The End (Bookhounds of London, RPG All)

I've talked about Opening Scenes and the Midpoint, the end is near. The final curtain.

Sing

What does that look like?

In Midpoint, I said that you didn't need to know where this scene is taking place. The important thing is that it does take place, so you need to plan for it. 

That's not the case this time. You absolutely do need to know where this scene is taking place. You can give yourself more than one option, if the plot demands it, but you need to know all your options. This is the Big Reveal; this, more than anything else in the game, is Rome. 

That means you need to be as true to the concept, and Rome, as you possibly can in the End. If this is an Arabesque Bookhounds game, it needs to be as Arabesque as possible. If Rome is Cthugha, you need to emphasize Cthugha as much as possible. Theoretically, if this is the End not just of the scenario but also the campaign, you need to have Rome appear in the final scene. In this example, that could mean burning London to a crisp as the Witch-Cult's schemes finally come to fruition. Or it could mean the characters bearding the remains of the Cult in its den and squashing their plot once and for all. 

Which brings me to the first important point: you need at least two Ends. One for if the characters succeed, and one for if they fail. That means you need a clear idea of what success and failure looks like, in context.

OK, so we already know from the Opening that there's a Hound-Lich menacing the population and that the Witch-Cult is after the Religio Medici because it thinks there's information in it that can be used to create one of their Books of Shadow. Failure for the characters means success for the enemy, so in this instance failure means the Hound-Lich gets what it wants and the Cult gets what it wants. Success means either the Lich or the Cult are thwarted - preferably both, but sometimes you just can't have everything.

Given that the Hound-Lich's tomb-lair is in Kingshill, it follows that a good End scene for the Lich would be in that tomb-lair. The Witch-Cult is represented by Alexis Waddell (and opposed by Jane Russell and Wilson Davies-Gore, aka the Baron of Blackheath) so it follows that a good End scene for Waddell would be in his house, or his magical sanctum where he carries out ritual magic. Theoretically the End scene could be in any number of places up to and including London Bridge Tube Station (because few things are more thrilling than a speeding train bearing down on someone) but you want this to be as Rome as possible, and what could be more Rome than a facedown with the main opposition in their place of power?

Look at it this way. Pretend this is Shakespeare, and you're putting on Julius Caesar. In that play, Caesar gets stabbed. That stabbing could happen anywhere up to and including the public lavatory. It's a stage play; you set the stage. But it's more impressive, more impactful, if it happens at the Forum, the legal and spiritual heart of Rome. 

Frankly, it didn't matter to Shakespeare whether the real-life Caesar died in that way and in that place; Shakespeare knew good drama when he saw it. The same principles apply to your End scene.

So: you need an End scene in Kingshill graveyard, and an End scene in Waddell's home/magical sanctum. That's what happens if the Hounds win.

What if they lose? 

Well, in that case the End scene is in their place of power - the shop. The shop's fortunes were at risk, and now you know the scale of damage done. Note that the End doesn't have to mean character death. Damage, yes, probably both financial and social. But if the enemy has what it wants and has retreated to its corner, there's no need for a big fight scene when a moment of existential angst will do just fine.

Three Ends, this time, not Two.

I mentioned damages. This is the kind of thing you want to specify in advance. It's Cthulhu tradition to have that block of text at the conclusion of the scenario that specifies what everyone gets. Such-and-such Stability reward if such-and-such happens, or a Windfall or Reversal for the shop depending on X, that kind of thing. This can be handled in an Epilogue rather than the End scene, if you like.

Do all three Ends have to happen in different locations?

No. They have to happen in thematically appropriate locations. That thematically appropriate location can be the same place for all, if it fits the narrative.

Take the Many Deaths Of Edward Bigsby. I had a lot of fun with that one. There are quite a few moving parts. Without wishing to spoil, the characters wander through Soho looking for X, and if along the way they happen to complete a number of subobjectives then their odds of survival in the End scene are greatly improved. If, on the other hand, they did not complete those subobjectives, then a Terrible Entity is present in the scene. 

Oops.

Point being, the number of subobjectives, the location of those subobjectives, did not affect the goals of the OPFOR. Those remained the same, which meant that the End scene could take place in one location as it fit the narrative demands of those satisfied goals.

However, in Buyer's Remorse you have two very different opposing factions with very different goals. It makes sense for there to be a separate End scene for each. 

Finally: this is your Reichenbach Falls moment. It ought to be impressive.

It is, indeed, a fearful place. The torrent, swollen by the melting snow, plunges into a tremendous abyss, from which the spray rolls up like the smoke from a burning house. The shaft into which the river hurls itself is an immense chasm, lined by glistening coal-black rock, and narrowing into a screaming, boiling pit of incalculable depth, which brims over and shoots the stream onward over its jagged lip. The long sweep of green water roaring forever down, and the thick flickering curtain of spray hissing forever upward, turn a man giddy with their constant whirl and clamor. We stood near the edge peering down at the gleam of the breaking water far below us against the black rocks, and listening to the half-human shout which came booming up with the spray out of the abyss. Doyle, The Final Problem

But! Do you have to play out every single moment? Do the players have to see everything?

Not necessarily. Remember, in the Final Problem you, the reader, never see that confrontation between titans on the waterfall's lip. The reader knows it happened because Watson sees the end result and infers the confrontation. But we never see the struggle, or that plunge into the waterfall's depths.

Let's say for the sake of discussion that the Hounds beat the Hound-Lich and there's an exciting climax scene at Kingshill but, for whatever reason, a climax scene with Waddell is inappropriate. Maybe the Hounds don't have enough on Waddell to force a victory, or maybe after the fight with the Hound-Lich they haven't got the stuffing for another armed confrontation. 

It would be perfectly appropriate in that case for them to find, when they come to deal with Waddell, that he's no longer there. The place is cleared out. The remains of the ritual circle hint at what he was up to, but the man himself is long gone. 

The same applies if they beat Waddell but find they can't deal with the Hound-Lich. The tomb is empty. Perhaps the malign force is still present, costing Stability and perhaps even Sanity depending on what's there, but the Hound-Lich itself is gone.

Or: the Hound-Lich marked one or more characters for death in the Midpoint, and by the endgame those characters haven't thought of a way to deal with it. If the players are willing, it could be interesting to have them narrate the final moments of their lives. That frozen second when they came face-to-face with the abyss. Remember, this is a player-facing game. What better way to have it end, at least for those characters, by having them tell the others how it came to pass?

It could even be a setup for a Reichenbach Falls moment. After all, Holmes did return from the Falls. Perhaps the characters do as well. No doubt irrevocably changed by their experiences, perhaps with hidden scars mental or physical (or both) - but they might return ...

That's it for this week. Enjoy! 

 

Locked Room Mysteries (GUMSHOE Any)

I recently watched a film I'd really wanted to see and came away dissatisfied. I shan't say which one, as this post might constitute spoilers. I'll just say CSI KYC and leave it at that, on the supposition that if you get the joke you've already seen the film and so spoilers mean nothing to you.

Part of my dissatisfaction is because it sets up a locked room mystery and then betrays the trope. The classic locked room is the Mary Celeste of mysteries. It sets up a situation that ought to be impossible, and then shows you not just that it's possible but takes you through the working until you see all the clues you missed along the way. It's called locked room because the classic example is the corpse found sealed away in a locked room, whose death seems inexplicable. Edgar Allen Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue is the original version, but there have been countless others since.

There have been a few real-life examples. The 2010 death of MI6 operative Gareth Williams, found padlocked inside a bag in his London apartment, is one. Williams, who might have been investigating Russian financial crime at the time of his death, went on leave and never came back. Nobody noticed he'd gone missing until his employers thought to make a welfare check, which is when his corpse was discovered. It's thought he went into the bag alive and the Metropolitan Police concluded his death was probably an accident, a sex game gone wrong. As a means of disposing of a body locking it inside a sports bag and leaving it in the flat seems unnecessarily theatrical, almost amateurish, especially if a professional espionage agency was involved. You'd think it'd be simpler to dump the bag in the Thames with weights wrapped round it. It's that Mary Celeste touch again - cups of coffee found still warm in the wardroom, everything apparently normal except there's no crew aboard.

The thing about a locked room is, it's never impossible. It's a puzzle box, and there's always a way to solve a puzzle box. The key is to disbelieve what's in front of you. The minute someone says 'judging by blood splatter, the only way it could have happened is ...' you know for a fact that, whatever else happened, the so-called only way is precisely how it didn't happen. A locked room works on magician's rules, and a magician's favorite trick is misdirection.

So if a corpse turns up in a burnt-out garage, for example, and dental records show that the corpse is Mister Bob Bingo who owed everyone a ton of money, then your first job is to look at those dental records and see if they're fake. Trust nothing, check everything.

As it's a puzzle the emotional satisfaction comes from solving the puzzle, and if the thing's badly designed or if the author cheats their way to a solution then the fun's lost.

Example from CSI KYC: at one point a poison's described as being lethal inside ten minutes. The characters go to a great deal of trouble to establish this. Then in another scene the same dose takes two hours, and even then the victim isn't dead. Which is it? 

In game, how would this work?

Remember this: once you introduce magic, or super-powers, or whatever it may be, the puzzle stops being a puzzle. The audience - the players - will assume magic did it. The problem switches from 'how does the puzzle work' to 'how do I show the solution isn't magic?' At which point you've probably lost the most important battle: capturing the audience's attention. 

So set the puzzle up in such a way that magic isn't the first or obvious answer. Maybe this is a Mutant City Blues game in which the necessary mutant abilities don't fit well into the Quade Diagram, or perhaps this happened during the day when vampires are powerless. Something quick, simple and obvious, so you can get on with the plot. This is why abilities like Night's Black Agents Vampirology are so useful, because one point spend will tell the agents 'a vampire couldn't have done it, at least not the way it was done,' without the Director jumping through hoops to show it wasn't vampire magic.

The best way to design a puzzle like this is to start with the solution and work backward. If you know who did it and how they did it then you should be able to come up with clues that show as much. Always remember this is a puzzle, and puzzles can be about anything. It doesn't have to be murder. It can be 'how did a virus get onto the system when it's not connected to the internet?" Or 'how did that burglar get into this hidden safe?'

Let's play with an example. Assume the setting is Night's Black Agents, modern day, so we're talking every conceivable current technology. Let's further assume that the crime takes place in an area patrolled by security robots which ought to have detected the intruder but did not. It doesn't matter what the crime is. The puzzle is how whoever did it foozled the security robots so they weren't detected carrying out the crime.

The software that operates the robots and monitors their activity reports no anomalies at the time of the crime. The incident reports show only that there was a brief interruption in patrol when a human employee fell ill. The robot stopped to monitor the situation and summoned a security guard, who confirmed that the person suffered a bad reaction to allergy meds. The sick person was escorted away and treated. 

The hardware that runs the show is not connected to the internet or the outside world. It's a purely internal network whose sole purpose is to run the building. It does everything from monitor the security robots to adjust the HVAC and make sure the goldfish tank in the exec suite is operating smoothly. Employees are expressly forbidden from attaching their own devices to the network, or using company property like laptops outside the building. There's no indication (via internal monitoring) that anyone did connect an outside device to the network, whether on the day or at any time in the past. So there should be zero chance of a virus corrupting the system. The hardware is in a security room down on the ground floor that is constantly monitored by cameras, sensors and human security personnel. 

So how was it done?

A virus was introduced into the system that prevented the security robots from detecting the intruder, or anyone at all, after a certain point. The target room and the corridors immediately around that room became invisible zones; the security robots could not see humans while they were in those zones. The agents may become aware of this when they realize that the robots did not detect the CEO even when he was in an area where he ought to be detected. He was working late on a big project, which is why he was in the building. 

How was the virus introduced? By our old friend the fish tank. 

The thermostat was recently replaced on the CFO's authority. That thermostat was the Trojan Horse which introduced the virus to the system. The CFO is the employee who had the bad reaction to allergy meds, which coincidentally enough happened at about the same time as the incident. The CFO doesn't remember authorizing the thermostat switch.

The CFO didn't authorize the switch; her secretary did. Turns out the CFO was poisoned by her secretary to create a diversion so the secretary could carry out the crime. While security and the robots were diverted the secretary got into the invisible area. She used 'I'm going to get your meds' as an excuse to leave the CFO's side and carry out the crime. The whole thing took five minutes.

So how would you do it?

Enjoy!