Work continues on Our Terrible Fate. Here’s an overview of what I’ve been working on lately.
Sanity
I’ve got an outline of a sanity system. That might sound like a small thing, but with the way it will integrate into the system, it doesn’t require a lot of additional detailed rules. I think it will yield gameplay results similar to CoC, with characters occasionally going mad and turning on their compatriots or waking up in strange places covered in blood and strange markings. At the same time, it should be less complicated – don’t need to make three rolls because you saw a monster and hopefully no flow charts required – by leaning into Fate a bit.
Underlying insanity is easily handled with consequences. The Keeper can use these to justify certain events, like hallucinations or dreams, and can compel them when they really create problems. And of course, players are encouraged to roleplay things like phobias, which can easily be used for self-compels to get some fate points.
Certain situations will automatically trigger a bout of madness, and the Keeper can offer a compel to trigger a bout as well. One thing I’m considering is possible ways to incentivize players to really play into a bout when doing so would cause them to take action against the other investigators. This is a common idea in CoC that produces some especially memorable moments in play, but it’s not really driven by the system.
Character Progression
Another area I’m tinkering with is character advancement and progression. I’ve never been a big fan of the default character advancement in Fate. It’s a little too removed from the fiction and gameplay, with progression essentially happening based on the end of a session or scenario. It’s also easy for players to get into the habit of making choices in advancing their character that aren’t necessarily based on what their character has done to this point.
I’ve long been a fan of skill progression being tied to actual skill use, but that can sometimes involve a LOT of bookkeeping that bogs down play. I also like the character advancement approach taken in Invisible Sun. Basically, it lets the player choose a type of goal from among several categories, flesh it out with specifics, and then gradually complete steps in support of that goal As they complete steps, they are able to make small advancements, with more significant advancement upon completion of the goal. This also works well for goals outside of strict character advancement, such as gaining membership in a group, advancing in rank within an organization, developing relationships, etc.
I’d like to incorporate something like this along with guidelines for Keepers to integrate steps for these goals into existing scenarios. I’m hoping this will not only provide a character advancement system that’s driven by the investigators’ actions, but also make it easy for Keepers to better tie scenarios into investigator backstories.
Scenario Rewrite
And the other major thing I’ve been working on is a draft of a scenario to use with the system. Applying the system to actual situations while writing a scenario is a useful way to identify things that need more work prior to actual playtesting. Plus I am putting a lot of effort into how scenarios are written and presented to the Keeper. One key element of the game is the ability to play out any given situation using different methods, depending on the needs of the scenario and your table at that time. This isn’t just about giving the Keeper a couple of different options and saying “pick one,” but also about explaining why one option might be preferable over another.
I’m also including a lot of guidance for building and maintaining tension and fear over the course of the scenario. First at the beginning to give the Keeper an idea of where the climax is and how tension should (or can) flow during the game, and then with additional guidance in each scene. More than once I’ve seen Keepers complain that their games like any real sense of fear, while they also spend 30+ minutes with their players acting out detailed conversations with a completely irrelevant NPC.
Rather than expend energy to develop a new scenario from scratch, I’m just re-writing a classic CoC scenario. The NPCs and overall structure of the scenario is unchanged, but it’s being rewritten to use Our Terrible Fate and provide lots of additional guidance for the Keeper. It’s also being setup with an eye towards making it easier to use at the table. Layout that’s easy to follow, layers to support printing with less ink/toner, and space on the page the Keeper can use for note.
A New Tenant
Finally, a tackled one other project over the past few days. It’s not directly tied to developing OTF, but I hope to use it as a prop in a future game. But that’s a separate post…
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.
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.)
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:
Minimize or eliminate any reference to sessions in character advancement & change (probably from other system mechanics as well).
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.
Before I get into what changes I’m making to Fate Core’s rules as written, I think it’s important to look at how I apply those rules to get the style of game I’m going for. The is because I have come to recognize that there are a lot of different styles of gameplay that emerge from Fate’s default rules. I think this is part of the reason that Fate has been so successful – it can accommodate very different game styles without requiring an actual alteration of the rules – you just have to apply the existing rules differently. However, this can also make exposing new players to the game a bit challenging.
There are lot of ways to describe and categorize tabletop roleplaying games, but one key idea that I have found that plays a role in how people approach Fate is the question of authorship. When it comes to authorship, you can think of all games as existing somewhere along a spectrum.
At one end of the spectrum, you have what I think of as the traditional or GM-led style of play, which is characterized by the GM having control over and knowledge of the game world that the players do not. Players only have information which their characters have, and they are only able to influence the game world through the actions of their characters. The GM controls all elements of the game world and possesses knowledge of the game world that is secret until the players uncover it through the actions of their characters. At the most extreme edge of this spectrum you also have GM railroading, where the players only control the moment-to-moment actions of their characters and have little to no say in where the party of PCs goes and what approaches they can take.
At the other end of the spectrum, you have what I tend to describe as a shared authorship style of play. This style is characterized by both the players and the GM being able to control elements of the game world on an equal footing and everyone having access to all information about the game world and the characters that reside within it. There are very few differences between the players and the GM in this style of game, and everyone has to actively distinguish between what they know about the game world and what their characters know.
Default Fate
I’d say that the default rules for Fate fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, though exactly where depends on how you interpret and apply some of the rules in Fate Core. This is most evident in how tables utilize the rules for Game Creation. Some groups start from scratch and create a new game world and setting, create characters and game aspects, create issues and some NPCs, and get straight to playing the game – using only the aspects they’ve created to drive play (more shared authorship). Other groups identify key aspects and issues and create characters during session zero, then take a break so the GM can prep everything else before the next session (more GM-led).
Games that make more use of secret or hidden aspects naturally tend more towards the GM-led end of the spectrum. There is also a lot of flexibility built-in to what players can do with the Create an Advantage action. While this action allows characters to change the circumstances around them to provide some sort of benefit, that still leaves some wiggle room. Some groups allow the CA action to alter those circumstances in ways that go beyond what the characters themselves can directly accomplish – for example, introducing a door to exit to a building or declaring that the ground ahead is a marsh in order to slow a fleeing enemy. This application of the CA action enables players to alter the game world beyond their characters – very shared authorship.
Using aspects and fate points to declare a story detail does not have a lot of defined limitations in the default rules, which provides a lot of potential for your players to influence the game world. Compels can be primarily viewed as a tool of the GM, with players occasionally compelling one another’s PCs if there is conflict within the party, but some groups also allow players to make broader use of compels – including compelling NPCs.
Terrible Fate Default
Since my goal is to play scenarios from Call of Cthulhu and other mythos games, my implementation of Fate will be focused on investigative horror gameplay. This means the game will tend more towards the GM-led end of the spectrum. The GM will have a great deal of information not initially available to the players, and the players will primarily interact with the game world through the actions of their characters. Players will be able to exercise limited narrative authority over the game world, but the limits of that authority will be narrowly defined. The GM will have broad authority over the world – and even some authority over the actions of PCs via compels and similar mechanics – while the players will determine where their PCs go and what they do when they get there. In other words, Our Terrible Fate will probably more closely resemble a traditional tabletop RPG than it will a freeform story game.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, in the past couple of years I have played two Call of Cthulhu scenarios with my family. The first game, The Haunting, did not go as well as I wanted. The second game, the Peru Prologue to Masks of Nyarlathotep, went far better. I learned a lot from both sessions, and studying those experiences can point to what worked well and what didn’t – pointing to a preliminary list of features for my game.
I’ve also played a fair bit of both Mansions of Madness and Arkham Horror: The Card Game, not to mention numerous other board games. Again, examining what I liked and what I didn’t should help define some more features I may wish to incorporate.
Differences Between The Haunting and Peru
There are a few things I did differently when playing these two scenarios. While The Haunting didn’t go badly, my kids had a difficult time with it. We also didn’t really engage the system that much, and wading through the content of the prop handouts I used consumed a lot of time without a lot of benefit in terms of driving the investigation forward (great for immersion though).
System
When we played The Haunting, we used the Trail of Cthulhu conversion. There were very few dice rolls, and in general we didn’t engage the system except for during character creation. We didn’t quite reach Corbitt before we had to stop, which assuredly would have used the system due to combat. Not sure that would have gone well anyway, since we didn’t use the system much leading up to it.
For Peru, I used a work-in-progress version of the system I’m working now, which is a custom adaptation of Fate Core. There were a few parts of the system we didn’t engage with as much as we probably should have, but that was due more to some mistakes on my part as GM. I should have made the difficulty of rolls known to everyone, which I think would have helped drive the Fate Point economy. (I was leaning on my past experience of using unknown difficulties to help build suspense, but that wasn’t necessary.) I probably called for a couple of rolls I shouldn’t have, since I didn’t have any good ideas for complications from failure. And I should have called for a few more defense from horror rolls when the investigators encountered something strange or horrific.
Overall though, we definitely used the system a lot more in Peru, and it never felt like we had an excessive number of rolls. I had already put together a conversion doc that helped me quickly identify what skills would typically apply. However, even when the players wanted to take some action that wasn’t explicitly covered in the scenario, the Fate system made it easy to quickly identify a skill and mechanic to handle what they wanted to accomplish.
Character Creation
I think one of the differences that had the biggest impact for my group was how we got started with everyone’s characters. Our first time around we created characters from scratch using the ToC rules. This got the adults interested in their characters, but we spent a lot of time on this – and since we didn’t engage the system much, it was largely pointless. The choices of professions and such was interesting, but no one had a clue how the numbers for the skills would be relevant. We ended up spending around two hours on creating characters, whereas if we had spent less time on this we probably could have finished the scenario. More importantly, the kids were completely lost during this part. There were way too many choices for them to pick from, which turned them off from the beginning.
When we played Peru, I converted the pre-generated characters over to my Fate Core implementation and presented them to the players. So three people were choosing between about 8 characters. Since I was using a version of Fate, each investigator had a handful of aspects that provided a quick summary of the character, which made it easy for everyone to see how the investigators were different from one another and make a choice. After the investigation got started, I also had each player come up with a Drive for their investigator – basically a goal or concern they had related to the scenario or the other investigators. We didn’t have much opportunity to actually use those Drives in the scenario, but it allowed a bit of customization without requiring a lot of time.
I’ve though quite a bit about how best to handle creating characters in my game. I like the idea of starting with pre-generated characters for the first scenario or two and then allowing custom characters to be created. I also think providing the option to use pre-generated characters in later scenarios could useful – especially if you have additional players join the group. The option to customize pre-generated characters could also be useful. I want character creation to be quick and simple, but still allow for player choice and customization. When it comes to creating investigators from scratch, I’m also thinking of starting with a limited number of choices and then expanding them over time. This makes it easier to get familiar with the process without being overwhelmed and helps support character creation being quick.
I’ll probably deviate a fair bit from typical Fate Core character creation. The focus on the player characters in cosmic horror is very different from that of vanilla Fate Core, and the likelihood that investigators will die or go insane is usually fairly high in these types of games. I want the players to be invested in their characters, but not feel so attached to them that they are put off when they have to be replaced.
Character Creation Design Goals
Incorporate pre-generated characters
Allow pre-generated characters to be customized (Drives, Stunts, Ties)
Allow creation of new characters
Quick and simple character creation combined with player choice and customization
Limited initial character creation options that increase over time
Character creation is one of the areas where I have some developed, but a lot planned conceptually. I’ll create a separate post delving into this in more detail.
Clues
A central element to investigation-based gameplay is the discovery and interpretation of clues. One mythos game that really embraces this idea is Trail of Cthulhu, and it also touches on there being different types of clues. Building on this idea and adding a Fate twist, I handled clues a little differently with Peru than I did in The Haunting. This ended up working to great effect.
When we played The Haunting, I used lots of props, so there were plenty of documents that provided clues to the investigators. While these were great for immersion, they did little to overcome some of the common challenges with investigation games. Without going too much into it here, the players had difficulty parsing through the documents to separate the clues from the fluff, keeping track of the clues they had uncovered, and piecing together clues any sort of helpful way. When we ran Peru, which has far fewer physical documents, the players nevertheless had a far easier time keeping track of clues and figuring things out. They still had to find the clues and interpret them, so the core of this kind of gameplay remained intact without many of the usual challenges. (They even interpreted the clues incorrectly, but were still able to bring about a generally successful conclusion to the scenario.)
The first thing I did was to give clues a little more of a defined structure. Rather than a document or “the information Mr. Knott told you” being treated as a clue, each piece of relevant information obtained from those sources is a separate, discrete clue. So a document may contain several clues, each of which is written as a short, bite-sized, phrase or sentence. (Each Clue is also an Aspect, which has some other interesting advantages, but more on that elsewhere.)
I then created cards for each Clue, which were given to the players as the investigators uncovered them. I still gave the players documents and other props, which continued to provide immersion, and the players only received the Clue cards once they had read the documents. The Clue cards proved extremely helpful. The players could use them to keep track of and review what they learned and easily differentiate between actual clues and information that was just fluff/detail. I also categorized Clues as either Core (vital to the successful completion of the scenario) or Supporting (helpful or background info, but not indispensable), which is useful when determining how to handle investigator efforts to find those Clues.
Clue Features & Design Goals
Clues written as Aspects on Cards
Clue types – Core, Supporting, Floating
Use props whenever possible for documents, etc.
Clue and Encounter maps for the Keeper/GM
Some Clues lead to other scenarios (Fragments, Seeds, Hooks)
Locations
Mock up of Boston board used in The Haunting
One thing I had a lot of fun with when we ran The Haunting was a map of the locations in the scenario. I printed a large 20s-era map of Boston and put it on a bulletin board. I then printed out small collages of images for each place and pinned them to the board, with thin yard tacked between the place and its location on the map. As new locations cam up in play, I added them to the board. Gave everything a nice investigation/conspiracy feel and provided the players with some images to help visualize each location.
However, using this board did have a couple of issues. First, it was rather large. We had to either let it take up one whole side of the table or put it off to the side, which meant the players had to get it and walk to it if they wanted to look at the images or reference the map for any reason. It also meant that any time a new location was added, it took a minute to post it to the board and tie it to its location. Most importantly, using the board meant that putting everything away between sessions either took up a lot more space or a lot more time.
When we played Peru, I took a page from Arkham Horror: TCG and decided to use cards. In that game, each location is represented by a single card. Obviously, this doesn’t take much space, and it has the added benefit of allowing for any size location to be represented in the same way. I made a card for each location that contained its name, an image, and an aspect or two describing the location. I started out with only the starting location in play. As places came to the attention of the investigators during the scenario, I put the cards for those locations into play (assuming they knew enough of the location to actually get there).
In practice, this worked extremely well. The players were provided with an array of options of where to go, and as they gathered Clues and learned more they revealed new locations. Essentially, it provided a visual path to follow. They still had to decide where to go and what to do when they got there, but they always had some idea of where to go to look for more Clues.
I also created a sort of “board” for the Ruins in Peru. The idea was to echo the process of exploring a location in Mansions of Madness. I showed the players the map of the Ruins and they described what they were doing as they checked them out, but once they went underground, I laid out tiles representing the tunnels under the ruins. They started out with only a couple of tiles branching in two or three directions. As they explored I added more tiles (and also a few Aspects that described the environment). Combined with the creepy sound effects of the Peru module for Syrinscape that I was using, the players were definitely spooked and cautious. It worked fairly well, even with just basic white tiles with no art. The descriptions provided by the Aspects and the process of revealing the map only as they explored it, plus the atmospheric sound effect, was more than sufficient to set the mood and keep them on edge.
There were a few things that need to be refined too. I think providing the players with the map of the ruins worked okay, but I think using cards to represent each area of the ruins could have some benefits. The ruins on the surface were kind of an odd middle ground between the “Encounter” and “Investigation” levels of the game, so I need to look at that some more. When there wasn’t anything of consequence for a couple of tiles in the tunnels, the process of “Which way do you go? That way. Here are more tiles. Now where?” got a little tedious and pointless. Obviously, Mansions of Madness has a lot more structure defined with turns, actions, and such, so I’ll have to work on how to structure this Investigation level of play better. I hadn’t really delved into that yet for this first play through, so all in all it went well. And of course having art for the tiles would be a big improvement. I’m a little concerned that while converting scenarios to this system should be fairly simple for the most part, creating tiles for the Investigation of specific locations could be a challenge and big time sink.
Location Features & Design Goals
Support quick set up and tear down
Include image and descriptions/Aspects for each location
Use cards for locations at most levels of gameplay
Put location cards into play as players learn of them
Player pieces can be placed on cards to indication their location during Encounters
Investigation of locations transitions to tile-based board/map with player pieces
Additional tiles are added as players explore
Support additional locations not specified by the scenario, as players desire to visit other places
Non-Player Characters
In games like Call of Cthulhu, keeping track of all the non-player characters the investigators come across can sometimes be a bit of a challenge. This can be such a big issue in larger campaigns that Chaosium’s most recent edition of the epic Masks of Nyarlathotep includes 12 pages of NPC portraits that Keepers can present to players just to help them keep things straight. It’s always a good idea to provide information in more than one form (spoken, text, images, etc.) whenever practical, since different people have an easier time processing and recalling information in different ways.
There aren’t that many NPCs in The Haunting, and only one of them is all that memorable. Since we didn’t reach him during our play through, NPCs weren’t that big of a deal during that game. On the other hand, investigators in Peru will actually get most of their clues from NPCs. There is a lot of repeated interaction with different NPCs, and even one that uses an alias. Again, I used cards for each NPC, including the image from the scenario guide and a couple of descriptive Aspects. Worked really well for helping the players get a quick impression and keep track of everyone.
One thing I need to do differently is with the Aspects for each NPC. I included some information on the cards that the PCs wouldn’t reasonably be aware of at first. I need to focus on basic first impressions and allow for additional details to be added as they are uncovered. Additional details/Aspects could be physically written on the cards, put into play as separate cards, or an alternate version of the card could replace the original. I actually used the last approach for one of the named NPCs in Peru whose “true physical nature” is revealed partway through the scenario.
Character Features & Design Goals
Use cards for each named NPC or mob
Include name, image, and descriptions/Aspects for each character
Allow for additional details of NPCs to be revealed and put into play, beyond what’s on their card initially
Wrap Up
Obviously, there are plenty of other elements to the game – details on the investigators, character advancement, tying scenarios together, etc. – but these are the big ones that made a clear difference in our two games, so they are taking center stage to start out. As I mentioned, I already have more developed or planned for character creation and clues as well, which I’ll hopefully get around to posting in the near future.
In Part 2 I looked at some of the big name mythos roleplaying games out there and briefly discussed a few reasons I’m not just playing them. Of course, those are not the only mythos RPGs available – it’s actually a very good time to be alive if you’re into mythos gaming. However, most smaller or indie roleplaying games these days tend to focus on minimal rules and/or a very shared authorship/narrativist style of game. That’s not what I’m after. It’s quite possible there’s a mythos RPG out there that’s actually fairly close to my personal preferences when it comes to system and setting, but I haven’t come across it. More importantly, I’m after something more than just a roleplaying game.
Why not just add components and a few custom rules to one of these games?
The next question that arises is why I don’t just add a few house rules and some play aids or props to one of these games. In actuality, I am going to end up just adapting an existing roleplaying system, but I’m envisioning something more than just playing a roleplaying game with a few house rules. Now, I do want to be able to play mythos scenarios using a typical roleplaying approach, but I don’t want that to be my only option. I want to be able to speed up or simplify play as necessary, and I want to be able to slow things down and delve into the details when it suits my purpose. And I want to make those adjustments on the fly, as things develop at the table. I also want to incorporate other gameplay elements that might seem downright foreign to a traditional RPG but nevertheless can bring something to the experience.
Over the years I have learned that when it comes to any situation or event in a tabletop game, there are always a variety of ways you can handle that event mechanically. Each approach brings with it a set of advantages and disadvantages when it comes to simplicity, detail, ease, time, etc. It all depends on what you’re trying to accomplish and what’s going to work best at your table. Now there are certainly systems out there that provide a wealth of options for dealing with any situation that may arise in play, but many of them do so by having an increasingly large assortment of rules that are intended to encompass different circumstances. Especially when it comes to playing with my family, I prefer a system that can be used to support a wide variety of in-game events and actions without having to resort to dozens of individual situation-specific rules – a system whose basic mechanics can be applied flexibly and powerfully enough to provide a fine level of detail without being cumbersome.
After working on my previous project I believe I came across such a system in Fate Core.
What? Not that system!
While my overriding goal is to play this game with my family, I have a natural tendency to write and develop for a wider audience. In other words, I’d love to be able to share what I come up with with others. One of my biggest concerns with all of this so far is the possible reaction to my using Fate Core. So let me say this: This will not be Fate Core as you know it!
Actually, I’m not sure whether to expect a stronger reaction from people that are opposed to all Fate systems or from members of the Fate community. One group may just declare “It’s got Fate in it. I’m not going anywhere near it!” and the other may jump to “That’s not Fate! You’re doing it wrong!” Oh well. I’ve got my reasons – and they’re coming in Part 4.
Before I start posting details about my mythos gaming project, I’m just going to post a quick list of the various games and products that are serving as inspiration and sources for the game:
Just posted some thoughts about some challenges faced by those that want to play characters that start as nobodies and eventually become heroes – and why character competence might be a little over-emphasized in the Fate community.
Just published the first of a series of posts examining some frequent topics regarding Fate Core. After spending a lot of time learning about the system and how I might tailor it to Proteus, I’ve seen lots of players with some of the same questions I’ve had. The Fate community being what it is, these questions are often answered quite effectively and with great explanations. Often times, confusion on the part of new players is merely the result of missing some key element of Fate Core or their own preconceptions from previous systems. On the other hand, there are naturally some preconceptions within the Fate community as well, and taking a closer look at some of these topics might help me make my game a little more accessible to players.
And the other major thing I’ve been working on is a draft of a scenario to use with the system. Applying the system to actual situations while writing a scenario is a useful way to identify things that need more work prior to actual playtesting. Plus I am putting a lot of effort into how scenarios are written and presented to the Keeper. One key element of the game is the ability to play out any given situation using different methods, depending on the needs of the scenario and your table at that time. This isn’t just about giving the Keeper a couple of different options and saying “pick one,” but also about explaining why one option might be preferable over another.
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.
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.
Finding Clues
Differences Between The Haunting and Peru
The first thing I did was to give clues a little more of a defined structure. Rather than a document or “the information Mr. Knott told you” being treated as a clue, each piece of relevant information obtained from those sources is a separate, discrete clue. So a document may contain several clues, each of which is written as a short, bite-sized, phrase or sentence. (Each Clue is also an Aspect, which has some other interesting advantages, but more on that elsewhere.)
