Tag: pelgrane

Gaming

Ssssh, it’s Confidential

Finn CullenLeave a comment
Regular readers of this irregular outlet for my musings will know that I’m a big fan of the Gumshoe system by Pelgrane Press.    I’ve got a year-old Night’s Black Agentscampaign that shows no signs of slowing down just yet, and a Trail of Cthulhucampaign that is letting me indulge my fantasy of being remotely as good at drawing together Lovecraftian strands into a single narrative as Alan Moore has been in “Providence.”   I’m not, but it’s fun trying, and the Gumshoe system has supported it brilliantly.

I recently picked up the PDF copy of the latest iteration of the system, Gumshoe One2One, in the soon-to-be-physically released CthulhuConfidential.  Gumshoe One2One aims to bring the Gumshoe experience to the specific situation of one GM and one player.  In doing so it’s had to address the usefulness of the pool point system for General Skills and also the often fudged issue of character demise or debilitation in a single player setting.   My Trail campaign has always been just me and a single player, so I was interested to see how this would work out.

I haven’t been disappointed – at all.
The system streamlines the use of Investigative skills (I won’t go too much into how the original Gumshoe system works, that stuff is easily found) by abandoning having a rating in the skill and simply either having the skill or not in order to determine whether core clues can be found by exercising the skill.   To replace the original method of having points in those skills that can be spent for extra benefits, each character now starts with a number of Pushes that can be spent on any investigative skill.  Pushes can be earned back during play by particular successes (I’ve also found myself handing them out in response to particularly inspiring moments of roleplaying by the player – not Rules as Written, but hey, I’m a maverick free spirit living on the edge etc).
General skills now have a rating of one or more dice to determine aptitude.    I was initially unsure about this but in play it really works – and it has the advantage of not requiring book-keeping.   One thing that was a tiny irritation about original Gumshoe was the need to keep tallies of point spends for each General skill as they were used.   Since my NBA campaign takes place over Roll20 this wasn’t much of an issue as the NBA character sheet I use on Roll20 does it all electronically, but the Trail Campaign is mostly face-to-face and required pencil and eraser work which was sometimes unwieldy.   Gumshoe One2One does away with the need even for this, nor is there a need to track dwindling Health or Stability scores as these like other conditions are now handled by gaining Problems and Edge cards.
Problems and Edges are picked up during play for passing or failing particular challenges that arise.   Some are one use bonuses or penalties, others linger around giving longer term advantages or hindrances.    Some, like particular injuries or sanity blasting shocks, may spell the end of your character IF they are left undealt with at the end of the adventure, so there are still some very real risks but unlike in a traditional rule set they won’t bring the game to a disappointing and premature end.    Any Lovecraftian hero has to survive long enough to record, in real time, a diary entry of his demise after all.
So far I’ve run a few sessions of Cthulhu Confidential, each with someone different, each time over Roll20.   I’ve had to do a little more prep work than normal in creating the Problem & Edge cards but this diminishes each time as with some careful rewording many of the cards can serve double duty in later adventures.   I’ve also created a Paint.Net template for creating my own cards that allows single click visibility of the various “tags” that may appear (including a nice Elder Sign graphic for Mythos shocks, Blood Splatters for injuries etc) which helps streamline creating my own adventures.
Two of the games I’ve run are straight from the rulebook – featuring pre-made characters and beautifully detailed settings, and they went down really well – with feedback from the players that they would love to continue playing those characters and the game in general.   I don’t often run pre-written adventures but these have really captured the feel of the hardboiled Mythos genre perfectly.     I’m always more comfortable running my own stuff though and in a leap of devil-may-care courage I’ve switched my one-player Trail campaign to using the new rules.  Two sessions in and it already feels comfortable.   It’s also given me some work in rewriting adventures I’d already planned to take into account the new system, but that has been less trouble than you’d think and it’s been fun working out how to switch certain encounters to the new way of doing things.    Combat especially becomes less gamey and strategic and more about character choices and narrative resolution – something that I think suits single character play better anyway, and I’ve never been a fan of characters getting into protracted shoot-outs with unnatural entities anyway.  Surviving rather than sharpshooting seems much more appropriate.
In summary then – Cthulhu Confidential presents wonderfully rich and detailed settings for play, some great and detailed characters (Viv’s player enjoys shipping her with various of her sources…  Sources being allied NPCs that the PC can draw on for assistance with certain investigative skills) and three great adventures to get you started.    The rules really suit the more intense style of play that the one on one situation generates, and the lack of required book-keeping makes it great for online play.     It may prove slightly harder than normal to wing situations and challenges than other games but I think this may be just a learning curve thing – and having a number of generic Problems and Edges to hand out will probably overcome this – if your PC decides they really want to shin up the rickety drainpipe you could make it a quick pass/fail test after all, but having a generic “You fall and injure yourself” Problem and so on gives you the chance to add more depth on a moment’s notice.
Would I recommend it?  Oh hell yes.    If you like intense play, Lovecraftian horror, or just the chance to tinker with one on one play in general go get it now.

How long before someone releases a Gumshoe One2One hack for “The Haunting”?      (mine is about halfway done…)
Gaming

Campaign Tarot – #TrailOfCthulhu

Finn CullenLeave a comment

I’m quite pleased with the latest iteration of my Roll20 “home screen” – this time for a Trail of Cthulhu campaign.    Rather than repeating my Incident Board idea from my Night’s Black Agent’s Campaign I’ve gone more for a classic desk-top look with cards representing the key locations and characters appearing in the episode.

This one is set up for the end of an adventure in which valiant Boston cops take down “The Boston Devil” a cannibalistic serial killer after gaining advice from (real life) anthropologists Richard Speck and Gladys Tantaquidgeon whose likenesses appear at the top-centre of the layout and who first introduced the investigators to the concept of Wendigo…

Gaming

HP Lovecraft and the Opera Ghost #TrailOfCthulhu

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I came across something today that puzzled me at first and then intrigued me.

I found this essay online – “The Horror on the Wall” by ST Joshi about Lovecraft’s opinion of movies, and in it was a passage about a favourite of mine which I am glad to hear that Lovecraft also rated highly – the Phantom of the Opera, starring Lon Chaney (in my opinion one of the finest actors who has ever brought his art to the screen.  That is only my opinion but you are entitled to disagree and that’s fine as long as you don’t mind your opinion being held in justified contempt by right thinking folks).

Lovecraft saw Phantom in 1925 and wrote this:

 “. . . what a spectacle it was!! It was about a *presence* haunting the great Paris opera house . . . but developed so slowly that I actually fell asleep several times during the first part. Then the second part began–horror lifted its grisly visage–& I could not have been made drowsy by all the opiates under heaven! Ugh!!! The face that was revealed when the mask was pulled off “

Well quite. Chaney’s self devised make-up was a wonderful piece of grotesquerie, replicating so near as could be achieved the death’s head look of the novel’s Phantom rather than the mild sunburn of the latest cinematic abomination to take the name.

But what intrigued me most were the next words in Lovecraft’s letter (emphasis mine):

“The face that was revealed when the mask was pulled off . . . & the nameless legion of things that cloudily appeared beside & behind the owner of that face when the mob chased him into the river at the last!”

As you young people say, “Wait, what?”    Nameless legion of things that cloudily appeared…   I don’t recall any cloudy appearance of things, nameless or otherwise.

Now the ending of Chaney’s Phantom is not ideal.   The novel and the originally shot ending of the 1925 movie both ended on a note of poignant drama as the psychotic Phantom releases the object of his fixation to live a normal life with her beloved Raoul, and then himself perishes alone of misery and a broken heart.   The originally shot ending of the movie truncated this to happen in minutes rather than weeks but nonetheless ended with a mob breaking into Erik the Phantom’s lair and finding him dead at his organ.

A surviving still of the original ending, now alas lost

That was shown to test audiences comprised, like most movie test audiences, of movie goers who naturally eschewed such moments of drama and poignant character resolution and demanded some active justice so Carl Laemmle had the sequence reshot as a carriage chase involving an angry mob pursuing Erik through Paris, beating him to death and throwing him in the Seine.   There would presumably have been a custard pie fight too, as crowds love those, but I guess the custard wasn’t delivered in time.

Anyway, those are the two endings I know of for the 1925 Phantom.  Lovecraft of course saw the ending from the final cut of the movie in which Erik is chased, battered and thrown in the river.  But I haven’t seen a single nameless legion of things cloudily appearing in that sequence.  Unless you count Parisians of course, but to be honest I think Lovecraft rightly included them in the word ‘mob’.

Erik serenades Christine at the cemetery where her father’s body lies
– a scene cut from the final version

The film had a troubled history.  The director Rupert Julian didn’t seem to have a cohesive vision for the work and lots of the scenes veer wildly between the macabre, the comical and the just plain baffling.   The character of The Persian, an unnamed figure from Erik’s past appears as he does in the novel but is suddenly renamed Inspector Ledoux of the Surete for no good reason and doesn’t bother to change out of his fez.   The ghostly rat-catcher of the novel appears and is entirely unexplained, and so on.   Scenes were filmed, used, recut, moved, dropped and reintroduced throughout the production.   In 1929 the whole thing was recut and scenes were added and dropped to conform to a new vision of the whole, including scenes shot from alternate angles during the original filming.   Most cuts of the movie you can see these days are drawn from the 1929 version as the original negatives of the 1925 version are in poor condition.

This video clip compares and contrasts the key unmasking scene from the 1925 and 1929 versions to illustrate the differences that exist.

Returning to the question in hand then, did Lovecraft, in 1925, see something we don’t have in today’s version of the film?  Did he simply imagine them, dredging up eldritch additions from his imaginative depths?
Were there actually nameless legions of shadowy things that appeared to witness Erik’s demise?  Certainly no such things appear in the novel as there is no equivalent scene in the novel.    Was there a cut, that Lovecraft saw, in which things appeared there on screen at such a key moment?  If so what were those things and why were they so ruthlessly expunged from all further cuts of the movie?

And if surviving film of that original sequence with Lovecraft-witnessed nameless shadowy Things still exists what would happen if it was found and viewed?

That’s one I’ll mull over for a while but I thought I would throw open that question to any Keepers out there who may want to revisit with Lovecraft’s eyes this cinematic conundrum.

What new surprises lie in store?

Gaming

Found Carcosa #TrailOfCthulhu

Finn CullenLeave a comment

I’ve been plundering the themes and flavours of Chambers’ work recently but today for the first time I came across this little gem.
The Carcosa mansion, built in 1896 to 1897 was intended as the residence of the British High Commissioner in Malaya.  It’s now a luxury hotel though given the antecedents of the name I suspect that the much vaunted Hotel California would be a safer place to visit.
The name was taken straight out of Chambers’ work as Sir Frank Swettenham, the aforementioned High Commissioner, explained:
To the Editor of “British Malaya”
[British Malaya, May 1936]
SIR,
In the April magazine your correspondent in Malaya asks me, in courteous terms, to tell him why I gave the name “Carcosa” to the house that was designed and built for me at Kuala Lumpur by the late Mr. C.E. Spooner, assisted by Mr. A.B. Hubback – as he was in those days – and I have no objection to answer the question even though the simple truth may spoil a number of excellent stories. When this house was finished and occupied I read a book which interested me. It was called “The King in Yellow” and at the beginning of this book there were some verses with a note explaining that they came from Cassilda’s song in “The King in Yellow”, Act 1, Scene 2. Here are two verses: –
“Strange is the night where black stars rise, And twin moons circle in the skies, But the stranger still is Lost Carcosa.”
“Song of my soul, my voice is dead; Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed Shall dry and die in Lost Carcosa.”
I did not call the Resident General’s dwelling “Government House,” or “King’s House,” because neither seemed an appropriate name in Protected States. I did not give it a Malay name, because it was to be the residence of a British Officer; so I took a book name as has often been done before.
As to the word Carcosa, I imagine it was the Castle of the King in Yellow, but the book explains nothing about either the place or its occupant. That apparently can be found in the play, to which there are only occasional allusions. Probably it is a word created by the author’s fancy, though it looks like a combination of the Italian words cara and casa and would mean “desirable dwelling,” as indeed I found it.
The only curious fact is that this name was prophetic for, as I understand, the house has lost its name and is thus, “Lost Carcosa.” The occupant, I am told, is now styled “F.S,” instead of “R.G.”
Yours obediently,
FRANK SWETTENHAM
19 April 1936.
Oh and the logo of the hotel is a yellow sign.    Clearly a coincidence.

Next question – how long can I resist the urge to send one or more of my groups of player characters to Malaya…
Gaming

Rolling out the rules #NightsBlackAgents

Finn CullenLeave a comment

I’ve been running a Night’s Black Agents campaign for a while now, the Pelgrane game of elite spies versus vampires and the rules, the ideas for structuring campaigns and the atmosphere have all combined into being one of the most involving and exciting games I’ve played in a gaming career that goes back far longer than I am comfortable admitting.

For most of those years of gaming I’ve been pretty emphatically anti-crunch.  I’ve played with players, lovely each one of them, that fall everywhere on the spectrum from “pure story” to “pure number crunching” but I’ve always been biased toward the former end.   Consequently I’ve tended to favour systems that are light on mechanics and that de-emphasise combat detail in favour of narrative immediacy.

However in Night’s Black Agents the details actually do their damned job and make the game more exciting.   The core mechanics of the Gumshoe system are simple enough to make intuitive sense and even when adding in all the Thriller combat options and the expanded options from the Double Tap supplement things just flow well enough to convey the action in detail without slowing things down or taking the focus away from what’s happening “on screen.”

In last night’s episode we ended up using rules we hadn’t touched before and, other than a moment when I totally blanked on how suppressive fire worked and had to look it up, everything just shot along at a hair-raising pace just as it should.

Rules that were new to us included:

Sneaking into the concealed terrorist headquarters in a run down part of Siegen using the extended Infiltration rules from Double Tap (made harder by the fact that combat-monster Hans has no infiltration skills and had to be nurse maided past the tricky security by Rowan… but it was worth having him along when a botched roll led to a sudden encounter with a single sentry… that ended a second later with a silenced single shot from Hans)

Deciding halfway through the infiltration that some sort of escape-diversion might prove handy later and Hans making a cherry-rich Preparedness spend to have already taken care of that by placing flashbangs and noisemakers adjacent to one of the other exits prior to their ingress.

Our heroes becoming trapped in a dead-end attic corridor after rescuing a pair of prisoners, and the campaign’s first use of Suppressive Fire as Hans emptied his MP5 downrange.   One of the enemy tried to risk moving for a better angle and got his head blown off, the others kept well out of the line of fire.    This was followed up by one of the surviving bad guys lobbing a grenade into the corridor so we also got to play with the explosive rules and – more specifically- the panicky use of Athletics skill to leap for cover before the damn thing went off.

Honestly I can’t recommend this game enough.   As it happened in last night’s session there wasn’t even the sniff of the supernatural so even if you’re only interested in playing high octane modern action this is definitely worth checking out.

Gaming

The Gate of Amen-Ekot #TrailOfCthulhu

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They say (but you know the sort of thing They say) that the much reviled sorcerer of the lower Nile, Amen-Ekot boasted that he could never be truly slain by his many enemies because he had entrusted his vital essence to a safer place than “any vault of all too perishable carrion meat” as he charmingly referred to his own body.

His enemies decided that they’d take the risk and slew him, cutting his perishable carrion meat into exactly forty one pieces, each one of which was burned seperately.

None of them were happy to hear reports of his reappearance less than a month later.

It transpired that the fellow had found a way to paint his likeness, or his symbolic likeness at any rate (since in reality he did not have the head of a blasphemously disfigured ibis) into the hieroglyphs and frescoes of a local shrine.   They beady eye of that foul painting could captivate the viewer and by an act of will (that will being often overborne by the sorcerer’s dread intent) could draw the painted essence of the sorcerer forth again as whole as he was (and bearing the memories up to the point) when the image was created.

They say (but you know the sort of thing They say) that the Gate works both ways as Gates are wont to do and that if he had chosen, Amen-Ekot could instead draw in a hapless viewer whose symbolic image would appear alongside that of the cruel magician and in that strange nether-realm of which the painted frescoes were but a representation, he could interrogate or consume his captive.

It is to be hoped that all the representations of Amen-Ekot were destroyed in the weeks and months after that first dreadful resurrection.   It is to be hoped that his writings were all destroyed and that no remnant exists of the instructions for this damned ritual.

On an unrelated* note I’ve always liked this video from A-Ha, even though the song itself is the usual banal nonsense.

* Not Really.

Gaming

"You don’t need two hands to hold a severed head." – #NightsBlackAgents

Finn CullenLeave a comment


“You don’t need two hands to hold a severed head.”

Not an actual depiction of events
Hans is more Swedish and better dressed



You know that the session of Night’s Black Agents has taken a dark turn when one of the player characters muses aloud along those lines.

Last night’s session ended up with Hans losing enough Stability to be Shattered for the first time anyone’s hit that state in the campaign after witnessing someone who they thought was a potential ally massacring a group of innocent bystanders at a barbecue, just after an encounter with the revived corpse of someone Rowan had killed in cold blood in a previous session (the former owner of the aforementioned severed head) and a furious thespian vampire who had just ripped out Rowan’s throat (she’ll live – barely) following Rowan’s taunts about her being second rate.

If things needed to go further south, Hans was having flashbacks to a mission gone wrong in Belarus as he drove to the safehouse where their friendly medic lives and recalled in vivid detail the time he had to shoot his way past a police roadblock.

When he reached the safehouse in a slightly more stable frame of mind he realised his pistol had been recently fired…

Gaming

Achy Breaky Stability Check #nightsblackagents

Finn CullenLeave a comment

 In last night’s session of Night’s Black Agents a vampire nearly houseruled the system spontaneously by so clearly failing a stability test it took the Director- me- aback.

Okay so vampires don’t make stability tests, nor did I roll one.   But it sure as hell felt like he failed one.

Here’s a bit of backstory to set the context.

In 1917 Captain Nathaniel Soames was crippled during a shell attack in Belgium during the Great War.  His pelvis and legs were shattered and he was paralysed from the waist down, surviving only because he was dragged back from No Man’s Land by a cockney infantryman Private Harry Sparrow.

Sparrow was an up and coming gangster in the immediate post war years and he was startled to be approached one evening by his former Captain, Soames, healthy as can be and offering Sparrow anything he wanted to set the balance straight.   Sparrow asked for prosperity for his band of miscreants and Soames promised him a century of unhindered dominance over the East End.   The Chapel Boys, as the gang became known, started to piece things together over the next hundred years and stories spread in whispers about the nature of the aid they occasionally received.   The imminent arrival of the end of that promised century is weighing heavily on the minds of their bosses.

Anyway… in addition to keeping his word of honour to the Chapel Boys, Soames has been hiding a secret of his own.  In the mid 20s, adjusting badly to his new undead state, he became obsessed with the young daughter of a family who were his neighbours in life.   Little Dorothy Coleridge (she hated the name Dolly even then) caught Soames’ attention as a spark of lively energy that he’d lost contact with.   He turned her, making her like himself, condemning her to an immortal life in the body of a twelve year old.   Her mind broke and she became cruel and savage.   Soames confined her within a private asylum guarded by his loyal servants and Renfields who occasionally roamed the streets of London to find playmates for Dolly, playmates who would soon become prey.

Soames tried to put his mistake from his mind, but in the way of some vampires he found it easy to grow obsessed and less easy to move on from his mistakes.   Dolly preyed on his mind.  He rarely visited if ever but he never got over her and what he and done to her (and his hopes for what she could have been).

So…  when our bold heroes, Rowan and Hans located the asylum while following up reports of missing girls taken from the poorer parts of London, when they confronted Dolly – which led to Hans being ripped apart by teeth and claws and left half dead – and Rowan staked her, reducing her to foul dust and decay… you can imagine Soames would not react well.

He ditched the job he was undertaking (of which more later) and returned to London, tearing witnesses and leads apart to try to find out who was responsible for the death of his inappropriate immortal paramour.

It came to a head with his hands round Hans’ throat in a side courtyard in the Tower of London with Soames hissing in his face.   “Tell me who killed Dolly and I’ll give you a swift death.”

That was Rowan’s cue to appear on the scene.

“I killed her,” she told Soames, grinning, “Staked her through her itty-bitty heart.”

The combination of the phrase and the way Rowan’s player said it hit me/Soames like a hurled brick.  I actually froze on Soame’s behalf.

“You know,” I said, “I think he just failed a Stability Check.”

And that probably saved their lives in the conflict that followed, throwing Soames off balance and giving our heroes a moment or two to act while he just howled at them in fury.

They made it out alive, and Soames melted away into a crowd of angry ravens after a short and intense encounter but the high point was certainly that moment when the Vampire took the Stability rules unto himself and was found wanting.