Final Thoughts - Serpentine

OK, so far I've talked about the basic shape of the chronicle and followed that up with a discussion of the kinds of scenarios that make up any chronicle, whether in this or a different system. I said there were three types: Foundational, Plot Specific and Climactic.

What exactly is a Foundational scenario?

A Foundational scenario does two things. 

• They elaborate on the established Building and put some flesh on its bones. 
• They also provide the initial clues which the characters will follow up on for later plot.

Let's go back to the first post and use the examples there for Foundational purposes.

The Strazzaruola are the other family business, the rivals, the no-goods. If a Strazzaruola did it, it must be wrong. Worse than wrong. You never met a Strazzaruola you didn't hate.

Four things:

• The Strazzaruola run loan sharking in the Night Market and there are few stalls that don't owe them money or favors - often both.
• Isabetta Strazzaruola is a sorceror, or at least everyone says she is. Dripping with corruption, no doubt.
• Baldo Strazzaruola is a notorious duelist, when he's not drunk off his ass. Dangerous, certainly - but unpredictable when drunk.
• Monstrosity: Several Strazzaruola are Drowned.

OK, so already there's some meat on the bones. We know the Strazzaruola are loan sharks; that must mean they have plenty of debtors, and some heavies to help them collect the debts. We know a little about Isabetta and Baldo, enough to put a little plot into them. The next step is to devise some Strazzaruola plot hooks that provide initial clues which can be followed up for later plot.

It'd also be helpful if that same scenario helped make the setting feel more alive, solid, real. If it helped create a situation in which the characters get to explore the world a little and see what's out there. 

Probably you've been to New York, or at least a major city. You know that feeling, when you stand on the street and realize that there's a whole world around you, teeming with life and stories of which you can only be the smallest part? It's easy to think, if you're sat alone at your desk, that the world is your desk and only your desk; that there's nothing more important than what you're doing, thinking, feeling right now. Being in a big city and just looking up shows you that you are, at best, the smallest part of a much larger story. That you and yours don't amount to a hill of beans, but that sometimes you can see a glimpse of the larger reality.

Casablanca

That's what you hope for in a foundational scenario: that the characters see the larger world and understand a small part of it, a fraction - but that's enough. For now.

If I was to take any of the Four Things to make a Foundation I'd pick one of the first three: the loan sharking, Isabetta, Baldo. The Fourth Thing, the Monstrous thing, is where the clues in that Foundational scenario lead.

In any scenario, even the simplest, there's the main hook, the main objective, possibly a Twist, and a conclusion. Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series, must-reads for anyone who wants to get into swords and sorcery, are very like this. Take Bazaar of the Bizarre as an example. There the heroes are hired by their sorcerous mentors to put an end to a nefarious threat. The main objective is that same threat. The Twist is that one of the heroes has been bamboozled by the threat. The story is about how that situation is resolved. It is as simple as it is possible to be, plotwise, and it's incredibly engaging, fun, and thrilling.

Foundation: Baldo's Triangle

Paulina the sword-swallower from Zavatera's Marvels is pissed off with Baldo. He's spending a lot of time with a mystery woman but he swears blind that isn't so. Paulina wants the heroes to check on Baldo's story.

Now, the heroes may want nothing to do with a Strazzaruola, but they want to stay in Paulina's good graces and they figure the best way to do that is to at least play along with Paulina. 

The truth is that Baldo's sister Isabetta's been plotting behind the scenes. She doesn't like how Baldo spends all his spare time with Paulina. Isabetta prefers it when Baldo is out making money for the family, collecting on debts and roughing up fools. Isabetta also doesn't like Paulina much. However, Isabetta hasn't been able to break Baldo's affection so she came up with a scheme that she thought was foolproof. Isabetta would make Baldo think, through sorcerous means, that she was Paulina. That way she could get Baldo to do what she wanted when she wanted. 

Trouble is, she hadn't accounted for Baldo's passionate nature. When Baldo has a little drink in him, he wants a good time. Isabetta, as Paulina, has found it harder and harder to keep Baldo from her bed.

Isabetta's doing all this by means of a peculiar little puppet that she keeps in her rooms. So long as she keeps that puppet, she can make Baldo think she's Paulina. If the heroes get hold of that puppet ...

The next step is to add the clues that lead to the Monstrous, which in this instance is the Drowned.

From the main book: the Drowned are humans who are puppetted and possessed by an underwater fungal hivemind somewhere in the city. They can instantly communicate with each other and use this hivemind communication to focus on and efficiently eliminate one enemy at a time. The Drowned seek to put themselves in positions of influence and power, all the better to promote the fungal intelligence’s inscrutable plans.

It wouldn't be helpful to have either Baldo or Isabetta as the Drowned, but there are plenty of other Strazzaruola. Let's say that Isabetta's maid and assistant, Sarafina, is a Drowned and she's been trying to recruit Baldo by infecting Baldo with wetlung. So far Isabetta's sorcery has kept Baldo, and the other senior Strazzaruola, safe. However, this new thing with Baldo and Isabetta gives Sarafina an opportunity to advance her plans - unless the heroes discover it and stop her. They might not like Baldo, but do they want him to become a monster?

We already know, because it's part of the Four Things of Sag Harbor, that the only time Sag Harbor feels clean is when it rains. "In downpours people come out to stand in the rain as if it were a crystal-clear waterfall, filling whatever containers they have with rainwater. It's the only way to guarantee freshwater supply." But maybe the Drowned don't care about that, or maybe there's something in the rainwater that they really don't like. So the one thing that gives Sarafina away is her reaction when it rains: she hides and doesn't try to collect the rainwater. Why is that, the heroes might wonder? Well ...

The main hook is the love triangle. The main plot objective is countering Isabetta's spell, which she cast on Baldo and is now regretting. The Twist is the Drowned, which in turn will lead to Plot Specific scenarios. It has the additional benefit of adding one of Sag Harbor's Four Things, which in turn helps develop the campaign's ongoing narrative. 

That's a Foundational scenario. 

Plot Specific scenarios function in much the same way. They have their main hook, the main objective, possibly a Twist, and a conclusion, the difference being that where a Foundational scenario hints at the greater world around it a Plot Specific scenario reveals definite things about that greater world and gives clues that lead to the Climactic scenario. 

The Climatic scenario is broadly along the same lines as its brethren, with this key difference: where before all attention was on the ordinary stuff of the setting - the meat and drink - and there were clues that led to Monstrous, now it's all Monstrous all the time. In Twilight Zone terminology, the eyeglasses have broken and now it's time to face the consequences. 

Time Enough At Last

If the Strazzaruola, say, were infected by Drowned before but not all of them had fallen, now all of them have fallen. If Rattakan were persecuting Zavatera's Marvels because Paulina was protecting those pesky orphans, now most if not all the orphans have died and Paulina may well be a Rattakan host, and so on. The adventurers have to deal with this situation as best they can, and how they choose to deal with it will determine whether or not this campaign ends on a high note, or a low.

What I'm getting at is a bit different from, say, Horror on the Orient Express, where the characters have been following a set path down a particular route, and while they may have made choices along the way the ultimate destination was always the same. The whole point behind the Building, and the Four Things technique, is that the players determine which elements of the setting they choose to engage with. In that sense it's more like Dracula Dossier or Armitage Files gameplay, in which there is a defined structure but the ultimate destination, and the route chosen to get there, is determined not by plot but by player engagement. 

The Building provides 'rooms' - encounters, NPCs, setting elements - and the Four Things helps you furnish those rooms. The players then decide for themselves which of the Four Things they engage with, and that in turn leads them to other rooms and more Four Things, and so on. 

Next week - something different!

Enjoy!

 

Playing with Real Toys: Abandoned Orient Express Trains, Belgium (GUMSHOE Modern)

There was a time when Orient Express meant luxury, mystery, and romance. Those days aren't quite gone, but the train in these pictures has seen better days. Abandoned somewhere in a Belgian train yard, these old carriages and locomotive have been quietly rusting away for many years. Lost and forgotten things have many stories to tell - so what can we do with this one?

A quick note on ownership: the photos shown here were obtained via Urban Ghosts and the blog Rebecca Bathory. I understand Urban Ghosts obtained at least some of its images from another user, blogging at PreciousDecay. To my knowledge, those are the original sources of the images.

For those who aren't familiar with Georges Nagelmackers' pride and joy, a brief history.

The state of train travel in Europe during the Victorian era was lamentable. Functional, yes, but where was the style? The panache? Meanwhile, across the water, American George Mortimer Pullman was showing how it could be done: luxury travel, in a carriage fit for a king, not the knock-crack-smash in a wooden box that everyone had become used to. 

This inspired many innovators, including Belgian Georges Nagelmackers, who founded the Wagons-Lits Company in 1867. His dream was to create a train empire, luxury that traveled across the continent, and he was successful. You could start in London, end in Constantinople, and never lack for anything, whether it be fine dining, comfortable sleeping compartments, or congenial companionship. Each carriage had its own name, its own personality, decorated and fitted to the highest standards of the day. Every need was anticipated, and catered for, down to the least detail.

Image taken from Wikipedia, Plan de vaisselle CIWL

If you had any pretense to importance, you wanted to be seen on that train, and that went for fictional characters as well as the more mundane sort. Dracula's hunters went by Orient Express from Paris to Varna, beating their quarry to the punch. English hero Harry Flashman went with his journalist friend Blowitz on the train's maiden voyage. James Bond nearly lost his life on that train, and Agatha Christie uses it twice, once in a short story, and again in her novel Murder on the Orient Express - probably the most famous novel about the Orient Express.

Image taken from Wikipedia.

The Great War knocked back the Express, and for the first time in its history it was unable to traverse its entire route. At war's end, armistice papers were signed aboard one of the train's luxury carriages; when Hitler kicked off World War Two, he made sure that the French surrender documents were signed aboard that same carriage, and later, when defeat seemed imminent, he blew it up. After World War Two the train revived again, but with a dramatically altered route; some of its traditional stops were now behind the Iron Curtain. However in the end it wasn't history but technology that killed it off; in the jet set age, there was no demand for train travel, however luxurious. For a brief time there was no train at all. Then in 1982 enthusiasts revived the brand, restoring some of the old carriages and building others. Now the London to Venice luxury run is purely for well-heeled sightseers, not for travelers on their own mysterious passage from wherever to whenever.

The train and carriages seen in the photographs are 1930s vintage, probably left there in the 1970s. If the 1980s enthusiasts looked at them at all, presumably they believed what was left wasn't economically viable - they may have been too far gone to be restored.

With all that in mind, some scenario seeds for Night's Black Agents, Fear Itself, and Esoterrorists.

Night's Black Agents: the opposition proposes a midnight meeting at the train yards; whether to exchange hostages or for some other reason is immaterial to the seed. The exchange is to take place aboard one of the abandoned Orient Express cars. As might be expected, it's a trap: two snipers have the train carriage covered, and there's a bomb inside.

Thrilling Elements: 

• A chilled bottle of champagne and an appropriate number of glasses rest on one of the abandoned carriage's seats. [the bomb, on remote detonation, is under the seat.]
• A goods train comes to an unexpected stop some distance away, and the screech can be heard throughout the yards.
• The faint glow of cigarettes can be seen, perhaps some fifty yards away - train staff on a crafty break, or something else?
• Train cars loom ominously in the darkness; every shadow could hide a potential threat.
• A tapped-out, blood-starved Renfield [the Conspiracy think she's a traitor, and this is as good a way as any of dealing with her], captured ally or other defenseless, twitching body is tied up on the carriage floor.
• A train unexpectedly switches to the track the agents are on.

Fear Itself: Urban Explorers say the Orient Express cars have a completely different personality at night, and the latest dare is to go there after midnight and leave some sign that you've been there - a card, a mark, anything. However some of those who do never return, and some who do return say they hear odd noises, a voice speaking in German. In fact, one is the train car Hitler ordered destroyed, but not because he thought it would be used as a war trophy. The demon inside Hitler transferred its consciousness to a special phylactery shortly before war's end, and arranged for it to be hidden inside the train car, for later retrieval by dedicated followers. The dazed and reeling Fuhrer, free of its influence, tried to have the car destroyed, but the demon's followers prevented this. However the last few months of the war saw all the Nazi occultists killed or captured, which meant nobody was able to retrieve the phylactery. There it sits to this day, waiting to be rediscovered - and in the meantime causing all kinds of mayhem to those unwise enough to disturb it without using the proper ritual.

Esoterrorists:  Several Esoterror cells across Europe have united with a singular purpose: to place copies of the abandoned Orient Express cars in every train stop that the original Express visited, before the Great War. Urban explorers from Paris to Istanbul report seeing these train cars, apparently copied to the last detail from the Belgian originals, left in depots and apparently forgotten. Are the Esoterrorists trying to create some kind of spirit copy of the original Orient Express, and if so, is this to weaken the Membrane, or have the Esoterrorists some other purpose in mind? Could this be an attempt to resurrect someone, or something, that rode aboard the Orient Express? Does this have anything to do with a string of murders, also from Paris to Istanbul, with one thing in common: an antique train ticket from 1892 found in the pockets of the dead?

That's it for this week. Enjoy!  

Got You Where I Want You (GUMSHOE Night's Black Agents, all)

I've been reading Andy McDermott's Kingdom of Darkness, part of his epic spy vs ... actually, I'm not sure. Spy vs reality, maybe? Or action hero vs mundane life? Anyway, it's book 10 in an ongoing line featuring Yorkshireman ex-SAS crazy person Eddie Chase and his beautiful archaeologist wife Nina Wilde. They wander across the planet finding pretty much everything and exploding bad guys as they do it.

By everything, I mean everything. I just dropped into this series and apparently they've already found Excalibur, Atlantis, and Valhalla, among other things. Presumably these discoveries all got blown up shortly afterwards; everything else seems to have the life expectancy of a gnat's fart, so why should Valhalla be any different?

This isn't not quite book review corner, so I won't go into detail except to say this: Chase and Wilde face down theoretically immortal Nazis living in Argentina, who discovered just enough immortality juice back in 1942 to keep a dozen of them going, and are now looking for more juice. Apparently Alexander the Great's cook Andreas knew where it was, so it's off to find Alexander's tomb. And blow it up. Because reasons.

It's a fun read, absolutely not to be taken seriously, and I have to give credit to McDermott for having the imagination and effrontery to put all this in one book. Apart from anything else I think this may be the first time I've seen a Yorkshireman in the protagonist role since James Herriot, though I suspect if you presented Eddie Chase with a cow's backside he'd stick a grenade in it.

I see from his bio he's written for 2000AD. Why am I not surprised.

Anyone who can sneak Patrick McGoohan and Raiders of the Lost Ark references in the same novel is worthy of praise. There's some good action chase sequences too, even if the biggest chase liberally borrows from The Man With the Golden Gun - the novel, not the movie.

That, and McDermott isn't as predictable as other pulp spy writers; there's no telling who's going to live or die, with the exception of the two longstanding leads of course - and it's not clear from the start that even they have plot immunity, since Wilde is under sentence of death from one of their previous adventures.

So yes, I do recommend it to Night's Black Agents directors with the obvious caveat that this is as Pulp as pulp can possibly be, so if your instincts draw you more to the Le Carre side of the spectrum you'd better steer clear.

However there's a moment in the book that intrigued me and I thought it would be useful as an Ephemera piece.

In the narrative Nina and some colleagues are captured by the Nazis and dragged off to the Argentina compound, there to languish in durance vile until they reveal the location of the source of the Immortality Juice, which means solving an archaeological puzzle.

Capture is not something recommended by most GMs in any system. It tends to derail the game, and takes agency away from the players which emphatically is not what GUMSHOE is all about. The NBA main book makes this very clear:

Directors should get player buy-in at the beginning of the game; if capture isn't an option, then it simply isn't an option ... Here's our GUMSHOE promise: If you are captured, you will learn something you want to know ... And you will have a chance to escape.

I would add another item to that list:

As Director it is your job to make sure the characters have something to do if they are captured.

Players tend to think that if their character is captured then that character can't do anything. They rot in a jail cell. No scenes, no spotlight; there they sit, forever and ever and ever.

Here's the thing: the McDermott sequence is a perfect example of good capture because it allows for three things:

1. The captives learn something about their captors, in this instance that they have the contents of cook Andreas' shrine and are on the lookout for the source of the Immortality Juice.
2. The captives have a chance to escape, when Eddie Chase invades the compound.
3. The captives have a puzzle to solve.

Granted it's not the most taxing puzzle in the world, but it's something to spend Investigative points on. It's an individual scene, which means characters can have the spotlight.

Players want agency, but agency isn't just about giving players the opportunity to roleplay. It's about giving those characters something to do. They're not just kicking their heels in a filler scene waiting for their chance to saw through the cell window's bars and break free.

In this particular instance not only do Nina and her companions have a puzzle but they also have an additional conundrum on top of that, because if they tell their captors what they know then their captors will probably kill them. So it's not just about spending that Investigative point to gain knowledge; it's also about bluffing or otherwise concealing what they know, just plausibly enough that their captors don't get bored and shoot them out of hand.

In short, it's Thrilling, which means as Director you could make a Thrilling sequence out of it.

Remember the Hitchcock film Torn Curtain, where there's a Thrilling sequence revolving around a Physics equation. The Thrilling mechanic's not just for car chases any more; you can make a Thrilling sequence out of almost anything, and that means you can invent one to fit into a capture scenario.

Any moment in which you can say 'this is a cat-and-mouse moment' has the potential to be Thrilling. Thrills depend on stakes, not action, and while you don't want to invent a Thrilling sequence every time one of the guards goes to the toilet there are times when a good Director makes Thrills happen.

There's one other important factor, which is:

As Director you should craft a capture scene as carefully as you would any other, but always remember a capture scene is Alternative, not Core.

What do I mean by this? Let's take a trip on the Orient Express, and find out.

VERY MILD SPOILERS AHOY.

In that venerable campaign there is an in-plot capture scene that cannot be avoided. The game literally cannot proceed without this scene, and there are other campaign elements in the capture scene which the players also may not appreciate.

I have yet to find a group of players that enjoy this scene. Even the players who accept railroading as a necessary plot element really have trouble with it. The scene boils down to the Keeper saying 'yeah, you're hosed. No, there's nothing you can do about it. Sucks to be you.'

The scenario in question even concludes with the line 'The investigators regain no Sanity for this scenario; after all, they have lost dismally.' Yeah, because the writer - and by extension, willing or otherwise, the Keeper - rigged the game, not because of any real failure on the players' part.

This is exactly the kind of agency-stripping plot device GUMSHOE was designed to avoid.

However with GUMSHOE I've noticed the reverse problem: that because Directors know capture scenes can be problematic, they don't detail those scenes. 'It's something you can do - if you're a complete and total weirdo - but we don't talk about it much.'

Capture has its uses. For one thing, it keeps characters alive in circumstances which might otherwise lead to a total party kill. Surrender means the characters live to fight another day. Okay, they have to find a way out of their jail cell, but that's a minor problem compared to crawling out of a bodybag.

For another, it's genre-appropriate. Even James Bond gets captured more than once, in the novels and the movies. Some of Bond's most iconic moments depend on capture scenes. 'Do you expect me to talk?' 'No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die.' Ahh, the classics!

Third and last, it's a brilliant way to introduce clues that either the characters have failed to gather - and it happens, believe me - or that they need in future scenes. Sometimes players display a perverse genius for avoiding or forgetting clues, even Core ones. Sometimes they could use a little nudge to discover, say, a Bane, or the Conspiracy's next target. Let them glimpse the clue they need, or a handy map, while in captivity, and the problem solves itself.

This is something the Orient Express capture scene does well. It's dripping with atmosphere, the players get to learn dark secrets, and they have a problem to solve that isn't just about getting out of their jail cell. The difficulty is that, in GUMSHOE vernacular, it's a Core scene, so any good it might be doing is outweighed by the evil it did in stripping the players of agency in the first place.

So my advice is this: in any game of whatever type, recognize that capture is possible. Then design an Alternate scene around that possibility. Give it a little local color, perhaps think about how it could be made Thrilling, factor in some clues that you know the characters will appreciate. Try to come up with a few ways for the characters to plausibly escape. Then leave the scene alone until you need it.

This preserves player agency. The scene isn't Core, and the characters might go the entire game without realizing this Alternative exists, but like other Alternative scenes the capture moment allows the players to gather extra clues which they can use to their advantage.

And if they end up strapped to a table with a red-hot laser slowly snaking its way up to their unmentionables, so much the better.

That's it from me. Enjoy!

Bookhounds Campaign Thoughts Part 2: the Early Chapters

So we have our antagonists, Susan Montgomery and Stanley David Fentiman. What to do with them? How shall the initial scenarios play out?

I'm assuming a mini campaign with at least three acts. In the first act, the players get used to the setting and are introduced to the antagonists. In the second, they deal with the first major arc, Susan Montgomery's plot, and are introduced to the second one, Fentiman's plot. In the third they deal with Fentiman, and conclude the overarching storyline. Each act consists of at least three seperate scenarios, so about nine sessions overall. Assume that an individual session can last an average of two play evenings (more or less, depending on the group's availability and the speed at which they tackle plot) and you ought to end up with eighteen evenings of play, or two to three months total.

That's a lot of time. It needs to be filled.

This Ephemera is going to tackle the first act, where the players are introduced to the setting and the antagonists.

The obvious first question is, why have a first act at all? It could end up being talkie talkie and not enough action. Why not leap straight into the plot?

The answer to that is you need the first act to establish the setting, the characters and the overall mood of the game. Whether the players are veterans, novices or a mixture of the two, they've never played in this game world before, because it's your game world, fashioned out of your ideas and imagination. They don't know what to look forward to, or what to be worried about. They may not know all of the rules, and they certainly won't know all of the locations or NPCs since you're going to be making many of those up yourself.

Bookhounds suggests three potential campaign styles: Arabesque, Sordid and Technicolour, and adds a fourth descriptor that could apply to all three, Tainted. It doesn't really matter which you pick for your campaign; what matters is the players get to understand what that means, both to the plot and to their characters. The whole point of the first act, in any campaign, is to establish mood and setting. You don't even have to introduce main plot at all if you don't want to. The important thing is, if the setting is Arabesque, then the first act has to drive that home to the players. Everything they see, do or encounter has to reinforce that atmosphere.

They don't even have to encounter the Mythos, or anything supernatural, in the opening act, so long as the opening act is true to the overall mood.

There's two important points to consider here. The first is that getting them used to the setting is paramount, and anything that distracts from that is to be avoided. By having them chase ghoulies in the very first scenes, you're distracting them. It may seem interesting at first, but it does mean that later on they may not fully understand what's going on or what they can do about it.

The second is that every reveal detracts from the ultimate horror. It's the first rule of good ghost stories: the less you see, the more you imagine. When M.R. James wrote his chillers, he didn't pitch the protagonist straight in and have them grappling with demons right from page one. In fact, you rarely ever see the creatures in his stories at all. In Canon Alberic's Scrap Book, for example, there's only one very brief scene with an actual spectre - no more. Yet there's plenty there to keep the reader occupied. If you as Keeper chuck in ghosties and ghoulies and long-legged beasties right from the get-go, you're only doing yourself harm in the long run. The big reveal should be a Big Reveal, and that means you oughtn't to detract from it by revealing your hand too soon.

Horror on the Orient Express has an interesting way of going about this. The initial scenes are pure prologue, (with the exception of one haunted train moment that many Keepers skip anyway). There's plenty going on, but it's all aimed at establishing setting and mood. Those are the scenes in which wise Keepers will be playing the Orient Express for all its worth, emphasising its luxury, the wine list, the attendants at your beck and call, the incredible novelty of such a fantastic train. Later, when things start to go wrong, it's exactly that information that will be most useful to the players. 

What you as Keeper ought to be doing is getting the players to concentrate on the things that matter (at least in the short term): the setting and the starting location. In Bookhounds, that's the shop, and book auctions, which even for veteran players will be an unusual challenge.

Some may wonder how they're going to make a session out of encounters in a shop. Those people have never worked in retail.

All the world passes through your door, and most of them are time wasters. People looking for a free toilet, hoping for shelter from the rain, who want a book for Uncle Bob but don't know what the book is called or who the author is, drunks, lunatics, thieves, actual honest to God members of the public who don't know what they want but might (glory be!) spend some money, and on and on and on. And that's just the customers - what about the staff? Slackers, dopeheads, no-hopers and snarky drudges, almost to a man (or woman). It's enough to drive you to drink, and if you happen to own the store you've probably got a bottle stashed away for emergencies.

The key here is to establish the shop as an important location, and its regular customers and staff as its major players. Many of the staff roles will be taken by player characters, but that doesn't mean all of them will, and whether they are or aren't, the customers aren't PCs. The very first scenario ought to be all about the store, and its daily routine. That gives the players some foundation for their future adventures. The major event of that scenario could be something relatively mundane - say, chasing down a potential squizz for a very important customer, which has the unfortunate character wandering all over London looking for something suitable. Not only does that keep the player busy, it's also a handy reference for future scenarios, as it introduces several other important locations and NPCs. Rival bookstores, markets, forgers, possibly the police, and so on.

Later scenarios in the opening arc could introduce other important plot elements. Say the Keeper chooses to use Idiosyncratic Magic, as introduced in the main rulebook and later fleshed out in Rough Magicks. If that's on offer then the players need to get used to the idea, so now's the time for some simple magic tricks, perhaps taught to the character by an NPC or picked up as they go along. Let them try these incantations in relatively safe circumstances, and they'll be more willing to rely on them later on. Of course there has to be at least one big book auction too; after all, that's as integral to the Bookhounds setting as dungeons are to Dungeons and Dragons. It'd be a pity not to indulge the players in an auction scene, particularly one where they win out over some hated rival by the skin of their teeth.

By the time the opening arc reaches its conclusion the players should be comfortable with the setting, the mechanics and the mood of the campaign. They may have met one of Sarah Montgomery's agents by now; possibly she was the important customer who wanted that squizz mentioned earlier. They've certainly had a few triumphs by this point and they ought to know by this stage that there are Things Out There. Possibly one of those spells went wrong, or they found the ghastly remains of someone who wasn't as lucky as them. Or they may even have been studying the stock a little too closely for comfort . . .

But however it went, now is the time to introduce them to the overall plot, and bring the introduction to a close.

Bookhounds Campaign Thoughts

This is inspired in part by a thread on YSDC.

For those who aren't familiar with the setting, Bookhounds is a 1930s era campaign book for the Trail of Cthulhu horror RPG. The concept is, the characters are traders in antiquarian tomes of one kind or another, particularly occult or outre grimoires, and they get their daily bread by trading in knowledge that man was not meant to know. It's a fine line: do you opt for poverty and refuse to sell to the sinister gentleman who may have very dangerous ideas, or do you damn the consequences and hope it all comes out all right in the end? Perhaps you opt for an even more dangerous game, and forge realistic looking tomes for sale to the highest bidder. The setting lends itself to M.R. Jamesian spook stories (many of his protagonists were antiquarians, and not a few found themselves in awful trouble because of a dusty old book) and has an atmosphere that's part Lovejoy and part Club Dumas.

The question is, what to do with it? Bookhounds is an impressive toybox, but can leave even veteran keepers feeling overwhelmed. As a setting, it's very nearly unique; plenty of games have horror elements and London certainly has been used before, but the antiquarian book trade is something altogether other. Most RPGs assume that the protagonists are Heroes with a Capital Haitch, and while Cthulhu tends towards the weedy academic side of the street even so there's usually one or two brutish toughs in the group. This time everyone's a cultured sort of gent who wouldn't dream of dirtying their knuckles - not when they can pay someone else to do it for them, at any rate. How do you set up a campaign with that sort of group?

Well, the obvious first step is to pick an antagonist. The essence of the setting is trade: the characters are buying and selling knowledge. Therefore the antagonist is going to be someone interested in that knowledge.

This is slightly different from the average Cthulhuoid plot, in which a disparate group of loons get drafted in by dear old pal X to globetrot around the world (see also Masks of Nyarlathotep, Horror on the Orient Express) fighting cults or helping stop the awakening of Old One [fill in the blank]. This time out there is no dear old pal X nor is there necessarily a global conspiracy. There's just the trade, and most of the action will be taking place in one location, London.

So let's start out by designing that one antagonist whose actions will spur the plot along: the customer. [S]he may or may not be mortal, or human. That said, there has to be power here, and a lot of it, for two reasons. First, without power there is no real conflict: the characters will probably be able to foil the evil schemes of a hobo living in the back alley behind the shop. Second, without power there's no real reason to worry. Even if the hobo's machinations aren't stopped, they can probably be ignored.

There also has to be an overarching goal for the antagonist. [S]he wants knowledge; if not, there'd be no reason to do business with the characters. There must be a reason for wanting that knowledge. Perhaps they want more power, or immortality, or to create some lasting monument to their God (or themselves, if they're going the Carnegie route). Whatever it may be, it is a concrete goal which they can only achieve by using occult means.

With those two facts in mind, let's brainstorm.

Assume a very wealthy widow, Sarah Montgomery, who lost her two sons in the Great War, wants to recreate the world that she believes was lost when the Guns of August started firing. She doesn't just want her sons back; she wants to remake everything as though the First World War had never happened. Because she has dabbled in spiritualism she came into contact with someone steeped in Mythos knowledge, Stanley David Fentiman, ex-Oxford don, who has a different goal in mind: he wants to recreate the school of black magic that existed at Chorazin, once upon a time, and set himself up as its new (immortal) headmaster. Fentiman is using Montgomery's money and connections to get the knowledge he needs, and in exchange he's promised to help her get what she wants.

Here you have two antagonists with very different goals working together. One is motivated by grief and loss, the other by a lust for power and immortality. In each case the motives are human and understandable, but in order to achieve their goals both will have to steep themselves in Mythos knowledge.

Which is where the characters come in. At first they may only know about Sarah Montgomery, and they may not even meet her face to face. After all, someone as wealthy as her can afford to hire agents to do their work for them. However they will be drawn into her schemes by her continuing search for Mythos knowledge, and in the process of uncovering books for her they'll reveal her overarching goal. Who knows? They may even agree with her, that the world would be better off if the War never happened. That said, the methods she's using to get what she wants are highly questionable, and could lead to disaster. She'll be drawing on the powers of the Old Ones to do what she intends, and that can only lead to trouble. Is her plan even feasable, or has Fentiman lied to her to get her to finance the project?

This could easily turn into a two-pronged campaign. The opening act would introduce the characters to the world, and to Sarah Montgomery. The second act would reveal Montgomery's plotline, and have the characters attempt to foil it, or perhaps pick up the pieces when it all comes crashing down around her ears. The final act would be a race against time to stop Fentiman, before he does something that will change the world forever. More on that kind of campaign design later.

For the moment, consider this: you oughtn't to start a campaign by wondering what kind of threat to fling at the players. You ought to start by thinking about your antagonist: what do they have, and what do they want? For it's the antagonist that will drive the plot, and whose actions the characters will have to react to. Without a good antagonist, you can't have a good game.

That's it for the moment! More to come.