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.