Posts from October 2009

Follow-up to the last post …

About a week ago, the good folks at All Games Considered interviewed Ken Hart and myself about a wide variety of Cthulhu-gaming topics – specifically, the Age of Cthulhu line of adventures from Goodman Games, and my own upcoming Age of Cthulhu adventure, “Shadows of Leningrad”.

The interview is now up on the All Games Considered site and can be found: HERE.

I have to say that I find these sorts of things weird. Interviews, signings … these aren’t things I ever expected to do in my life. So when they happen, I find them strange. And a little uncomfortable … but flattering. The fact that people take interest in the things I write is always a little surprising to me.

Hopefully I don’t come across as a total babbling moron during the interview. If I do, my apologies. I meant to convey something slightly better than that. And if you didn’t learn too much about the adventure … again, my apologies. I tried to give a sense of what the adventure was about without giving too much of its mysteries and intrigue away, and in hindsight, I don’t think I did the best job of that.

Anyway … hope you’re entertained by the podcast.

And I’ll be talking more about “Shadows” in the weeks and months to come.

Horror has been an integral part of my gaming experience for a long, long time.

I don’t think horror is a theme that’s particularly easy to mix into gaming, particularly fantasy gaming. A lot of horror’s power comes from fear – fear of the unknown, fear of being powerless, and fear of the gruesome or macabre. For an ordinary person, just wandering through a labyrinth filled with monsters would be a horror-filled experience indeed.

But it’s often hard to inject that fear into the context of a roleplaying game. For example, a mighty paladin, clad in platemail armor and wielding a magical vorpal sword … well, he’s probably not going to fear all that much in a dungeon. To me, when it’s successful, horror in gaming is so much more about setting mood and atmosphere than about attempts to physically frighten a character (or a player). Some of the most horrifying moments I’ve experienced in games turn out to be simple betrayals, or the corruption of innocent souls, rather than just the appearance of a powerful demilich or vampire.

My first real experience with horror in gaming came with a module called I6: Ravenloft. I ran it for some friends in seventh or eighth grade for a couple of friends. We completed the module in a single session … granted, it was a Mountain Dew and cheese doodle fueled session that lasted for almost three days straight and involved little to no sleep! I don’t think that module wandered particularly far away from the typical modules like “The Lost City” and “Ghost Tower of Inverness” that I was running at the time … the style was still mostly find monsters, hack monsters, repeat. However, I6: Ravenloft introduced a lot of interesting NPCs – in particular, the villain, Count Strahd von Zarovich – which added a lot of dimension to the adventure, and encouraged a lot of roleplaying interactions. It was also well-written enough to inject a lot of good moments of horror into the game without much work needed for a then-inexperienced DM like myself. Ravenloft was a solid, entertaining module, and between that and “The Lost City”, I started down a road to playing and running a lot of great games over the next several years.

I didn’t touch anything particularly horror-related, though, until a few years later when my friend Tony bought the then-new Ravenloft boxed campaign setting, and started running some original adventures using it. It was a fun campaign – I played a dwarven barbarian, who I would resurrect in a fashion many years later for a much different 4E campaign – but in retrospect, it wasn’t particularly horrifying. Our characters encountered a lot of grim terrors, to be sure, and we went through many harrowing adventures involving Doctor Victor Mordenheim and his creations, but there was never a sense of fear or terror in those games. Torhak (my dwarf) never was particularly afraid of what he faced, nor was he ever forced to make the tough choices involved in stories of tragic horror. In retrospect, I think it was merely a matter of expecting the game system to inject all of the atmosphere and mood of horror into the game, and not better shaping the stories and the adventures to bring out that atmosphere and mood. It was a learning experience, even though I don’t think any of us realized it at the time.

However, what we did realize back then was that Ravenloft wasn’t doing what we wanted – namely, to give us a game about horror. So, on a trip to the Game Room around that time, I discovered this book …

… which led to a grand experience in my years of gaming, which I’m still enjoying today.

Call of Cthulhu is one of my favorite games of all time. Easy to play, easy to run, drenched in the sinister horrors of the Cthulhu Mythos established by H.P. Lovecraft … in other words, WIN.

One of the interesting things I’ve noticed about Call of Cthulhu over the years is how it seems to polarize gamers. Most gamers love CoC, or hate it. There’s no in-between. (I’ve also noticed that those in the “love” crowd – myself included – tend to be writers.) The split, I think, tends to run along the lines of whether you make characters based solely on concept, or if you like to optimize characters to a degree … and to what degree you like to “win” in a roleplaying game. There’s really no discernable difference between the various types of Call of Cthulhu characters – there’s no sort of min-maxing that will make one character clearly better than another. Yes, some characters might choose to learn spells, others might focus on skills involving combat … but at the end of the day, when that shoggoth comes lumbering out of the shadows, both characters are in deep, deep trouble and headed for some SAN loss.

If you’re looking for standard sorts of “win” in a RPG – “I want to save the day”, or “I want to beat up the monsters”, or “I want to advance my character so he can do some really cool things” – Call of Cthulhu is probably not the game for you. Characters usually don’t survive long enough to evolve into anything remotely powerful, and, well … to use one of the general rules of thumb generated at my gaming table, if you need to draw a gun, you’re probably already dead.

So why play?

Well, I play Call of Cthulhu because I enjoy the atmosphere, and the mood. If you’re a horror fan, it’s a wonderful game. I play because it’s a fantastic environment in which to roleplay interesting characters – pitting ordinary characters against extraordinary foes throws standard D&D tactics straight out the window, and usually brings about a fair amount of innovative game play. I play because of the investigative nature of the adventures – with combat usually resulting in dire consequences, it’s a game where there’s a premium on investigation, and using your wits. And, oddly enough … I play because I enjoy the struggle. I know whatever character I’m going to play is eventually doomed to die, or at least be locked in a padded cell as a raving lunatic … but there’s a lot of fun to had in living to see another day, to survive the horrors unleashed by the Cthulhu Mythos, and to see how long a character can beat the odds and succeed.

Our games began with two of the classic Call of Cthulhu adventures produced by Chaosium – “Horror on the Orient Express” and "The Trail of Tsathogghua" – and then slowly turned towards homebrewed adventures, which we set in more traditional Lovecraftian settings like Dunwich and Innsmouth. One of the nice by-products of the game was that we used a rotating Keeper system – one week, someone would dream up an adventure and run it as Keeper; the next time we played, someone else would take the honors; and so on. I always liked that system at the gaming table. It allowed a bunch of players who normally weren’t accustomed to running a game – or writing an adventure – to try their hand at seeing what the other side of the game screen might be like. It also took a lot of pressure off of the “regulars” who ran games, like myself – it’s much easier to write a one-shot adventure like the ones I wrote for Call of Cthulhu than multiple connected adventures for an ongoing campaign. More variety, more chances to both run and play adventures … it’s one of the reasons that Call of Cthulhu still resonates strongly as a great memory of my earlier days of gaming.

There were many, many fun moments in those long-ago adventures. I remember playing a cowardly scholar who eventually became so paranoid about occult books that he took to carry a can of gasoline around with him wherever he went … and would set books on fire whenever they were found, whether they contained secrets of the occult or not. (This strategy later backfired when he stumbled across a ghoul in a graveyard playing with a crate filled with potato masher grenades. Don’t ask.) As with most of those games, though, they were played for awhile, we enjoyed the hell of them while they lasted, and then we moved on to other games, or other things.

Unlike other many games, though, we still occasionally heed the Call of Cthulhu. Every year or so, a bunch of us still get together to play the game. I don’t know if it’s because the game lends itself to the one-shot format, or because there’s no long-term expectation of character development, or just the simple love of horror and the works of Lovecraft – but whatever the reason may be, it’s easy to gather some of these old friends together for a single night of exploring the Cthulhu Mythos, and looking around for the terrors that lurk in the dark.

And, of course, dying. Or going mad.

It’s fun.

I was asked this earlier year by the good folks at Goodman Games to write a horror adventure for their “Age of Cthulhu” line. Obviously, I jumped at the chance to write it. “Shadows of Leningrad” will probably be out sometime early next year, and while the writing of that adventure deserves its own post, suffice it to say it was one of the most fun – and challenging – adventures I’ve ever written. Researching all the historical details, trying to set up the appropriate mood and atmosphere, setting up encounters where fighting is only meant as a last resort … it’s very different that the other adventure modules I’ve written in recent years.

Hopefully, it works for all Call of Cthulhu fans, and they enjoy it.

In the meantime, in the spirit of the Halloween season, I intend to play the game some more, and enjoy the horror and the madness.

If you’re a gaming fan – and a horror fan – I encourage you to do the same. It’s a phenomenal game.

Here’s hoping you make your Sanity checks, though!

I played in my first game of Exalted last night.

And, I’ll admit, much to my surprise … it was a blast.

My friend John has been trying to get me to run Exalted for years. He really liked the game, and wanted to play it, as did a few other players in my gaming group. However, for the past few years, I’ve pretty much been the guy running all the games for my group. I haven’t been “just a player” for quite awhile. So games that we play have largely depended on whether or not I want to run them … and I haven’t wanted to run Exalted.

To be honest, I’m not a huge fan of the various games published by White Wolf. I know this surprises a lot of gamers who know me, as I tend to like games that favor story over combat, flavor over mechanics … and that’s right in line with the White Wolf games like Exalted, or Vampire, or Mage. However, I like to tell my own stories. White Wolf’s games are usually drenched in an established metaplot, and unless that metaplot really grabs my interest, I don’t like running those sorts of games. I don’t like ripping out sections of metaplot and tweaking others to fit what I want to do. Give me a setting, give me a sense of what the game is like … but don’t tell me what’s going on. I want to figure that out for myself.

Exalted takes the “metaplot” a little further in that the game story intertwines with the game mechanics, which is something I never liked. Exalted, put simply, is sort of an anime-inspired superheroic/martial arts game set in a “lost age” of humanity. A lot of the character powers – or charms – are connected to things in the background story of the game, and virtually all of them have names like Graceful Crane Stance or Seven Shadow Evasion. Which is cool, except you can’t tell what the charms do by just looking at their names (Seven Shadow Evasion, for example, boils down to ‘automatic dodge’), and it makes it even harder to throw away the massive metaplot and backstory built into Exalted, and to try and create something a little more original instead.

(Side note: D&D 4E kind of adopted this annoying habit of giving powers names that don't clearly describe what the powers actually do as well, much to my irritation.)

Exalted also features a lot of game design features that I don’t like. For a game that’s really supposed to be story-driven, there’s an awful lot of math and die-rolling. Which is fine, except in my opinion there’s plenty of instances where the rules are either badly constructed or just broken. (Google “Exalted - Twilight Essence Reactor” for a fantastic example of broken rules, if you’re interested.) Yes, you can houserule away the rules you don’t like, but I’m a lot more forgiving of houseruling simple systems than complex ones, and Exalted – to me – just seems unnecessarily complicated. The game designer in me looks at the concept of the game, looks at the rules, and just believes there’s a simpler way to approach the concept, and some of the rules for Exalted seem to be complex just for the sake of being complex.

So, Exalted became this thing at the gaming table that got brought up every few months.

Hey, Mike, you should try running Exalted!

Umm … no.

Things went on like this for awhile, until something unexpected happened.

Eric – one of the gamers in my group – offered to run Exalted.

To those of you who’ve read this blog and its predecessor over the years, Eric ran most of the great AD&D campaigns of my misspent youth. Two of his campaigns – Tunnelworld, and his AD&D flavored version of Renaissance-era Paris – stand out as the best games in which I’ve ever played. I’m not exaggerating when I say those games – and Eric – shaped my life. Those were the games that inspired me to write my own campaigns, and to became a freelancer and writer in the gaming industry. The adventures and sourcebooks I’ve written are my own attempt to capture but a fraction of the excitement, wonder, and pure awesomeness that I discovered week in and week out of Eric’s games. With all due respect to the many wonderful people who have been kind enough to run the games I’ve played in over the years - and most of those folks are damn good - Eric is the best game master I've ever met.

Eric hadn’t run a game in many, many years. So the offer was both exciting and a little surprising … and for me, a little frustrating. Because Exalted still hadn’t managed to grab my interest, either as a Storyteller or as a player. In a selfish sense, I was happy as hell that Eric wanted to run a game, I just wanted him to run just about any game but Exalted. But the group was into the idea, and, well … I decided that maybe it was time to quit bitching, throw away my preconceived notions about the game, and just play the damn thing.

Making a character was a struggle, I won’t lie. It took me a long time to get into the rich and complex backstory of Exalted, and to come up with a character concept that I liked. I eventually settled on my character Talon, a Twilight-caste Solar Exalted who essentially is a cross between Bruce Lee and Sherlock Holmes, but getting the character worked out the way I wanted took a long time. When I finally sat down at our gaming table last night, I was still sorting out the final details for Talon, and still eying the game with a lot of trepidation.

All of that completely went away in the first ten minutes.

Is Exalted still unnecessarily complicated? Yes, in my opinion. Am I a tremendous fan of its massive metaplot and backstory? No. Those things didn’t change. However, all things considered, those were minor details once the game got underway. Eric proved once again that he’s a phenomenal storyteller and game master – the campaign kicked off with a bang, and he immediately got our characters involved in an intriguing mystery splashed with tons of cinematic action. Though it took a little bit to get used to the rules system, after an hour or so, we started getting used to it, and things really started to run smoothly. The game became about what all good games are – a terrific, engaging, creative interaction between the game master and the players that’s a hell of a lot of fun.

Last night’s game reminded me of something important – that the games we play are about much more than rules. The rules are just a framework for the storytelling collaboration that goes on in a gaming group. It’s easy to look at a game, or an adventure, and just think it’s not going to work, or it’s not going to suit your tastes. There’s just no substitute for playing that game or that adventure with your friends at a gaming table. They often play much differently than you think they will. Do I love Exalted? No. I’ll be honest, there’s things I still don’t like about the game. But after playing it for the first time, I definitely like it. It turns out my gripes about the game are relatively minor, not major, as I wrongly thought they would be … and I have to admit I’m very much looking forward to the next time we play the game.

So, my thanks again to Eric, for running a fantastic game, for inspiring me – yet again – to try and write better adventures for my own games, and to be a better game master. It was great to see him back in that role once more.

And the next time you look at a game and think, “nah, I wouldn’t like that” … give it a second look. Better yet, take out some dice and just give it a try. At worst, you just confirm what you already thought.

And at best … well, you might be surprised by what you find.

I know I was.