Year: 2020

Investigator Passports: Feature Survey

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Looking at some ideas for the Investigator Passport props, and I’m at that point where I need to have a better idea of how people are actually using them at their table. Stuff like if people actually use the ability to print the character sheet on the inside, or if it’s just used as a prop alongside a conventional character sheet.

Anyway, I put together a quick 5-question survey to gather info. I’ll be using this to help decide if (and how) I should add options like blank pages for visa stamps/stickers, or if I should just focus on adding more countries.

Let your thoughts be known, and thanks!

Click here to go to the survey!

Passport with Visa Pages

The Grand Grimoire – Homebound

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Finally finished my custom bound copy of The Grand Grimoire of Cthulhu Mythos Magic! This isn’t an exact match to Chaosium’s printed cover, but let’s call it heavily inspired by the official cover.

This home bound copy includes a cover made from a strange hide (skin?), aged gold foil title and Cthulhu artwork, custom protective corner and cover hardware, hand-sewn laser-printed pages with gilded edges, a ribbon bookmark, and embossed endsheets with matching headbands.

I’m using this as a learning experience so I can make a cool version of Our Terrible Fate when I finish it, and this was by far the most complex bookbinding project I’ve undertaken yet.

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Making the Grimoire

Here is a brief description and some highlights of the process I went through to make the grimoire. The most time-consuming parts of the process were planning the cover design and setting it up in vector form for use with my Cricut (about 3 days) and actually making the faux hardware (another few days with lots of trial and error). All told, this took me about two weeks.

Preparing the Text Block

The pages are laser printed and divided into signatures of four sheets (16 pages) each. These signatures are then hand sewn with linen thread. To help keep the printed content aligned despite the tendency of consumer printers to fail at centering content, stitch marks are added to the PDF prior to printing. Once all the signatures are sewn together, the spine is then glued with a flexible glue designed for bookbinding.

After the signatures are bound together, it’s time to trim them. During my past projects this step was done by hand with a box cutter. For this project, I stepped things up and purchased a larger guillotine cutter. Of course, that is one of the first points at which things took a turn for the worse. Not having used this type of cutter before, I made a couple of mistakes before I got it right. Fortunately, nothing went so badly that I couldn’t correct it, though the end result was slightly smaller pages than originally planned.

The end result of trimming the textblock was good enough that I went ahead and gilded the page edges. I used a metallic acrylic paint designed to work well on paper. I’ve used this process before on past projects, but the cleaner edges produced by my guillotine made this work much better this time around. Next, I debossed some linen cardstock for my endsheets using my Cricut. The endsheets were then folded and attached to the text block, along with a ribbon bookmark, moslin to reinforce the spine, and headbands to match the endsheets.

The Cover

The cover for this project is a bit of a challenge. The artwork on the official hardcover is designed to look like a tome, but not an ordinary one. To begin with, some of the elements aren’t exactly identifiable. There are parts that might be straps, including one that actually covers a portion of the elder sign in the middle of the cover. The elder sign itself is a little different from Chaosium’s usual representation of the symbol. A lot of the stuff on the cover is made to look like metal hardware. And then there is the background of the cover – the material of this tome. It’s unusual to say the least.

I actually started with the cover material – even before the text block – because I knew it was going to be more challenging than my past projects. Trying to approximate the look of the exotic skin from the official book wasn’t going to be as simply as cutting a piece of faux leather. I ended up adapting a couple of techniques I found online to make a heavily textured cover from a combination of butcher paper and acrylic paints. I then glued that to another layer of butcher paper – again using the flexible bookbinding glue.

Then I turned to planning out the other elements of the cover. I wasn’t about to custom order actual metal hardware or take up metalworking, so I would need another material. I also needed to determine which elements I wanted to keep. Using a PDF of the official cover as a reference, I gradually put together a planned version of the cover using vector artwork. This step took the better part of 3-4 days.

I wrapped the material around the boards I cut from chipboard for the front and back cover and spine and affixed with glue. The double layer of butcher paper is thinner than the faux leather I’ve used for previous projects. It’s not quite as flexible, but I definitely understand why bookbinders prefer working with thinner materials. This material also seems like it will hold up better than expected, but time will tell.

For the foil, I used iron-on gold foil cut out using my Cricut. Ran into some challenges with the title on the spine, but finally got it worked out. I also used some watered down acrylic to “age” the foil and better bring out some of the texture of the foil overlaid on the cover material.

Then I turned my attention to the hardware. This took several days with quite a lot of trial and error. The end process consists of heavyweight (110 lb) black cardstock, which is cut and debossed, painted/drybrushed with metallic gold acrylic, and glued together in layers. Some pieces also include resin and some more acrylic. Even the protective corners use this process, with scoring used to allow for clean wrap-around folds to actually protect the cover. The debossing allowed me to get some good detail and a solid overall look without having to custom order hardware.

The hardware was all attached using glue. I considered applying an additional protective layer over the hardware and cover but ultimately decided against it. Everything seems much more resilient than I originally expected. I had planned to make a strap to gold the book closed with a magnetic clasp – there’s even a magnet embedded in the cover chipboard. Unfortunately, the magnet is not strong enough to work the way I wanted, so I decided to leave it out.

In the end, not everything went as expected, but I learned a lot. I’m also pleased with the end result, and am happy to have added this tome to my shelf.

Clues in Play – Part 1

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I’ve already written how part of what I’m working on with this game is integrating some board game elements into the actual gameplay. Probably the most obvious example of how the table will look different from many games is the inclusion of a lot of cards. Some of these cards are used for characters, locations, ancient tomes, or strange artifacts – but the majority of the cards in the game represent one of the most central gameplay elements of any investigative game: clues.

Clues – From the Players’ Perspective

As a player, the the primary goal in play is to discover clues. Eventually, these clues will point to the truth behind whatever mysterious events the investigators are looking into – and maybe even reveal a way for the investigators to make a difference in the world (temporary though such success might be). These clues are integral to investigative gameplay, but it’s not always as simple as just finding the clues.

Play enough mystery games, and you’ll probably see at least one of the following issues come up:

  • Players forget about some of the clues they already found.
  • Players find a clue, but don’t realize it’s a clue.
  • Players become convinced that some mundane detail is actually a vital clue.

I think I’ve briefly touched on these elsewhere, and I’ll probably go into them more in depth in the future. But for now, if you recognize any of these, you realize how they can create problems and potentially stall a mystery game.

The way I’m using cards with clues is fairly simple. Whenever an investigator discovers a clue during play, the Keeper gives them a card that shows a brief summary of that clue. Nothing complicated – just a short phrase that describes whatever the players know now that they didn’t before. The investigators find a bloody, mummified body in the basement, with bloody footprints leading away from it. The Keeper gives the players a couple of cards, one with the description of the body and one with a description of the footprints.

This effectively helps mitigate all three of the issues above. The players have a stack of all the clues they’ve found that they can review whenever they want. The players a clear about what information is actually a clue – after all they got a card if it was a clue – and this covers two out of the three.

So from the players’ point of view, clues are pretty simple: When they find clues, they get cards to keep track of them.

(For those familiar with Fate, clues are also Aspects – they describe the world as it is – and they can be used to have a mechanical effect within the system.)

Clues – From the Keeper’s (GM’s) Perspective

As usual for investigative games, things can be a little more complicated from the Keeper’s side of the table. If players can have a hard time keeping track of the clues they’ve found, the Keeper has to keep track of all the clues in the game – which clues have been found, which clues haven’t, where the remaining clues are, and how they might be found. If you’ve been a Keeper in these kinds of games, you also know that some clues are more important than others, more critical to the investigation. And since things don’t always go the way you expect, you may even have to alter some clues on the fly. (Okay, let’s be honest, if you’re the GM, the players will make certain things never go the way you expect.)

So the Keeper needs some tools to help manage all these clues (while they’re also keeping track of everything else going on). Recognizing that different clues play different roles in the game, sorting clues into different types can really help. There are two basic types of clues: core and supporting.

Core clues are those that are critical to the scenario. They are the clues that are necessary to the players figuring out how to bring the scenario to a successful resolution. Discovering all of the core clues will still leave a lot of unanswered questions, so the players may not understand what’s really going on, but they will have the bare minimum information necessary to figure out what they have to do to stop the cult, seal the gateway, defeat the creature… whatever has to be done to resolve whatever mystery or end whatever threat is at the heart of the investigation. Core clues also include information necessary for you to find other clues – such as a new location or character which possesses other clues.

Supporting clues are the other clues in the scenario which provide background and explanation. They help answer a lot of the other questions players may have about what’s going on, but they’re not indispensable the way core clues are. If the players don’t find a single supporting clue, they should still be able to “win” as long as they find all the core clues. It’s important to understand that supporting clues still won’t answer everything – after all, a cosmic horror game should always leave a little mystery.

Understanding which clues are core clues and which are supporting helps the Keeper run the game and keep it running smoothly. When the investigators go to a new location, you’ll know which clues there you need to make sure they find and which ones they can miss without bringing the game to a halt. When I write up a scene for a scenario, I include a quick list of all the clues up front so the Keeper can quickly identify which clues are available in the scene.

Due to whatever events lead up to the scenario, many clues will naturally be found at specific locations. The body and blood trail are found at the crime scene. The clues pointing to how the ancient artifact was stolen are found in and around the auction house vault. However, some clues could plausibly be found at different locations, and the Keeper can make adjustments to those clues based on the needs of the game. These kinds of clues are referred to as floating clues. They are core or supporting clues just like any other, but their location can vary.

So how do these different kinds of clues help the Keeper?

Finding Clues

Look around the web, and you can find a number of different ways to make sure play doesn’t stall because players can’t find clues. Examples includes never requiring rolls to find clues, spending points to find clues, and tripling the number of clues to increase the odds at least some of them are found. All of these have their merits, but they also rest on the assumption that all clues must be handled the same way. But that’s not true.

The point of distinguishing between different types of clues is to let the Keeper know what options are available for finding those clues. Since core clues are critical, you don’t want players to miss them because of a bad roll of the dice. Supporting clues, on the other hand, aren’t necessary to keeping the game moving forward, so you’ve got a few more options with them.

Finding Core Clues

Part of your job as Keeper is to make sure that, by the time a scene has drawn to a close, the players have found all the core clues available in the scene. Some clues are more or less just given to the investigators – a helpful NPC is sharing information or an obvious clue is out in the open. As long as the investigators are in a position to receive the clue or take some basic action to obtain it – like looking at the journal on the desk – they are given the clue. But which investigator gets the clue can vary, and the Keeper can use this to spread attention around between the PCs.

If it makes sense in the situation for a particular investigator to receive an obvious clue – one player describes their PC as leafing through the journal – then give that player the clue. If multiple investigators could notice the clue, then consider their skills. Figure out which skill would be most relevant to finding the clue and describe the investigator with the higher rank in that skill as finding the clue.

Other clues might require some effort or otherwise seem like their discovery is not a foregone conclusion. These are the ones that scream out for some kind of roll, and that’s okay. The roll provides dramatic tension, and let’s face it, finding important clues should be a tense moment in an investigative horror game. On the other hand, we’ve already established that the Keeper needs to ensure the players get the core clue. So the roll isn’t to determine if the investigators find the clue – it’s if they find it without complication.

Finding Supporting Clues

Supporting clues are easy. You have all the same options on the table as with core clues, but the investigators can also just fail a roll – or fail to even look – and just not find the clue.

Action Resolution – The Core Gameplay Loop

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One of the things I want to include in this project are rules and guidelines that actually teach players and Keepers how to play the game. That might seem like a no-brainer, but it’s amazing to me how many professional tabletop roleplaying games out there don’t actually do this. You’ll probably find plenty of detailed, case-by-case rules and a hoard of great setting material. You might have a brief overview of roleplaying game concepts, but a lot of the details of how to really play the game are often summed up as “find someone that already knows how to play and learn from them.”

There are a few reasons I think this is a real problem within the tabletop gaming community in general, but one of the big reasons is that there are a lot of different styles of games and play at the table. When you don’t clearly describe the style of game you’re going for and align your rules to match, how do you expect players and GMs to play the game the way you intended?

So I plan to include reasonably comprehensive rules and guidance for both players and Keepers. And with that in mind, one of the most important parts of any roleplaying game is how to resolve the actions of the characters. Action resolution is the core gameplay loop, so it seems logical to focus on providing solid guidance for this first.

Note that while OTF borrows a lot from more narrative games, it still places the primary narrative responsibility (and authority) on the GM/Keeper. In other words, the Keeper is the one narrating the results most of the time. The reason for this is simple: It works best for an investigative horror game.

So here are draft versions of both an overview and a more detailed breakdown of Action Resolution in OTF. If you have comments or questions, please post them in this thread on our SubReddit.

Action Resolution Overview

I. Present the Situation

1. Keeper Sets the Scene (Describe the Scene and present Choices, Sources of Opposition, and Obstacles)

II. What Do You Do?

2. Players provide Intent and Approach.

III. Yes, No, or Roll?

3. Yes, No, or Maybe? – Are all possible outcomes interesting? Is this a possible branch in the story?

IV. Here’s How We’re Going to Play This Out…

4. Set the Stakes
5. Single Roll, Single Roll with Help, or Pacing Mechanism?
6. Obstacles and Opposition
7. Core Action and Skill(s)

V. Roll Some Dice

8. Roll Dice, Invoke Aspects, Use Boosts
9. Determine Outcome

VI. Here’s What Happened…

10. Narrate outcome. Apply changes to Aspects, free invokes, boosts, etc.
11. Scene Complete?

Action Resolution Breakdown

I. Present the Situation

1. Keeper Sets (or Resets) the Scene.

a. Keeper presents situation – a choice the Investigators must make or immediate problem to deal with.

b. Describe scene visually (Aspect), add a detail (Aspect), add goals and points of interest (Aspect), add exits, finish with any obvious Sources of Opposition or Obstacles.

c. Consider if the situation appears the same to all characters

i. Differences in Skills, Sanity, Mythos can all impact how Investigators perceive the world.

II. What Do You Do?

2. Players imagine their Investigators in that situation and decide how the character acts in response.

a. Investigators react to Sources of Opposition, attempt to overcome Obstacles, or make a Choice.

b. Keeper and players discuss the action until a clear Intent and Approach are identified.

c. Who is participating in the action? Who is taking the lead? What are other characters doing during the action?

III. Yes, No, or Roll?

3. Keeper determines if action succeeds, fails, or should be randomly determined

a. Keeper determines if the action is even possible.

i. Is the action possible within the fiction? Can the approach actually work?
If the answer to both questions is No, then the action fails; go to step 9. (Say No)

b. Keeper determines whether the outcome needs to be randomly determined.

i. Can the action plausibly fail? Does failure carry risk or cost? Is failure interesting?
If the answer to all questions is No, then the action succeeds; go to step 9. (Say Yes)

ii. [Possibly consider if possibility of failure is appropriate to pacing.]

c. If the action is possible, and the opposition or possibility of failure is interesting, then Roll.

IV. Here’s How We’re Going to Play This Out…

4. Set the Stakes

a. What are the possible outcomes? What interesting thing will happen if the action succeeds? What interesting thing will happen if the action fails?

b. Always consider Success at a Cost, especially if the action involves a Core Clue. Consider what kind of opposition is involved and how things could go badly.

c. Both the Keeper and the players should have a basic idea of the Stakes before moving on, but the precise details will be determined in Steps 9 & 10. Occasionally, the Keeper might leave the players in the dark about the Stakes for failure.

5. Keeper determines how to randomly determine the outcome.
(Single roll, Teamwork, or Pacing Mechanism?)

a. Emphasis and Pacing?

b. Single character or multiple characters working together?
If multiple characters, are they using the same Approach (same skills or different skills?) (Help vs. Challenge)

c. Opposition and Obstacles? What is the Opposition’s Intent? (Contest vs. Conflict)

6. Keeper sets Opposition/Difficulty

a. Active Opposition or passive Difficulty?

b. Set Opposition or Difficulty relative to Investigator skill?

c. Consider Aspects in play

7. Keeper determines which skill and core action are being used.

a. Keeper uses the Investigator’s Intent to determine which core action or pacing mechanism applies.

b. Sometimes the player is simply rolling to Oppose an action by an NPC or the environment.

c. Keeper uses the Investigator’s Approach to determine which skill applies to each roll.

V. Roll Some Dice

8. Dice are rolled or pacing mechanism is played out, Aspects are invoked, Boosts are used.

9. Keeper determines the mechanical Outcome of the roll or pacing mechanism (success, tie, failure, or success with style), and determines appropriate outcome (short-term) and repercussions (long-term), including any costs (success at minor/major cost).

a. If action is automatically successful (Step 3.b.) consider which Investigator succeeds based on skills.

VI. Here’s What Happened…

10. Keeper describes (narrates) the results of the action of the players, which results in a new situation. Make any appropriate changes to the Aspects in play, free invokes, boosts, etc.

11. Keeper determines if the Scene is complete.

a. If the Scene is not complete, reset the Scene (go to Step 1).

b. If the Scene is complete, Transition to next Scene.

Why Fate?

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Fate Dice and Fate Points

This post has been a long time coming… but it’s going to have to wait just a little while longer. First, I want to briefly re-look at why I’m not using Call of Cthulhu or Trail of Cthulhu to play my games.

Call of Cthulhu

  • I previously mentioned that I don’t like percentile and roll-under systems – it’s just a personal preference.
  • Despite the updates over time, CoC is still rooted in a traditional Basic Roleplaying (BRP) system. Other than Sanity, there is very little alignment between the system and the style of story it’s trying to accomplish.
  • I prefer each roll of the dice to be interesting, so I don’t like systems that involve constant die-rolling – especially those that require multiple rolls to resolve a single action.
  • I want a system that supports and encourages the story, and stays out of the way the rest of the time. A game that has people developing complicated flow charts just to explain a basic mechanic (I’m looking at you Sanity mechanics) is not getting that done.
  • I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen new CoC GMs ask about a rule (and I don’t mean a weird edge case) and the bulk of the advice is to not worry about the specifics of the rules and just focus on what makes sense in the story. That’s great advice, but it suggests that a lot of the great stories told playing CoC happen in spite of the system, not because of it.

Trail of Cthulhu

  • I like that ToC directly tackles the issue of an investigation stalling because the players fail a die roll, but I don’t like the way it does it. Getting the vital clue automatically is fine, but it removes possibilities from the game. I like the idea of failing a roll to find a clue still resulting the players discovering the clue, but with an added complication. I think this approach still resolves the problem Gumshoe is trying to solve, but also creates new opportunities for interesting play.
  • I really don’t like the point spend system to obtain additional clues. I believe the best games encourage players to focus on what their PCs are actually doing, not on what skills they want to use. The point spend system appears to work against that idea.

Why Fate?

So that hits the highlights of why I’m not just playing CoC or ToC. Which leaves the question of why I’m using Fate Core. If you’re familiar with Fate, you’re probably thinking one of two things: “I like Fate, but I’m not sure it makes sense for an investigative horror game.” or “I can’t stand Fate; what are you thinking?”

I’ll address both of those ideas in more detail, but I think it’s important to understand that there is a difference between the rules of Fate Core and the way people play Fate Core. Put another way, some people play RPGs in a fairly typical style using the Fate system, while others view and play Fate as a somewhat different style of RPG all together. Neither is wrong, but these two different styles of playing Fate can lead to a fair degree of confusion when discussing the game.

System Gets Out of the Way

As I’ve mentioned, I prefer roleplaying games that emphasize actual roleplaying, which I loosely define as “making decisions and taking actions as though you were your character.”  In other words, the players (and the Keeper) act based on what their characters would do an any given situation, NOT based on the mechanical options granted to them by the system or other mechanical factors like which skill they want to use. Not only do I find this style of play much more enjoyable (assuming the Keeper is capable of effectively running this kind of game), but it is also easier to learn and teach to others.

Not only does Fate Core support this style of play, but it explicitly encourages it. The Golden Rule of Fate, often paraphrased as “Fiction First”, instructs players to “First, figure out what you want to do, then consult the rules to figure out how to handle it in the game.” This is arguably the central tenet of Fate, and as long as you stick to this concept you should end up playing a style of game along the lines of what I’m going for.

Elegant – Powerful Simplicity

Again, I like a system that let’s us focus on actually playing the game and pursuing the story. I want a system that’s easy to learn for the players and doesn’t require you to look up rules every time a new situation arises. If you need a flow chart for a core system of the game, that’s not good. With an eye towards keeping players focused on what’s going on in the story, I also prefer dice mechanics that are consistent, don’t require you to figure out what kind or how many dice to roll every time, and require a minimum of math.

Fate has a fairly small number of core elements that can be applied in different combinations. They can seem simple and minimalist at first, but once you start seeing how they can be used, it becomes more apparent that they can be used to handle virtually any situation. This approach emphasizes determining what’s actually important in the moment, as opposed to simply ‘in this situation, always follow this process’. This can actually be more challenging for Keeper’s to learn, compared to other system, but it also offers more possibilities and helps speed up gameplay. Ultimately, it can make things easier on everyone. It also encourages Keepers to understand why they are choosing to use a mechanic at any given time – rather than just blindly following a step-by-step process – and how those choices impact the game. This can ultimately help produce better Keepers and better games.

And if you’re rolling dice in Fate, you’re rolling four dice and adding a few numbers. You might make a decision about re-rolling or adding a couple more numbers, but that core mechanic doesn’t change. The basic process is consistent throughout the game.

Scalable

As you learn more about roleplaying game (and adventure) design you begin to see patterns in different areas of play. For example, using dice to resolve an action attempted by a character is serving the same purpose, regardless of who or what is attempting the action. The more you can utilize the same basic mechanics for similar circumstances, the easier the game is to learn. This also minimizes the amount of focus that everyone has to divert away from experiencing the story from the perspective of their character and towards the mechanics of the game (the cognitive load).

As an example, some games might have a whole separate additional system for resolving combat between military units on a battlefield. In some games, this uses a completely different ruleset from the core roleplaying game, which means you have to learn a whole new system for a situation that will only see limited use. In other games, this uses a ruleset closely mirrors the core game mechanics, which makes it quick and easy to learn. It also allows the players to better focus on why that battle is important to the story.

Fate uses the same basic mechanics regardless of the players involved. Resolving what happens when a single soldier fights an opponent on the battlefield uses the same process as two infantry units engaging in close quarter combat. The names of the skills being used might be different – just to help differentiate that these two operate on different levels of scale – but resolving these two actions is handled the same way. Indeed, virtually every element of Fate’s system can be applied the same way at any level of scale.

Simplifies the Narration

One thing I’ve never liked as a GM is blocks of text to be read aloud verbatim as part of a scenario. It always comes across as forced and artificial to me. Unfortunately, I’ve also sometimes not been so great at coming up with detailed narration on the spot. I’ve also noticed two trends in that occur sometimes in mystery games: First, if the narration doesn’t include something, the players assume it must not exist – which limits the options they feel are available to them. Second, if the narration does include something, the players assume it must be important. Don’t mention a painting on a wall if you don’t want the players to inspect every inch of it. This can create challenges for the GM or Keeper.

Fate uses Aspects – short descriptive phrases – to describe just about everything in the game. These Aspects are open-ended and allow everyone to make assumptions about the world. Describe a room as The History Professor’s Cluttered Basement Office, and everyone can reasonably assume it contains a desk, bookshelves, books, papers, and artifacts, as well it being dark and dreary. There’s no need to describe all of those things individually. This might seem odd at first to some veteran roleplayers, but it is incredibly freeing and effective in practice.

Adaptable

I’m a firm believer that the best games align their ruleset with the setting and themes of the game. So if I’m not going to build a game system from scratch, then I need to use a system that is already set up for investigative cosmic horror – or a system that can be easily modified. One thing the Fate is known for is how easily it can be hacked to suit a particular need. In fact, I would argue that Fate is actually more hackable than many players think. It has a reputation for producing a very particular style of play, but it’s capable of fostering other styles as well.

Wrap-Up

So that covers the highlights of why I’m using the Fate Core system, but if you’re concerned about how Fate can be used for investigative horror – or if you don’t like Fate – it probably doesn’t really address your concerns. Which is why my next post is going to discuss what I’m changing about Fate Core, and why…

Lessons in Fear – From the ALIEN RPG

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One question that pops up from time to time is how to actually instill fear into horror games. There’s plenty of techniques for setting the atmosphere – especially for games like Call of Cthulhu (CoC) – but I recently came across some really useful guidance in the newly released ALIEN RPG. And since it plays upon the idea of “fear of the unknown” it’s certainly suited to a Mythos game. I definitely plan to use this in my future games. And I also realized that I had unwittingly done so in a past game as well.

Cover of the ALIEN RPG from Free League Publishing

The ALIEN RPG repeatedly highlights that it is a horror game, and it briefly outlines three different kinds of fear (and how to use them). Combined with an understanding that the tension of fear has to periodically be released, I see a lot of potential here. The three stages of fear the game points out are Dread, Terror, and Horror. Here’s how they are described in the ALIEN RPG (Note that the game refers to the GM as the Game Mother):

“Creating horror in a roleplaying game is not always easy. Overdo it, and the players aren’t scared anymore—downplay it, and the game drags on. The key to Game Mothering horror is to manage pacing properly and keep the major threat hidden as long as possible. To do this effectively, you need to carefully manage the stages of fear in the game: dread, terror, and horror.

DREAD: The sense that something bad is about to happen, but no-one is really sure what or why. Dread is the first stage of fear in the ALIEN roleplaying game and should be employed as often as possible. The key to using dread is planting seeds and watching events unfold. The players know something terrible is about to take place, but without knowing what it is, they can’t do anything about it. This dread may evolve to the next stage, but sometimes it won’t—and that’s fine. Examples of dread:

  • A control panel indicates that the airlock was just cycled manually whilst all of the crew are accounted for on the bridge.
  • Someone finds blood on the walkway. The ship’s cat is missing.
  • A strange and leathery egg is found in a crashed derelict ship. It’s like something is alive in there.

TERROR: You feel terror when you know something bad will happen any moment now. It is no longer a question of if but rather when it will take place. From a roleplaying perspective, the feeling of terror is the most effective feeling of fear as the PCs are at their most helpless state. Therefore, terror often involves the scariest moments in a gaming session. Use it selectively for maximum effect. Examples of terror:

  • A squad of marines investigating an old mine steps into something slimy. One of the marines hears a hissing sound. She realizes that something is directly above her.
  • A colonial marshal following a killer in the deep bowels of a space station realizes that she is the prey.
  • A pilot on a stranded shuttle barricaded in the cockpit hears pounding on the access hatch. Something wants in.

HORROR: The ultimate form of fear is horror. Horror is the moment when the danger reveals itself. It is the moment of climax. The payoff that the earlier stages of fear have hinted at. But because of this, it is also less scary than terror. When horror hits, the game mechanics take over. You draw initiative and fight it or try to escape. Horror is vital to the game, but it should be used rarely and is often best utilized late in a game session rather than early. Examples of horror:

  • A corporate agent turns around and stands face to face with an alien baring its teeth.
  • The egg opens and a crab-like creature lunges at the closest crew member, attaching itself to her face amidst the screams of her friends.
  • Black, lightning-quick creatures crawl through the walls and roof towards the marine squad.”

After reading this a couple weeks ago, I immediately began thinking of ways to incorporate this into how I GM. Then, this morning, I realized this also helped explain one of my more successful scenes from a previous game.

Last year, I ran the Peru Prologue for Masks of Nyarlathotep. (I used it as a test for my WIP alternative to CoC’s mechanics: Our Terrible Fate.) The players were my two children and my mother. This was still fairly early in the scenario, but they were already a little paranoid – not freaking out or overreacting, but generally distrustful of everyone. (Also note that I used two play aids during the game that came in towards the end of the scene. I had a printed card showing what the monster looked like – not always appropriate for CoC but worked in this case – and I had Syrinscape’s MoN audio program on my laptop.)

(Spoiler alert: This won’t reveal any big details from the scenario, but it may ruin this scene if you intend to play it.)

  • The investigators were visiting a professor at the local university museum. The professor’s assistant was translating an old journal that may provide important clues. They are introduced to the professor and are having a conversation. As that wraps up, the professor mentions that his assistant should have arrived already. He suggests that the investigators could go down to the archive room and check on her. (Dread: What happened to the assistant, and what are we walking into?)
  • The investigators head down and discover her dead body. (This initially provided a small bit of tension relief.)
  • Then they looked over the body and discovered the nature of the strange wounds and emaciated state. (Dread: What could have done this?)
  • Then they notice bloody footsteps leading away from the body to another exit from the room. “We are NOT following those footsteps!” (Dread: What left the footsteps, and where did it go?)
  • The investigators then hear screaming from upstairs. (Dread)
  • Rushing upstairs, they hear signs of a struggle from inside the professor’s office. (Dread leading into Terror)
  • Heading inside, they see what appears to be a man clutching the professor. His back is to them. (Terror: It’s right there. What is it, and what’s it doing?)
  • The strongest investigator, a boxer, decided to grab the figure from behind to pull him/it away from the professor and restrain him. I narrated that the figure easily broke free from the investigator’s grasp and flung him back a few feet. It then turned and snarled at the investigators, revealing at strange mouth on an otherwise human-looking face. (At this point, I played the snarling sound effect in Syrinscape and showed the players the card so they could see the monstrous form of the villain.) (Horror: Big reveal.)

At this point, my son actually got up from the table with an “Oh, hell no!” and started pacing around. Everyone was on edge up to that point, and I think it was the snarling sound effect that really pushed him over the edge. This was immediately a big tension relief in terms of fear, but some of that tension was immediately replaced by the tension of “Okay, now that we’re face to face with this thing, what do we do?”

This scene was easily one of the highlights of our session. (Though admittedly, that may have been because I screwed up some other scenes. But that’s another story.)

(If you’re interested in the ALIEN RPG, you can buy the PDF from Free League Publishing on DriveThruRPG.)

A Light Dawns: An Epiphany about Fate Core’s Character Advancement

nataix2 Comments

Work continues on my efforts to create an adaptation of Fate Core to place investigative cosmic horror. One area of the rules that I remain a little unsure about is also one of the first pieces of Fate Core I originally wanted to change – character advancement. Ever since I first read through the rules for character advancement, something about it has bothered me, and today I read something that helped me realize why.

Fate Core’s character advancement revolves around the concept of milestones. The basic idea is that there are minor, significant, and major milestones that generally occur at the end of a session, scenario, or story arc. You can ‘spend’ a milestone to change or advance your character.

I understand that there’s a lot about this system that works really well – and is far better than  generic XP system – but there’s always been this inherent nagging feeling I’ve had that just turned me off from these milestones. Part of me simply thought a session is not a standard unit of measuring anything so why should it be used to pace character advancement? Turns out that’s really close to why this bothers me, but it’s not the whole thing.

I’ve also come across numerous examples online of this system not working the way I feel it should. Players using their milestones to change a character’s skills and stunts, not based on what has happened to the character recently, but based on what they thought would be more useful in upcoming play. To me, that is counter to focusing on the story – something Fate normally places a great emphasis on.

I’ve also seen some really great things happen with milestones, and I like how it helps to align how the characters change with how the world changes around them. So I’ve been tempted to just leave it alone and see what happens.

However, today I read something that helped me realize why I don’t feel right about milestones, courtesy of the Angry GM.

First, I read a couple of posts about types of scenes, the importance of pacing, and how these ideas interact to help bring about great, memorable, and fun stories. Then I came across this post about sessions. There’s a lot of great stuff here, especially in the context of the emphasis Fate places on the importance of the fiction – the story – itself. Then there’s where something clicked for me:

Anyway, in RPGs, we have this metagame concept of “the session.” You know, of course, that every week or every two weeks or whatever, we get together and play a chunk of the RPG game. Whatever game we can fit into three hours or four hours or five hours, that’s what we do. And we pick up next time where we left off last time.

The problem is that sessions don’t care about the story. They don’t care about the game. The narrative. They don’t care where arcs begin and end, where adventures begin and end. While RPGs are essentially episodic, the episodes have NOTHING to do with the narrative.

So sessions don’t generally have any connection whatsoever to the story. They are not connected to the fiction you are trying to create at the table. So then it hits me: By tying character advancement to sessions, you are inherently introducing a barrier between character advancement and the fiction.

It’s not just that a session isn’t a consistent way to measure time or experience – which is part of what initially bothered me – it’s that sessions are often disruptive to the pacing of the fiction, and by using them in advancement we are creating an additional obstacle to integrating character change and advancement naturally into the story.

So, how do I fix this in my game? I’m not sure yet, but I’m thinking it’s going to be through some combination of two basic ideas:

  1. Minimize or eliminate any reference to sessions in character advancement & change (probably from other system mechanics as well).
  2. Integrate sessions more fully into the pacing of the story and flow of the game.

I still want to provide a lot of guidance and tools for Keepers in the game, so the second option will probably work well with that, but I may tinker with the first option as well. Now that I finally have a little better grasp on what bothers me about milestones, it should be much easier to put together the kind of advancement system I want in the game.