Rome (RPG all)

So, every chance you get, hammer that home. The cultist, the innocent victim, the peculiar item - all those roads lead to one Rome. Make sure that is forefront in everyone's mind.

Where is Rome?

Bearing in mind you need to design this before the first session of the campaign, how much detail does Rome need?

That will depend on the nature of the campaign. I’m going to use Bookhounds in this example, but you can use the same design principles in any RPG setting. 

First, you need to have a clear idea what the end point looks like. Any Cthulhu setting has an advantage, in that there are Old Ones with distinct personalities that can act as the end point. A setting like Ravenloft has a defined endpoint provided in the campaign narrative: the Darklords. Whether it’s Strahd, Mordent’s ghostly Lord Godefroy or one of the many other Darklords, that entity, its plans, and its assets are the endpoint. Cyberpunk has Corporations, the obvious target, but the endpoint could as easily be a corrupt police force, a boostergang, or something else. Vampire’s endpoint could be a particular entity, a group like the Sabbat, the Second Inquisition, or something else. 

Point being every ruleset, every campaign setting, has at least one entity, group or problem that can be used as the end point. Or you could make your own.

Say this is Cyberpunk. Say you want the game to be about a group of scrappy Punks who want to open a comedy club on the edge of Little China and the Hot Zone (hey, rent is cheap). In that case Rome is the finished version of that club, whether finished means ‘the new hotness’ or ‘burnt to a crisp.’ The setting didn’t come up with that; you did.

Once you have that clear idea, you need to flesh it out a little. What does it mean to face off against Arasaka, or to build a new comedy club amid the rubble of a nuclear explosion? If Rome is Strahd, what is it like in a land ruled by a vampire overlord?

To begin, you need to pick some keywords.

You’ll notice in the Bookhounds example below that I pick out specific keywords from the text and expand on each of those, using those keywords as a jumping-off point to describe some campaign-relevant situations. I also divide the situations up by Arabesque, Sordid and Technicolor because those are the possibilities available in Bookhounds and I don’t know, at the start, which of the three the group will prefer. 

Remember when I talked about four things? 

Whether the players are dodging horrors in Cairo or arguing the finer points of literature and history with Shakespeare, it's all vampires, all the time. In the Four Things parlance, vampires are the Fourth Thing.

Using this example as a template then whenever I describe an event, location or NPC going forward, the end point, the Rome, is going to be the Fourth Thing, just as Vampires were the Fourth Thing in the Cauldron. 

So if the keyword is Thus-And-So, and the event/location/NPC fits within that keyword, then that event/location/NPC as Rome in its Fourth Thing slot.

Enough preamble. Let’s look at the example:

What is Rome?

Cthugha

“For this shape was nothing less than that which all the world has feared since Lomar rose out of the sea, and the Children of the Fire Mist came to Earth to teach the Elder Lore to man.”

Through the Gates of the Silver Key

From the Trail main text: Cthugha is a neutral force, a repository of energetic information. The race known as “fire vampires” established their own caches of Cthugha on many worlds, including Earth. Under the guise of the Magi, the ancient fire-priests of the Aryan Persians, they created the Elder Lore of fire-magic, the infrastructure to access Cthugha on our world.

Additional Stability +3  Additional Sanity +1

Keywords: energetic information; Magi, the ancient fire-priests; Elder Lore of fire-magic.

Arabesque

From Bookhounds main text: “Baghdad on the Thames.” In an Arabesque London, anything might happen around any corner … Strange conspiracies claim unutterable lineages and vanish with the sunrise; sentient dreams and plausible strangers shake the Investigators’ hands and lives. Arabesque London has mighty temples inside shabby warehouses, underground civilizations, hypnotic detectives, and immortal hidden races.

energetic information: the electric hum of telephone wires carry with it the whispers of the dead; gas lamps can be asked three questions and will reveal three secrets; television, in its infancy, shows a window to another reality.

Magi, the ancient fire-priests: monomaniacal engineers work to create the 1670 airship design invented by Jesuit Father Francesco Lana de Terzi, with the objective of flying beyond the atmosphere, to the stars; bartenders in certain clubs serve cocktails that open the drinkers’ third eye; hidden souls in earthly disguise remain incognito until triggered. 

Elder Lore of fire-magic: the ABC Rail-Guide hides secrets on every page and only the worthy can find them; Daniel Defoe’s Daily Post is still being published, but only for a select audience; there is a 25th book of the children’s 24-volume encyclopedia The Book of Knowledge, which contains peculiar truths.

Sordid

From Bookhounds main text:  London, as Watson says at the beginning of Study in Scarlet, is “that great cesspool, into which the idlers and loungers of Empire irresistibly drain …” The Sordid London is the London of prostitution, drugs, poverty, desperation, extortion, and cruelty. Gross villains whore children to grosser clients; old women die by inches in the gutter while those who step on them curse the inconvenience; self-congratulatory cliques of the “best people” justify their neglect with cant about inevitability.

energetic information: Jack the Ripper is worshipped as a Charon-figure by some policemen, who claim that the worthy are vision-priests of the damned; photographs taken in certain parts of London show more than they ought; drowned men have proven very useful to students of optography.

Magi, the ancient fire-priests: a small group of homeless veterans of the Great War create new butcheries in pursuit of a truth they saw on the battlefield; the wreck of the SS Princess Alice near London’s sewage pumping network spawned a peculiar legend of one who drank the tainted waters but did not die; among students of optography the medical student Arthur Notwood is supposed to be the most knowledgeable. 

Elder Lore of fire-magic: those who go to the gravesites of the passengers of the Princess Alice hear whispers that, when pieced together, have hidden knowledge; the daily log at some police stations – the right log – reveals ghastly truths; opium fiends who take their dose at the site of a recent murder see things that ought not be seen.

Technicolor

From Bookhounds main text: There is another London, garish and glorious. This is the Technicolour world of Hammer Films, in vibrant colour – and the colour is always bright red or lurid green … Technicolour London has more than the eye can encompass: overstuffed bookcases, opulent drawing rooms, rat-infested labyrinthine attics, dripping tunnels of slime-coated stone. Pentacles – and manacles – are lined in silver or some shining metal … 

energetic information: there is a song that echoes through time, which can be heard through stone tape reading; a particular blend of tobacco from an East Indies island nobody has ever heard of gives prophetic dreams; some telephone boxes do not exist entirely in our reality and can be recognized by a peculiar hum.

Magi, the ancient fire-priests: a clutch of cultists who follow a vampire-priest claim to have the secret to reality; military scientists experiment to find a death ray; a group of businessmen wish to harness the powers of creation in their own commercial projects.

Elder Lore of fire-magic: tarot cards owned by dead occultists retain peculiar powers for up to a week after the deaths of their owners; blood can be set aflame and the secrets that the flaming blood tells are not to be spoken aloud; certain tobacconists are not of this reality and one should be very wary of any deal they offer.

Tainted

From Bookhounds main text: A Tainted character is one that has come into contact, wittingly or unwittingly, with the Cthulhu Mythos.

Arabesque: The ones who know are fascinated by technology but it never works as it ought, in their presence.

Sordid: The ones who know sweat blood, in the presence of Mythos items and creatures.

Technicolor: The ones who know prize youth above all things and cannot be apart from youth for long; life is too painful for the old.

OK, let's review. 

I divided into Arabesque, Sordid and Technicolor because that's in the text. I expect that, in session zero, after discussion with the players, one of those three options will have been chosen. In other RPG settings where there is only one option, I don't have to do that. Or there may be different options; Ravenloft, for instance, has several different kinds of horror, and just as with Bookhounds I expect to offer these options to the players in session zero and have them choose which they'd rather have.

Always remember that this is a collaboration; you can't expect the players not to experiment with the main concept. Or anything else, really.

The one thing I haven't touched on so far is the Fourth Thing. The part of the narrative that all roads are leading to. 

Well, we already know that the ultimate destination is Cthugha. Whatever that Fourth Thing is, it has to be related to Cthugha in some way. It seems only fitting that the Fourth Thing be fire. Fire-related, perhaps. The dancing light of blue flame; the way that every spot tainted by Cthugha mysteriously burns to the ground, or how every book written about Cthugha can never burn or be touched by the elements in any way.

Arabesque: Those patterns may look like scorch marks, but they move in a peculiar, hypnotic way. Stare at them too long and you may learn truths; or you may feel your mind detach and float into the never-know-where.

Sordid: Those orphans play with fire not because they enjoy it but because they are compelled to. Every firebug has seen something in the flames. Those arson attacks may not be arson at all.

Technicolor: Every place touched by this evil has a shrine of some kind. That sign of the god with the great green eye might be painted onto the side of a building, hidden in some secret room or tattooed onto the corpse of a sacrificial victim but it is always there. Always.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!