Category: Gaming

Gaming

Red Shift – Episode 3 – Night’s Black Agents play report

Finn CullenLeave a comment
Episode Three of RedShift was played out on Sunday evening, and while lighter on the action than the opening two episodes was still pretty intense and we got to see the Heat mechanics close up.
Mysterious Arab fellow
Valiant freelance agents Rowan and Hans ended last session in a private room just off the ER of Casablanca’s main hospital.   Hans’ face and neck had been badly torn up by the mysterious Arab man who had punched through the windshield of his car and tried to break Hans’ neck during a high speed chase… until Rowan had blown the attacker’s brains all over the car with a point blank shot to the head.    The stability loss from seeing the man rise to his feet in the rear view mirror was the first big use of the Stability rules in the campaign but perfectly justified I think.
Hans had a contact at the hospital who he’d worked with before and agreed to fix him up off the books.   While Hans was recovering the doctor, Jean, brought some bad news.   The shoot-out they’d had against the operatives with the obscure Templar insignia at the railway station had made the news and blurry CCTV images of Rowan and Hans were all over the television.    Jean was glad to help an old friend… but perhaps now they’d been patched up they could go and recover somewhere else?
No slouch at disguise…
Rowan, who’s no slouch at disguise, spent a few points toward reducing the Heat and they ventured out into early-morning Casablanca to find somewhere to hole up.   They had a meeting to arrange with their mysterious patron in the early afternoon.  Finding a McDonalds (for that authentic North African ambience of course) they sat and planned the meet.   At this point they discovered that Casablanca was home to a vast high tech luxury shopping mall.   With an IMAX cinema (“We can go see Deadpool” suggested Rowan, and because they had time to kill, they did just that!) and the largest conical aquarium in the world – Aqua Dream.
That detail clinched it for them and they mailed their handler to pass on the details to their patron.   The mysterious MORDRED121 would meet them at 1pm at Aqua Dream.
This gave me a GM dilemma.   A huge high tech mall with all those lovely features, balconies, multi-level goodness, expensive shops and glazed frontages AND A WORLD RECORD HOLDING AQUARIUM… and there was no logical way I could introduce an action scene at this point.   They’d covered their tracks pretty well and – in my defense – neither were actually in any shape right now for any dangerous confrontations.    I filed away the venue for potential later use and squirmed at the missed opportunity.
When MORDRED121 turned up he was an arrogant English academic in appearance.  He wanted assurance that the team had recovered the stolen documents in their entirety and the team retired to an upper floor of the nearest large chain bookshop.   They decided that there would be an unused reading table in one of the less popular sections and I decided to throw them a bone… while MORDRED121 began poring over the 18th century manuscript of hand written Latin arcana Rowan spotted their patron’s picture on the spine of a book nearby.     MORDRED121 was, according to the author bio on the book, a Professor William Helm of Magdalen College, Oxford.  A medievalist.    Two questions got added to the team’s agenda here:

How does a university professor, even one at Oxford, afford to hire two deniable mercenaries to recover a stolen manuscript?
Why would a medievalist be so interested in this much later document?

Helm saw them looking at his bio in the book and was not best pleased.   He also wanted assurance that Rowan had not made any digital copy of the document she’d helped recover for him.
Of course not, she lied.   She’d photographed every page individually as soon as the document was in her hands.   Helm let slip the name of the package too – the Sangretti Collection.   Suspicious but mollified Professor Helm let that issue go and decided he’d want to engage the pair for a supplementary task – escorting him and the Collection safely to Paris where he apparently had a convention to attend.    The details were provided to RedShift, the agency that handled client/operative relationships and the appropriate funds were transferred and tickets obtained.
On the way out of the bookstore though the Heat roll I’d made earlier came into play.    There were local cops all over the mall, more than you’d expect, and one of them approached Hans directly asking for ID.   Hans bluffed his way past but the cops were not convinced and Hans spotted others moving to cut off his exit from the mall.   Rowan and Helm peeled off to avoid the trouble as Hans took the initiative and approached the cops.
They were looking for the man who’d been involved at the railroad station shootout.  His description matched that of someone at the scene.   He was to consider himself under arrest…
“Of course I work for Interpol you jackass”
Until Hans’ player decided to use his first Cover spend of the campaign.   He had the cops reach into his inside pocket and locate his Interpol warrant card.   Using a combination of Cover and Cop Talk he managed to bluster the locals into believing he was working a case here (albeit slightly out of his jurisdiction) and they were endangering it.    They weren’t completely convinced until one rang control to get the Interpol identity checked out… one very tense die roll later and they let Hans go with some harsh words about authority.
Things went pretty smoothly from then on.  The team arrived at the Mohammed V International airport.   Rowan saw Helm having a quiet word with security and flashing some sort of pass… she caught the word “EISENBRUCKE” on the card and the three of them were whisked through to board the plane with no questions asked about their carry on weapons.   Rowan recognised that name – the courier with the stolen documents that they’d abducted in Marrakech had asked them in terrified tones if they were working for the Eisenbrucke Foundation.    It turned out that maybe they were…
From there a flight north to Paris.   Rowan felt mysteriously relieved – and regained a point of Stability – after crossing the North African coastline and heading over the ocean (the magical connection forged by the mysterious Arab attacker having been cut off at the water’s edge, not that they know that yet) to safely deliver Helm to his destination.

Now for a week’s downtime while Rowan has a sordid liaison with her married lover (and Source of Stability) and Hans recuperates… and then a new assignment already mailed to them by RedShift to deal with a patron in Calais.   And to ponder the questions raised from the last job.
Gaming

The Sundered Seven

Finn CullenLeave a comment

In recent posts I’ve discussed the collaborative worldbuilding undertaken by myself and a couple of players new to Tabletop gaming and posted the questions I set them to outline the basics of the world, and the answers they came up with.

I’m attaching a link to the basic setting notes that resulted and hope they’re an enjoyable read- we’re adding more details as they come out in play of course so this was very much the first wide glance at the setting.   Every adventure has added more information of course as is inevitable, and now we know, for instance, why the abandoned city of Kalnathan is a haunt of ghouls and why the ageless librarians in the tower of that foul city do not venture into the windowless Westernmost tower of the library despite the wisdom that remains on those unlit shelves, and why books of magical lore disguised as collections of erotic poetry are so keenly sought by certain Orloi ladies.

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Gaming

Earworms of Y’Golonac

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This is an adventure outline I worked up for a Trail of Cthulhu one-shot that I had planned, set in modern day Leeds.

Y’golonac – by Finn

It’s not fully polished and lacks game related statistics etc, and is a brief framework for an adventure that I think would suit the Purist rather than Pulp mode of play.    Keepers can of course change the location and details to suit their campaign, and with a little bit of finagling can make it suitable for multiple investigators rather than the single character I had created it for (one of my regular sessions is me and a single player).

It’s quite open ended after the first set-up scene which exists basically to show the investigator someone who had gone a long way down a particularly dark path… and then to set their own feet on that same path.    There are hints in there of investigative avenues that Keepers can flesh out as they wish and a variety of sketched out NPCs that can become allies, adversaries or some combination of the two as things go on.

While suggestions are given for potential end points and solutions nothing is set in stone.   My own style would be to run this and see what paths the player’s choices led them down and adapt accordingly.

I hope it is of interest and whether it is of use in its current format or not I hope it may perhaps spark an idea or two that you can use.

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Gaming

Outsourced Worldbuilding – Part Two

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 Yesterday I posted some open-ended questions I gave to my two players for a new Fantasy Fate Core game, the purpose of the questions being to allow them to shape the world we’d be playing in.    They discussed things between them and sent back their answers as follows:

Image by Asafesh

How many years is it since the great capital city was abandoned?
120 years 

WHat led to the fall of the royal house.
War 

What price do magicians have to pay for their magic?
Their eyesight 

How many of the noble houses of the realm fell into dark ways?   How did the others respond?
About 40%, the others are resisting more or less openly depending on their level of bravery. 

Why are priests shunned by wise folk?
Priests are not looked kindly upon by the powers that be, and so people don’t want to associate with them and risk getting entangled. 

Which of the gods is still revered by the common folk and why?
A warm deity, often associated with harvest, mercy and peace 

Why is it hard to reach the elvish lands?
There is a large mountain range to cross to get there. 

What weapon is the weapon of the nobility?
Naginata-type of weapon  

What non-combat skill is a true nobleman or woman supposed to master?
They’re supposed to have some kind of musical skill – whether that’s singing or an instrument is not important (Though preferably both). 

What do people swear by when they really mean it.
By my mind, heart and hands (ordered by order of operation) 

Have the trolls gone for good or might they return some day?  Who or what defeated them last time?
They might be back. The royal family and their loyal supporters did.

That gave me a good starting point for defining the world –

Since the fall of the capital city and the royal house was as a result of war just over a century ago, I figured the land would still be pretty fragmented.    Having just under half of the noble houses turned to the dark ways suggests that they were the ones who opposed the royal house and the status quo while the other noble houses were the loyalists… and therefore the losers.    And since that was only a century or so ago there would still be a lot of bad blood between the big families.

The questions about customs, the nobles wielding a particular type of weapon and being expected to be skilled at music suggests some nice background colour for the setting, and I really liked the idea of magic use costing the practitioners their eyesight.  That makes magical ability something with a real cost, and also allows for some nice distinctive NPC magicians who have to find ways to compensate for what they have given up.

The players had a good enough time with coming up with the ideas that I followed up with a second round of questions to dig a little deeper and flesh things out.   The questions and their answers are here:

What obligations are placed on members of the nobility that do not apply to the common folk?
Every noble family that has 3 kids or more must send one of them to join the army.
(Player commented: One of us might be escaping that)

What is the Final Oath?  That’s the oath the last king swore before the last battle, swearing to protect his people. 

Why does the last king’s spirit still haunt the ruined city?  He hasn’t fulfilled that oath.  

What is/was Duke Raendor’s secret? He’s secretly protecting a descendent of the royal family.  

It was lost at sea and the people of the coast rejoiced – what was it?  A slave-trader ship + crew that had been raiding the coast.  

What was the greatest creation of the dwarves and who stole it? A mechanical contraption with numerous uses, some of which are rather obscure. It was stolen by a small sneaky quiet thief, usually called The Weasel. It’s not entirely certain if it was his own idea however.  

What animal do they liken the king of thieves to?  How secure is his hold?  He’s likened to a snake, and his hold is pretty secure.  

They call her the Lady of Sanctuary – who is she and what does the title mean?  She is the goddess of harvest, mercy and peace. Her title alludes to the fact that she gives refuge and healing to suffering souls after death.  

Which group of people wears the tattoo on the back of their right hand? Slaves do

Plot hooks galore.   The players pretty much decided that one of them would be playing the third child of a noble house who was skipping out on their military service,    We have the ghost of a king haunting his abandoned city because his spirit cannot rest because of an unfulfilled oath.   We have a nobleman hiding an unknown scion of the royal house.   We learned that there is a predatory slave trade assailing the country, that there is a master thief called the Weasel who – on the orders of some mysterious other – has stolen a dwarvish artifact, and we’ve fleshed out the only deity still actively worshipped in the area.   Given how much conflict and discord there is in the kingdom I can imagine why a goddess of mercy and peace would still have followers.

We all really enjoyed the process and it gave me as GM an awful lot of material to work with when I sat down to flesh out the details – which I may post at some later time.   One thing I really appreciated about the process was the knowledge that if I presented the same questions to another group, or even to the same group again at another time, we’d end up with a world with plenty of background and potential plots that wouldn’t need to resemble this one at all.

I followed the worldbuilding questions up with some more character focussed ones once the players had their core concepts for their characters worked out, and in much the same vain they were open ended leading questions designed to bring out key points of their past and a cast of associated characters that could act as friends, rivals or just background colour.     It’s the first time I’ve used this process but the results have been very satisfying and I’ll almost certainly use variants of this in the future.

Gaming

Outsourced Worldbuilding

Finn Cullen1 Comment

One of the things I loved the most about Fate Core when I first picked it up was the emphasis on collaborative world-building – the creation of Aspects for the setting and attaching Faces and Places that the players come up with in concert with the GM.

Image by Jessie Therrien

I do most of my roleplaying online these days using Roll20, Hangouts and/or Skype and two of my players were interested in starting up a Fantasy campaign using Fate.   While they’re both seasoned veterans of PlayByPost and even some magnificent LARPS with casts of hundreds and spanning years in the forests of Europe they’ve never done Tabletop before.   I figured that sitting them down and trying to explain Aspects and some of the rulesey stuff about Fate (even the approachable Fate) might not be the best way to start, but I did want to involve them in the creation process so I hit upon a compromise idea that turned out to pay dividends.

I created a questionnaire for them with a few leading questions in there – not leading in the sense that I had particular outcomes in mind, but in the sense that they opened the door to a variety of tropes – and then I left it with them both to discuss between them.

It worked well, and I can recommend it as a great way to get the creativity going in a group even before sitting down together to play, with the beautiful bonus that everyone is invested in the results and knows the setting much better than if they’d simply been presented with a sheaf of pages of background material from the GM.

The questions are reproduced here.  In the next post I’ll share some of the answers they came up with which formed the basis of the world we’re now playing in.

How many years is it since the great capital city was abandoned?
What led to the fall of the royal house?
What price do magicians have to pay for their magic?
How many of the noble houses of the realm fell into dark ways?   How did the others respond?
Why are priests shunned by wise folk?
Which of the gods is still revered by the common folk and why?
Why is it hard to reach the elvish lands?
What weapon is the weapon of the nobility?
What non-combat skill is a true nobleman or woman supposed to master?
What do people swear by when they really mean it?
Have the trolls gone for good or might they return some day?  Who or what defeated them last time?

Gaming

Thoughts in the Depths

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A creature for Trail of Cthulhu.

The shunned tribal elders called it Giaouchatnhon when they discovered it’s lair deep within the caves in what is now Vietnam. They saw the effects it had on the first unfortunates to be exposed to it, infected by it, and they studied the results.

The victims grew ill, pale and weak. They began to suffer delusions and terrifying visions of worlds and lives utterly beyond their comprehension. The elders recorded the babbling of the victims, restrained them when they tried in their delirium to seek out dark hiding places of their own, and after the inevitable final moment when the doomed man or woman collapsed into greasy grey dust they sifted through the powdery remains and they found the slug-like larva and roasted it over a flame. 

The charred thing, ingested, would grant visions to the elder who consumed it and grant them knowledge and magical gifts that helped the elders cement their rule over the tribe. But power is never enough power. The elders sent more and more victims into the caves to expose them to the spores of Giaouchatnhon, to sicken them with alien flesh growing within them, to record their delirious cries and then to consume the thing that had slain them. The elders became priests of a sort, and they consumed the larvae more frequently, becoming themselves other than human. And inevitably their untainted neighbours eventually decided enough was enough. The elders and their followers were executed and the sacred caves became the forbidden caves, and the entrances were blocked with rocks and earth.


 Alhazred encountered it in his dream-wanderings beneath a brittle sky, a vast coiled worm or grub with an oil-black membrane and hardened roots at its extremities burrowed into the rocky wasteland beneath it. He wrote of plunging his hands through that crusty skin into the gelid interior and he touched its mind… its minds… its mind conscious at every moment of every place, every world, every age in which it grew and festered. One being, one consciousness, a thousand thousand dark places. He licked his dream-fingers clean and tasted each one of those worlds and he wrote down what he tasted. He tasted of darkness and the desire to spread itself wide across every world that was, of the desire to be carried to every speck of dust that made up the cosmos until it was everywhere and everywhen. He knew from the slime trickling down his throat in that dream that the creature lurked within the deepness of his own world too and he wrote down cryptic warnings about digging too deeply.

 The Mi-Go recognise the signs of infestation in their own kind and in the bodies of other species they encounter as they surge from world to world. They burn the worlds that are too badly infested. They vivisect the victims, even among themselves, to study the growing infection and then they destroy the larvae with strong acid. Their symbol for the creature placed upon a boundary place will dissuade them from entering, as a red plague-cross on the doorway of a house deters visitors.

Behind The Scenes –

Giaouchatnhon is the name it was given on Earth by the tribal elders who first discovered it. It exists in only one location on Earth – for now – but it is the same entity that lives in and on countless other worlds across the cosmos. Every instance of it shares the same consciousness and it perceives at once every sensory experience of every one of its manifestations.

Its thoughts, you can be sure, are not human thoughts.

The life cycle of the creature is one of contagion and dispersal. The adult form resembles a vast slug, several metres long, with a hardened carapace and rigid talon-like roots at either end with which it anchors itself into whatever surface it has chosen for its home. While capable of uprooting itself and moving it does so very rarely, and it is clumsy and slow. It prefers to remain stationary since once it has put down its roots it begins to spread trails of filaments through the surfaces it is in contact with, thin lines of mold that can permeate through almost any material, forming a nearly invisible web around it and extending from it over increasing distances.

The filaments spread only slowly in daylight, faster in total darkness. The creature perceives the world around it through this web and the longer it remains in place the wider the net grows. When the creature perceives a potential host moving within the compass of that web it will begin to form tiny nut-like cysts on the filaments. These will detach from the web when they are ripe, and about the size of acorns. Movement triggers them to burst releasing a small cloud of sharp spores which can be breathed in (causing irritation of the throat and lungs) or absorbed through any damp or broken skin. 

The victim is now a host and the spores will invade the host’s cells like a virus and replicate themselves. The host will become ill over the next week to ten days. At first a fever, tremors and night-sweats, then delirium. Their dreams will become disturbing with disjointed images and sensations, and inexplicable alien landscapes and appetites. After a few days those dreams will become waking hallucinations and the host will become helpless to resist the touch of the creature’s consciousness.

When the creature within him has multiplied enough the host will be compelled to seek out a dark place to lie down and rest. At this point the host’s body dissolves into greasy ash or dust and within that dessicated mass there will be the larva of the creature. No larger than a long thick finger, resembling a slug or black grub, it will wriggle to a place of safety and there begin to grow, and attach itself to the environment around it.

After a month it will be several feet long and will have developed enough to anchor itself in place and start to extend its filaments of perception around it. It will reach its full size after after six months and then it will be able to create its own cysts and spores.

In Play
Giaouchatnhon is a source of stories rather than a direct actor in them itself.   Its earthly form is largely immobile, brooding within a deep sealed cavern beneath the hills of Vietnam, thinking the same thoughts as all its other manifestations across the cosmos, perceiving everything they perceive and waiting for a chance to spread.

Sooner or later those caves will be opened, perhaps to spelunkers, perhaps to tourists.   Perhaps some reference in Alhazred’s allusive text will drive someone foolhardy to explore in just the right place.   They will become infected with the spores of the creature and carry them outside for the first time in countless centuries and Giaouchatnhon will have an opportunity to propogate itself.

Player characters may be part of that foolhardy expedition and companions of theirs may be the first to fall prey to the mysterious illness from the caves, growing sickly, their minds starting to crumble as they ramble about alien landscapes and secrets undreamed of by sane minds.   Or perhaps the victim may be a friend of theirs returning from some foreign trip and falling ill… or perhaps by the time the investigators touch this story things have already advanced, and Giaouchatnhon is also growing in some damp basement in Chicago, or the store room of some night-club in New Orleans or London… growing and spreading its filaments and forming spore-rich cysts ready for the next host.

It may be that some modern savant has realised what they are dealing with and, like the hated priests of ancient times is deliberately cultivating the infection of others in order to use them as oracles in their delirium, or as growing mediums for the vile larvae which, roasted and consumed, grant magical power and inhuman insights to the ingestor.    Cults may grow up around such creatures as in older days, offering up the helpless and hapless to deliberate infection simply to obtain the larvae whose foul bodies transform the human monsters who devour them.

If the cult fails to allow some of the larvae to grow though, if the cult prevents Giaouchatnhon from spreading, then it may become aware.   It is ancient and it is wise and its patience is not infinite.   With effort it can retard the illness of the hosts who carry the spores and reach out with its vast mind to take direct physical control over them as their own grip on sanity weakens.    Investigators may not only have the cultists of Giaouchatnhon to deal with but controlled hosts who seek to spread the contagion further even at the expense of the cultists who seek to control the creature and use it for their own ends.   And as mentioned above the Mi-Go are well aware of the threat posed by Giaouchatnhon to worlds they have a use for.   If the fungi from Yuggoth become aware of an infestation on Earth then the investigators may find themselves in the middle of a massive conflict between inhuman interests… or possibly in a strange alliance with the Mi-Go as the slightly lesser of two evils.

Gaming

Red Shift – the story so far

Finn CullenLeave a comment


(I’m copying a couple of posts I made at Google+ for the sake of completeness and to avoid the Empty Blog syndrome that conjures the demons Blokk and Lackspiration)

First session of Red Shift my new Night’s Black Agents campaign has just finished and I have to hand it to +Pelgrane Press Ltd and +Kenneth Hite – the system worked so well we had a blast. Highlights included an inventive use of Reassurance (after first providing an imaginary threat that the subject needed Reassurance against… “Fucking Liam Neeson bullshit” as he commented afterward), a Thriler car chase through the crowded Medina streets of Marrakech, and a brief encounter with a mysterious Arabic gentleman who for some reason didn’t show up on the hidden cameras our surveillance expert had planted around the Saadian Tombs.

The Roll20 Incident board idea I implemented worked well… and is now looking a whole lot busier.

The second episode of Red Shift took place yesterday evening and I have to say that Night’s Black Agents is proving to be one of the most enjoyable role-playing systems I’ve used in many years of trying lots of different ones. The mechanics of the game just get out of the way and let the players make appropriate genre-appropriate decisions and actions and everything conveys the right thriller atmosphere.

In last night’s episode our intrepid freelancers fled from the mysterious Arab gentleman in the Saadian tombs who luckily seemed strangely reluctant to follow them into the sunlit streets of Marrakech. Still in the possession of the mysterious package they’d recovered from a low-life English art-thief they retreated to their safe house and discovered the package contained a sheaf of several centuries-old documents in Latin. Realising there were at least two other parties interested in this package, both of whom had shown a willingness to take extreme measures to get hold of them, they decided to drive out overnight toward Casablanca to go to ground.

Alas for tracking devices and rival teams that also have Electronic Surveillance… a car chase on the A7 highway ensued which ended with our heroes out distancing their pursuers and branching off into the railway station at Skhour Rehamna and picking up a couple of tickets for the first train northward.

Did I mention the tracking device? The pursuing team turned up minutes later and the first real gunfight of the campaign ensued on the northbound platform that left the two pursuers dead, the team’s Heat rating climbing through the roof, and our heroes deciding not to wait around the station for the cops to show up but to steal their pursuer’s car and complete the journey to Casablanca without delay.

Availing themselves of a decent hotel room (using money stolen from the rival team) Intrusion Expert Rowan hacked the hotel’s security camera system and set her laptop to cycle through the cameras for advance warning. After a gory hallucination in the shower (she put it down to stress) she let Hans take the first watch while she got some sleep.

But not much… the lobby camera kept fritzing out… dissolving into static just like the camera she’s set up in the Saadian tombs. When the image cleared the receptionist appeared to be talking to someone, but there was nobody else in view.

Suspecting trouble the pair exited quickly via the balcony and a quick clamber down a drainpipe to ground level, or at least Rowan did. Hans was still on the balcony when someone they recognised from the tomb kicked the hotel door entirely off its frame, burst into the room and slammed Hans so hard he made it to the ground the hard way, badly injured and barely able to stand. He was able to use his Driving cherry to boost a nearby Volkswagen Beetle though (expressing a certain distaste at the lack of choice) and the pair fled. The Arab gentleman who just stepped off the balcony and instantly broke into a run to purse the car managed to leap atop it and smashed the windshield, trying to throttle Hans with those perfectly manicured hands… Rowan put her gun to the side of the man’s head and fired, blowing a large chunk of it away and sending the assailant rolling off the car and into the gutter… where he was visible in the rear view mirror struggling to his feet and clutching at the bloodless wound in his head.

Stability losses ensued and we had the first Network spend of the campaign as Hans remembered an old acquaintance of his, a French doctor, working in Casablanca who didn’t mind doing off the books work for a friend.

TL/DR: Lots of fun was had, the rules support the action perfectly, and the plot thickens.