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. 

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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!