a breakneck pace in my opinion, and no-one will blame you if you bend a few rules to keep the action moving along. They probably won’t even realise.

Possibilities

Another good idea for a one-shot is to come up with a few possible big endings. This is obvious, of course, but it helps to think about where you might want the PCs to end up and if you have a couple of big set-pieces to choose from, that really helps with engineering the big ending.

Epilogues (1)

And if all else fails and you run out of time while they are nowhere near a satisfactory endpoint, epilogues can be a fun way to go. Just get each player to narrate the life of their character five minutes after the last scene of play, or five weeks or five years! Just as long as the events of the game have a major effect on their epilogues.

Campaigns

It’s really hard to give any advice on this. Let’s be honest, every campaign is going to be so different, even if they are published campaigns played by thousands of groups, no two of those ends will end up being the same. But, we’re here to discuss it so let’s do it.

Arcs

Character arcs are important in campaigns, long and short. Players want to see growth in their characters and not just the kind where they level up. They want to find the thing they had been searching for and figuring out that what they really found was the friends they made along the way. Sometimes they want to gain power and prestige and property to make them feel successful. Other characters change drastically due to the events of the campaign and come out quite different to the farm girl they were at the start. My advice on these is to make sure they are wrapped up in advance of the big finale if you are planning something like that. Give each character their moment in the spotlight in the sessions leading up to the end so they know they are all just as important in the building of the story together and that everyone can see them in all their glory/misery. Players remember that kind of thing forever. Its good to involve character stories in the finale too, if you can, but if you leave their big moment to then, they will rarely get the time to revel in it too much. I could be wrong about this but such has been my approach in recent times and it has tended to work out fairly well.

Threads

Loose threads can be left loose, in my opinion. There is an impulse in some games to ensure that the players get to experience everything. But, by the very nature of RPGs, it’s simply not always possible.

So, the party ran into an itinerant wizard in the third session. She asked them to explore her phantasm-infested old tower and return with certain writings that might have relevance to the overall campaign plot. But they never had time to do it or they got sidetracked. That’s just an answer they are never going to get! At least not in game. The GM could always explain where that was going after the end of the game I guess.

Of course, for narratively integral beats, I endeavour to bring them all home at the end. If they lost track of a vampire servant of the Big Bad that they were hunting through the Deep Dark Forest, bring him back in the last fight as backup for the big bad, maybe. If one of the PCs’ parents went missing earlier and they didn’t find them, have them in the cultist temple as a sacrifice to the evil demon they are summoning in the final scene. Complicate the scene! Make it so they have to rescue them!

Fights

As for the final battle, if you are even running the kind of game where you would have such a thing, elaborate set pieces, evocative or emotionally resonant locations and big fucking monsters usually do the trick. I would say, though, difficulty-wise, more enemies is usually harder than bigger enemies. One or two big monsters with lots of hit points and abilities will go down much quicker than one big guy and ten small guys. I guess I am mainly talking about D&D finale battles and other set pieces here. This is because action economy is king in D&D. So this piece of advice should be taken with advisement.

One thing that I always try to encourage is for the players to talk and cry out and banter during these bigger fights. Makes the whole thing way more exciting and personal and funny.

Epilogues (2)

I think epilogues for the PCs really work well at the end of a long campaign as well. For these ones, I generally want to know what the characters are doing a year or two down the line. How have their day-to-day lives been affected by the events of the campaign? Where are they? Who are they with?

End games

At the end of the Blades in the Dark campaign I played in recently, our GM ran us through a different game to give us a chance to ask some questions of our characters to see how things ended up for them. The World Ending Game is by Everest Pipkin. It is a cinematic game that imagines the last scene or episode of a movie or TV show. It frames a bunch of different types of ending scenes called things like “the Confession,” “the Reveal,” “the Revision,” “Tableaux.” It was a fun and alternative way to treat the ending of a game that felt really personal to players and characters both and I would encourage others to use it to wrap things up for their own games.

Conclusion

I still find endings hard but I like them more and more. I have become much fonder of shorter more contained games of specific numbers of sessions. So it is a little easier to plan for. Also, sometimes, a character’s end is the best part, just look at Heart and its Zenith abilities, they will end the character, but they will also achieve the seemingly impossible. I love this idea for a couple of reasons, it brings the character and probably the campaign to a hard stop in the most amazing fashion and it is player driven. They have gotten themselves to the point where they want to use that ability, it is their choice to use it and it makes for the best ending for their character from their point of view.

How do you like to end dear readers? Do you like to go out in a blaze of glory or do you prefer to sail off into the West and remain Galadriel?