The Black Campbell

I bloody hate exploding dice mechanics!

Last week I finally introduced the Supernatural RPG that I have been preparing for. Mostly, it was a teaser to introduce the monster of the week and the characters, and to try to get an initial read on the flavor the campaign is to take. Overall, it was a qualified success.

1) Teaser: The game opened with Jerry Neimann — the fat, geeky ghost hunter that was played with gut-busting elan by my player Joe…you know this guy, gamers (or in this case, he’s a amalgamation of a couple of guys). Tall, fat, myopic, redhaired with the nerd beard (neird, Joe called it.) He’s an IT guy and ghost hunter, a comic book fanatic, a toy collector, who still lives with his parents because he’s stunningly cheap. He’s arrogant, not that well educated but thinks he is, and is a leader in his own mind. the kind of guy that with a straight face can tell you his 300 lb bulk studied ninjutsu and he can cloud men’s minds.

He and his friends Scott, the comic store owner and “amateur physicist” (he got kicked out of Cornell), and his friend Greg, the gay black LARPer who goes by his favorite character’s name since high-school, go into New York City to ghost hunt in the old IRT tunnels near City Hall. (Google them — they’re absolutely beautiful!) There they stumble onto a murder –a man being eaten by a massive, hairy, and pissed off man-thing. Scott is killed when he is swatted off the platforn and hits the third rail. Maloc (Greg) is tossed the breadth of the station. Jerry pees himself a bit, shows some courage, and then nearly gets capped by Transit cops who are wondering why the lights are on in a closed station under City Hall. Jerry and Maloc survive what is coming to be known as “The Werewolf of Manhattan…”

Next, we intro Leo Parkes, former FBI agent, with a dream sequence of him playing catch with his son at their place along the Cheasapeake. The kid goes missing looking for the ball. He goes to find him and sees the reflection of the serial killer Graves that he had captured with all-black, shark-like eyes. He runs for the house where suddenly there are cops cars and cops trying to stop him from going in. His partner Bob Morton is telling him not to go up, he doesn’t want to see this…and then there’s his son, hanging on the wall from pierced hands and feet with strange marking carved into him and painted around him on the wall…then his son looks up at him and tells him to wake up…

…to his assistant Wanda, who doesn’t know why she puts up with his drunk Irish ass. He’s been off the grid for two days on a bender, trying to keep the ghosts quiet. Bob Morton has been trying to call him for two days: they’ve got a wierd one in NYC and he wants to put him on the payroll as a contract investigator. If he’s sober. He flies to New York.

Next, we’re at the Vatican where we intro Father MacEveney and Dr. DellaMarina, and the Instituto del’Esterno Affari, a branch of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith. Led by a crusty old archbishop nicknamed “the Mastiff” (most of this cribbed from Arturo Perez-Reverte’s excellent The Seville Communion), they do mostly exorcisms, etc. around the world. But this time they have something more dangerous…three months of attacks in New York have led dellaMarina to conclude there’s a werewofl, or possibly more than one, on the loose in Manhattan. This is their next assignment: find and eliminate them.

Mac was a navy chaplain, but even there he never carried a gun. The people he helps, he hasn’t had to kill before. This is going to be a tough one. These people didn’t ask to be monsters; they might not even know what they’re doing. But unless he can find a way to contain them, they’ll have to be put down. He flies to NYC. (Canovas was not introduced; the player was out of town.)

In New York, Parkes gets briefed on the situation and why he was pulled in. There’s a terror alert for the 9/11 memorials and the FBI has most of the office working Joint Terrorism Task Force. It’s dark, rainy (there’s another hurricane off the coast being held at bay by a tropical storm…) and very moody as a setting. I think it hit it out of the park with the descriptions during play. He isn’t wanted there by the SAC, who nows of his drinking problems.

The evidence suggests a number of attacks. The first month there were a few attacks in Central Park over a two day period with one survivor that is considered unreliable as a witness as he was high at the time. The next month, the attacks trebled in number, in the Park — but at the same time there were a number in Tribeca (Where the first survivor lives) in the subway stations! There were two survivors of one attack. Last month, the number quadrupled — with attacks at NYU, Tribeca and the IRT (the teaser), and Flushing. Multiple suspect descriptions, including one woman (one of the survivors was a woman who lives in Flushing.) Parkes thinks it’s a conspiracy, and they start the investigation the next morning before he can have a chance to get drunk.

Father Mac and Dr. dellaMarina arrive, brief the archbishop and get put up at the old rectory where he was apprenticing when 9/11 happened (St. Peter’s on Church.) Lots of character stuff with the old priest he served under and going to view the construction and spotlights at the 9/11 site.

That’s where we left off after a three hour session…

The high points: the atmosphere was just about right — there’s some humor (mostly Neimann), but it’s dark, foreboding, but the real “horror” came from the Ground Zero descriptions and flashbacks of Parkes to his kid’s murder and Mac’s aiding people when the towers collapsed in front of him.

Neimann…this character was excellent and the player hit it out of the park.

They’re hunting werewolves, but in some ways, people are more scary.

The low points: pacing was, as always for a first night, spotty. The teaser clipped along but a lot of time was sucked up by great character stuff by Neimann; the rest was a bit slower, and most exposition and character bits.

More as it plays…

From the folks at Scoopertino.com…

The further we get into the 21st Century, the less need there is for fancy Q gadgets…because you can buy something better and cooler right off the shelf — which brings us to a new gadget for your James Bond: 007 campaign: the iPhone (or any smartphone, for that matter) and the SCOUT (Satellite Communications Operational User Toolkit).

Firstly, the smartphone. It is obvious how useful these things are in the field just from the number of movies and TV shows that are using them as plot elements. Having avoided the smartphone for years, I finally broke down and bought an iPad when they first came out. (Okay, not a phone…unless you drop Skype on it.) The basic features alone make them indispensable for the fictional spy: they’re a phone. They’re a map. They’re email, web access, a file storage device, a recorder, a camera…and everyone has one, so they’re not immediately suspicious.

For both iOS and Android there are easy and fast programming toolkits. Q Branch (or S&T) tweaks can give you crypto tools, R/C controls over vehicles (here’s a nice article on some of the other nasty tricks you can use a smartphone for …), etc. etc… Some hardware hacks and your phone could have IR on the camera or some other funky feature. I’ve found our characters in our Bond campaign depend on their phones more than a gun, car, or any other tool.

Add to that the SCOUT — a new device that uses your smartphone as a communications base for satellite communications, GPS, wifi hot spot, comms analysis, spectrum analyser…here’s the sales sheet for more.

From a plot standpoint, the usefulness of the smartphone was obvious in Casino Royale — bad guys, as much as good guys, live off their phones if you’re a mobile, busy henchman. They’re packed with data, even when the user is careful. There’s phone numbers, at the very least. Even if they are password locked, most people don’t realize that smartphones’ OS usually have a root password for service providers to break in and fix stuff…hacking a phone is fairly easy (especially the Androids.)

This is a response to one of Don Mappin’s posts over on Gnome Stew — a guy I quasi know from the old Star Trek gaming BBS. In the post he had a series of tips, hints, etc. for gamers from a GM (himself) that has been at it thirty years. One of those rules that caught my eye was:

Gaming Group Romances
Don’t. Just don’t. 

My initial response was something, “Oh, come on…I’ve met plenty a girlfriend through gaming…” and was ready to pass this off. then I thought about my own experiences in gaming groups, or near others, with players that got involved with each other.

Most of the time player romances lead to you losing one or both of the players; usually the woman. This happens because the happy couple move on to other things — they go out on game night, they get married, have kids, go on a crime spree and drive their car into the Grand Canyon. Maybe not the last one. Most of the time, however, they date for a while, something happens to make one or both jealous, upset, or they just break up and to avoid the other person, one or both stop coming. Sometimes it’s another player that is jealous of the relationship — they were interested in Steve or Serena, or whomever…they drop out from frustration to masturbate, sulk over some of their badly written poetry, or go on a crime spree and drive their car into the Grand Canyon. (More likely, but still improbable.)

So I thought about all the examples of gaming group romances — which go right, which don’t…

In college (the first go ’round), the gaming group was pretty big — 6 or 8 people, depending, and all couples. There wasn’t a whole lot of jealousy, or shenanigans. But personal issues between one of the female players and a male player meant there was a lot of tension between the girl and her boyfriend, and the other player. This colored play pretty much all the time. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t bring your significant other to game; just realize that people sometimes don’t get on so well. (This is why I like to meet prospective players first…so we can avoid to strong a personality clash.)

Another group in Philadelphia pretty much revolved around everyone’s interest in the female player (and if you saw her you’d say, “Well, duh!”) She flirted with them all, started getting to be more than that with one of us. Then started playing one off against the other, causing a row. She left the group, others were less happy, but it held together until I moved out of the city.

Similarly, two gamers in a later group were interested in a woman not part of the group, but married to another player. Ugliness, as they say, ensued. That’s probably the worst example. Infidelity, sorry to say, does not seem to be in short supply in the various gaming groups I’ve seen — it was particularly bad in the LARP that was running here in Albuquerque. I’m not a LARPer, but friends were, so I went to observe a few times to see what the fuss was about. It was a Vampire game (of course) and the purpose appeared to be for everyone to flirt/hook up with everyone else…or kill their character. I came away with a very dark opinion of the community and returned to the table. During my military years there was a thinly disguised threesome going on in the group between one couple and the wife of another player. Didn’t end well, when the woman in question finally caved under guilt and the group shattered.

I met my first wife in a game group, and despite the interest of others, won her. She was the object of affection for one of my gamers for 18 years…and everyone, me included, knew. It never caused trouble until our divorce — he bailed on the group with her. No happy ending there, I’m led to believe.

Overall, looking back on it, gaming gave me a wife, three girlfriends, and a plethora of opportunities to fool around. I can’t quite bring myself to endorse the “Don’t…Just don’t…” advice of Don, despite seeing his point. Gaming’s a hobby for me, and one I love…but if it’s between gaming or the chance for romance? I’d say go for it.

I’ve met a couple of gamers through my tenure in the hobby who avoid stepping behind the screen. For some, they just don’t have the time, and one admitted didn’t have the creativity, for the position. Others see running the game a daunting proposition: there’s a lot to remember, some aren’t as practiced as others with the improvisation that is key to good gamemastering, some don’t have the rules entirely mastered…

And none of that matters. If you’ve got a good story to tell — or just an entertaining one — it doesn’t matter if you’ve only got one in you, or it’s just the start fot eh storytelling dam breaking, if you have entertained the thought, give it a shot.

Here’s some idea for a new GM to maximize their effectiveness, and most importantly enjoyability — not just for the players, but for the GM as well. Because if you’re not having fun, you’re doing it wrong.

1) KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid! Don’t craft some multitextured, year-long adventure with dozens of NPCs, loads of backstory, or worldbuilding. Do what you need to tell the story. We’ll use a movie example — Pitch Black.

The basic story: A bunch of characters crash land on a moon of a gas giant when the ship malfunctions. Something is lurking underground and get one of the characters, leading to the discovery of the light-sensitive creatures that are soon to make their lives more interesting than they’d like. The moon drifts into the shadow of it’s primary every decade or so and the place is immersed in darkness. Which is when the nasty critters come out. Your mission: get to an outpost nearby and get the shuttle up and running before the sun sets and the nasties come to get you. No slop, just a survive-or-die adventure.

What do we know about the universe? (Ignoring the craptastic Chronicles of Riddick) Not much. There are colonies and interstellar travel, nasty penal systems and bounty hunters, Muslims in space. That’s pretty much it. The setting, this moon, looks an awful lot like Western Australia.

What do we know about the characters other than a thumbnail? There’s the pilot, guilty about crashing. There’s the bounty hunter we barely know other than he’s a drug addict, and his quarry Riddick — an infamous killer with eyes that allow him to see in the dark…but who shows more compassion than we might expect. The bounty hunter doesn’t trust Riddick; it’s mutual. There’s a miner who gets killed early. The imam and his sons praising Allah and not much else. The merchant. A young boy 9actually a girl) that idolizes the killer. All very basic characters.

Simple.

2) Don’t Panic. You don’t even need a towel for this one. If you have trouble with the rules, have a player look up the specifics while you press on. Or better yet, simply adjudicate the issue with common sense and based on what you do know of the rule. (Crap! How do explosives work in this game? Whatever — they’re area effect and the damage listed is 6d6 with an area effect fo 5’…let’s assume it’s a die drop off/range. Roll 6d6, line ’em up, and knock of one per increment. What, there’s a wall between you and it? Let’s assume the wall soaks a die.)

If you start to feel in over your head, call a bathroom or drink break. Take a moment, regroup, figure out what to do next. What not to do — dig around the rule book for more than a minute or so. You might consider tabbing them with the colored doo-hickies students use in their textbooks, labeled with the appropriate rules you might need.

3) Don’t be afraid to let the characters wander off course a bit, so long as they are enjoying themselves. They might drift off of the story for a bit. Drop a new hint or clue to get them back on course.

4) HAVE FUN! If you’re not, you’re doing it wrong.

5) Afterward, when the session is done, get feedback from the players to see what you did right or wrong. If they don’t even mention your GM’ing but enthuse about what happened, who did what, the cool NPC, congratulations! You succeeded! And if you didn’t, don’t take it personally.