Posts in RPG Campaigns

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…

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

RPG Campaigns RPG Life

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…

A Certain Tendency in Investigative Horror Scenario Design

RPG Life RPG Campaigns

So…remember that last blog post, in which I threw aspersions and praise on Arc Dream? (Me neither, but let’s pretend!) It occurs to me that my entire take on the published investigative horror scenario might seem negative. It’s one thing to go poking at scenarios in hopes of exposing their decrepit foundations. It’s something else altogether to have anything constructive to say about what you discover.

Here is a hypothesis: the more complex a mystery is, the more simply it must be laid out for anyone other than its contriver to understand it. And yet, the tradition of classic Cthulhu-type scenarios is baroque on every level, especially in the presentation of information. It’s probably got something to do with all the flapper girls, Model T’s and other Roaring 20s semantic elements that Chaosium used to colonize our consciousness. Cthulhu games often feel like they are shooting for qualities like excess and decadence. (In fact, I’m half-tempted to get into another lecture about why investigative scenarios so disproportionately seem to happen to rich, stylish characters…certainly not to anyone who’s truly poor—unless you’re playing Cthulhu Dark or something like that—and let’s face it, not enough of you are.)

Everything in mainstream investigative horror scenarios is rich and overstuffed, especially the copy! Content may be limited by all important trigger warnings, but few ideas, characters, or words are—even extra letters are left in…outside of investigative horror scenario writers, wtf says “amongst?” (If you just indignantly said “I do!” but don’t write horror scenarios, then may I suggest that you have just found your true calling.)

Most investigative horror scenarios seem to proceed from a notion that mystery is equivalent to complexity. In terms of a good, solid investigative scenario, I would, in fact, argue for simplicity since, the GM and players will certainly complicate any mystery just by playing through it. So there’s often little justification for lengthy NPC bios, elaborate bits of cosmic lore that have no chance of coming up, or dense descriptions of places the PCs may never visit. I think that most of these ideas about mystery and complexity are derived from mystery fiction, wherein the Twist is often the thing, (just ask Chubby Checker) and the accrual of narrative material adds gravity and an air of unpredictability to the mystery.

But the GM who bought your scenario wasn’t shelling out for a collection of your short stories. They’re shelling out for a scenario that they can run at their table, and to expect them to do a lot of work to translate your short story into an RPG scenario isn’t necessarily unconscionable, but, well, I think you should feel pretty bad about it.

If I sound like I’m being that one asshole in your novel writing workshop, I apologize—because the writing is not the only thing about these scenarios that is overly busy. The graphic design often lines right up, with redundant sidebars, stat blocks, and props. The unfortunately predominant state of mind seems to be: this scenario is good, therefore it can’t be short.

As a GM, I want my scenario to be short, but deep. Give me a good clear summary of a situation and some evocative possibilities about where it might go. If you sketch it well, the GM will gratefully unroll your scenario in front of their players, and then, it is likely that everyone will have fun. But here’s the thing, in my opinion: sketch. Leave room for all of it to breathe— the players, scenario, and especially the poor GM who shelled out for your work. Your name will be sung gratefully in these parts!

As to what that sketching might look like…well, I‘ll try to get to that soon, but I am pretty certain that it will involve a magical concept known as bullet points…

Assembling the Super Team!

RPG Life RPG Campaigns 1 Comment

In Masks, the players take the part of young superheroes, generally 16-20 years old. By default, you all live in Halcyon City, a metropolis that has been living with superheroes and villains since the 1940s, along with the various peculiar occult, futuristic, and just plain bizarre things that go along with a tradition of super heroism/ villainy.

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