This will be the last post for a short bit, as I shall be off island. Hopefully New York won’t be too cold …
I’ve been noodling a few campaign ideas for Wraith: the Great War. I don’t know if I’d ever get to play them; Wraith isn’t the most popular World of Darkness setting, and it wants players who a) understand the rules system and b) are willing to get put through the mincing machine, which … I mean, people like that exist, it’s getting them in the same room for several hours on consecutive weekends that’s’s the problem.
However, expanding on a previous post about the Building, I thought I’d talk a little about RFC Conty.
The TL/DR of the Building can be summed up as:
The Building is that area in which you, as GM, expects plot to happen. For plot to happen, the GM needs to populate the Building, either with people or events with which the players can interact. It is player interaction, not NPC action, that makes plot.
The last time I talked about the Building I focused on the people in it. This time I want to talk about events. But first, a bit of prologue.
RFC Conty is a Royal Flying Corps air base operating out of the village of Conty, not far from the Somme shortly before that battle is about to begin.
The action in Wraith: The Great War is loosely supposed to take place in the 1920s shortly after the Great War’s end. It presumes that during the War, sparked by the colossal slaughter that was the Somme, a spectacular outburst of spectral armies shredded the Hierarchy, the Wraiths’ nominal form of government, and as a result of that chaos one particular faction, the Legion of the Grim who represent those who died of violence and especially murder, step into the breach and attempt a coup. That goes about as well as you might expect given all the other carnage that’s taking place, and it’s this cesspit of violence and its consequences that kicks off the main plot.
I’ve always thought it would be interesting to have a kind of prologue event to all this, hence RFC Conty. That’s the main hub of the plot for this opening chapter. The action takes place prior to the Somme hence prior to the main spectral outburst that kicks off the main event. Think of it as a kind of backstory to the devastation to come.
RFC Conty is the base for Sparrowhawk Squadron, No. 7 Sqn RFC, which flies DH2 single-seater pushers out of Conty. The DH2, popularly known as the Spinning Incinerator, is a recent arrival intended to take on the Fokker Eindecker head-to-head and put an end to the Fokker Scourge. It’s not a bad plane but lack of experience meant that many of the early intake span down to the ground, hence ‘spinning incinerator.’ Some of the RFC’s early aces cut their teeth on the DH2, notably Lanoe Hawker (one of Richtofen’s kills) and James McCudden.
For settings like this which rely so heavily on real-world details I find it helpful to turn to history, and in this case An Infantry Subaltern’s Impressions of July 1st, 1916, by Edward Livening, which I nicked off of Gutenberg. He describes the area roundabout, just before the battle:
The country in that part is high-lying chalk downland, something like the downland of Berkshire and Buckinghamshire, though generally barer of trees, and less bold in its valleys. Before the war it was cultivated, hedgeless land, under corn and sugar-beet. The chalk is usually well-covered, as in Buckinghamshire, with a fat clay. As the French social tendency is all to the community, there are few lonely farms in that countryside as there would be with us. The inhabitants live in many compact villages, each with a church, a market-place, a watering-place for stock, and sometimes a château and park. Most of the villages are built of red brick, and the churches are of stone, not (as in the chalk countries with us) of dressed flint. Nearly all the villages are planted about with orchards; some have copses of timber trees. In general, from any distance, the villages stand out upon the downland as clumps of woodland. Nearly everywhere near the battlefield a clump of orchard, with an occasional dark fir in it, is the mark of some small village. In time of peace the Picardy farming community numbered some two or three hundred souls. Gommecourt and Hébuterne were of the larger kind of village.
OK, so that gives me a bird’s-eye view of what Conty is probably like. Clay earth, used to be a corn field, a large community nearby, probably an orchard nearby (apples, why not – it’s cider country after all). A chateau, always good for plot. Anywhere that long-lived is bound to have a hidden history that the current population don’t know about or remember, and hidden histories are meat and drink in Wraith games.
What about the Squadron?
Total aircraft: 15, in three Flights, of which 12 are in the air at any one time and the others – the knacker’s yard – used by replacements or if one of the flight is too badly damaged to fly.
Commander: Major Bob Lennox
Flight Commanders: Captains David Lynch-Hardinge (A Flight), Robinson ‘Mule’ Fairbrother (B Flight), Eustace ‘Skipper’ Wainwright (C Flight)
Flight: Leftenants Eric Quarry, Norman Fitzhugh, Daniel Rutledge (A Flight);
Andrew ‘Crasher’ Lacy, Geoffrey Vine, William ‘Billy’ Mason (B Flight);
Victor Crawthorpe, Harold ‘Crackers’ Parrot, Percy Warnock (C Flight)
Also present, though No. 7 Sqn has no knowledge of this, are two relic aircraft. One is a Fokker Eindecker, and the other is a SPAD SA two-seater recon aircraft. These fly daily, keeping an eye on events on the battlefield and reporting back to Hierarchy higher-ups on the ground.
Pilots & Observers: Otto Rall (d. 1916, Eindecker); Arthur Bonneton (d. 1915, SPAD Pilot) Sir John Fastolf (d. 1459, SPAD observer)
Additional Hierarchy support on the ground at No. 7 Sqn is provided by the Office of Maelstrom Preparedness which has an outpost in what is now the munitions store and was a barn. This small Iron Legion outpost is led by Chevaleresse Marie Allard (d. 1804) who employs a small number of scouts, couriers and administrators kept constantly busy by the changing tide of events on the battlefield.
Ammunition Store: Seems constantly ablaze (burnt down in a fire), has spectral horses (plasmics, always screaming), wraiths coming and going at all times of day and night. I see the Ammunition Store as having been built on the remains of some past tragedy, the burning down of a stables, hence the spectral horses. Places like that have a lot of energy humming away.
In Conty I’ve already placed a few people but haven’t gone much further than names and nicknames, because this time around I want to talk about events.
Events don’t have to directly affect the players. However, events happen whether the players get involved or not, and the consequences that flow from those events are also things that might affect plot.
An event in its simplest form is a thing that happens, and the great thing about a setting that involves real world situations is that you have some events baked in. If this was about the Titanic or the Lusitania disasters, there’s a predetermined sequence of events; the iceberg or the torpedo always arrives at such-and-such time on such-and-such date. In a battlefield situation as GM you know roughly when the battle starts and stops, but beyond that there’s a whole smorgasbord of events you can pick from.
The Somme has a defined start point: 1 July, the Battle of Albert. That’s when the Maelstrom kicks off, with massive exhalations of spectral energy. From my perspective, that’s where the Chronicle ends.
I mentioned RMS Lusitania a moment ago. She went down in May 1915, after being torpedoed by U-20. That sounds like a good start point for the Chronicle; it provides a meaty inciting incident and is exactly the sort of thing that might kick off an uptick in Maelstrom activity. An outburst of spectral activity inspired by the sinking is exactly the sort of thing that might inspire the Iron Legion to set up its Office of Maelstrom Preparedness outpost at Conty.
The OMP is a small organization at this point; the main book describes it as being a couple hundred field researchers. Sounds like a great group patron for the sort of miscellaneous vagabonds who make up the average Chronicle.
The story begins with the sinking of the Lusitania, in which one (or more) wraiths are killed. They have fetters in Conty – we can thrash out the whys and wherefores in session 0 – so they snap to that location after the tragedy. That’s where they meet Chevaleresse Marie Allard, who at that point is just setting up the Office that her superiors have asked her to create.
[For those not familiar, fetters are things that link wraiths to the living world. They can be anything from a favorite doll to a house but are usually small personal items of one kind or another. When a wraith dies, assuming they don’t disincorporate altogether, they go to a fetter. That's how these wraiths get to Conty from the murky depths of the Atlantic.]
Right there we have events Zero and One. Zero being the sinking, One being the snap to Conty and the initial meeting with Chevaleresse Marie Allard. Those are fixed points, and they have to happen for plot to proceed. In theory they can happen in session 0 and not involve dice or any kind of ability check; it can be their introduction to the setting and the world at large.
Broadly, a fixed point is something that has to happen. Think of it like a Core Clue in Gumshoe. The players will always be given Core Clues since without them the plot can’t proceed. The same principle applies here. Fixed points have to happen because without them the plot can’t proceed.
Whereas a floating point is something that may/may not/will happen at some point, but don’t have to happen directly to the characters. The death of Major Bob Lennox may/may not/will happen at some point and the characters may be affected by that death, but it does not have to happen to them directly. A big party in the officer’s mess, a sudden uptick in maelstrom activity, a raid by the Grim Legion, the last ride of the ghostly coach-and-four that’s been going up and down the Conty road since the 1700s, the arrival of a group of pretty Irish nurses, the card game that nets Crackers Parrot a significant sum, a bombing raid – all these things are floating events. They provide useful background to what’s happening on the main stage, or they become the main stage, depending on whether/how the players interact with them.
As GM you don’t need to go chapter and verse on every single event. That way madness lies. However, it can be very useful to go over the calendar month by month and pencil in a few things. That way even if the players never interact directly with, say, the last ride of the coach-and-four, you at least know when it happened and can work out what affect it may have on the plot. Perhaps it deeply affected Chevaleresse Marie Allard, or robbed the OMP of a useful resource, or its end somehow brought Major Lennox’s career to a premature close. Or maybe it just provides water-cooler gossip for a few weeks.
An event can be absolutely anything. The day the sewer backed up is an event. The day the house got painted is an event. Its significance may be anything or nothing; often the things that seem the smallest to those on the outside matter a great deal to those intimately connected with the event.
There’s a sad moment (one of many) in Capt. J.C. Dunn’s WWI account, The War the Infantry Knew, in which a number of trees in the village of Le Nord are cut down to make gun limbers. An old woman watches it happen. ‘Soon there will be no trees in Le Nord,’ she says. A small event or a large one – who can say, except those who were there and experienced it?
Point being, it’s worth having a few floating events to hand either to have the players bounce off them, creating plot, or at least as hints dropped for future plot. The players may not care that much about the coach-and-four, but if they care about Chevaleresse Marie Allard then they care about what happened to the coach-and-four. That means plot. It may also determine future plot.
If this wasn’t Wraith, if this was a fantasy setting without a Gregorian calendar much less the fixed points described here, what then?
Exactly the same. You frame it differently. You might say that this happens in Spring, this Summer, this in Autumn and this in Winter. The crops are planted in spring, the crops harvested in Autumn. Or the great storm that shatters the old oak tree happens in Summer, or the taxes go up in Winter, or the wizard turns all the children into mice in … and so on.
The process does not change. There are still fixed points, and floating points. The difference is in the description, but not the details.
Enjoy!
I'll be back later in December (briefly) to talk about New York and will probably take a hiatus after that until January when we'll pick up the weekly posts.
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