A Race Against Time (GUMSHOE, RPG All)

Hitchcock is a cinematic genius, but one of my favorite Hitchcock moments is a little obscure.

In Torn Curtain Paul Newman plays actual honest-to-God rocket scientist Michael Armstrong, a man with a problem. He needs information that is trapped firmly in the head of another rocket scientist, a Russian, Gustav Lindt. In order to get that information Armstrong defects to the Soviets, and in a nail-biting confrontation with Lindt tries to lure the information out of the Russian in a race against the clock. 

The powers that be are on to Armstrong’s little game and are looking for him. The confrontation takes place at a university and the Soviets are searching room by room for the wily American. Meanwhile Armstrong tries the only gambit he has left; he engages Lindt in a mathematical challenge, trying to get Lindt to solve the problem that’s been haunting Armstrong for months by playing on Lindt’s intellectual arrogance.

It’s pretty much the only time I’ve seen a thrilling Physics equation.

But it brings me to my topic today. Plenty of settings have Chase rules of one kind or another. Those rules assume both actors in the scene are, well, actors. Intelligent creatures with a definite goal in mind. What happens when the race isn’t against a person, but the clock?

Night’s Black Agents solves a lot of problems by turning the situation into a Thrilling [whatever-it-may-be]. Infiltration, Interrogation, Digital Intrusion, you name it, you can Thrill with it. 7E CoC takes the position that you can solve most problems with challenges and dice mechanics. Other systems handle the chase in different ways, but the fundamental problem remains the same: while in other chases there is a tortoise and a hare, both of whom have goals and means of achieving them, in this situation it’s just the hare against inevitable doom, and doom lacks intelligence and motivation. It’s just doom. With a great big D. You can draw a silly mustache on it if you like, but it’s difficult to give faceless, voiceless Doom personality and without personality it’s difficult to really get invested.    

Puss In Boots: Last Wish. Doom with face & a voice.

Look at it this way. 

In an ordinary chase scene the character is competing with something or someone, and the end result is in doubt. That something or someone has personality, individuality, characteristics. Even if the chase is actually a race against the elements (skiing down a mountainside barely ahead of an avalanche, eg) the elements take on a form of personality precisely because the end result is in doubt. Humans assign human characteristics to things that directly affect or interest humans, and doubt is the element that creates the direct affect.

In a race against time the end result is not in doubt. 12 noon will arrive at 12 noon whether we want it to or not. We cannot make time go faster nor can we save a single second in a jar for future use. The question is not what the result will be. It’s whether or not a thing can be achieved before the time runs out. It’s the thing to be achieved, not time, which has personality and individuality.

Let’s start with basic principles.

To make a race against the clock interesting you, as DM, need to establish stakes early on and they need to be pretty big stakes. Life or death. Victory or ruin. Salvation or damnation. No milksop middle ground for you, my friend: it’s time to get paid or die trying.

Example: your character needs to get to a doctor’s office and bring that doctor, or at least some medicine, back to the isolated little hut on the prairie where your sick daughter lies dying. If you get there before time runs out, your daughter lives. If not … 

The example Hitchcock uses in Torn Curtain is much the same. Armstrong knows that time is running out and if he takes too long getting the information from Lindt then Armstrong will be arrested. It’s not in doubt whether Armstrong will get the information. What’s in doubt is whether or not he’ll do it before he gets arrested.

A similar problem arises later in the movie, when the heroes are escaping on what amounts to a fake bus. In Soviet Russia all transport is scrutinized and movement regulated, so the network the heroes use to escape has faked up an entire bus, complete with passengers, in order to transport people across country under the noses of the apparat. However, the fake bus’ progress is delayed by unforeseen circumstances which means – o dear! – the real bus, which is just behind the fake one, might catch up. The problem isn’t whether or not the bus will get to its destination. The problem is whether it will get there before its fakeness is exposed by the real bus. A chase scene, but without the chase.

As Director, it may be prudent to let the player set the stakes (or wager). That gives the player something to fight for, to bargain for. However, you should be wary of mismatched risk and reward. If the player’s willing to make that bet, they’d better be willing to put up some stakes for the reward they want.

You as Director need to set the challenges and I’d recommend limiting the number to three. Any more than that and you risk boring the group or, worse yet, winning by attrition. It’s one thing for luck to play a role, something else to call for die roll after die roll until someone finally rolls a 1, or exhausts their pools. 

It may also be a good idea to determine a midway condition, something that is neither success nor failure. Say you arrive with the doctor an hour after midnight, when things are at their worst. Your daughter isn’t dead, yet, but is fading fast. While she lies in critical condition and the doctor is otherwise engaged, the Devil pops up from a fiddle contest in Georgia and says, ‘if you want this to have a successful outcome, boy, have I got a deal for you.’ 

Victory with a cost, in other words. The character lost the race but doesn’t have to lose their wager, so long as they’re willing to pay the price. It’s the equivalent of rolling a messy success (7-10); the player gets what they want but there’s conditions attached.

Let’s put this into an example.

Say this is a School of Night clock challenge. In School of Night the players are occult experimenters in the days of Queen Elizabeth, scholars using their esoteric knowledge for the good of the Crown. A magical challenge sounds interesting.

The scholar is deep in wild, forbidding territory and is there for a purpose. They are threatened by faerie powers but they have a ritual to complete, and they have to make sure it’s done by dawn. If cock-crow comes and it’s not finished, someone they care about will die of a faerie-inspired illness. 

The characters set up a magic ward around their cauldron/ritual site to keep the bad spirits away and get to work. The ward will keep pretty much anything from attacking them directly but that doesn’t mean they can’t be spiritually attacked or frightened.

So the stakes are: get this done before dawn, or someone dies. After some discussion, a midway condition is reached: if the character doesn’t get it done by dawn the threatened person may yet live, but only if the threatened person accepts a changeling in place of their daughter. The threatened person won’t know about the switch, but the player will. 

The director sets three challenges:

Fear. The faerie powers do their best to frighten the character into abandoning the ritual & leaving the protected space. 

Desire. The faerie powers do their best to tempt the character into abandoning the ritual & leaving the protected space. 

Exhaustion. After so many hours awake the character is using their last reserves to get the job done. Will it be enough?

The precise mechanics of those challenges will depend on the system used. This is Gumshoe which is a pool plus dice mechanic, probably Magic, probably Saturn, and if there are multiple casters then they can all add into the pool. Difficulty might increase from challenge to challenge. 

There might be other ways of doing it. Say that, rather than a magical ritual, the character had to Carouse with faerie folk and keep everyone drinking and merry until dawn. There would still be three challenges. You might want to vary them a bit; Fear doesn’t fit too well with a drinking challenge. But the basics still stand. 

Point being, for all it doesn’t look like a chase, it’s still a chase. The difference being, in a traditional chase scene it’s you against a foe. 

Whereas in this chase it’s just the ticking clock against you.

Tick. Tick. Tick …

Enjoy!

Cauldron 3: The Long Term

Opening Scene. Bioshock

A man attacks flight crew with an improvised knife attempting to get access to the cockpit so he can crash the plane, all the while screaming that he’s a child of Dracula. Passengers subdue him and he’s arrested as soon as they land at Gatwick. That’s when the agents are called in, because not only is the attacker on a special, secret list (known Renfields), he was also attempting to crash the plane in Southwark in order to ‘destroy them all’. 

Destroy who? And why Southwark?

That’s how I’d start the Cauldron. 

Which begs a few questions, among them how I’d organize this multi-genre epic, and how I’d deal which changing story arcs bearing in mind this sprawling yarn takes in everything from Shakespeare to tomb-hunting shenanigans in Cairo. It’s vampires, vampires, all the way down, but what exactly is the thread holding all this together?

As described in the ground rules, there are four sections: prehistory, Elizabethan, 1930s, 1980s. The long-term plot revolves around a strangler cult that boils the remains of its victims in a cauldron, for divination purposes. This cult has been anti-vampire in the past but a takeover bid in the Roman era may or may not have permanently changed it to a vampire asset – that’s to be determined in play.

We won’t be playing in prehistory, or even Roman times for that matter, though we probably could; GUMSHOE is nothing if not versatile. From a timeline perspective, the action starts in School of Night. 

Not necessarily in a playtime perspective, though. The great thing about a multi-genre chronicle is you can begin whenever you like and move to whichever moment in history best suits the narrative. Which is why I’m starting with a potential plane crash in the 1980s. Start with action. You don’t get much more action than an abortive attack on a major metropolitan era, and it’d get even better if you followed it up with a vampire attack on the Renfield suicide bomber. No witnesses, after all. 

Imagine being on that plane. Passengers going crazy, the Renfield sweating blood and raving. Maybe only one player character is aboard and the other players have civilian characters for this brief scene – but what a scene it could be … After all, this is 1980-something, long before the security theatre we have now. Scans and searches were lax and best. You could still smoke on planes back then. All sorts of possibilities!  

The opening scenes of every narrative, whether we're talking about an RPG campaign, a novel or a film, serve to establish two things: setting, and stakes. The setting in this case is London, mostly in Southwark, with some stopovers in Cairo. The stakes? Control over the government, through divination, which allows the vampires to infiltrate the corridors of power by being the only one who know what the future holds. By predicting what's to come they can guide their allies and catspaws to success, and therefore glory. 

That means by the end of the opening scenes your players should know that there is a conspiracy, that it stretches back centuries, and that it revolves around divination through ritual murder.

Once those objectives are achieved, you as Director immediately switch genres to the next point on the plot graph, which is whatever you want it to be. For the sake of this example I'm going to say that the next point is School of Night, because I want to establish some backstory and the best way to do that is to let the players do the hard work for me. I want to get them involved in that mysterious revenger's tragedy written by Francis Harman, and the best way to get them to do that is to put them in a room with Harman. 

My objective, once the opening scenes have been dealt with, is to define some of the parameters of the Conspiracy. The best way to underline the stakes of the game is to make it clear from the outset that the enemy are powerful and aiming for high stakes. The best way to do that is to show the enemy doing exactly that, by having them take a shot at the Queen of England, Elizabeth I. It might be interesting to hint that this same group tried to cement Lady Jane Gray's claim to the throne, but that the 9 day's Queen was outmaneuvered by the members of the School of Night. Now those same conspirators are plotting to put Mary, Queen of Scots on the throne, and it's up to the players to make sure that doesn't happen. 

Point being, the best way to establish that the enemy is powerful and aiming for high stakes is to show them exercising power and aiming for high stakes. It isn't enough to say that they're bad. They must be seen to be doing bad things, and scheming against the characters and the Crown. There's got to be murder, got to be a hideous soup boiling in that cauldron, and the best way to demonstrate this is to have it happen. Think of it in the same vein as the Bond villain demonstrating the power of the super laser (or whatever it may be) by blowing up a few preliminary targets. 

 Diamonds Are Forever

From this point forward the plot evolves through player action. You can have the bare bones outlined in your text, but whether or not the players win or lose determines how powerful the enemy are in the next segment. The Conspiracy might be a scattered and beaten force in the 1930s, or they might be nigh untouchable villains, and whether they are or are not will be determined by how well the players do in School of Night. 

OK, so far so good. But this is an evolving narrative so that means the characters are evolving too. Except where in a normal long-running game evolution is determined through experience (and the spending of experience points) that isn't as easy an option to model here, where the characters are changing from session to session. This week, Sir Henry in 1609, next week, Basil in 1930. How to deal with that?

Again, leave it to the players - but establish a framework for them to do so. In any game they're going to be earning experience points. Give them the option of doing one of two things with those points: giving their current character a boost, or spend the points on an artefact or benefit for another, future character.

Let's say Sir Henry ends the session with 3 points to spend. Sir Henry's player has the option of spending those points to increase Sir Henry's skill set or to use those points to benefit one of the other characters in that players' stable. This is especially useful if, in session Zero, that player either designed all their characters for all the sessions, or at least established a framework for future characters even if that framework is just a name and a few lines of backstory. That way the player knows, in advance, that there will be adventures featuring Basil the bookshop owner and therefore it might be handy to give Basil a boost to prepare him for the horrors to come. Or maybe Dorcas the Night's Black Agents spy, or Roger the Cairo tombhound. 

I'd allow the player to do this in one of two ways:

• Lineage, or,
• Item

By lineage, I'm allowing the player to say that Basil is a descendant of Sir Henry and therefore has some of Sir Henry's characteristics. Or maybe some family legend informs Basil's decisions. However it works, Basil gets that boost because Basil is descended from Sir Henry. Of course, only Basil benefits from this boost. If Basil dies, the boost is gone forever.

By item, I'm allowing the player to create an item that Basil can use, whether or not Basil is related to Sir Henry. A magic dagger, say, that Sir Henry crafts to destroy vampires and which Basil, not knowing the item's backstory, is using in the 1930s as a letter opener. The benefit still exists; Basil has a magic dagger which can kill vampires. The difference here being that items can go missing, be stolen, or be passed on. The dagger isn't unique to Basil so Basil can give it to someone else, or have a fellow player take it from his cooling corpse. But it can also be stolen by the enemy or destroyed in some other way. 

That's the first takeaway in a multi-genre game. Allow the players to establish a bridge between genres by letting them build that bridge with experience points. It could even be a pooled benefit. Say all the characters in School of Night collaborate to create a book that is passed down to the Bookhounds. There could be a lot of experience points invested in that book. But it is a book - it can be stolen or destroyed. Giving the players custody of an artefact like that, one which they created and have a personal stake in, is significantly better than letting them chase after the McGuffin of the week.

The second takeaway is one we've discussed before but which I'm going to reiterate here: find the points of commonality between the genres and play on those points.

Night's Black Agents is a spy game, full of intrigue and action. School of Nights can be a spy game, full of intrigue and action. Tombhounds has the potential to be a spy game (remember that sinister Nazi treasure hunter, Gottfried Frank) and is definitely full of intrigue and action. Bookhounds is full of intrigue and action, and even if the mouthfeel is a little different from the other games that's no bad thing. It's the commonality you're looking for, not the differences.

This can be reiterated by reminding the players of important locations significant in all of the iterations of the game: the Clink prison, London Bridge, the Devil. 

Let's say the Clink is one of those touchstones. There are several versions of that notorious prison (it burnt down more than once) and there's a museum there now. It's not immediately clear when that museum opened. If I was guessing I'd say probably in the late 1990s/early 2000s, but this is fiction; it can open in the 1980s if that's useful for your game. 

We've already established a timeline roughly corresponding to Prehistory, Elizabethan, 1930s, 1980s. Under the Four Things principle, we need Four Things that correspond to those four points in the chronicle history. So:

The Clink

• Prehistory: when the cult was scattered by the Romans, one of the pieces of the Cauldron was buried here for safekeeping.
• Elizabethan: Francis Harmon, a Catholic, spends some time here in jail and while at the Clink carries out rituals intended to evoke demons - but he evokes the Cauldron, instead.
• 1930s: some relic or satanic remnant of Harmon's demonic ritual still haunts this spot, and the Conspiracy is determined to harness this for its own ends.
• 1980s: the serial killer preying on people with his (her?) strangulation ritual seems to be using the Clink either as a base of operations or as the central locus for an occult experiment of some kind. Why?

Physical tags, The Clink:

• Gloomy, the haunt of the desperate and the damned.
• Violent. Things happen here - terrible things. 
• Desolate. It's easy to lose your soul in the Clink - or your mind.
• Vampires. Agents of the Conspiracy enjoy special benefits while at this location.

This is enough to establish the location. If it becomes a major crux of the campaign you'd need more, but you can establish that during play. You don't need to establish that at the start, and you really want to avoid doing more than the basics if you can because you don't want to waste work. Remember, the Clink isn't the only location in the chronicle; it's one of many, perhaps dozens, in this particular Building. You're going to be doing this for all of those locations. Don't obsess over one when there are plenty of others that could end up being just as important, or considerably more so.

With this, you can use the Clink at any point in your multi-genre chronicle and you already know enough about it to place the Clink anywhere in your timeline. It's the same location, evolving. It has different significance depending on when your players encounter it, but it's the same place, with the same long-term role in the ongoing plot. 

OK! I hope this was of use to you. With this you've got enough to build your own Cauldron, with its own plot arc and deepening, horrific mystery. 

Next time: something completely different.

Cauldron 2: Going To The Devil (NBA, School of Night, Bookhounds, Tombhounds)

From Urban Adventurer

Last time I laid the groundwork for The Cauldron, a multi-genre RPG campaign using School of Night, Bookhounds, Tomb-Hounds, and Night’s Black Agents. This time out I want to populate the Building, putting some flesh on the campaign’s bones.

What is the Building? A refresher:

I'm going to suggest to you now, as GM to GM, that this conceit is the Building. It is the structure in which the action happens, and in which people meet the players, creating plot. It can be as large or small as you need it to be. Some games need entire planets. Some stories can play out within a single structure … 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.

In this instance the Building is mostly Southwark, London, with a detour in Cairo for Tomb-Hounds (and possibly Night’s Black Agents). It’s multi-genre which means it’s more than one time period. School is Elizabethan, Bookhounds and Tomb-Hounds 1930s, and Night’s Black Agents is modern day. However, the great thing about a location like Southwark, London, is that you can borrow some common elements that exist in all time periods – the London Bridge, say – and even if some of the places you want to use no longer exist in some time periods or have yet to be built in others, you can still factor in the location even if the specifics change.

Example: last time out I talked about the Devil, the playhouse used by the Children of Christ's Chapel players in the Elizabethan period, which becomes the Devil Tavern in the 1930s and is used by the Children of the Sphynx, and which could still exist as the Devil Pub in the modern day. Or the Devil’s Darling Cocktail Bar, if you’d rather. Whatever works for you at your table. 

An Elizabethan playhouse is obviously going to be very different from a cocktail bar. At least, I’d really like to think so, otherwise that cocktail bar must be a … special … place. But if the location remains the same then there’s at least one descriptor that can also remain the same, for continuity purposes if nothing else. That’s the tag that lets the players know, even if it’s not the playhouse they remember from before, it’s still the same location.

Which brings me right back to the Four Things principle.

Again, for reference:

Whenever designing OPFOR - or for that matter anything else, whether it's the town the adventurers start in, the organization they work for, or the theatre which they notice as a potential adventure location, design four highlight points and no more than four. The average player's attention span is short, and yours is not any better. You could go deep in the weeds and design twenty different things about the OPFOR, but who apart from you will ever know it? Even you won't, not really; in the heat of play you'll forget half your notes and curse yourself later when you realize you could have used the Thing, dammit, the THING, and never did. That's why you limit it to four. You can remember four things. So can the players.

Using the Four Things principle and bearing in mind as discussed last week that the Fourth Thing has always got to be vampires because this whole thing is vampires, vampires, all the way down, then the Third Thing has got to be the point of commonality. The one eternal verity. The constant, the descriptor that always applies no matter which setting we’re playing in this week.

Using the Devil as an example, then:

Devil Tavern & Playhouse (School of Night)

• The Devil is owned and operated by Walter FitzHugh, an ex-soldier and Upright Man who has been on the fringes of the Vampire cult for many years but hasn’t quite managed Renfield status yet. Walter knows most of the toughs and cunning men in Southwark, though not always on friendly terms.
• The Devil has been a playhouse for five years now and is known as a safe place. Folk who go to playhouses expect to get their purses pinched or their persons ruffled, but not at the Devil. Walter makes sure none of the usual troublemakers get in, and anyone caught causing trouble on the premises is given the boot, but good.
• The shadows at the Devil are peculiar things. They seem to follow a person about, somehow, to flicker when there is no light and to remain solid when in bright light. Anyone who spends a lot of time in the Devil’s shadowy corners feels as if they’re being watched.
• Vampires. The undead come and go at the Devil and use its back rooms as a slaughterhouse/dining area. The clothing and valuables of the dead are sold by Walter at various pawnbrokers about town, but never in Southwark. Walter’s too canny for that. As for the bodies … there’s always somewhere to sling a naked corpse, but many of them end up slung off London Bridge. 

Of those Four Things, the third thing – the shadows – is the constant. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about the 1930s tavern, the cocktail bar or something else. Those shadows are always there. That’s what ties the players to the location, will make them think ‘yes, this is the Devil I remember – and, oh God! Wasn’t there something about a slaughter room? Is that still a thing?’ 

It might be – who knows? Because this isn’t the only version of the Devil. 

Devil Tavern (1930s, Bookhounds)

• The Devil is well known among London’s bohemians and raffish set. If you want to find a Communist enjoying a pint and pie with his rough lad friends, or a well-known portrait artist chatting up his female acolytes, go to the Devil. They’ll be there.
• The Devil has private rooms upstairs which it rents to its deserving customers. The Children of the Sphynx use it for their auctions but they’re not the only ones who use it. All sorts rent the space, from Satanists to ‘film entrepreneurs’ looking for a spot with privacy and lockable doors.
•  The shadows at the Devil are peculiar things. They seem to follow a person about, somehow, to flicker when there is no light and to remain solid when in bright light. Anyone who spends a lot of time in the Devil’s shadowy corners feels as if they’re being watched.
• Vampires. The Devil is protected against vampires by several banes and blocks put here by the Children of the Sphynx. However, anyone with Vampirology or Occult will notice that those banes and blocks are defective – perhaps deliberately so. 

Moreover, if you want to give the players a very deliberate hint that this location is the same as that, then you use that Third Thing as a descriptor.

Example: 

Coffee Shop (Qahwa) on Tawfiq Square, Cairo

• The owner, or qahwagi, is an amiable old soul who greets every foreigner in perfect, almost academic French which he claims he learned in Paris as a boy, when he was sent there by his father. He calls himself Mehedi Saleh and is believed to be Bedouin; many who frequent the coffee shop call him Father, or Old Father.
• The tea served here is strong and sweet, and Mehedi claims to know a secret brew which can cure any illness. Many locals swear by it, and quite a few foreigners as well. Some say this has more to do with the tureen he brews it in, which is marked with occult sigils.
• The shadows here are peculiar things. They seem to follow a person about, somehow, to flicker when there is no light and to remain solid when in bright light. Anyone who spends a lot of time in the coffee shop's shadowy corners feels as if they’re being watched.
• Vampires. The sky above the coffee shop is haunted by bloodsuckers and witches at night; why do they gather here, of all places, and what terrible secrets do they gossip about when they think nobody is listening?

The protagonists may never have set foot in Mehedi's coffee shop before, yet the minute they notice the Third Thing they will be on their guard because they have seen this sign before. Moreover, having given them the Third Thing they will know there must be a Fourth Thing and it must be related to the vampires, because every other important plot location has had a Fourth Thing and it's always been vampires.

You might reasonably ask, what goes in this particular Building? Well, in no particular order:

• London Bridge
• The River Neckinger
• The Strangulation Ritual
• Execution Dock
• The Colkins Family (in general)
• Francis Harman
• Harman's Play, A Season Of Blood (Revenger's Tragedy)
• Sir Jacob Colkins
• Douglas Colkins-Firth
• The Clink
• Tomb of Two Sisters, Egypt
• Cairo

And probably others, but I hope you get the idea by now. These bits of the Building are the bits the players interact with, in their various genres and incarnations. That interaction creates plot. 

Don't be afraid to let plot change your ideas of where the long-term arc might go, always bearing in mind that wherever it does go vampires are standing at the other end of it. But the flavor of that ending? Can depend on actions taken in play. Did the players do something in Egypt that significantly changed the odds of success in the modern day? Then that's what happened. Did an unexpected death in the Elizabethan period mean that Harman's play, A Season Of Blood, became a lost text in the modern era, potentially changing an important clue trail? Then that's what happened.

OK. That’s enough to be getting on with. Using these principles, you should be able to populate your own Building with whatever you need in it.

Next step: building the long-term arc.