The Recent Unpleasantness (Wizards - OGL)

The OGL.

Oh dear.

Ginni Di

Zee Bashew

Legal Eagle

I’m going to assume you’ve a base familiarity with the problem and not go over old ground. If not, talk to the Internet – it has Opinions and is not afraid to share them.

What fascinates me about this situation is, first, it’s beginning to sound a little like a constitutional law question where President Albert issues an Executive Order and everyone assumes it’s there forever, only for President Bluebottle to come along and tear up that Order replacing it with one of their own. Or just not replace it at all.

The assumption is that Executive Orders exist in perpetuity and some of the most famous ones – Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation – have. More or less. But the outgoing President’s order can be torn up by the incoming at any time. Or by the next one. Or by the one after that. They give the appearance of solid, binding and enforceable statutory law whereas they are nothing of the kind, laws being the province of an entirely different body. They might last only so long as it takes snowfall to melt on a spring day.

See also the OGL, which basically took the form of a company pinky-swearing not to do a thing, and everyone assuming that the pinky-swear was a legally enforceable contract and How Very Dare You Do The Thing, Sir.

Second, I think this only can have happened in the age of the Internet.

As has been said many times before by wiser minds than mine, the whole point of the OGL and its predecessors was so Wizards could pass off scenario-writing duties to someone else. Scenarios are vital to the hobby but they don’t sell enough to make them viable product, particularly if we’re talking about paper versions.

Ask anyone who’s ever published physical – the Unspeakable Oath magazine springs to mind – how those razor-thin profit margins can make strong souls weep like children, particularly when advertisers vanish like a ferret up a drainpipe. Ask the newspaper industry how it feels about running those presses all day every day.

Wizards in its wisdom decided to give the scenario sales to small press outlets, and everyone was happy.

In the pre-Internet past, third-party scenario and supplement production led to product glut and the fabled bargain bin, the butt of so many Knights of the Dinner Table jokes. Many hours of someone’s blood, sweat and caffeine reduced to a $0.99 ‘please God buy this turkey’ junk sale box. As mentioned, there's a huge up-front cash investment when publishing physical, and a lot of would-be creators were forced out on cost grounds. There just weren't the buyers to support the hobbyist creators.

That's still the case, I suspect, for most producers of content. Ask all those streamers who put out Let’s Plays for 10 viewers at a time, or the folks on sites like DriveThru who sell maybe 20 copies of a book that might have taken them years to write. Such is publishing. The difference being that there isn't the huge up-front cost. There is a cost. It's just nothing like as substantial a cost as it used to be.

As a side note – going back to my days at the Escapist – I remember when the site was basically dead, most of the creators bar Yahtzee having moved on or been kicked out. There were a couple video content creators still kicking around the place like ghosts in a museum, none of them big names. They were being shuffled off to Buffalo, one after the other. I still had back-end access and used to poke around just to see what was what.

I recall one video content creator being given the heave-ho and complaining bitterly that it was thanks to the Libs, who had denied her bid for fame. Having back-end access, I looked at the hits per vid. Less than 20 on average, IIRC.

Content creation is not a fertile field that wants only a few seeds and water to grow beautiful flowers. It’s rocky, unforgiving soil. If you persevere, have talent and a bit of luck, you can make it – but there are no guarantees.

It is much easier than it was, and this is where I come back to the Internet.

Look at the production values in any of Ginni Di’s vids, or Legal Eagle’s, Zee Bashew, Game Knights. There was a time not so long ago when that kind of performance was basically out of reach for most, on cost grounds alone. You’d need to be a midsize production studio at least, with hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank, before you could even think about doing that kind of work. You’d need Disney level resources to produce a Zee Bashew-style animation. Now someone can work from home on a relatively ordinary desktop setup and produce amazing stuff.

Don’t misunderstand me. What Creators do still takes talent, knowledge, effort. I know that I, for one, haven’t the chops to do what Ginni Di does. But it’s not nearly as expensive or difficult as it used to be, which creates two illusions:

1) The people who do this must be swimming in cash.

2) It’s easy.

I’m reasonably confident that Matt Mercer can pay his rent, or mortgage. I wouldn’t swear as to anyone else’s income. Just because it looks expensive doesn’t mean there’s been a sudden influx of millionaires in the RPG space. It just means that doing this isn’t as costly as it used to be.

Put it another way: there are plenty of creators who may seem to have cash in hand, and yet only be able to do what they do because their spouse has a good job with benefits.

Also, just because content creation doesn’t need a midsize studio any more doesn’t mean there are no studios. Command Zone, Loadingreadyrun, these are studios. They just aren’t traditional studios with network-level cash behind them. They’re small outlets which put out regular content and can afford to pay rent. They make a little look amazing. That’s as far as it goes.

Hell, I can write and self-publish a book, put it on Amazon in front of millions of readers, and pay almost nothing for the privilege beyond my time. That’s absolutely insane. It wouldn’t have been possible thirty years ago. I can put a complete scenario on DriveThru and pay nothing at all, and still collect income from it. If you’d told me thirty years back that this was possible, I’d have called you a liar.

But I’d lose on that book. Because while it seems easy to create content it is not easy to create quality content, nor is it easy to sell product in a crowded market. Not by a long shot. The job still wants editors, draft readers, maybe playtesters, decent art, publicity. Especially publicity. I have yet to meet a writer who’s any good at selling themselves; it’s an introvert’s craft, for the most part.

Or to put it another way, just because Ginni Di makes it look easy to put together a great video or YouTube series, without any apparent resources beyond her time and a dream, doesn’t mean it is. But that’s part of the illusion that the Internet has created.

Ironically this is the future that the folks who created the DotCom Bubble back in the late 90s foresaw and tried to cash in on, but they were too early for the tech and overfed by venture capitalists who, by rights, ought to have been in padded cells rather than throwing cash at the wall to see what sticks. Not unlike some recent venture capitalists I could name, who thought that giving millions to a cryptojackass who liked to play video games during business conferences was a good idea. Funny how venture capitalist seems to be another name for moron no matter which era we live in, but … I digress.

This brave new world has created Creators. If the Internet didn’t exist Matt Mercer would be a talented geek working in a $25/hour office job somewhere, playing D&D with his buddies on the weekend. Always assuming, of course, that D&D survived the collapse of TSR (the original, not New Coke) back in the 1990s. Loadingreadyrun, Command Zone, all of it would be impossible.

However, because the Internet created Creators we now live in a world where anyone, absolutely anyone, has a voice and a means of making themselves heard. To an unprecedented degree. Every day on Kickstarter I see projects that wouldn’t have made it through the submissions stage at an established company ask for $20K and get $2 million, or some equally absurd figure.

Understand, this is the part that’s unprecedented: Creators having their own voice, unfettered. Gone are the days when Cary Grant or Carole Lombard owed everything to the studio. You don’t have to be top of the food chain to have an opinion and be heard. The money situation isn’t unprecedented; control, over the work, the content, is. Having a means of being heard that doesn’t depend on the bosses in corporate is.

It’s worth bearing in mind, as a side note, that this situation kinda underlines the power of white privilege too. If this situation only affected creators who weren’t white, and only attracted complaint from non-white creators, this wouldn’t be a thing. You might hear it mentioned on a podcast. Maybe PowrDragn would be talking about it. There would be no instant takebacks from corporate, no sudden changes in tone or policy. Whereas now, folks have to wait a week for a response from corporate and that week becomes a substantive concern, worthy of ridicule and opprobrium and God alone knows how many thinkpieces on influential online news sites – or even the Actual In-Print Press. Imagine if you had to wait a week for forty acres and a mule. You’d be outraged, I’m sure.

It’s not as if this stuff never happens. Spelljammer: Adventures in Space – remember that? Or the whole business with New Coke TSR? Gee, that was news not so long ago. 2022. What a year.

Back on topic.

As far as the OGL is concerned it appears – at least, it appears to the madding crowd - as though Wizards took one look at the evolving situation, thought about the money they believed they’d thrown away when they gave scenario creation to the nerds, and tried to rake the cash back in. Only to discover that they were biting the hand that fed them. You don’t get to sell $50 game books unless you make the nerds happy, and they weren’t happy about this.

But I submit to you that the alleged motivation for doing this – the money – was illusionary from the beginning. Possibly on both sides. It’s been said – mostly by Wizards – that money was not the company’s primary concern. That this situation has less to do with cash than it does the changing market. Whether or not you believe that is up to you, but judging by the screams the Creators definitely believe it’s about the money.

Yet another side note (they breed like rabbits). It’s been suggested that the reason why Wizards wanted this switch was to protect their rights to the brand; they wanted to ensure they could step in and quash unacceptable use. I can see a case for that. It used to be said, if you were in the software business and Microsoft wanted to buy your company, you had two options. Take the money and run, or say no. If you said no, Microsoft would reverse-engineer your tech, and then steal the business right from under you.

I can see a case for arguing that if, say, Disney, wants to get into the RPG space, it doesn’t even have to reverse-engineer the tech; making it OGL or Creative Commons does all the hard work for them. It’s not as if anyone ever got rich fighting the House of Mouse. You can say that’s unlikely right now, and I’d agree with you. But the more visible Dungeons and Dragons gets, the more movies/TV shows/whatever are based on or reference Dungeons and Dragons, the more likely it is one of the bigger fish in the pond will take note. Then there will be trouble.

Back on topic.

The money.

You can make money doing content creation. Good money. But it’s not anything like as easy as it looks and just because someone, operating on a smallish budget, can put out good-looking content does not mean everyone’s a millionaire and there’s oceans of cash out there waiting to be redirected into your pocket. Or anyone’s pocket.

It’s still the same game as ever was. The production values are better, but don’t get fooled by a pretty outward show.

Anyhow, that’s enough bloviating from me. Have a good one!

Lost But Not Forgotten (RPG Modern)

Most of you will have noticed that the world will soon come to an end thanks to a Japanese rock and an ancient curse, as attested by pretty much every newspaper in the Western Hemisphere. Possibly the writers were looking for a distraction from current events.

The rock in question is the Killing Stone or Sessho-seki, which until last week contained the corpse of Tamamo-no-Mae, a beautiful woman who had been part of a secret plot hatched by a feudal warlord to kill Emperor Toba. Tamamo-no-Mae was actually a nine-tail fox - a trickster spirit - and when caught in the act the Emperor had her remains imprisoned forever. Or so he believed. 

Original Theatrical Poster

Most newspaper accounts mention that her story inspired an anime film, but none that I've seen went into any depth. Which is a pity, as the anime makes for a good story.

Incidentally I owe my information to the kindness of Ian Horner of Loadingreadyrun fame, a gentlemen whose Twitter feed and many comedy videos I highly recommend.

Once upon a time in 1960s Japan there was a man named Gentaro Nakajima who wanted nothing more than to make his magnum opus, Kyubi no Kitsune to Tobimaru, a horror(ish) fantasy anime. He switched to anime because nobody was willing to back his original idea, a live-action film. As it turns out there weren't many people willing to back his anime version either, and it proved to be a box-office dud which only showed in one cinema for a very limited period in 1968. 

Crushed, the disappointed filmmaker retired from showbusiness and gave the original print of the film to one of his sons. That gentlemen speculated unwisely, and committed suicide in the aftermath of a bribery scandal. The original print - the only version thought at that time to exist - vanished altogether, and for many years was considered a lost film.

Not so. A print was found, and is currently in the vaults of the Tokyo Metropolitan Library. It has never seen a commercial release of any kind since 1968, though the Library has shown it several times.

So, in one breath we have: a curse. A broken sacred stone. A luckless anime that ruined the life of its creator, potentially also his son, and currently lives in a library vault like some scorpion lurking in a shadow. Or a nine-tail fox spirit hiding in a rock, come to that.

Given that one of the characteristics of a nine-tail fox is its desire to consume the flesh and/or souls of men this is a story that fits nicely into Nights Black Agents, but it could as easily be an Esoterrorists plot, Fear Itself, Delta Green or any modern-day horror setting. With a bit of finagling it could be a Cyberpunk plot; lost mysterious anime lurks on the Net, allegedly killing any runner foolish enough to seek it out. Is it some crazed AI, an urban legend, something else? Or, depending on the nature of Japan in your RED world, what really happened to the Killing Stone way back in the dim and distant past of 2022, and why is Arasaka so concerned about it? Is it because one of Gentaro Nakajima's heirs is now a senior figure in Arasaka who'd rather nobody remembered the past, or is there some other reason?

OK, all that said, let's gamify.

Lost But Not Forgotten

The original print of Kyubi no Kitsune to Tobimaru turns up at a minor auction or flea market, perhaps in Japan, perhaps somewhere else. The person who buys it has no idea what they have, but they do know it's anime, so they offer it up for viewing at a minor anime convention in [choose location now]. 

All twenty of the people who watch it are found dead over the next few days, brutally butchered and partially eaten.

If this is a Fear Itself game or a similar setting, where the characters are ordinary people who are unwitting victims of unearthly forces, then they were among the audience that day and recognized the film for what it was, but they aren't dead - yet.

The viewing takes place shortly before Monday 7th March; the cracking of the Killing Stone is when the murders start.

Options:

• The killer is the alleged 'discoverer' of the anime, who actually faked it in order to lure in victims. This person believes, perhaps incorrectly, that they're a fox spirit on the verge of achieving the unthinkable: ascension to Heaven, after a thousand-year cycle. To complete that cycle and achieve the ascendance they deserve, they need a *lot* of energy - hence the killings. The victims are sacrificial, and the whole point of getting them to watch the anime is to make them understand, even on a subconscious level, their place in the grand scheme of things.
• The 'original print' was faked by Esoterrorists (or a similar cult-style group) who added a special scene not found in the version held by the Tokyo Metropolitan Library. That scene is the true killer; the monster hides in it like a vampire in its coffin, but once it's exposed to an audience it lives in their minds - until it can creep out and kill them. It might emerge from a painting, a mirror, or a television screen, but it's really coming from inside the victim's memory. The intent is to spread fear, but also to generate interest in the 'psychic killer' anime. If enough interest is generated more people will seek it out, creating more mind monsters ...
• The problem isn't the film. The problem is the mold growing on the film reel. It's pretty toxic stuff. It does damage the film a little, but not so that it makes it unwatchable - though the effect is clearly visible, and anyone with knowledge of old film knows what's causing it. However, if you breathe that stuff in it can warp your mind in very unpleasant ways. The original discoverer is the most dramatically affected; they're living in a very dark closet trying to keep the mind weasels at bay. Meanwhile some of the audience, less dramatically afflicted, are seeking out the other audience members to 'commune' - that is, to kill and eat - their fellow sufferers. They see it as further exploring their shared experience. One of them has the film reel, and will do anything to show it to others - bringing more people into the shared experience.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

Bookhounds of London - The Joys of Retail

Recently the booksellers Henry Sotheran, who you may recall from their hosting of a Bookhounds play session, tweeted a cri de coeur:

 

This micro RPG is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, but I wanted to draw your attention to it both as Bookhounds fodder and also as a means of establishing a setting.

Just drink in the inevitable grind into poverty of spirit and purse. There's only one possible way to make money: roll a 1, 2 or 3 (a customer! A CUSTOMER!) and then roll a 6 (purchases book). That's it. Every other option on the board costs you something. It might be patience, time, or (God forbid) money, but it's all cost, all the way down. After 10 days of this, your landlord demands their rent. 

Are you still in business?

Sotheran's

While Bookhounds is about running a bookshop, there aren't many mechanics for the actual shop beyond its credit rating and some helpful advice to let the players describe the shop and its working day. Ultimately the shop takes a back seat to all the Mythos creepiness infesting London. When your characters cross swords (metaphorically or otherwise) with, say, the Keirecheires, the last thing on their minds is whether or not someone made sure a plumber came in to unblock the shop toilet. Even though the stinking gusher from said toilet might be the reason why they don't make rent that month.

This is a mistake. If the game's about running a shop, then the shop is a character in its own right - and retail has its demons, far more dangerous and hideous than any interstellar squid person who keeps hitting the snooze button on their alarm.

I've mentioned Orwell before. I'm going to mention Orwell again, and also this Forgotten London post about Pubs, and could probably name a few dozen Ephemera posts before I was dragged, kicking and screaming, back to sanity. The point I'm trying to make, and seem to have been making for a very long time, is twofold.

First, conflict is the engine of plot.

Second, retail is nothing but conflict from the moment the first staff member cracks open the front door in the frosty morning, to the darkened shadows of evening when someone flips the signage from Open to Closed and starts cashing up the till. 

Loadingreadyrun

Sure, you can have a game that's all about chasing squid monsters and giving them a darn good wedgie. In a sense, that's what squid monsters are for. 

But you've played that game before. A dozen times or more. Surely it's getting a little ... stale?

Let's tweak this micro RPG and bring in a mechanic I used once upon a time in the Great War supplement Flying Coffins:  sacrificing Stability to survive. 

In Flying Coffins I gave the option of letting players whose aircraft were damaged in combat exchange Stability for Health. The idea being, if your crate is shot down you're dead, so why not spend Stability to ensure it stays in the air? Sure, you're sacrificing long-term health for short-term gain, but why wouldn't you when the alternative is burning alive ten thousand feet up?

In the micro RPG the player sacrifices time, patience, and possibly money to keep on playing, until the point comes when they no longer have the time, patience or money to continue. Then the day ends. Ten cycles of that, and the game ends. Again, the point is sacrificing long-term health for short-term gain, the difference being that in the micro RPG it's all down to a die roll. It's not a player-facing system, which is perhaps the point: retail isn't a heroic business. It's a daily grind in which you, the retailer, have little to no control over your fate.

Well, Trail has a mechanic that's all about sacrifice: Stability. Often Stability is expressed in terms of raw horror: you lose Stability either because you encountered something horrible, like a gouged-out eye, or because you encountered an element of the Mythos, like a Fire Vampire.

But retail has its own horrors. The micro RPG lists a few; if you've worked in retail you can probably think of a dozen more without too much effort. You could write a book about customers alone, and some have. There are significant portions of Reddit devoted to stories you can turn into RPG fodder.

For those of you asking 'should I be spending Stability to stay in business?' the answer is, obviously, No. You should be spending Sanity. However, since you can get Stability back but Sanity, once spent, is gone forever, out of the kindness of my heart I'm suggesting Stability as a pool instead.

Moreover I highly recommend getting out of the mindset that Stability is only for the spooky heeblie-jeeblies. Life stresses us in all sorts of ways without putting on the Scooby Doo rubber mask. There ought to be a means of expressing this in-game, and Stability spends are a convenient way of doing that. 

Mechanically, I would express this as follows:

At least once a week, each working week, there's a crisis. It doesn't really matter what the crisis is, for the purpose of describing this mechanic; all that matters is, it's a crisis, and needs to be dealt with urgently - but that's spilt milk under the bridge, as Jeremy Irons has been known to remark. 

In order to deal with this crisis, one or more of the characters needs either to pass a Stability test, or sacrifice two Stability. Failing the test means losing 3 Stability.

Alternatively the players can ignore the crisis, but that means it isn't dealt with. If they ignore 2 or more crises, or they fail a Stability test 2 or more times, then the shop suffers a Reversal for the month and its Credit Rating goes down the pan. This has consequential knock-on effects for the longevity of the shop as a business. Too many Reversals and it's back to running a barrow under a bridge in the Isle of Dogs, or wherever it is booksellers go to die. 

The intent is this: the players should always feel under pressure. Their usual adventures bring them into contact with the outré on a very regular basis. That means their Stability is already under threat, so they might want to ignore a crisis and retain their Stability. However, if they ignore too many crises then the shop suffers. 

At the same time each character may feel it prudent to pass the risk on to someone else. It shouldn't be them who takes the test, or sacrifices 2 Stability. It should be someone else. Anyone else. Which inevitably means a few minutes of furious infighting, as the characters decide amongst themselves who gets to deal with the tedious bore of a customer who just walked in the door, unblocks the sink, does the taxes or otherwise deals with whatever-it-is that has the shop in an uproar.

This can only lead to wonderful things.

Always remember, conflict is the engine of plot, and retail is nothing but conflict, morning, noon, and night.

Three cheers to Henry Sotheran's and all who toil in retail's service!

The Building (RPG all, Cyberpunk)

Rear Window is a fascinating piece of cinema directed by one of the greatest talents of the medium, but it struck me as I was watching it the other day how much it relies on a setting that is as dead and gone as Caesar's Rome.

Sourced from Matt'sfilmblog

Shot in 1954 and based on a story written in 1942, the concept, setting and entire premise relies on two fundamental facts about New York in the mid-twentieth century.

First, there is no television. The glass teat does exist, and the basic technology's been around since the late 19th century. Yet it hasn't become a commodity, it isn't in every home. None of these people own a set, and if the protagonist, James Stewart's L.B. Jefferies, had one in his apartment this whole movie needn't have happened. It won't be long before televisions become commonplace; Sony sold over 4 million portable sets worldwide in 1960. It just hasn't happened quite yet.

Second, there is no air conditioning. Again, the technology exists, but it's so far out of reach for the ordinary consumer that the average New Yorker prefers to live with their windows open in the red-hot summer time. Some even sleep out on the fire escape, as the only way to get anything like a decent night's rest. I lived in New York for a short while years ago, and I can personally attest the city's just as hot in summer now as it would have been in the 1940s - but that doesn't matter any more. 

From the Brooklyn Eagle in 1934, via the Gothamist:

15,000 persons spent last night on the beach at Coney Island and several thousand more sought relief from the heat in Brooklyn parks and playgrounds. Additional thousands slept on roof tops and fire escapes in the Brownsville, Williamsburg and other crowded sections of Brooklyn. In Manhattan, many slept on the grass in Central Park and on the open piers in the East River.

There's even a brief moment early in the film where you see someone delivering ice for the ice box, which isn't something you'd see nowadays. The ice box, if you don't know, is literally that: a box where you keep ice, so you can put butter and other perishables in cold storage. Once the ice brick you bought melts, you buy another one. Selling ice was a major line of business, in the days before refrigerators. It's something people have been doing since before the birth of Christ, and only came to an end relatively recently.

But here's the kicker: Rear Window can only exist because there is no television, and because there is no air conditioning. As a result, people live outdoors more, open their windows more - which lets Jefferies peer into their private lives, and provides the inciting incident that kicks the entire movie into gear. 

New York still exists. If you looked hard enough you could probably find a neighborhood like the one Jefferies lives in. The film's shot on a Paramount stage built especially for the occasion, but it shouldn't be that difficult to find somewhere in Greenwich Village that looks like Rear Window. What you won't find are a lot of open windows. The landlord will have made sure they can't be opened, since the law changed in the 1970s so as to stop kids plummeting to their doom. You also won't find many people looking outdoors; either they're watching television, or their mobile devices, or both.

Rear Window's New York is as dead as dead can be, which is probably one of the reasons why the 1999 remake with Christopher Reeve didn't work.

When designing a setting, think about how people live and what they have to do in order to live well. Not just the big stuff, like which Camarilla faction holds political sway after dark, or whether ghosts are secretly controlling the police force. I mean the small stuff. What do people do for fun? How do they get their food? Do they have light when night falls, and if so how is that managed? What happens when it's hot? What happens in the rainy season? What happens when it snows? What happens to all the shit - literally, the shit - that your average city produces every day? Is someone hauling that off to the tanner's vats, or the farmer's fields? Are there public toilets, public baths? Do people just fling their waste into the streets?

Not that you, as GM, have to answer all those questions, but even answering one or two can lend a lot of atmosphere to your setting. Say that street lights are had by capturing souls and setting them on fire, which is something that happens to the souls of the poorest of the poor who can't afford proper burial. In Sword of the Serpentine's Eversink everyone tries to make statues for their dead, but there are always going to be people who can't manage that, or whose statues break. What if the alternative is an eternity roasting in hellfire so the wealthy can have decent street lighting? What kind of ghost catcher would the city have to employ to make that system work? How would the poor feel about that? Would there be riots, with people demanding that instead of using the poverty-stricken the city burns foreign souls instead? How do the characters feel about that?

Let's go from the general to the slightly more specific. What I want to talk about this time is the Building, as setting and as plot device.

Rear Window wouldn't work if all Jefferies did was stare at the murderer all day. He has an entire world at his disposal, from Miss Torso and Miss Lonelyhearts to the sculptor, the newlyweds, the old married couple, the composer, and dozens of others who appear and disappear like mayflies. They all exist within an artificial concept which I'm going to call The Building, even though the concept extends outside the walls of the structure to the coffee shops and railway stations of the film's 'outside world'. In the film's conceit the Building is literally that, and Jefferies is tied to that spot because he has a broken leg. The audience hardly ever sees anything from any perspective other than Jefferies' room.

Loadingreadyrun recently finished a short series directed by Jacob Burgess called Not A Drop To Drink, a Vampire chronicle set in Vancouver Island. I recommend it to anyone thinking about getting into tabletop but isn't sure how best to do it. However I bring it up now because of something Jacob said in the Q&A.

In answer to the question, was there anything you changed about the campaign due to decisions taken during session 0 (about 1.09.54 in), Jacob replies:

I had nothing planned going in ... I made a city, I wrote a city and all of the people in it ... and then you drop four [players] into it. I really didn't plan anything ahead of time and I used the elements people gave me, what they wanted, what they said some of the characters' desires were because those are sometimes different things and sometimes they even conflict ... to then feed in and fold everything in, so we all created the space we got to play in.

Jacob created a city and all of the people in it. Many settings do the same; Swords of the Serpentine again is a classic example of this, where the GM has an entire city at her disposal ready to be populated. 

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. 

Most of Rear Window happens within one apartment; Jefferies can see other apartments, other people, but he's as locked in as any prisoner in Sing Sing. If he wants to talk to other people, they either have to be in the room with him or he needs to call them on the phone. Half the tension in the final act is precisely because the audience is locked in there with Jefferies; they can't move any more or any further than he can. 

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. 

For example, in a Cyberpunk session that I'm creating for some friends of mine, I've created:

Zhirafa Alley: For whatever reason the Zhirafa police drones have a bug in their programming about this crossroads. There used to be a CHOOH2 station here, run by some of the Aldecaldos. That went up in the third strafe. Nobody knows what happened to piss the drones off, but they regularly zap moving targets and complaints to Precinct #2 are ignored. Shooting back does not help; it only summons more Zhirafas.

I haven't written any more than that. I shouldn't need to. There's enough here to paint a scene and give the players something to interact with. Whether or not they go any further than that is up to them. They might never encounter Zhirafa Alley. I certainly haven't splattered stats all over the page, any more than (I suspect) Jacob gave each and every one of the dozens of NPCs in Not a Drop full stats. What would be the point? 

Of course, if the players start paying close attention to Zhirafa Alley, that's a different story. That's the point at which I start thinking about stats, and motives, and other player-engagement things. Just as (I suspect) Jacob at least partially statted out the more important Not a Drop NPCs, like the Sherriff, as soon as he realized that NPC could become plot-critical. 

Moving from the slightly more specific to the very specific, consider this potential Cyberpunk answer to the question, where do the characters live?

If you've existed on the internet for longer than five minutes you've probably seen at least one story or video about Hong Kong's coffin homes:

Sourced from Channel NewsAsia via Mythopolis Pictures

Lest we get too sanctimonious, it's worth reminding ourselves that coffins are for the rich just as much as they are the poor:

Sourced from CNN

Sourced from Here be Barr

With the obvious caveat that the rich can buy much nicer coffins than the one in the Hong Kong video.

This is nothing new. We tend to think that the ideal middle class environment is the detached suburban house with garage, back yard, decent schools nearby for the 2.5 kids we intend to have and so on. We forget that suburbs are a very recent creation - late 19th century, with England's Metroland - and only came about because the train, and later the car, extended our reach. Before them, we could only ever go within walking distance of work and food. People lived in tiny houses or stuffed whole families into single rooms in big cities because there was no other affordable space. 

Public transport was an incredible boon that allowed places like London to burst their boundaries, with buses, trains and highways creating new suburban opportunities. Trouble being, nobody's invented anything better since then, and the boomer generation's greying suburbs means installing more highways or better rail networks is almost impossible because grandpa doesn't want that in his backyard. That creates more pressure on the existing habitable space, which in turn creates demand for even the smallest of city habitats.

In the world of CP RED space is at a premium. After the nuke dropped, refugees ran away from the hot zone and set up temporary-but-permanent tent housing in what was the former Beavertown of Rancho Coronado. Many people don't have the luxury of four walls and a roof. As for public transport ...

Surprise, surprise. Contrary to expectations, the Dark Future has not yielded any staggering new developments in transportation. Years of economic strife and civil unrest have discouraged research into new ways to travel—in fact, the very act of travel has become very restricted. Don't expect the inner-city world of the Time of the Red to be much like the 20th century—a network of crowded freeways, packed trains, and swarming airports. Instead, think of it as a patchwork of badly up-kept roads, abandoned airports, and trains plagued by gangs and intermittent service. (Main Book, Everyday Life p 322).

So if you want any kind of work at all you need to live close to where you work. Odds are unless you have a lot of cash in your pocket you can't afford whatever travel networks exist, and that assumes those networks are safe(ish) to use - which they almost certainly aren't. When Rancho Coronado was a Corporate-controlled Beavertown with actual transport options this wasn't a problem. Nowadays, though, when you can't even reliably drive anywhere and Rancho Coronado is basically a tangled slum, we have:

Crystal Rock

Nobody remembers how Crystal Rock got its name, but it probably wasn't a compliment. When refugees first started flooding into Rancho Coronado many of them were temporarily housed in this old sports stadium. Over time, as Rancho Coronado devolved and it became clear there were few options for the forcibly evacuated, enterprising businessmen started adding portable Cubes, as a kind of an upgrade to tent housing and uncovered sleeping pallets. After all, it's not like the Rancho Raiders were ever going to play here again. Cubes piled on top of Cubes, and a couple of Cargo Containers were added to the mix for those who could afford luxury accommodation. 

Cubes: You live in a single windowless room with a nice strong lock where you can touch both walls if you spread your arms. Flatpack furniture folds out of the walls, converting your cell from a chair with a desk to a bed with a small television. [Notice how even this is better than the Hong Kong coffin; there's space to sit, and a desk. You could work from home in this environment. It wouldn't be pleasant, but it would be doable.]

Cargo Containers: You'll have plenty of places to store your things, a bed to sleep comfortably, a desk, electricity, a refrigerator, microwave, and sink, protected by the security of a strong lock. 

None of this was designed by any kind of qualified architect. It just grew like Topsy, built on top of what was intended to be temporary tent housing inside a sports stadium. Think of it like a ring fort, with the outer ring being the old stadium (now basically a kind of glorified strip mall catering mainly to residents), the next ring being open air tents and sleeping pallets, the next ring being Cubes, and the innermost ring being Cargo Containers. The final two rings are piled on top of each other, on foundations of building rubble and old abandoned Cubes. Sometimes there's a shift underneath that shakes the whole structure. It probably doesn't mean anything. You get from low to tall by means of escalators, which don't always work. Climbing all the way up to Container level when the escalators don't work is a real five-storey-brownstone pain in the ass. Luckily some enterprising folks have set up little mobile kibble wagons at each level, some even with seating, so climbers can take a break when they need to. 

Many of the people who live here are in construction and entertainment. Company transport wagons bus them over to Pacifica Playground to the West, where there are plenty of jobs. The ones who don't work in Pacifica either work in one of the nearby construction or factory zones, or they have a hard time getting by.

Utilities (power and water) are handled on-site by filtration plants and solar generators. The Cubes and Containers aren't plumbed-in (though some of the more expensive Containers do have micro-shower cubicles). Instead there are public lavatories and showers inside the Stadium, accessed by private keys issued to tenants. The company that manages the utilities, toilets and showers, River Bend Management, is every tenant's love-to-hate company. Brownouts are common in the hot months, when everyone tries to run a fan or some kind of air conditioning. 

Wireless Nodes nearby are run by three different service providers, of which the most popular is Feebus, with its cartoon winged man logo. Feebus isn't more reliable than the others, but it's cheaper. 

Gang activity was a big problem in Crystal Rock's early days, but it's less of a problem now thanks in part to BozoByeBye, a loosely organized neighborhood watch. Originally set up by a Solo who's since moved out of Crystal Rock, BozoByeBye was created to deal with a persistent Bozo infestation in the Stadium. Nearly every permanent resident has the BBB app installed in their Agent, and it's generally assumed that when an alert pings someone in the group will deal with the problem. Eventually.

There is no security per se. River Bend keeps a remote eye on its installation and occasionally a Precinct #2 Zhirafa flies over, but there are no armed guards on patrol. 

OK, so that's the Building. More than enough information there to keep the players entertained. What about the people?

Let's stick to three per area to keep things as simple as possible. So what are the areas? Broadly: the Stadium, the Tents, the Cubes, the Containers.

Stadium: Khan a cheerful little man in his early thirties (Aikido 6) who owns and operates PatchIt, a clothing repair store, bullet holes a specialty. He's dry cleaner, leatherworker and tailor to all of Crystal Rock. When this was still a sports stadium his store was a souvenir shop, and he hasn't changed the layout much. He also runs a self-defense class for Crystal Rock tenants. 

                Mulligan a broad-faced woman in her early forties, techie, River Bend's main maintenance operative. Big fan of BBB, will abandon a job in progress to go hunting with her shotgun.

                Hooman an acne-scarred Fixer in his mid-twenties, the unofficial pharmacist for Crystal Rock. Limited medical skills, nothing like a ripperdoc or even a competent medtech but he can at least fill you full of narcotics, slap your ass and send you on your way.

Tents:       Alice, formerly a dancer with minor exotic body mods (cat), lost her main gig after a bout with cyberpsychosis. Scrapes a living refilling noodle Vendits in the Stadium, dreams of getting back into Pacifica. Local strip joint TropicalMotion keeps offering her work and she keeps turning it down. 

                El Nagar, a Solo lying low after a really bad gig. Light tattoos indicate Triad affiliations. Enhanced Antibodies, Skin Weave, Vampyres. Keeps a machete and an SMG on him at all times. Likes to play chess.

                Sudo, a gambling fanatic who sometimes has a Cube but more often than not is out in the tents again. His main game is poker. His prize possession is his Netrunning deck (500eb), the only thing he's never sold or pawned. 

Cubes:    Dirty Dirty, affiliated with the Aldecaldos, is Crystal Rock's Shylock. Mid-forties, broad and brawny. If you want a loan and have something to pawn, he's your guy. He doesn't really live in his Cube; it's more of a storage space for the stuff people give him. The lock's much better than average, and you won't get the combination from Dirty Dirty even at gunpoint. Day in, day out, you'll find him sat outside his Cube waiting for business.

                Mikey, construction worker (borgware Sigma, heavy lifter), eternally cheerful, to such an extent people wonder if he's permanently stoned. He does a lot of work in dangerous zones; people joke his footprints glow.

                 Cleo, kibble vendor who runs a stall out on the Cube's rooftops. Korean theme, has a popular sideline in medicinal foods or boyangshik. Always on the lookout for her deadbeat former girlfriend Seo-yun, who's often strung out on Hooman's latest batch.

Containers:  Hibiscus, rocker/entertainer at a Pacifica nightclub, Redemption. Age impossible to guess, apparent age twenty-one. They specialize in pre-Bomb classics, more feel-good than high-intensity. One of Khan's dedicated students, and often runs the class if he's not available (Aikido 6).  

                    Wally, corporate shark (literally - shark aquaform), works human resources for a construction firm, Premier General. He's one of the few people in Crystal Rock who was actually born in Rancho Coronado, pre-Bomb. He remembers coming to watch the Rancho Raiders with his dad when this was still a stadium.

                    Bobbi J, media, street scribe with a local music scene focus, a regular vidcast, Spread the Word, known in Rancho but not elsewhere. Popularly thought to have links with Network 54 talent scouts. Almost pro-level dancer, technicolor hair.

That's it. That's the Building. That's all you need. 

Insert players, watch plot develop. Will they help Cleo save Seo-yun? Go Bozo hunting with Mulligan? What's the deal with El Nagar, and will some heavy hitters come looking for the Solo down on his luck? Is Dirty Dirty going to have to break Sudo's leg before Sudo coughs up the cash? Is Mikey borderline cyberpsycho or is his permanent happiness actually the real deal? Jesus, what is up with Feebus today - reception's patchy as hell. Will River Bend ever fix the fracking toilets - and what is causing that stink anyway? (My money's on a dead Bozo Mulligan chased down an HVAC vent, but you never know ...) 

Enjoy!

                    

A Night On The Town (Swords of the Serpentine)

 

I've been watching Black Lagoon recently and am beginning to think that seinen anime like this is excellent viewing for Swords of Serpentine prep. Not because it's a fantasy setting - although a lot of what they get up to is basically fantasy with guns. It's because the action scenes are great fun to watch, and if you're a harried Game Master trying to think of something to throw at your bloodthirsty players then using something like this for inspiration is a good idea.

Also, from a purely Serpentine perspective, main character Rock pulls off a lot of interesting Sway attacks. 

Let's talk about One-Shots again.

OK, strong premise, start with action, clear goals. What else?

• Strong Roleplaying Opportunities: A complex network of social and political connections helps define Swords of the Serpentine. Take advantage of that and give Heroes interesting and challenging supporting characters to interact with, both as allies and enemies. Center adventures around social and political needs, as well as traditional adventure hooks such as greed and vengeance.
• A Plot and B Plot: The best adventures have both an A plot — the main goal of the adventure —and a B plot, a secondary plot thread that is likely unrelated. This might be about someone’s family, about personal growth, or about a foe or rival who keeps interfering. Having A and B plots allows you to shift the adventure focus from one plot to another any time play starts to slow down, and quite often the B plot can provide leads to help solve the A plot as well.
• Change the World: It’s a one-shot, so encourage Heroes use their influence to literally change the world around them. Unbalance power structures, seize power, and bring about societal change for good or ill. Why not? In a game where influencing others is a core mechanic, affecting the world around you in permanent ways is a fun way to show off the game’s strengths.

Black Lagoon features a team of pirates and smugglers operating out of the fictional harbor city of Roanapur in Thailand, near the border of Cambodia. It's one of the world's grey areas, and if you're a gunman or bounty hunter looking to make a reputation as well as a fortune this is the place to be. A scar-pocked statue of the Buddha overlooks the harbor, lending a spurious air of virtue to a town otherwise devoted to vice. [any of this sounding familiar, Serpentine fans?]

The Black Lagoon team, when not on a mission, often drop in at the Yellow Flag bar, and as luck would have it chaos usually erupts around them. Incidentally in nautical terminology a yellow flag is a disease marker, warning anyone who gets too close that the port is rife with deadly infectious plagues. So without even setting foot in the place you already know what you're getting into.

That's the kind of moment I'm aiming for in this one-shot: the team is about to step ankle-deep in manure, and doesn't even know it.

Let's talk about roleplay. 

The best kind of roleplay comes from high stakes. These can be personal high stakes or a more general threat to the area. They can be the kind of high stakes that come from violence or the more intimate sort that arise from, say, a Sway attack on a character's personal beliefs. Point being, this needs to be Serious Business. You can get good roleplay from quiet, downtime moments, but this is rare and usually only seen when the player is already a good roleplayer and relishing the moment. Whereas high stakes can get even the mousy, quiet ones involved.

In improv, the key is to keep moving forward without letting your brain get in the way of your mouth. If you think, you lose control of the moment because you lose momentum. If you want to know what letting your mouth do the work looks like I recommend Canadian lunatics Loadingreadyrun, whose videos can be found pretty much everywhere video content dribbles forth from the quivering demonic buttocks that is the Internet. Critical Role's good for this too. I swear some of those people haven't used their brains in years, but their mouths work just fine.  

I joke, but kidding aside, I bet everyone reading this has had something like this happen in their day-to-day:

I need to think of something cool to say. I need to think of something cool to say. I have thought of a cool thing. I am saying the cool thing. Huh. That did not work the way I thought it would.

If you spend time thinking about what to say you are not listening to what's being said, or paying attention to what's happening around you. That takes you out of the moment, so by the time you finally come up with something to say you've lost the chance to say it.

The same applies here. If you think too much about what to do you'll lose the chance to do it. 

 So what you're aiming for is high stakes + no brain = ACTION. The minute a player says 'let's think about this' it is your job as Game Master to squish that with the biggest boots you have. Preferably hob-nailed, with something nasty already smeared on the sole.

Changing the world goes naturally with high stakes. Maybe the crime boss who rules this district is about to go down in a pool of blood. Maybe someone's takeover plans are about to be thwarted, or assisted. Maybe a landmark is about to get burnt down, blown up, or sink beneath the watery limits of Eversink. There's bound to be disruption and with disruption comes blowback. Maybe the crime boss goes down but her allies are out for blood, or maybe when that landmark vanished it left behind a nasty Corruption stain. Whatever it is, the city changes - and adapts.

A & B plots can be literally anything. The A plot is obvious, the B plot less so, because the B plot will depend to a certain extent on the characters involved. Whereas the A plot is a plot unto itself, and doesn't depend on the characters at all - though they will definitely become involved. 

Let's begin.

A Night On The Town

Your heroes have coin in their purses for the first time in a while, and want to have a good time. Traditionally they stop off at their favorite bar for cheap drinks before moving on somewhere more lubricating - get a buzz on, then have fun.

The first thing you do is ask them to describe their favorite cheap bar. They can even name it if they like. For purposes of this narrative it's going to be called the Yellow Flag, but you can call it whatever best suits. Get each player to describe one thing about the bar. It can be anything from their favorite drink to the color of the stains on the wall.

From the Game Master's perspective, the Yellow Flag is a bar at water level with two storeys above it and a cellar below that isn't completely waterlogged yet. The level immediately above is a gambling house. The level immediately above the gambling house is open to the elements after a fire, and is currently occupied by squatters trying to repair what's left of the roof. The cellar below is used by a cheap sculptor who makes funerary statues for the very poor, claiming the corpses' hair in exchange to make wigs. Think Rashomon the short story rather than the film. Consequently the available floor space down there that isn't covered by half-made statuary is devoted to wig-making, and what little space there is left is where the sculptor lives.  

There are almost certainly other aspects to this building but those can be described in play. Are there secret chambers below the cellar? Bridges that lead from the squatter's section to the building next door? Some secret slide that goes straight to the water from the gambling house, so they can slice up deadbeats and get rid of the remains easily? Sure, why not?

This is a bad night to be at the Yellow Flag. Earlier that night the McGuffin was stolen from Two Smiles (Gang Boss stats), one of the most dangerous criminals in the area. The McGuffin was supposed to be handed over to the thief's patron at the Yellow Flag. Trouble is, the patron's second-in-command betrayed the op and Two Smiles knows where & when the handover's supposed to take place.

Two Smiles is hopping mad. An example has to be set. The best example Two Smiles can think of is to kill everyone in the Yellow Flag and take back the McGuffin. Meanwhile the second-in-command wants to knife the patron and steal the McGuffin for themselves. 

The action begins when the thief (Burglar stats), sometimes called the Mortician on account of her somber dress, gets to the Yellow Flag. She's clearly worried; she's seen Two Smiles' people gathering outside and fears the worst. She stops at the bar and slides a package to the bartender while she gets a drink. (She might slip the package to the heroes if the group decides they know the Mortician personally.) The heroes don't know what the package is but they should get a chance to see it and guess that it's important. Then the Mortician goes to one of the private booths at the back of the bar, where someone is waiting for her. (She doesn't entirely trust her patron, which is why she's leaving the McGuffin with the bartender. Or maybe she didn't leave the McGuffing with the bartender, and it's all a clever fake-out for the benefit of witnesses. Whichever it is will be determined in play.)

Little does the Mortician know that Dancing Meg (Sorcerer's Apprentice stats) has already made her move. Her master and the Mortician's patron, Zuane the Herbalist, is dead, his eyes burnt to a cinder as well as whatever's left of the contents of his skull. His corpse still sits in the private booth, awaiting discovery. Dancing Meg is upstairs with a few Mercenary bodyguards, pretending to gamble while waiting for the kick-off. As soon as Dancing Meg knows that Zuane's corpse has been discovered (she's keeping an eye on a magical hand-mirror whose counterpart overlooks the private booth) she'll make her play.

What nobody appreciates is that Two Smiles is not playing around. He has plenty of mooks at his disposal as well as his favorite Duelist, Stefano the Undying (two near-mortal wounds so far, and he's not dead yet) but his opening gambit is to block off every conceivable ground floor exit with mooks and then fling bottle after bottle of alchemist's fire in at every window and door. Anyone who tries to run outside to fling themselves in the canal gets sliced to pieces. The McGuffin is proof against flames, and besides Stefano and a group of mooks have special protective gear that will defend them from the fire (effective Armor 4 against alchemists fire only). It's their job to go in and get the McGuffin. Two Smiles' mooks have bows and arrows (or firearms, if used) as well as swords, so anyone who tries to get out an upper storey window or across the squatters' bridge will have problems.

So: the place is on fire. Anyone who goes outside will be brutally murdered. Upstairs is the sorcerer's apprentice and some heavily armed Mercs who want to get downstairs and take the McGuffin, were it not for all those pesky flames. Meanwhile everyone else in the bar, the gamblers upstairs, and the squatters all have immediate quality-of-life concerns.

Objective: survive the night, with or without the McGuffin. There are effectively three factions: the Mortician, Two Smiles and his people, and Dancing Meg and her Mercs. All three will need to be dealt with somehow.

Complication: if the heroes get out of the Yellow Flag without the McGuffin whichever of the enemy factions that doesn't have it will be convinced the heroes have it, since they don't. So they'll chase down the heroes and try to get the McGuffin from them. It'll take a lot of convincing to get them to back off. 

B Plot: the (in)famous private detective Yalo the Unhinged (Foreign Spy stats) is also after the McGuffin. Yalo claims he's working on behalf of the McGuffin's actual owner.  He's sitting at the other end of the bar nursing a drink when the action starts, having followed Zuane to this location. Think of Yalo as a combination Inspector Clouseau and Inspector Zenigata with an unfortunate curse: once a day he falls madly in love with someone. Anyone. Like one of the heroes, perhaps. This condition is completely out of Yalo's control, always lasts a day and a night, and Yalo's desperate for a cure. It's because he's been promised one that he's after the McGuffin.

Enjoy!