The Black Campbell

Walking away from my day job this summer and entering quasi-retirement on the education front, I find myself on the cusp — the edge, if you will — of deciding what to do next. Since the last big publishing push in 2021, Black Campbell Entertainment — our publishing group has been coasting. Our focus has been roleplaying games, and specificaly in the pulp adventure subgenre.

As I extricate myself from the other things that build up when you’re working full time. Ask any retired person and they’ll tell you: I’m busier without a job than when I had one. Now all the things that should have been done, but you’re too tired/busy/ don’t wanna, catch your attention. The main thing catching my attention are the projects that have been fulminating for years.

So, now my engagement with roleplaying games is about to shift from buying and enjoying the latest thing to producing the things I hope people will find fun and useful.

We always tell folks to be proud — of their accomplishments, who they are, where they’re from — but for much of humankind, pride is seen as a danger, as well. Pride is probably the one sin that crosses all religions. For the Greeks, hubris was the ultimate crime against the gods…even though they often respected heroes who skirted the edges of this with their pride. Proverbs 16:18 tells us “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit comes before a fall.” and hits us a bit later with “Before destruction, the heart of man is haughty, but humility comes before honor.” The Bhagavad Gita lists excessive pride as a nullifying of good karma, and that modesty (namrata) is the first virtue. Pride is called māna in Buddhism (this is the “excessive” form word in Hindu) and is tied to an excessive ego and causing harm to others. Since increasing suffering is the opposite of achieving enlightenment, it is considered a mental poison.

Is there something wrong with taking pride in doing a good job? No. Is there pride in seeing yourself as somehow better than other people — well, that’s where things get dicey. Excessive pride leads you to over-estimate your abilities, your worth as a person, undervalue others and their contributions. It makes you slip up, because you don’t see that possibility. And let’s face it…we all love to watch the mighty fall; history is replete examples. Perhaps one of the best examples of this is the poem Ozymandius by Percy Bysshe Shelley — a story of the ruined remains of a statue to some prideful king, the plinth boasting of his works…surrounded by desert.

So, let’s create our own Ozymandius for Legend in the Misti — a nobleman and warrior of stunning ability in the early portion of his career: Antra Langress, from the mountainous of the north, has inherited his father’s small fiefdom and seeing the ills of the world, is rushing out to meet them and bring order and peace to the world (or as much of it as he can…) Young, smart, and cunning, he knows he is destined for something great…that some fate awaits him. He is boastful, and usually rightfully so. (The worst kind!) He leaves foes crushed behind him, but seething in their defeat. He leads an army of excellent warriors who enjoy their job too much and see their inspired leader as a means to wealth and power. Dominion awaits!

But built into the character are the seeds for his destruction — one that, if the player were willing to pursue that story, could lead to an Alexander-like figure who conquers a quarter of the known world in a matter of years, then dies either from some disease (or poisioning), or the betrayal of his ministers of state, jealous and resentful of his power. Or like Conan — sit on a throne with crown resting on a heavy brow. He got everything he wanted…and now realizes that there is nothing more, and what he got was not just his, but the troubles of his subjects, to content with.

Ponos, in Greek mythology, was the god of labor, toil, of hardship. Labor, hard work, wasn’t just something you have to do, but a virtue — something divine that defines the character of a person. Egyptians saw works as essential to the maintenance of the harmony of the universe. Greek myth has the Labors of Heracles, the voyage of Odyssey, Sisyphus’ punishment — work so difficult that it requires the aid of the gods, themselves. 

This notion of work being tied to the order of the universe is an idea people have forgotten. Work is just there to make a living. But heroes — their work should move the world, set things right (or tear them down). That kind of work is hard it’s a burden (day 5) — something more than just a mundane day at the shops. It takes resolve (day 8), it brings loss (day 12) and strain (day 13) that requires endurance (day 15), and grit (day 22). It can’t just be a milk run: a labour is something for people to remember for the ages.

In a fantasy game, these labours can build up — from the small, clearing out bandits around a town or destroying a seemingly-unkillable monster; to going through to raiding Hades or destroying that ultimate evil.

Oops! I forgot to schedule days 27 and 28!

We’ve touched on some of this in other days during this year’s RPGaDay, in the Lossand Familiarity days, most notably. When building a character, and a group, why they are together is important, how they interact, but also other motivators — who do they love? Who will they protect? Who will they do anything for??

Maybe the character has a sick relative and this sketchy job for the megacorp will make enough to keep them alive. Maybe the characters’ village is under some threat and they need to band together to save it. (I’m using a variant of this in our Viking-setting Legend in the Mist game, where the heroes have been tasked by their local giant with retrieving the body of a monk from an abbey in Britain. Get it, their village will have her protection; don’t, she’ll wipe them out on the next thaw…)

It could be devotion to an idea. Maybe it’s a devotion to a god, or justice, or remaining free. What is it that your character loves?

Oops! I forgot to schedule days 27 and 28!

Some roleplaying games focus on resource management heavily — what gear and supplies do you have? Where can you get more? What happens when you can’t get those things? When we were playing in the high school/college days, tracking the amount of rations (or even the weight of the stuff you were carrying) was often ignored in favor of the fun factor. You see this in a lot of video games where you apparently are carrying a multitude of weapons and other crap that no one could hump on a 20 mile ruck march, much less a 30 second sprint to cover.

I suspect this is why later RPGs tend to forego this in favor of more stripped down, hand-wavy approaches to food, water, etc. It’s not sexy. If you have an urban-based Shadowrun or Vampire: The Flirtening game, there’s always the 7-11 (or the worker there, if you’re a vampire.) most espionage games aren’t going to be worried when you brought enough MREs or water to keep you going for more than a day or two.

It is, however, an excellent element to ratchet up tension on a character. In Alien, this takes the part of “consumables” — food, water, air; everything in space is precious. When I most recently ran the Chariots of the Gods scenario for a high school RPG club, the kids were pretty smart and stayed in their vacc suits for much of the time. However, using the consumable rules, they were steadily ticking down on air. They might have water access in the suits, as well, but that was also limited. And they couldn’t eat; within a shift they were getting hangry. Worse, their actions to fix the derelict they had found were hampered by clumsy spacesuit fingers, getting into air shafts was difficult because of the bulk of the suits. By using discomfort, hunger (to the point it was pulling a die from their die pools), and getting close to running out of air, that eventually got them out of the suits…but into the dangerous environment I wanted them it.

Legend in the Mist does this with consequence tags like running low on supplies to work against their tests. Outgunned! uses the “Looks” consequence, in this case “Looks Hungry” to dock your die pool. Using hunger to motivate and hamper characters that ignore that basic function is a good way to nudge them in certain directions (in, say, a horror game) or slow them down if they’re pressing on too quickly on a story. “You all have a hunger -3 condition…maybe you should do some foraging or hunting…”

We all have ‘em. As you get older, regrets pile up. It doesn’t alway mean guilt, though they’re often related. Things you said or did, injuries — slight or great — you did to someone, actions you took and shouldn’t (or worse, that you had to because you were forced to it.) Things you wanted to do…and never got to it, never had the time, never had the money, or were just too afraid to try. 

Regret is a pretty common theme when you talk to anyone in middle age or older. It’s a powerful motivator for some, and an even stronger anchor for those that let those opportunities they were too scared to go after slip by. It’s also excellent fodder for a character.

Let’s start with the Alien RPG (2nd Ed.): Marcus Fox looks to be in his 40s, but a lifetime in space — much of it in cryo — means that he is closer to 60. His hear is dark and wavy, he has got a perpetual five-o’clock shadow. He may actually not own clothes that are not tagged with the company logo or the ship’s name. He’s not certain — he hasn’t worn anything else in decades. He doesn’t talk a ton about his past except to his flight officer, Bixby: a man that has flown their ship, U.S.C.S.S. Victoria Jane for what seems forever. Fox avoids entanglements — and the wedding band on a chain he wears suggests that there might be something in his past that makes him want to keep on moving.

Maybe he shouldn’t have taken that “one last run” — but they needed the money. He knew she wasn’t happy alone, so one day she wasn’t…and told him to keep flying. Or perhaps the story was flipped, maybe he should have been more supportive of her new opportunity and in the end, space was quieter than the arguments. Either way, it’s easy to be alone. Or so he tells himself.

Noir is perfect for characters with guilt or regrets. The excellent comic book Blacksad — essentially a ‘50s detective series, but with anthropomorphic animals standing in for people as a visual for their personalities. John Blacksad is a panther who dabbles as a private detective. Always a good hook. Nosorol put out a roleplaying game based on the comics.

So here’s Henry Vaughn, a Badger Motocycle Hooligan that rides around sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong. His milestones for the game are 1) a motorcycle accident killed his sister — he was driving; 2) too poor to go to college; 3) military police during WWII; 4) can’t rejoin the “machine”. He’s like a lot of the guys that came back to America after the war — he can’t adjust to the enforced normality of being a good citizen, can’t just be a hoodlum like other bikers, and is well read, but can’t bring himself to join those beatnik fools (but he reads them, daddy-o.) He’s mean when he has to be, soft if it’s useful. He’s used to hardships — be it the beaches of Normandy or a stormy night ride on the bike, and man! you don’t want to be in his sights.

(Threes would be average, fours good — the schticks add another die to the die pool.) He a guy who wants to be respected for his smarts, but he was too poor and the posh crowd find him too blue collar (he thinks.) He feels guilt for the death of his sister, even though it wasn’t his fault. He feels regret for not having gone another way, but can’t seen to allow himself to risk to get what he wants.

“Familiarity breeds contempt,” is a — familiar — saying for many. The suggestion is that as you come to know a person and their foibles well, you lose respect for them. However, familiarity also breeds trust, understanding, and community. One of the major complaints of the current military promotion structures is the need to throw officers from one assignment to the next, checking boxes; but the most successful militaries of the world had lower officer:enlisted ratios and these officers remained with their cadre for extended periods on time. They knew each other and trusted each other. 

Building in familiarity to a new set of characters is difficult. Players are usually trying to figure out what the role of the character is in a group — fighter, cleric — or optimizing their characters to maximize their effectiveness (and figuring out that most difficult of things…a name) rather than how these characters fit together. There are a few games that attempt to jump start these relationships — Alien has the buddy/rival mechanic where you choose how you interact when the chips are down. Legend in the Mist has the “Fellowship” theme card to decribe how your characters work together, what their combined weakness it, and what they are seeking, but it also has a listing for each character to define the main relationship between the other characters: love, rival, respect, whatever…

When we started our Star Trek Adventures game (actually started in the old Decipher Trek rules), one of the conceits was the ship and crew had just come out of the Federation-Klingon War. Because two of the players were not highly familiar with any of the series, they chose to come in as lower decks officers so they could grow over time. The other two characters were senior officers that had served on the ship through the war, and due to loss, danger, and camaraderie were very tight. They needed to be familiar with each other, as much as the newbies needed to be — well, outside that circle. To start, we built out what the relationships were, what some of the key events were, and what they knew about each other.

The captain was a hard woman who lost a lover in the war, and was driven by a desire to be “exceptional” and by spite. She had saved the life of the ship’s doctor, and vice-versa. He was exceedingly tied to the Andorian notion of honor, and saw her as family. Their Saurian ops officer — who would move up to executive officer, then captain of his own ship later in the campaign — was the first of his race to be an officer and had been mentored by the captain’s paramour. Shared loss. She had taken him on as her protege.

The Saurian officer, Olaf, understood his captain’s foibles: she was stubborn, spiteful, and driven to succeed — especially when the odds were against her. She knew him to be careful, technically proficient, and prone to look for peaceful options even when the outcome was unlikely to succeed. On Day 8 of RPGaDay, we showed how these traits worked to occasionally create tension. The captain and the doctor had a romantic tension that was mostly one sided, and her loneliness led to her making some idiot decisions that he had to help her maneuver. They stand by each other even when the political ramifications of their actions could be “non-career enhancing.” The characters argue, they don’t always agree on the right course, but in the end — they support each other.

That familiarity eventually extended to the new officers. They learned how to do their jobs a certain way, how to approach problems and how to avoid the errors of their superiors. One recent moment in the campaign, the hot-shot pilot learned from Olaf to think first, to worry about his people first. Olaf learned that taking a much more aggressive stance toward a threat was sometimes appropriate. The captain learned to let her anger go. They learned from each other — both what traits to emulate and resist.