Posts by andrewthooks

7 of My Most Successful Campaigns (part one)

RPG Campaigns RPG Life
7 of My Most Successful Campaigns

Potato Falls (2019)
Hypertellurians (2020)
The Final Revelation (2020)
Masks (2022-2024)
CyBorg (2023-2024)
Kult (2025)
Hearts of Wulin (2025)

I don’t know if it’s old age or the state of the world, but, lately, I’ve been reflecting on various parts of my life in a deliberate way. Predictably and appropriately, a large part of this consideration has revolved around tabletop roleplaying games. I’ve been game-mastering since I was around 12, I think, though there was a lengthy break, from maybe 1995 to 2017, due to various trivial “real life” things, like work and health.

Before that hiatus, every game that I ran or played in was a campaign. Neither I nor the people I played with ever considered playing otherwise. That mindset seems really strange to me now (not in the least because so many of the old campaigns were discontinued after only a session or two). These days, I run a lot of one-shots and enjoy doing so. At the same time, like many other gamers, I have a certain passion or compulsive sentimentality—I’m really not sure which it is—for the idea of a campaign. I love the epic meta-plots, the sweeping character arcs, and the familiarity and camaraderie that go with a long form TTRPG—not to mention the slow builds, the setups and punchlines, the will-they-or-won’t-they moments of suspense. 

With that last point, I’m not (just) referring to romance. I’m pointing toward those remarkable moments wherein you find yourself wondering: will the GM go that low? will the player go that high and/or silly? and what unexpected developments will come out of someone/everyone going off the rails, the script, the planet, or the plane of existence? There are the big fights, the noble or ignoble deaths, and the times when a beloved character is lost to madness.

Currently, I find myself running three campaigns—all in different systems and settings: Vaesen, Trail of Cthulhu, and Brindlewood Bay. We are at least a couple of months into all 3 games, and they all seem to be going well. (Vaesen has been running since July.) I know that things can and will change before we hit the finish line with any of these games. (With Brindlewood, I suspect we’ll be done by mid-March.) I’m running hardly any one-shots, though I don’t expect that situation will outlast this winter. I love campaigns, but I do miss the huge range of experiences that a one-shot setup offers. Still, while in my campaign mindset, I wanted to say a few words about some of my most successful campaigns to date.

Potato Falls (Dark Places & Demogorgons) – 2019

  • The pitch: It is 1984. PCs are adolescents and teens growing up in the town of Potato Falls, OH. Peculiar things keep happening, from attacks by ghosts and monsters to disturbances in the space-time continuum. Somehow, none of the adults ever seem to pick up on how weird everything is.
  • Context: Potato Falls was a pickup game that we set up for our public RPG group. In the space of a year, I’m not sure how many people showed up, just out of the blue—definitely more than 20. Everyone rolled a character in 5 or 10 minutes, and was cast into hijinks right then and there. Many of them went on to join other games with me, public or private.
  • The verdict: I can’t begin to tell you how fun this game was. It was also really chaotic, and I responded to all the energy at the table with bigger ideas and crazier concepts for how we played. Almost everything worked, because the vibe was so positive and welcoming. I really miss the game and might be running it still, if it weren’t for COVID.

Hypertellurians – 2020

  • The pitch: You are part of a group of passengers and crew aboard the Ultracosmic pleasure-ship, The Aetheric Lordling. You visit strange places, always seeking after new adventures and experiences. This game is really about wonder and exploration, viewed through a 1970s lasers and sandals haze.
  • Context: A campaign that I threw together for 4 players in March of 2020. It was a bonding experience for all of us, I think, and led to some really memorable, psychedelic moments.
  • The verdict: Despite the game’s innate silliness, we loved its Wonder mechanic, and we all became really committed to the various PCs and NPCs, and at times, the whole thing had the capacity to be somehow moving. Go figure.

Part 2 coming soon…

War Games—Thoughts after Recent Play-throughs of Never Going Home and Carry (part 2)

RPG Life

Part 1

Carry and Never Going Home both have unusual systems—especially for games set in the midst of a war. There is no detailed tactical combat, though each has specialized rules for fighting. Never Going Home takes a more traditional approach, offering skills, attributes, even spells. (The latter are evocatively named Whispers, which is nice and creepy and suits the game’s foreboding portrayal of magic.) Still, it allows for a pip-shifting D6 pool that is meant, I think, to weigh training and expertise against decision-making that is necessarily urgent and impulsive.

The game also makes use of playing cards in a way that bridge the distance between selfless soldiering and personaI contemplation. Cards can be used for basic mechanical boosts, but they also feed and are drawn from a separate part of the game that is called The Journey. Through them, we can learn about a soldier’s life before the war or about his inner life. It’s really fascinating and pushes the game close toward moments that play almost like a story game. These moments can make the chaos of battle all the more meaningful for your players.

If Never Going Home approaches story game territory, Carry steps deliberately into it. Here is a game that is all about framing scenes, in the dramatic sense. It is a game about interpersonal and intrapersonal conflicts during a war, and some of the most brutal experiences will probably play out between American soldiers. (Civilians and enemy combatants remain elliptical.) Each PC is featured in specific moments, as the game tracks individual story arcs, just as it tracks complex knotting that comes from interaction, especially in conflict.

I do not mean to say that battle plays no part in this game. On the contrary, when it comes up, it blots out everything else, though, even here, conflicts within a squad are just as dangerous as enemy gunfire. In fact, they may actualize enemy gunfire, by putting more dice into the hands of the GM or those of the player who controls the ranking officer. What’s important here is not so much whether the PCs follow the orders that are given by the ranking officer, but whether they agree with these orders. In the end, the GM benefits from dissent to a potentially lethal extent.

As with Never Going Home, Carry also creates opportunities to learn the personal lives of individual PCs. As they confront their personal burdens, (the things they carry as Tim O’Brien would say,) they change mechanically—including, potentially, what die types they are rolling. Action and contemplation become linked, as they are in Never Going Home.

While I’m just offering impressions—not conclusions (sorry)—I guess the above says something about why I enjoyed bringing Carry and Never Going Home to my gaming table. Both games made me think. Their mechanics are unusual, and open up narrative approaches to what it means to be an individual stuck in a relentlessly conformist setting—one in which you are surrounded by death and inhumanity—and in which you are doing whatever you can to avoid both. I will say again that neither game is going to appeal to every player, but if you give them a chance, they may lead you to fulfilling experiences, albeit uneasy ones. But then, after all, they are games about war and humanity. Uneasiness, at least, should go with the territory.

War Games—Thoughts after Recent Play-throughs of Never Going Home and Carry (part 1)

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War Games—Thoughts after Recent Play-throughs of Never Going Home and Carry (part 1)

This year I was lucky enough to be able to pull together player groups for two separate Never Going Home scenarios, as well as a one-shot of Carry. It’s challenging enough to sell groups of players on two different sets of unusual mechanics. I also had to convince them that it would be entertaining to play games about war. To be clear: I wasn’t hawking traditional war games, which allow the player considerable distance, by way of detailed maps and mathematics. The classic sort of war game often puts you in the general’s chair, far removed from the humanity of a soldier out there, on the ground, who is faced with the prospect of taking a life, losing their own, or just witnessing, immediately, the death of others.

Traditional war games do not offer the chaotic and subjective experience that games like Never Going Home—a Weird World War I game—and Carry—a gritty Vietnam War game—try to bring to the table. They are concerned with the psychological effects of war on the individual. Each game does an exemplary job of bringing very difficult subject matter to your table. Neither game is exactly easy to run, especially on a first outing, and even less so with a group of players that is not well-aligned to the games’ style.

It’s worth noting at the outset that both games are very specific in their approach. Not everyone is going to like them. (What’s more—even though I am linking them up here—a group that likes Never Going Home might not be enthusiastic about Carry and vice versa.) When I ran them, my players gave these games a chance, but some were upfront about not wanting to return to one—or both—in the future.

I am fortunate enough to have players who are curious and open-minded, but who also offer honest feedback. Out of the gate, I will say that Carry was received less favorably than Never Going Home. My players felt disconnected from both facts about the Vietnam War and related media tropes. So they weren’t easily drawn into the intense emotions the game is looking to channel. (For the record, I suggested media sources in advance.) My oldest player is in his early 40s, so maybe that accounts for the lack of immediacy. Also it could be that my GMing may not have engaged them. (No one said so, and so I can’t speak to it.) 

In a way it seems odd that my players did not mention any distance from Never Going Home. I think that it may be true that the extended chronological gulf may actually help though. World War I feels almost fantastical, as does the inclusion of supernatural elements that are absent from Carry. It could play sort of like D&D, but with gas masks, although I really hope that it did not. I believe that the game’s designers want the Great War to feel deadly serious and not at all whimsical.

That said, whether you’re talking about Carry or Never Going Home, the sense of history comes mostly from style and esthetics. Neither game insists on veracity, because they want to tell emotional stories first and foremost. In running these games—and no doubt in designing them—you have to find a playable space that is suggestive of history but not immersed in it. You don’t want to bury the players in historic minutia, but you also don’t the conflicts involved to feel interchangeable.It’s a difficult balance to strike.

Part 2 coming soon…

What I Do

RPG Life RPG Campaigns

If you’ve wound up at this blog, I thought it might be worth laying out where my thoughts about TTRPGs are coming from. I’m not suggesting that I’m especially interesting, but if you’re going to take the time to consider my opinions about games, you might want some context. So…

What I don’t Do: First of all, I don’t look at social media anymore than I have to. I have a lot of trouble expressing myself or connecting in that setting. I also don’t spend much time looking at reddit or anything like that. I’m largely ignorant of a lot of things that are happening, outside of what I hear from my players, people I meet at conventions, or what I read on creator or crowdfunding websites. I am not quite a luddite, but am often out of the loop. 

What I Do: I spend a lot of time preparing and running games. Nowadays, I run about 2 games a week, but I’ve pared back from a heavier load only in the last year or so. I used to run about 3 games a week, but I began to feel that the quality of some of these games suffered—though I’ve been told otherwise—and that I was enjoying the whole endeavor less. I have not gotten rich running games, so if I’m not enjoying them, there seems to be little reason to continue. So I cut back. Sometimes I have to fight the urge to start up another game, and sometimes I lose that fight and find myself taking on another game. It really is an issue sometimes, but I tell myself that I’m managing it. It bothers me most of all that my compulsion keeps me from game design, scenario design, and matters that are unrelated to games.

The bulletin board from my Delta Green “God’s Teeth campaign

Still, I am fascinated by TTRPGs in general and enjoy time spent prepping and running them. I mix up genres and systems a lot. I also shuffle longer campaigns with mini-campaigns and with one-shots or two-shots. My favorite genre is horror, but I’ve run a lot of super hero, cozy, sci-fi, heroic fantasy, gritty drama, etc., with tones ranging from deeply sill to very bleak; cerebral to visceral; immersive to detached. My favorite campaign game ever was a recent run-though of the Delta Green campaign of God’s Teeth, even though it was heavy, and at times difficult. My favorite mini-campaign was a 3-arc/24 session game of Masks: A New Generation (which, overall, ran about as long as God’s Teeth). Close runners-up for mini-campaigns would be Tales from the Loop, City of Mist, and Velvet Glove. My favorite one-shot is harder to locate, because there have been so many, but I can think of standout sessions of Ten Candles, Bluebeard’s Bride, Kult, Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast (technically GMless), Dialect (also GMless), World Wide Wrestling. I’ve had a few really good public pickup games, including runs of Dark Places & Demogorgons, Hypertellurians, and CyBorg—D20 systems all 3.

There are two broad types of TTRPG that I tend to avoid. One is tactical combat. I get antsy, and I like fast, brutal combat, if you’re gonna focus on combat at all. I lean way left, politically, but I’m also not a fan of power fantasy games that are self-consciously focused on fighting against “the government” or “capitalism,” because, for me, they lead to a sort of closed-circuit anger, and then I have to go off and decompress somewhere or just wander around feeling really bad. It is a weakness that I have, and I don’t believe it reflects at all on the validity of the games or the personalities of the people who do like them in any negative sort of way. (Also, for the record, I am not talking about something over the top and pulpy like, say, Eat the Reich, which I did enjoy a great deal.)

I mentioned above that I have interest in game and scenario design. Of necessity, I’ve had to do some of both—as I imagine most GMs have to, if they run a lot of games of different types. It is often necessary to fill in some element or other to keep a game moving. Most of those things are improvised and/or fragmentary, but at other times, you want or need something more deliberate—so you end up manufacturing weird little props, calculating situational mechanics, drawing maps, (badly,) outlining biographical details for an NPC, defining lore, etc. Sometimes you go even farther, and you wind up with a scenario, a setting, and/or a game system.

Inspo board in my office

Necessity aside, if you GM a lot, you’ve probably read a lot of games and scenarios and have developed opinions, notions, and theories about what you think works or might work. For me, sometimes, I’m inspired by a fascination with everything that games can do. At other times, I’m acting out of frustration—a feeling (no doubt driven by hubris) that whatever I’m reading could be better. Eventually, I found myself writing stuff and thinking about unleashing it into the wild. (Maybe then other people can recognize how I could have done better—if I’m lucky.) I have one scenario on itch already, which is a quickie one-shot for Dread. It was something I put together for a charity event in Chicago. (Money was raised to help stop the practice of shark-finning.) I ran it along with another scenario that I’m finishing for a limited print run soon. The players are lifeguards, who are rescuing people from a sharknami. It’s Powered by the Apocalypse. I also have a Cthulhu scenario upcoming, in which all of the PCs are nuns at a rural convent in the early 1960s.

So if you’ve read this far, you know what I do. Here’s hoping that provides some context for the other stuff I’ve written here.

In Praise of Hearts of Wulin

RPG Campaigns RPG Life
In Praise of Hearts of Wulin

I just finished a 9-session mini-campaign of Hearts of Wulin. It is a wuxia-melodrama RPG that is Powered by the Apocalypse. Despite the fact that it was published by The Gauntlet, it seems to maintain a very low profile online. It’s unfortunate that it hasn’t been discovered by more gamers. It really is an exceptional game, and a very solid toolkit for the emulation of wuxia television and cinema.

I’m an enthusiastic fan of classic wuxia films of the 1960s-1980s—especially those produced by Shaw Brothers studios and their contemporaries—and for some time, I had been shopping games so that I could run a mini-campaign that I hoped would bring their spirit to my gaming table. I found a lot of interesting systems, which often seemed carefully formulated. Two of my favorites were Art of Wuxia and Righteous Blood, Ruthless Blades. I’d recommend both, if you’re thinking about running a wuxia game. Each one offers some background and world building tools, and, importantly, solid mechanics that codify the fluid grace and explosive violence of wuxia cinema.

Still, while the mechanics in these games are well-crafted, their tendency toward codification seemed to clash with how I experienced good martial arts media. Wuxia fight scenes shine as set pieces, each with an internal logic that responds to what’s going on in the story. The logic of one fight scene—in terms of both style and physics—may not be consistent with the next. Consistency does not always seem to be the point. The point—or at least one important point—is what best illustrates the story.

Hearts of Wulin bears this idea out. Its mechanics are intended to channel and enhance a player’s creativity. Combat, along with most other randomized tasks, is given a rhythm, but most other things are left to narration by players. The player is not even strictly limited to narrating facts about their own character. If they roll well enough, they are encouraged to provide details about the world around them—including their opponent’s weaknesses or fighting style.

As with many PbtA games, (not to mention other looser games,) Hearts of Wulin can get vague, especially when using the basic combat rules, which amount to a single dice roll that decides the entire fight. The game’s designer has made some very useful play practices to give the fights a sort of cinematic flow. (The best of these is borrowed from the awesome game World Wide Wrestling.) They mostly enhance the pacing of fights, and, when combined with the optional  “Extended Duel” moves, I felt that they gave a very strong emulation of wuxia fight scenes. One of my players highlighted the same feeling on multiple occasions—both of us were just surprised at how well it worked. My entire table was completely adapted to the system within a few sessions, and we found ourselves staging some very interesting fights.

One unusual concept is called Scale. It does a fine job of incentivizing patience and forbearance, relative to combat. Some opponent’s are so far outside of a PC’s ability as to be undefeatable. If a PC chooses to fight such an opponent anyway, they lose, flat-out. However, Scale can be shifted if a PC works with allies at their side, or if they employ the “New Technique” move. This move is exemplary—it allows a player to narrate a montage of their character studying and training to learn better how to defeat a superior foe. If the player uses the move successfully, their opponent’s scale is reduced, making what was impossible now possible. (For very powerful foes, the GM may ask for multiple shifts before Scale can be meaningfully shifted. Interestingly, one PC may have an entirely different Scale relative to a foe than another does, which brings all sorts of dramatic depth to the game, as one PC struggles, sometimes for mysterious reasons, to defeat an enemy, while another knows how to best them. These reasons may be physical or emotional.

It feels a little strange to me that I’ve been focusing on combat so much here. Hearts of Wulin designates itself as a game based in wuxia melodrama. Many of the rules have little to do with martial arts, focusing instead on the relationships, romantic and otherwise, and the emotional struggles experienced by the game’s various characters. The game truly shines when it’s exploring emotions. Sometimes it happens during a fight, but more often, in my experience, the worst injuries to PCs happened when their feelings got the better of them.

I highly recommend this game. I’m hoping to come back for another story arc and the same group of players somewhere down the line, but in the meantime, I wanted to take a moment to share how well done it is and how much I really enjoyed it.

The Joys of Mucking about with Wicked Ones

RPG Campaigns RPG Life

A few weeks ago, I started a short run campaign of Wicked Ones. My group set up a sandbox and are playing through it until we’ve had enough of it, or until our dungeon is maxed out or destroyed by adventurers. Yes, we have a dungeon—mostly they do, as one part of my GMing duties here is to attack their dungeon and to push them to fight to make it better and more secure.

I may be getting ahead of myself. It is easy to do with this game. Let me take a moment to better explain its premise and offer some observations about how it works. In Wicked Ones, the PCs are fantasy monsters who build and operate a dungeon. In order to develop and improve their dungeon, the monsters must conduct raids on surrounding targets aboveground. The game rules emphasize how dangerous it is for monsters to venture into the “civilized” world, as they will almost certainly be detected and then crushed by the weight of human (and prosocial demi-human) society.

If you’re conjuring political subtext here, I think you’re on your own. (I can certainly see it—in parodic or more straightforward terms—but it’s not really the purpose here.) If you are flashing on the classic computer game Dungeonkeeper, then you are on the right wavelength. If you are recognizing the potential for tragicomic metatextual hijinks, then you will probably like this game. And, finally, if you think that surface raids seem a lot like heists, and so find yourself looking to Forged in the Dark as the basis of a system, then you should probably be prepping this game ASAP!

Unfortunately, even if all the above applies to you, you may be in for some frustration out of the gate. Wicked Ones is out of print, and unlikely to come back into print anytime soon. It is not even easily available as a PDF, though it can be found with a little digging online. It is a casualty of a catastrophic Kickstarter campaign that is best understood by scrounging through project updates, the last of which more or less put an end to future sales or development of the game. I won’t attempt to explain it, as I don’t fully understand it myself, was not a backer of the KS, but was fortunate enough to buy a physical copy of the core rulebook when the game first saw light, before the campaign. It is an awesome game, and the physical book is both well-designed and pleasing to the eye.

The game itself is somewhat overstuffed with mostly good ideas. While many of these are not exactly new, they tend to be interpolated in interesting ways. All the pieces taken together can be a bit messy, but, being that play is structured into a cycle made up of distinct phases, you mostly only have to deal with subsets of rules at any given time. Phases include: 1) Lurking—when you’re hanging out in and improving your dungeon; 2) Calamity—when unexpected things may happen to your dungeon; 3) Raiding—self explanatory; and 4) Blowback, when you evaluate the effects of your raid and determine whether you’ve drawn the ire of the civilized world. Each phase stands almost as a game unto itself, but they flow together really well.

I feel that the game somehow encourages mutual experimentation. With my group, at least, we seem to genuinely enjoy the process of figuring out things together. All that said, I would not recommend Wicked Ones as a starting point for new GMs. It requires a lot of bookkeeping, improvisation, tricky adjudication, and thoughtful hand-waving (if such a thing exists). I think it is a challenge for players as well, though mine seem to be having a good time with it. Everyone has to be OK with finding their way as the game moves forward—both in terms of the story and of the rules. All of the players have to make some improvisational leaps and to provide some narration and world-building on the fly. At the same time, the point of view remains fairly distant, so the one thing you will not have to do much is speaking in character, unless you want to.

All the energy and creativity that you put into Wicked Ones pays off. It is open and crazy, and really leads to engagement with—even attachment to—your dungeon. Each player is responsible for elements that they introduce—traps, creatures, rooms…even locks. And each player has their very own set of monstrous minions. One of my favorite things about Wicked Ones is the mechanics it sets up to enforce the nonsensical “logic” of traditional dungeon design. You know…where the low level monster always come first—these are probably your minions—and the real bad guys lurk below—and these are the PCs. If your dungeon doesn’t seem “appropriately” designed within those and similarly classic fantasy RPG principles, then your minions may turn against you. It is an awesome conceit, put right out there in front of everyone as a part of the structure of play.

I don’t recall ever running a game where the workload intersected with the rewards in such a strange way as they do in Wicked Ones. Have I said that it’s a lot of work yet? Yes, I know I have. Have I said that it takes you to strange places, and that the scenery along the way is really interesting? I think so. Check it out if you have the energy, the time, and a good group of players who like to expand the boundaries of what a TTRPG might look like.

Kult Musings – Part 2

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I should mention that, while I have GMed Kult several times, I’ve always been ambivalent about the system. Generally, I love games that are Powered by the Apocalypse and run them quite often. I think I’m pretty good at separating good hacks from bad ones, and, well, Kult isn’t pretty, mechanically. Among other issues, it suffers from a flaw that is common to PbtA knockoffs—the designers don’t seem to have given much thought to really exploiting what a PbtA setup can do for the kinds of stories that they want to tell. You won’t find anything as interesting or well-suited as the mechanics for Influence in Masks or for Momentum in World Wide Wrestling, and there are no Moves here that are as clever as those found in Pasión de las Pasiones or The Warren. Kult stays safe, with only the most basic rules for combat, diplomacy, psychological stress, etc. The only basic Move that really feels like Kult is nothing new—See through the Illusion—and in practice, it often seems redundant, considering the fact that after a few sessions from most Kult campaigns, the GM may be cutting through whole swaths of the Illusion. (Obviously, you’re mileage may vary, depending on the story and the style of GMing involved. On a related note, I think that I should have made the PCs start with Aware archetypes, rather than Sleepers, but I’m not sure how much of a difference it would have made to the pacing.)

I suppose there’s one other place where the game does do something with PBtA rules that is sort of individuated: Advantages and Disadvantages. Akin to what other PbtA games might designate as Playbook Moves, Advantages vary wildly in scale and usefulness. They’re OK. Disadvantages mostly amount to inducements to extra GM Moves. (The worst one might be the nadir of the entire game—the consent-breaking “Sexual Neurosis.” I can’t imagine ever allowing it in a game that I would run.) I have no idea who wants dice rolls to prescribe this stuff—but it makes a pretty good case for all those people who say that PbtA places too much control on what a GM can do and when. Under normal circumstances, I’d say that they just don’t get it, but when I look at Kult’s Disadvantages, I’m really not sure.

In truth, the real problem with Disadvantages that I discovered was that they push you to do too much. If you followed them strictly, I think it would lead the game to feel like a never-ending river of melodrama, with one PC’s stalker showing up, just as another’s demonic curse spikes. If you GM it by the rules, you may find that you have little room for the story ideas that you do like, because you’re always hurrying to spend Hold on ideas that you don’t like.

I would almost go so far as to say that Kult shouldn’t be PbtA at all. The only open acknowledgement of the game engine is buried on the bottom of p. 369 of the rulebook. (Predictably, it makes no mention whatsoever of Meguey Baker, though I have to acknowledge that, however egregious that omission may be, it is not unique to Kult.) What’s more, Kult’s designers have shifted the dice involved from d6s to d10s, skewing stats and bonuses into atypical arrangements. In Kult, rolling dice is like playing power ballads on a ukulele: you can do it, but the results don’t feel appropriate. 

Regardless, gameplay is generally so straightforwardly task-oriented that you might do just as well with a solid d20 or d100 system. I know: Kult doesn’t want to be D&D or (especially?) Call of Cthulhu. It doesn’t even want to be Vampire: The Masquerade, however familiar the goth-BDSM trappings may seem. It wants to share its own vision. Unfortunately, this vision is muddled, at best.

At worst, it’s just  unpleasant—and maybe it says something about my taste in horror that I’m not really into reflexive cynicism and bad Beat-influenced flavor text—for example, the way in which the first person plural musings of Kult—wherein “we/us/our” seem to refer to humanity in general. The trouble is: “we/etc.” also seems to refer to a bunch of rich assholes, who are hustling past some creepy, possibly unhoused guy ignoring the prophecies he calls out while we stare at pornography on our cell phones. I’m uncertain of demographics, but, in terms of point-of-view, I think something may be askew here.

I would look up more examples to quote from the core rulebook, but the truth is that I had to psyche myself up to look at the book every single week when I was running the campaign, and I’m not sure I’m ready to face it again. I might trigger some horrible break within myself. To be clear, any reheated trauma would have very little to do with the art found in the rulebook. It features sexual images that are suggestive enough that you have to verify your age to view it on Drivethru RPG. Still, if you have an iota of imagination, you probably won’t be too shocked by Kult’s visuals, especially if you’ve seen Hellraiser recently. It’s strictly BDSM for prudes and cosplayers. 

Anyway, I did my time with the rulebook. Every week, when it came time to prep my game, there I would be: wincing as I walked over to pick up this bloated, battered “rulebook,” with a bland-out image of a chained angel on its cover (dark, “urban fantasy” skyscrapers in the background, naturally). Once more, beyond the Illusion…The game was good, the players were better.

Closing thoughts: a warning about Gnosticism…by virtue of its preoccupation with the idea of the illusory nature of our world, and given its terminology, (archons, demiurge, etc.,) Kult is, evidently, a little bit Gnostic. When I was in college, I took a course called “Medieval Sources of Modern Culture.” In it, we read excerpts from early Christian and Christian-adjacent stuff that included bits of Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, etc. The teacher’s written evaluation of me mentioned how my comments were “rare, but germane” and how I was often asleep during class. (What do you want? I had a 40 credit hour course load, as well as a part time job.) So maybe it’s understandable that I remember next to nothing about Gnosticism, but the good news is that about 75% of my players are Gnostic scholars, apparently. I have learned from them that it’s sort of like “if Christianity were cool.” Apparently Kult is “Gnostic,” so if you’re looking to GM your own campaign, may I recommend appropriate glossings of wikipedia. Don’t admit to knowing nothing about Gnosticism, or you’ll never hear the end of it from your players!

And if you’re running a Kult one-shot, just don’t worry about it at all. Nobody seems to notice.

Good luck, and may the Demiurge help us all!

Kult Musings 2025 – Part 1

RPG Campaigns RPG Life Uncategorized 1 Comment

The following is a deposition drawn from many days of working with Kult. It mostly deals with things that I don’t like about the game. There are good things about Kult as well, but, mostly, I think these things can be found in other games that don’t share Kult’s mechanical and stylistic problems. Also, I think that superlative reviews are easy to find elsewhere. (In fact, as far as reviews of TTRPGs go, they are almost inescapable.) Anyway, this isn’t a review. It’s just a personal reflection.

Where to begin with Kult? I feel like I’ve been having a toxic hate sex relationship with it for sometime now, and I’m not really sure how to express all of my gross icky feelings. Here’s something cogent from the notes I took while prepping and running the game: “Kult—a game for people who are too dumb to understand the concept of symbolism.”

See, but that’s harsh, and part of what bums me out about Kult is how it brings out the worst in me. Maybe that’s the point? After all the game’s designers like to prop up Ayn Rand-style assholery such as “Our families, our friends, our place in society, and our roles in the community are like cement around our feet, dragging us down to the ocean floor. We’re instilled with the false conception of being responsible for each other, that we belong together in the prison created for us. Those who realise this is untrue break free. Those who wish to awake cut their ties with a vengeance, whether that is by no longer returning phone calls or actively destroying the ones they love. This deed in  itself encourages the Illusion to crumble.”

For what it’s worth, when I read the above I realized how cool I was, (cooler than all of you people, obviously,) and leapt into action. But it wasn’t much of a leap, because I couldn’t decide whether to ignore calls, (I do let things go to voicemail a lot, it is true,) or to destroy my loved ones. Trapped on the horns of a dilemma, coward that I am, I decided to just stick with the Illusion and run a Kult campaign instead.

On Friday, March 28, my home group concluded a mini-campaign of Kult. The game ran for eight sessions, plus a session 0, and was set in the Detroit area in February of 1977. The setting was home brewed, in part, from my own childhood. I was born in 1969 in Flint Michigan, and spent the first 18 years of my life there, before heading off to the University of Michigan in nearby Ann Arbor, and then eventually making my way to Chicago. My memories of southeastern Michigan in the 1970s have lingered. It is a place and time for which I feel a great nostalgia, but, more than that, I feel it all imprinted itself on me to such a degree that I experience very basic things through a filter of Flint in the 1970s/1980s. Flint informs my dreams and my nightmares, and so, I suppose, it was inevitable that I would eventually use it as the setting for a larger story.

I have taken stabs at capturing Flint in short stories—even in a feature length student film—but the idea of using it for a TTRPG occurred to me only about 6 years ago. Actually, it occurred to my players, in Chicago, when I gave them the option of picking a setting for a more comedic game. (To the players of that game, I say once again: ha ha…very funny…) It was fun, but we didn’t get especially deep into the setting. It wasn’t until more recently that I started to think about using Flint as the location of a deeper game.

I decided that the game would last for a limited number of sessions, while leaving the door open to a second arc, set in the 1980s, that I might run sometime in the future. I outlined the setting and themes that I wanted to get into, and then formally pitched the concept to my players. I sent along a playlist and a list of suggested media. Everyone confirmed that they were up for the game, which ran mostly weekly, with a couple of breaks.

Here are some excerpts from general notes I took while running the campaign:

“On the rules: Just a bloated, overly descriptive list of bad faith GM Moves.

On the lore: Mostly shallow. It’s an art book that bamboozles the impressionable. Filled with tedious ‘edginess.’

Players seem to love it.”

And doesn’t that last part just figure? I don’t mean to say anything bad about my players. They threw themselves into the game, making it much more than the sum of its parts. What I was commenting on was the ever-looming discrepancy between GM and player experiences of a traditional TTRPG. Still, whenever I was working privately on the game, I would grow impatient with its rules and esthetics, while still feeling that I had to hold onto them at least long enough to finish the mini-campaign. I found myself resenting the whole endeavor, while, at the same time, really enjoying and admiring the story we were telling as a group.

More in Part 2…

Chupacabracon Recap

Uncategorized RPG Life

I just returned from a 5-day trip to Chupacabracon IX. While I was there, I GMed three games— Necronautilus, Cthulhu Dark, and Dread—and each one provided a positive experience. In fact, I am still riding on good feelings from the con—to a point where, despite the somewhat punishing workload, (I never learn!) I came home feeling rejuvenated and ready to explore new gaming territory.

For me, it is a remarkable shift. I generally run at least two games a week—one of them public and open to strangers—so nothing I did as a GM at the con was atypical overall. And while Texas may be very different from Illinois, I don’t think that a change of venue is what really led to my positive feelings. I owe most of these to 14 very cool players.

One very important characteristic of players at conventions: they choose the games they play from a very wide range of options. If they show up at your table, it means they are there to play your game, which may sound facile, but what I mean is this: they are committed to playing your game. Sure, they can get up and walk away, but generally, in my experience, they don’t And their commitment means you can run the games as intended—you should. It’s what they want, or they wouldn’t be there.

Necronautilus is an unusual game with rules that can be challenging to pick up quickly. I made sure that everyone knew that I loved the game, and that if they gave it a shot, I’d do everything in my power to make it a good game. I almost didn’t need to say any of it. In the interest of full disclosure, I acknowledged that the game was weird. (It is.). One player said, “Then it’s the perfect game to play at a con.” He was right. Why not throw yourself into something new and really try to play it wholeheartedly? They all did, and after they’d finished burning down a massive dollhouse and putting an end to the machinations of the Heretical Doll-maker who lived inside it, they talked about what an interesting game it was, and how it had encouraged creativity in all of them. One of the players immediately bought the game.

That was my first game, and I would’ve thought the rest of the con might be an anticlimax. Game #2 happened that same evening. It was Cthulhu Dark, and it proved to be anything but anticlimactic. I ran a scenario that I wrote in which all of the player characters are women in the early 1960s. (You know, in the same way that they’re mostly all men in most RPG scenarios 😉 My table was entirely male, and they dug into the pre-generated characters with a lot of energy and depth. I’d kept the number of players low, as I wanted this game to play more intimately and to allow the players plenty of room to go big with their RP. They did—and it being a very rules light, horror heavy game—we had plenty of room to draw drama and catharsis out of the game. I am really proud of it—not in the least because it was the second game of the day for me—but, even more so, I was impressed by my players and grateful for the degree to which they bought into the basic premise of the game. We were all gonna hit the bar at the end and debrief, but the evil hotel had closed it down for the night. It wasn’t even midnight yet!

But it was all OK, because the next afternoon I GMed another really good game, thanks to the buy-in of my players. This one was a custom Dread scenario that pays tribute to bad shark movies that are set on yachts. Dread is a fun game to play, when you just want to screw around, and I intended this particular game to just be dumb fun. How seriously can you take an RPG that uses a Jenga tower to resolve tasks? All my players bought into the setting and the humor with loads of energy. They picked up my premise and carried it past “dumb fun” to something that was really remarkably comic. I had a great time in the midst of a highly improvisational game filled with Australian gangsters, pirate ghosts, and (yes, sorry,) coke-addled dolphins. I think they all did as well.

So thanks to all my players at Chupacabracon. You restored my faith in the whole gaming thing. To my players at home: I like you just as much as ever—which is a lot—and hope that you’ll believe me when I say that I’m grateful for all of you as well. You are very fun, very cool people who have enabled my excursions into…well, all sorts of weird places. I’m looking forward to coming back to the home games and bringing a little something extra to them. See you soon!

System versus Synthesis

RPG Life

Not too long ago, I became preoccupied by how permeable the popular notions of system and setting seemed to have become in mainstream TTRPGs. I’m not talking specifically about the idea of a “traditional” universal system, such as GURPS, BRP, Cypher, Savage Worlds, etc. (Thankfully, ‘cuz blecchh!) Neither, particularly, am I talking about systems that foreground “story mechanics,” such as Fate, Powered by the Apocalypse, Forged in the Dark, etc. (Though I like them a good deal more than the blecchh stuff…) All of these systems have small to medium sized armies of adherents and sit above any infinitesimal objections I might raise toward them. Hmm…so why am I writing this?

Oh yeah! Because I want to provide a public service, I think, and I’m just monomaniacal enough and needlessly analytic enough to do so. So listen up, I’m gonna break it down… None of those systems matter anymore than the other. Don’t care who’s moving the most units or occupying the greatest numbers of shelfies… If you’ll allow an argument that might seem initially facile… systems are not the same thing as story concepts, genres, or settings. If you are in love with, say, the steampunk meets heist movie optics of Blades in the Dark, that does not necessarily mean that you love the Forged in the Dark system, mechanically. If you’re enthusiastic enough about the former, you might work around, or at the very least forgive, the inevitable bumpiness of the latter. I’m not denigrating FitD. All systems are more or less bumpy here and there. (Except for Rifts, obviously. My heart broke the day they ported that shit to Savage Worlds 🙁 ) I am saying that, in itself, it does not guarantee a fully satisfying experience of the Blades setting.

Let’s pretend, for a moment, that we live in a world without FitD. If someone had the vision to develop the Doskvol world and then left it stat-less—or system agnostic or mechanically inert or whatever—how do you think it’d’ve sold? My guess is: not very well, for two reasons. First, people are presented with Blades in the Dark as a solid product, wherein system and setting determine one another. (Not true!) Second, because people are intimidated by adapting story elements to a system. These fictional “people” aren’t lazy—however much they might (tend to) otherwise insist. In my experience, they are intimidated. It’s understandable—remember the Mercer Effect? Some people are so gifted when it comes to building worlds, so adept at ushering them from system to system, and so annoyingly charismatic that they can flood a whole (admittedly small) industry with romance. Screw Wizards or Paizo—without the evangelization of Mercer, many of us aren’t doing this hobby. And if Mercer can move a gateway drug that leads people to, say, Dialect, I’m not gonna hate him.

But what about the example of Blades? Well, back in this part of my life in which I used to worry about people mistaking system with setting with scenario, etc., I would get frustrated with how many systems were springing up. Most of them, it seemed, weren’t really contributing anything to an existing set of resources and were, sometimes, exploiting that gamer who didn’t want to port things from one system to another or to hack an existing system into something that would better suit a setting or individuated styles of play or whatever. To be fair to myself, my frustration was largely the frustration of a consumer…one who found himself studying —and shelling out for—system after system—many of them dubious— when really the established field of systems was, if not wholly adequate to every fictional notion, at least robust enough to allow for a good pairing of baseline mechanics to fictional setting.

There is a problem here, and I think some very good games are looking ahead to one kind of a solution. (Some examples would be Brindlewood Bay, Blades in the Dark, and Trophy, which, in turn, pull together elements from existing design systems like Cthulhu Dark, PbtA, and, by extension, Fate.) What we need is not more systems, but rather a lot of solid synthesis of existing rules. The path to every kind of gaming setting you like is right there…you just have to figure out how to follow it.