The Senses (RPG All)

First, a bit of housekeeping.

I shall be abroad next weekend, so no post. It's a bit of an unexpected trip for me but I need to see a tailor. No, really. A tailor. For lo, I am that in need of one, forsooth.

Now, on with the show.

I had intended to do a bit on Silent Hill 2, as the remake is out and, as a treat to self in October, I bought a copy. The plan - sinister and wicked, I'm sure you'll agree - was to play yesterday and talk about it today. I'd even intended to record some footage. 

Life had other plans. I couldn't get the damn thing to play. It hard crashed every time I left the cemetery, roundabout where Silent Hill Ranch is. I convinced myself it was a game problem, but in fact it was a me problem. I had to turn off my VPN. Once I did that, it worked a treat. However, the footage I'd been trying to shoot was lost to the void and it's difficult to get that 'first time' energy when I'd already seen the intro three or four times by that point. 

Still. What little I've seen so far is convincing. If you enjoy the genre and the series, it's worth your money and time. 

It does mean that I'm left with little to talk about. I haven't seen much beyond the first half hour or so. I haven't been to Neely's Bar. I can say that, while this is very like the original, it isn't exactly alike beat-for-beat. The game can still catch you by surprise, even if you - as I have - played the original, perhaps many times before. 

Let's talk about atmosphere and the senses. 

Touch. Sight. Taste. Smell. Hearing.

Let's use a stock location to explore options: an art gallery. Located in a not-quite-fashionable part of town. What used to be tenements and low-rent housing has become just that little bit gentrified, and this is the result. 

The sky is dark. Streetlamps gleam, little oases of light in inky darkness. The air is heavy and wet; a storm is coming. A brace of stars glimmer in a cloud's rent, the moon smothered. Not another soul on the street, but there are lights in some of the windows, a radio's buzz, laughter, a touch of warmth.

The gallery's doors are wide open.

The first piece that greets you as you walk in the door is a sculpture half the size of a man, twisted as if under a colossal weight or pressure, its tendons gleaming. The floor under your feet is somehow sticky; the soles of your shoes protest just a little every time you move. Peppermint. The antiseptic air is underlaid with the slightest whimper of peppermint. The sensation waters your mouth, just a little.

Touch, Sight. Taste. Smell. Hearing.

It's worth your while borrowing a trick from Dungeons and Dragons. In that system, and in BRPG to a degree though not as often, it's standard practice to write up a brief description of each room in the dungeon as the players enter it for the first time. 

Unfortunately, Dungeons and Dragons often wastes that opportunity by telling you the dimensions of the room or other trivia. As if it matters whether this room is 20 foot by 15. What matters is what the floor is made of, whether it's rough, smooth or something else, whether the air is fresh or foul.

If you've ever been into a house or office that's been shut up for a while, you know it instantly by how the air feels. A kind of trapped, heavy sensation, underlaid with a little damp or rot. If something died in here it decomposed long ago but there may still be a little reek, adding its stench to the mix. If you're sensitive, you may break out in hives or find it difficult to breathe. Your skin may reflexively prickle, as if touched by a thousand needles at once.

It's difficult to think of the right words, on the fly. Much easier to do as D&D does and write them down in advance. Which is what the Cameos and Stock Locations in GUMSHOE are for. They give you something to hang your ideas on; what you do after that is up to you.

Some ideas:

• Touch:  
• Slippery, twisting, a cat's reluctance.
• Sticky, its casing covered in fluids.
• Hot, just the wrong side of comfortable to the touch.
• Cold, as if it's been dipped in negative space.
• Sight:
• Far-off, just on the edge of perception.
• Somehow visible in every possible detail, to the least crevice and crack.
• Impossible to see completely, it fades in and out.
• Behind you - but you can see a portion out of the corner of your eye/
• Taste:
• Cloying, sweetness overpowering and omnipresent.
• Sharp, acrid, bitter, poisonous.
• Molten sunlight that lingers and vanishes.
• A sensory nail through the tongue that no amount of milk will kill.
• Smell:
• It rips through your nostrils demanding instant attention.
• Antiseptic, bitter, a thousand thousand hospital floors.
• The least hint of something, like daffodils in the Milky Way.
• Leaden absence of life, light, hope - dust, and nothing more.
• Hearing:
• A siren's bold wail, out of sight but drawing nearer.
• Laughter's warm spice, without malice, without shame.
• A sudden glimmer of caution, a warning just on the edge of perception.
• Battering and blowing, a gale demanding entrance.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

Dungeons and Dragons Player's Handbook 2024

I am the first person to get one of these, on-island.

This according to the store owner, who ought to know.

Short version: this is about 60 pages longer than its predecessor, more or less, and feels as if there's not as much there. 

I'm guessing part of the extra length went on spell descriptions. That section is considerably chunkier, about 100 pages more or less compared to the previous book's 80-odd. However, most of the bulk seems to be character classes and their various subclasses, which has gone from 70-80 pages to about 130.

Gone are the extra creative fillips. Gone are the extracts from writers like Margaret Weis, Tracy Hickman, Erin Evans. Gone are the call-out boxes like Met With Mistrust (Tieflings) Excellent Ambassadors (Half-Elves, now extinct), Monastic Traditions, Druids and the Gods, the example characters Tika and Artemis, the paragraph of description at the start of every class section (A tall human tribesman strides through a blizzard, draped in fur and holding his axe ...). Gone is the list of recommended reading. 

Even the art is kinda gone. Don't get me wrong; there's still pretty things to look at, and plenty of them. But some of the best pieces (like a full page Ravenloft splash with the usual suspects facing off in Strahd's fortress) are taken from other books. The others ... standard stuff, I guess, but to my untrained eye it looked as if someone said 'we have six poses. Six. Don't go nuts. Stick to the six.'

'Oh, and put a smile on those faces. Everyone's having a good time, ok?' 

Not that they all grin like Joker, but there's an odd lack of genuine emotion across the board. Frankly, after a while it feels less like an exploration of epic fantasy and more like a stroll through the lobotomy ward. It's as if there were two emotional states available, neutral, and smiling. Rarely laughing. Just smiling. 

Except for the Ravenloft piece. Nobody's having a good time in Strahd's castle.

I don't mind the rules changes. It makes sense to me that, say, your stat boosts (to STR, WIS, CON and so on) are based on your background not your ra ... species. Someone who spends their entire life working as a farmer is bound to be marked by that experience. Though I will say that, if Wizards are going in that direction, they needed a lot more backgrounds. 

Particularly given that your starting Feat is also based on your background. I can see a time coming when the players say 'ok, this NPC is clearly a Criminal, so they almost certainly have the Alert feat ...'  

I don't mind the bland player character sheet. In this shiny modern day and age there'll be a dozen of those up on teh Internets in all the usual places before the week is out. Within a month there will be far better character sheets available for free than anything Wizards could put in the book.    

It should be simple enough to use existing books with this new manual. The actual changes are slight. It's the work of maybe a minute to take the information in Volo's about, say, Tabaxi, and translate that to this new ruleset. You'd need to rejig the special traits a little and ignore anything about a stat boost. That's about it. 

I don't doubt that there are some rules changes, some feat rewordings, which will cause many arguments at many tables. The one I spotted was Weapons Mastery. 

A weapon is just a stick with a sharp bit, if you don't know how to use it. If you do, you can unlock special actions like Nick, Cleave, Topple and others. The martial classes - fighter, barbarian, paladin and so on - get a kind of mastery for free at 1st level. They have the option of taking mastery in a particular weapon or weapons mentioned in their basekit (eg. paladins get simple and martial weapons at basekit, which covers a wide range of sticks with sharp bits) but they don't get mastery in every weapon they know. Just the one or two out of the basekit list that they pick. They have the option of changing that weapon mastery at Long Rest, so the paladin who was a master of the longsword can switch to being a master of the halberd, eg.

I can almost smell the arguments incoming. "But I can switch!" "Yeah, at Long Rest. Did you? No. You didn't say. You're stuck with that longsword mastery." Or "we're not having a Long Rest right now, there's too much to do." "But I want to change my master weapon!" Or "Hey! You just picked up that weapon, how come you have mastery in it?" "Oh, uh ... by pure chance I trained in this type of weapon at the last Long Rest." Or "If you just escaped from [prison/durance vile/whatever] with no weapons to train with, how come you have mastery in that one?" "Well, before we were captured, months ago, I trained in this weapon type and never lost mastery, so ..." 

Added to all that is the Weapon Master feat which is a different beast (4th level General feat) with roughly the same intended use, which might end up a feat without a user. The people most interested will be the martial classes but if they already have a form of mastery at basekit, why take the feat? There is a stat bonus attached, but there are plenty of ways to get a stat bonus that don't require wasting a feat slot.

Maybe non-martials will want it? But even rogues (damage dealers but not a natural front line weedwhacker) get the base weapon mastery at 1st level. Only the weedy wizard and suchlike don't. Maybe there's a caster build out there somewhere which wants a sub-par weapons feat? As a replacement for one of the much more useful, class-relevant feats out there?

All that said, I think the most telling changes are the switch in priorities.

In the prior edition the book goes from an Introduction (Worlds of Adventure! How to Play!) which is maybe a few pages long and then leaps straight into Character Creation, where who you are - Race, a little over 20 pages, followed by Classes, then a half a dozen pages on Personality and Background - is the important bit. It lures you in with bold, glittering ideas, followed by a spotlight on You, the Hero.

In the 2024 edition it tells you What You Need right from the jump, followed by a lengthy description of game mechanics. You're 48 pages in before it begins to talk about Classes. More than 180 pages in before it talks about Species, the new way to describe Races. 

This is a system where Who You Are is far less important than How You Play The Game. 

That could be a problem. This book, out of all the books in Dungeons and Dragons, is the ambassador. The carnival barker outside the tent, luring in the rubes. It's the one that everyone's going to own, whether player or dungeon master, experienced gamer or filthy casual. 

It needs to be persuasive. It needs to sell itself. 

I don't know that starting out with 30-odd pages of fairly esoteric rules and little significant flavor text is the way to go.

Maybe I was warned right from the jump when I saw the book had dropped all those fantasy novel quotes, the flavor text at the beginning of the class description, the recommended reading list. This is a book about the rules of the game. Not about its soul. 

That's what I meant earlier when I said it felt as if there was less here than before. Reading this is like wandering through an empty house. You see where all the furniture was, once upon a time. Nothing there now.

Ultimately, I can't judge it. Its companion volume, the DMG, isn't out yet; the Tweedledee to its Tweedledum. 

We'll see. 

I blame Greg Tito, that base, villainous dastard, for getting me back into Dungeons and Dragons. I worked with Greg at the Escapist. I remember his enthusiasm for gaming, the way his little chipmunk face would light up talking about Dungeons and Dragons. It was his persuasive spiel that lured me into Ravenloft and from there to other things. I wonder what he's up to these days ... 

       

Floating Scenes (RPG All)

I've talked in the past about having information ready for an improv moment. I said:

There’s no accounting for taste. Players get all sorts of ideas in their heads. You can’t anticipate them. They might decide to forge their own copy of the [McGuffin], or steal a copy from somewhere else, or murder all those disappointed customers. Anything’s possible.  

This is where improv comes in. I’m sure I don’t need to describe improv to you. The basic point is this: you need to have just enough random facts at your disposal that you can deploy them as necessary in a yes, and situation. If this becomes a crime scene, you need to have some stats for cops. If this becomes a fight, you need some stats for mooks, monsters, what have you. If this becomes a criminal conspiracy, you need some criminals, and so on. 

The great thing about these improv stats is, you don’t need them for one scenario. You need them for all scenarios. Which means you can re-use them as needed.

I went on to say:

When [the opposition] Acts, they take the initiative. In this case, they do a thing that complicates the scene. 

When [the opposition] Reacts, they take the back seat. Because you complicated the scene, they had to do something.

Improv Stats: in which everyone can be classified as Clever, Industrious, Lazy, or Stupid, with the qualifier Hostile, Indifferent or Friendly.

I've already discussed what that looks like for NPCs.

What does that look like in a Scene?

Just what is a Floating Scene, anyway?

Briefly, a Floating Scene is a Scene which you have sketched out in advance and deploy, as needed, in a plotline that wasn't anticipating whatever it was that the players did to start this scene. 

Say that your plot requires the characters to talk to a particular NPC and get information from them. Instead, the players decide to steal the NPC's wallet, or beat them up, or take some other hostile action that removes any and all possibility that the NPC will cooperate with them. 

Or, say they knock out a particularly important bridge.

Viva la Dirt League

That's when you need a Floating Scene. To cover those moments when you don't have anything else handy. The rabbit lurking in your hat. 

In this example, I'm going to use law enforcement as the opposition. 

Most settings that aren't overrun by zombies have some form of law enforcement. It may be very rudimentary; Dogberry and his mates roaming around with billhooks, for instance. It may be sophisticated. It may be automated, or run by magic, or depend entirely on the whims of Heaven, but there will be some poor shmoe (or group of shmoes) tasked with making sure society doesn't crumble overnight and things which have not yet been stolen remain in the hands of their lawful owners. 

The great thing about this is, because law enforcement of some kind or other exists in almost all systems, you can use the same floating scenes in different systems. The physical stats and powers will change, but a floating scene doesn't depend on stats and powers. It depends on roleplay and motivations.  

For purposes of this example, the opposition is tagged as Indifferent and Clever. By that I mean, they're clever enough not to fall for obvious ploys and they have no particular reason to favor or harm the player characters. Just doing their job. 

There are two possibilities: they Act, or they React. 

If they Act, then they were probably called into the scene by someone else. That means they have some information about what to expect when they get there. Not a lot, and it may be misleading, but the hypothetical 911 may have said something along the lines of 'shots fired!' or 'there's intruders in my house!' In the worst case they may have already been surveilling the scene from a distance, for whatever reason, and chose this moment to intervene. In that case they probably know exactly what to expect when they get to the scene.

If they React, then they stumbled into the scene. They were on patrol, or whatever the equivalent of patrol is, saw something suspicious and decided to do something. They know little or nothing about what to expect when they get there. They may overreact, or they may take the wrong action altogether. 

Much Ado About Nothing

Police Act: Medium Threat: Code 3

A police group medium threat arrive on scene. Their order of action is:

1. Arrest, if a crime is obviously taking place.
2. Shut down whatever's going on and close off the scene.
3. Investigate the scene of the crime, if a crime has obviously taken place but is not ongoing.
4. Interrogate any witnesses.

Personality: veterans at end of shift, tired but cautious. 

Resources: arms, armor, ability to summon backup (another medium threat).

Four Things:

• Someone named [insert superior's name/rank here] is very important to them and they keep referencing this person (eg. 'the captain's gonna be all smiles tonight.')
• They're grumpy about having to extend their shift and will be on the lookout for coffee or similar.
• They will not rush into combat but won't back down from a fight either.
• ROME [whatever Rome is, this time out.]

OK, so most of that should be self-explanatory. Medium threat means that they pose a medium level threat to the protagonists. You already know that they're Clever and their tactics should reflect that. They're Indifferent, so some kind of negotiation or bluff is possible but not likely.  

Police React: Medium Threat: 11-54 

A police group medium threat stumble onto the scene. 11-54 is Suspicious vehicle but really the inciting incident could be anything. Their course of action is:

1. Assert their authority.
2. Ask questions.
3. Detain any suspicious characters for further interrogation back at the station.
4. Any reasonable excuse or bluff gets them to leave the scene.

Personality: veterans at end of shift, tired but cautious. 

Resources: arms, armor, ability to summon backup (another medium threat).

Four Things:

• Someone named [insert superior's name/rank here] is very important to them and they keep referencing this person (eg. 'the captain's gonna be pissed if we don't get a move on.')
• They're grumpy about having to extend their shift and will be on the lookout for coffee or similar.
• They will not rush into combat but won't back down from a fight either.
• ROME [whatever Rome is, this time out.]

See how little changes? Exactly the same four things. The same personality, resources. The course of action is the only variable. 

OK, that's a couple of Floating Scenes involving law enforcement. There are no stats, because those will change depending on the system. The scenes are designed to be used in any system. There's not a lot of meat on the bones but that's because these are Floating; a designed scene has props, scenery, clues, but this is something you're doing on the fly, so you have to leave a lot up to chance and the situation at the table on the day.

Suppose it's not law enforcement?

If this is a horror setting, for example, it's reasonable to expect supernatural activity of some kind. Probably death, or a series of deaths, both recent and long past. Something moody and mysterious.

Supernatural Act: Medium Threat: Restless

A supernatural manifestation. A swarm of [whatever fits, rat-equivalent] invade the scene. 

If not attacked or interrupted the swarm moves in an ordered, ritualistic way, forming strange patterns and moving in absolute union. As they do so, a melody plays; the music seems unconnected with the swarm but the player/instrument cannot be seen. POTENTIAL SAN/STABILITY/EQUIVALENT loss.

If attacked or interrupted the swarm becomes an undead/infernal/equivalent version of its current form and attacks the person who attacked or interrupted it. The swarm will concentrate on that target(s); anyone who did not attack or interrupt is left alone unless that person engages them. The melody becomes a screeching cacophony.   POTENTIAL SAN/STABILITY/EQUIVALENT loss.

Once the encounter is dealt with / left to play out, a CLUE is left behind as to the nature of ROME or the mission objective, whichever best suits.

Supernatural React: Medium Threat: Restless

A supernatural reaction. A swarm of [whatever fits, rat-equivalent] are attracted to the scene.

This may be deliberate (eg. someone let the lab animals out of their cages, someone laid bait for the swarm) or accidental.

The first few of the swarm move aimlessly, like cockroaches caught in light. They can be avoided or crushed quickly. If either of those two things happen, the encounter stops at that point.

If left to their own devices, then within a number of (combat rounds or the equivalent) the full swarm gathers, and this plays out as Supernatural Act: Restless.

In situations like this you don't really need Four Things. You can have them, don't get me wrong. It will be useful to have them if there's a risk of this becoming a roleplay encounter. However, in a situation like this the more likely result is a brief combat moment and if that happens then the Four Things become basically irrelevant.

How many of these do you need? Well, how many do you think you'll use? After all, the whole point is to have these on hand for those moments when the players ski off-piste. You know your players best; how often is that likely to happen? A lot? Then you need a good variety of floating scenes. Once or twice a session? Then about half-a-dozen is a good number, to allow a choice of options. Almost never? Then you could get away with one or two prepped.

Don't forget you can re-use these as often as you like. Particularly if you play with different groups or in different settings. A Cop encounter in Elizabethan London is going to look very different from a Cop encounter in 2016 Berlin, even if the basic script is the same.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!      

PS if I were to write a list of floating scenes for DriveThru, would there be takers?

 

 

 

 

 

The Joys of Collecting

I recently got back into collecting films (thanks be to Terracotta) and I just spent more than I ought on books (thanks be to Thompson Rare Books) all of which got me thinking about when I first picked up the collecting bug.

Back in the mists of time I went to Reading University and joined the WARUS Society (wargaming & roleplaying - I think it must be the precursor to GARPS). It was my first time living abroad and the first time I lived anywhere that was close to a gaming convention. At that time Reading (and the surrounding area) was host to at least three, including Europe's version of GenCon. Briefly, anyway. The Student's Union thought we were responsible for GenCon being at Reading so we got all sorts of bennies, right up till GenCon upped sticks and went to ... France ??? [memory error] ... for a while. Salute was nearby too; looks like they've upped sticks as well. It certainly wasn't anywhere as fancy as the EXCEL center. My memory says there was at least one other but damned if I can tell you which.

It was the first chance I really had to collect anything.

Hell, it was nearly the first chance I had to go to a gaming store. Before that when I was in high school we dipped into a shopping mall when I was on the Washington DC trip and I picked up some of Steve Jackson's stuff plus (if my memory's not playing with me) The Tower of Indomitable Circumstance, a Judge's Guild scenario.

I see you get a toe shot as well, you lucky devil.

It's in remarkably good shape for its age. The cover's a little shot but otherwise everything's there.

That, incidentally, was the first time I encountered that pesky devil, sales tax. Caught me by surprise. I had to spare-change a classmate to be able to afford it.

The only other time I got to see the inside of a gaming store on a regular basis was when I was at King's College Taunton (a place I do not remember fondly) and the Taunton store must have closed; at least, I look at the map and I don't recognize any of the names.

Reading was the first time I really lived in a place, took care of myself as opposed to having other people take care of me, and it was the first time I got to spend my own money. 

So of course I spent it on RPG stuff. 

I had quite a few boxes, once. I've culled a fair amount of it. I discovered that stuff is stuff, it collects dust and roaches whether it's paperback Agatha Christies or antique TSR scenarios, and there are only so many hours in the day so why spend them taking care of inanimate objects that do not love you back?

These days I keep the things I want to keep and bung the rest, but I wanted to talk about the one guiding principle to my collecting that has never left me:

Will I use this?

This is one of my earliest purchases. I think I first saw it in the WARUS games cupboard and knew I had to have a copy of my own. Seven Sinister Scenarios! 80 pages of terror! They don't even waste the frontispiece and back pages, which are devoted to maps of Maine and Arkham. I see it had a re-release in 2022 so theoretically there should be copies out there on the Ebays and probably the stalls of some RPG convention or other. 

I got this because I knew I would use it. Have used it, many times.

There are a couple clunkers among the seven. Black Devil Mountain is basically a dungeon crawl and Gate From The Past is an absolute stinker (six shoggoths? SIX SHOGGOTHS? SIX BLEEDING SHOGGOTHS JAYSUS PLEASE US! WHY ADD DINOSAURS ON TOP OF SIX FECKIN ... [unitelligible])

But the ones that work? They really, really work. The Auction. The Asylum. The Madman. Even The Mauritania and Westchester House are pretty decent; you might not want to play them every chance you get, but they're playable and entertaining. 

For my money The Auction is the best of the bunch, and for those of you on the lookout for crossover material it works really well as a Bookhounds of London scenario. Plus, at the end of it the Hounds might possess a McGuffin that could power an entire campaign. Choice!

The Asylum is very nearly neck-and-neck with the Auction. The villain is suitably villainous and there's enough background here to hint at even more sinister goings-on which, again, can power an entire campaign. It could be retro engineered to take place somewhere other than New England but that would take some doing.

The others are just plain old fun and The Madman has the added advantage of fitting well with The Asylum. It could be used as a precursor scenario with very little difficulty.

Now let's move on to something I didn't buy until much, much later.

Masks is of similar vintage to The Asylum. First came out in 1984, which is about the same time The Asylum saw print. I could have picked it up easily. 

Why didn't I?

I couldn't use it. Still can't, really.

I know it's one of the beloved shibboleths of the Chaosium canon. Mine is the 1996 edition. Masks garnered great reviews when it first came out and it's been a staple of the Cthulhu scene since it launched.

Ehhhh.

See, I have the same problem with this as I have with some of the earliest Cthulhu products. Cthulhu Classics is a bit similar. Even Horror on the Orient Express - one of my favorite campaigns - has this problem. 

Put simply, the story as written is a meatgrinder. Insert characters here, re-roll characters half an hour later, have some backups for half an hour after that. 

Bear in mind this was written in the Before Times, when the average investigator carried two tommy guns, a shotgun, a barrel full of dynamite and a couple grenades attached to their unmentionables. (Encumbrance rules exist for a reason, kids). They existed to do damage, lots of it, in a hell of a hurry. This caused a kind of arms race between Keeper and Players, and since the Keeper had access to all the best toys the Keeper usually won. But not without devoting significant firepower and damage reducing armor to the enemy forces.

What this invariably means is, the investigators march from bloodbath to bloodbath. Either they outgun the cultists, or the cultists outmatch them. More often, the cultists outmatch them. Thus the investigators take cover and watch all the exciting stuff, which they could be involved in, take place just out of reach. Gods are summoned, ancient priestesses brought back to life, strange craft built and launched - and the investigators can do little or nothing about it. Unless they're packing an extraordinary amount of heat. 

See, what I like is a story where anyone can get involved. Where you don't have to be Rambo to get the job done. One of the things I like about Baldur's Gate 3 is that you can have almost any party combination and still have a decent shot at winning. There are multiple ways to solve most problems, multiple ways to get to any location in the game. 

With campaigns like Masks, as written, there's usually only one way to solve the problem. 

From Dr. Strangelove

Yes, that's what the bullets are for (you twit) but I don't like stories where the only answer is to shoot until it stops moving.

That's it from me. Enjoy!

Sacrifices for Art (Bookhounds of London)

This week's post is inspired by a report from the Guardian about a display currently on show at the V&A in London. Theatre lover Gabrielle Enthoven is getting the recognition she deserves.

Sourced from Wikipedia

Short version: Gabrielle Enthoven fell in love with the theatre at a young age and continued her obsession till the day she died, in 1950. She married but it doesn’t seem to have been a happy arrangement, and after her husband died she never remarried. A child of privilege, she had connections to royalty and spent her life among high society.

She never missed a show.

I don’t know if any of you work in theatre or are theatre fans, but if you are, you know Gabrielle’s type. Someone who’s always there. Seats booked, opening night. Knows the cast on a first name basis. Can’t be kept away from the theatre door. If she breaks her leg then she’s there the next day on crutches – or in her sedan chair, more likely.

Her obsession led her to become a collector’s collector. She wants everything from playbills to scripts to tickets to costume designs. Her home was stuffed full of theatrical ephemera which she did her best to pass on to a museum for curation and safekeeping, a self-appointed task that proved surprisingly difficult. It eventually went to the Victoria and Albert and formed the basis for that institution’s theatrical collection.

In the 1930s she would have been in her early sixties, a fixture of the London theatrical scene. By that point she was working daily at the V&A cataloguing the museum’s collection – her collection - and was paying for three staff to assist her. Anything and everything to do with the theatre, past and present, was meat and drink to her.

From a Bookhounds perspective, she’s a perfect Patron. Assuming the Hounds can attract her attention. Any number of theatre mavens, Bright Young Things and other moths drawn to her flame might come to the Hounds for material. Actors on the rise, or trying to avoid the fall, might seek her help, and therefore the Hounds’ help in finding material she’d deem suitable. In 1933 she becomes Vice President of the Passing Theatres Association, a group dedicated to seeking out ephemera related to old, dead theatres.  Which sounds a lot like Plot Hook Central for Hounds and has the added advantage that the Hounds themselves can be members of the Association.

People likely to know her or want to know her: Scribblers (p42 main book), Artists (p48), Bright Young Things (p45), Boffins (p48, particularly if connected to the V&A or a similar institution). Possibly Solicitors of the older generation, particularly if they spent some time in the Colonial Service; her father was Judge Advocate General in the Crimea and India, a renowned legal brain. 

Her parties are famous and she's well-travelled, so she's likely to know all sorts of people. She spent some time in New York and knows that city's theatrical establishment well, and her connections to royalty mean she has links with the highest levels of society both here and on the Continent. Once she gets her museum collection, she spends a lot of time cataloging material at the V&A, so if the Hounds want to ambush her at her place of work, they'd best stake out the museum, which she visits every day at 10am on the dot.

All that said:

A Most Exclusive Gathering

Lounger Harvey Walters, fresh off the boat from America, wants in to Gabrielle Enthoven's inner circle. He's desperate to find something to win her favor and to get him into the Passing Theatres Association.

He haunts all the bookstores looking for prizes, and the Hounds can earn a few spondulicks selling him whatever they can scrape up. Walters appears to be minted, but it's always difficult to tell with loungers. Maybe he has it in the bank, maybe he doesn't. 

He becomes obsessed with the Corinthian Hall, a rather grand establishment in North Finchley that was built in 1850 and expired in 1910, briefly becoming a picture house before burning in a fire. The original building's been knocked down but there's been arguments over how best to use the site, so nothing's been built there since. 

If the Hounds can get him something from the Corinthian Hall that impresses Gabrielle Enthoven enough to let him into one of her exclusive parties, Walters offers the world on a plate. Money is no object. 

Option One: Dreaming, Dreaming. There is still a Corinthian Hall in North Finchley. Every night six dreamers will it into existence again, to remind themselves of past glories. If the Hounds can track them down, using Magick or Megapolisomancy, they can enter the dream, find the Hall, and take what they like from it. However, they need to be careful. Nightgaunts circle the Hall, guarding it from intrusion. Should the Hounds attract their attention they may find themselves on an unscheduled flight, high above London.

Option Two: Gabrielle's Dilemma.  Gabrielle Enthoven knows Harvey Walters all too well. When she was in New York the fellow was an absolute pest, wittering on about Mythos forces lurking in every shadow while committing every sort of faux pas imaginable at her New York parties. She dispatches agents of her own to make sure that the Hounds fail in their mission. If the Hounds ally with Gabrielle and secretly sabotage Harvey, those Mythos forces he blithers on about may become all too real. There is no wrath like a Mythos stalker scorned. 

Option Three: Corinthian Shadows. The ruins of the old Hall are very dangerous to the unwary. Anyone who gets too close finds themselves obsessed with the former Theatre, and eventually sacrifices their lives in an attempt to get close to it. This is because the Hall is home to a kind of psychic vampire that exists by draining life energy; the vampire's physical body was destroyed in the fire, and it's building another out of bits of its victims. Gabrielle Enthoven knows about it which is why she and her friends in the Passing Theatres Association never try to get anything from the Corinthian Hall. They've warned Harvey but he won't listen. Will the Hounds?

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

House (1977 Film)

 

Sourced from Criterion

Sometimes it's just for fun.

I run a small cinema group down here. We watch films on the big screen in the drama society bar. I supply the film every Monday night. October is on its way and I'm putting together the cinema list: Yokai: 100 Monsters, The Haunting, probably Night of the Demon and then I'm a bit torn. I have options. I could go for Kurokeno. I could go for Kwaidan. Both are solid choices.

Then I reminded myself that House exists.

So of course I had to watch it again.

Have you seen it? Once seen, never forgotten. I don't know that I'd recommend it, exactly. You have to have a love of surrealist imagery and a tolerance for nonsense. If you have both those traits, then, by golly and by Gadfrey, this is a film you'll love.

Gorgeous, a headstrong teen, is surprised when her film composer dad comes back home from a shoot with a new bride in tow, replacing her beloved dead mother. Consumed by angst and mommy issues, Gorgeous decides to run off to the countryside for a while to see her aunt, her mother's sister. She gathers up her friends Kung Fu, Professor, Sweet, Fantasy, Melody, and Mac, and brings them all to a nice place in the country. It will be a summer vacation to remember.

For the rest of their lives. 

Director and producer Nobuhiko Obayashi would go on to have a long and successful film career, but this was one of his earliest outings and a big risk for Toho Studios. They wanted him to make Jaws, the Japanese version. He wanted ... well ... this. Which was a tough sell. All Toho's usual people refused to direct it, thinking it would end their careers. To be fair, it probably would have. This is the kind of thing that can only be made by someone who truly believes in the material. 

Obayashi believed.

This is one of those times when the belief shines through. 

The aunt turns out to be a Hidgeous Fiend In Human Form. That's not me spoiling; the movie makes it very clear from the moment she shows up on screen, early in the runtime. She's a vampire, and she's not at all well, since all the young people are dead or moved away and she has nobody to eat. Now here's the niece with her six friends. begging to be devoured. Yum! 

Special shout-out to Mac, the one who goes first. Before she does, she turns her head and gives a smiling farewell to her dear friends, not realizing she's about to become vampire chow. But the way that moment happens ensures the Audience (with a capital A) knows what's about to happen. 

It's not the last time Mac appears on screen. It's just the last time she's seen alive. 

Night of the Living Dead is one of my favorite films, and that's not just because it's a classic. It's because you can see, on screen, everyone's enthusiasm for the project. It was made by a bunch of crazy cinema fanatics sleeping in bunkbeds in an old house that was going to be torn down once the shoot ended, so they could do what they wanted to it. Furnished by Goodwill. The car in the opening sequences belonged to the director's mother. Made on a shoestring, crafted with care. That sort of thing.

That's how I feel about House. It's ropey as hell. The special effects are certainly ... special. But it has that quality, the raw enthusiasm bleeding off of every scene. Crafted with care. 

There's really nothing else like it.

If I had to drag one fact off the screen and use it in every TTRGP from now until the end of time it would be this: enthusiasm sells. Your game is not perfect. I guarantee you will make mistakes. But you are the best (and often only) salesman for this product. If you go all-in, if you make sure everyone sees how much care you invested, if you show your enthusiasm, you will get players onboard. 

Not all players, mind. Not everyone loves House. But you will get players, and you can't game without them.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai (Bookhounds, RPG All)

It is not made of air at all, but of ghost - the substance of quintillions of quintillions of generations of souls blended into one immense translucency ... Lafcadio Hearn, Kwaidan

Yokai: 100 Monsters, via Shudder

Got to see this courtesy of a box set from Terracotta, which I highly recommend.

Bad people do bad things, upset the local spirits, and the expected results result. So far, so plot, but what makes it work is its use of the traditional storytelling game Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai as a plot device, allowing the narrative to be broken up into shorter chunks. 

Briefly, the idea is to gather your friends in a shadowy room, at night. Preferably during the Festival of the Dead, for maximum effect. 100 lamps or candles are lit and provide the only light in the room (or rooms - there are different ways of playing the game). As a ghost story reaches its conclusion, a light is snuffed. With each story, the spirits - the yokai - come ever closer to the gathering, and with the last candle gone, they are in the room with the participants. 

For that reason, it was common for the last story to remain untold, keeping the last candle lit. Or, as in 100 Monsters, you could have a cleansing ritual after the last tale to achieve the same effect.

You've probably seen versions of this in other films or may have played one of the many games inspired by it - Ten Candles, say. 

In 100 Monsters the effect is heightened by a series of special folding partition screens, each with their own image of horror, provided especially for the evening's entertainment by the storyteller. As the light dims, the images begin to seem as if they glow in the dark, or at least move of their own accord. Prints were made of the stories which could, theoretically, be used in similar fashion. Many books were printed to help participants come up with their own stories; Lafcadio Hearn used them in his own Kwaidan, which inspired many a film.

How to Bookhounds this? Or to RPG in general?

The obvious route is to hold a Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai in-game. 

Some settings - Swords of the Serpentine, say - have explicit rules for non-physical combat. In Swords, Sway is the technique used where the intent is to damage morale rather than someone's physical form. A Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai could be an extended Sway challenge. 

Or, in Night's Black Agents, this could be a means of arranging a Thrilling Stability challenge. Stability isn't usually thought of as an ability pool, and Thrilling challenges are reserved for, say, Gambling, or Driving. But there's an undeniable attraction to gathering all of these badasses in a dark, shadowy place, and getting them to compete for the McGuffin through telling ghost stories. Particularly when there are actual ghosts and monsters in the wings, waiting for their chance to intervene.

Dungeons and Dragons has a whole character class, the Bard, devoted to performances, and any other character class can have a performer background. [I'm aware there's a new PHB due to drop, I haven't seen it yet so can't comment on specifics.] Often in Dungeons and Dragons where there's a bard contest, it's a singing challenge. It would be fun to have a ghost story telling challenge instead, and just like in NBA, there are probably actual ghosts and goblins waiting in the wings. Plus, as DM you could have those folding panels and story books become actual magical items, in-game. 

Bookhounds is about buying and selling books. A Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai needs kaidan. It makes sense, in a Bookhounds game, for the end goal to be one of those kaidan.

From that:

An Evening in Chelsea

West of the Park are Kensington (still acceptable to the quality), Notting Hill (which offers what the middle class no doubt consider gracious living), and Chelsea, of which the less said in polite society, the better ...

The late ghost-breaker Thomas Carnacki lived at No. 472 Cheyne Walk in Chelsea. Saiitii emanations haunt his house; his copy of the Sigsand Manuscript has never been found ... [Bookhounds main text]

Ghostly dinner parties are the new big thing.

It started in a Chelsea place - nobody can say for sure precisely where, probably an artist's squat - and the evening was so spectacular that the vibe caught on. Now everyone wants to do one. The best (the most fashionable) want copies of Kaidan, preferably in the actual Japanese, and there's a sudden rush among booksellers to source these ghostly tales. Even the most battered versions, with stamps proclaiming them property of the ship's library off of some Orient Steam Navigation Company's boat, are worth far more than they should be. Not that the buyers can read Japanese; just pretending you can while holding the book in your hands is good enough for an evening's entertainment.

Larry Gore, one of the biggest names in Chelsea, (sculptor, darling, the one who made those precious primitivist thingummies that were all the rage last summer), is determined to make the biggest splash. His party will be the talk of the year. He's rented 472 Cheyne Walk (well, rent is such a strong word; Larry hates handling anything so mundane as money) for one night only and is out to get the best party favors, including among other things a series of prints made by Tadashi, an artist based in Paris who visits London regularly, to enhance the event, and a special kaidan Gore's heard about. The one used at the first ghost party in Chelsea. With the woodblock pictures. Surely the Hounds will be good enough to find him that book?

Option One:  Something In Your Eye. Dust Things are at the bottom of this rabbit hole. They inspired the first Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai in Chelsea, and there was enough energy in that event that they fed well for weeks. Now they want more, more, even more. It was they who gave Gore the idea of holding one of these events at Carnacki's old shop and it was they who inspired him to look for Tadashi (actually a creation of theirs) and the special kaidan. What with all the energy already penned up at 472 Cheyne Walk, and Gore's blundering 'seance', if Gore gets to hold his party Chelsea's in for a very bad night. Potential link to the Long Con.

Option Two: Book Thieves. The kaidan Gore wants belongs to a collector, Quentin Dalgleish, Quentin won't sell but he will trade; if the Hounds can get him into Gore's party, he'll let them have the book for one night only. Gore isn't having it; he and Quentin are on the outs ever since Quentin did [insert ridiculous nonsense here]. Quentin has ulterior motives. He wants to get into 472 Cheyne Walk so he can search the place for the Sigsand Manuscript, and he doesn't care what kind of damage he does - or what he might accidentally summon - along the way.

Option Three: Unimaginable Power. You don't do what Carnacki did in that house all these years and not taint the place. There's Magickal energy leaking out the walls, and the kind of ghost party Gore wants to have is exactly the kind of focused ritual to let it all out. Effectively this is a Create Hypertime Gate (This version of Create Hyperspace Gate creates a gate joining two points in time at a single point in space. It uses the same rules as Create Hyperspace Gate. Once created, the duration between its ends remains constant, both ends moving “forward” in time together) ritual with all the Power necessary to cast it supplied by the house. There are two issues with this casting. First, while one point in time - the party - is fixed, the other is not. It can link to any moment in the House's past or future, including the moment in 1943 when it's obliterated by Nazi bombs. Second, there's a not insignificant risk of encountering Carnacki himself, and his mysterious Sigsand Manuscript. That's what Quentin Dalgleish is hoping; it's why he gatecrashes the party. Gore is an oblivious bystander, but this is the kind of party that puts a man's name on the map forever and ever, amen. So the stranger it gets, the better, as far as he's concerned.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!