The Black Campbell

I did a one-shot adventure for a truncated Wednesday night gaming group.  I put it together very quickly, as I had few players than expected — one cancelling last minute.  I took ran a quick Lovecraftian horror “issue” of Gorilla Ace!…without the gorilla or his wife.  The background players got to step forward and use their talents.

Dr. Stanford — physician and scientist — and Dexter Vincetti, the group mechanic and inventor team up with an MI6 agent.  The two are approached by an old acquaintance of Stanford’s, a physicist with occultist leanings — actually a member of a splinter group of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.  He hypnotizes them to get information he needs to complete a dastardly machine, the intention of which is unknown to them.  There’s a fight later with zombies — reanimated corpses controlled by strange black slug-like creatures.

This leads them to a meeting with Aleister Crowley — secretly working for HMG whenever there’s a matter like this.  He’s been watching the physicist, who has a houseguest…a strange Egyptian man who is known to the world by various names.  This creature is a vanguard for menaces so ancient and vast as to be incomprehensible.  And he thinks they intend to let them into our world.  The machine he is building will amplify mystic powers to achieve this.  (How does Crowley know?  Does it matter?)

They raid the mansion of the physicist and confront him while he is performing his ritual, releasing these creatures into the world.  They fend of the evil until Dex reverses the polarity on the spiraling quantum whatsinator and sends them back to the deep beyond.

The adventure ran smoothly, was fast and fun, but I discovered that doing horror is truly hard to do.  You can do creepy fairly easy, but truly scary …tough.

It’s 101 degrees in Albuquerque today.  One of the players had a crappy day at work. Another two are having some personal troubles.  One player forgot his character and had to call up a version from online.  Not the best set up for a night of gaming.

But it was one of the better gaming nights I’ve had…period.

First off, we made shepherd’s pie for dinner — hand mashed potatoes, hamburger fried with onions, garlic, green oni0ns, salt, pepper, paprika and mixed veggies.  Absolutely delicious.  Blue Moon’s honey summer ale with lemon.  A good start.

The adventure was already underway — Gorilla Ace! and his “Flying Circus” have stopped an attack by radium-powered robot men (“Radio Men” for their remote control.)  They are investigating the parts necessary to build the thing and eventually, they find the warehouse the radio signals to control the machines is coming from.

The first fight is right out of the gate this night — two big metal robots with Bren guns on their arms v. Gorilla Ace with his Tommies.  The other characters fight Bulgarian henchmen.  One character gets into a chase through the London Undergound on hoop cycles.  (Stats in another post.)  Pacing is fast and the fight is won.

The chase leads to the underground lair of the Phantom — a Zinovievite communist on the run from Stalin’s purge, and fighting the fight against the British monarchy (which he sees as siding with the fascists in Germany against the proletariat.)  Character, Gorilla Ace’s wife, is captured in the James Bond-esque lair in the catacombs of London.  His plan:  use a mole drill train to dig through the Underground to Parliament, where the king is giving an address to Parliament on the eve of the 1936 Summer Olympics, and blow up the lot.

GA! and his compadres find the lair, thanks to the investigative talents of Dr. Robert Stanford and with the aid of the Special Branch and Scots Guardsmen, raid the lair in a massive fight with black rollneck sweaters Russian and Bulgarian toughs.  Lots of breaking glass, gunfire, fistfights (including one on a darkened catwalk in the catacombs that the hero lost, allowing the villain to escape.)

They stop the train and drive it through the streets into the Thames as it explodes.

Pure pulp.  The pacing was fast, smooth; the players were in their groove and really got into character, playing up their flaws and strengths to the hilt.  Style points were flowing back and forth like a tennis match.   They were challenged, they won out, lost the villain appropriately, and everyone had a fantastic time.

Sometimes, it doesn’t matter how everything else is going, and you have that perfect game night.

I just did.

I’ve been gaming for 30+ years and one thing you can be sure of:  people will not show up.  Sometimes it’s because they’re just not that interested, sometimes it’s a group dynamics thing…and sometimes (often) life just gets in the way.  People graduate from high school or college and get jobs.  Jobs that have weird hours are the worst — if the player’s on a night shift, or works in the filnm industry…  They get or have a boy/girlfriend, or get married and now the significant other/spouse is dictating their time.  They have a kid — the ultimate time sink.

It’s rough for gamemasters to deal with people not showing.  Sometimes it’s just a nuisance, sometimes it feels like rejection.  The more work you put into the game, the more likely you are to be peeved with people dropping out for a week here, two weeks there.  Remember, most of the time, it’s nothing personal.  If it is, dump the player.  It’s better to lose a player than to have personality conflicts at the table.  It’s fine for players to be at each other’s throats…not for the players to be.

There’s a few options you have to deal with no-shows, depending on why they’re happening.  If it’s because a friend or gamer is uninterested or busy with other things they’d rather do, simply back burner their character and press on with the understanding the invitation is always open, but they shouldn’t feel pressure to show up.

This can be difficult in campaigns that are more than a dungeon crawl.  Especially if you’ve worked them into the plot line and have to extricate them from the  main storylines.  It’s annoying when you’ve crafted an action or other scene that plays to their strengths — especially if it’s an important scene and no one else has the skills needed.

Now, say you’ve got that player off the main roster — you can give them the henchman, aide, native guide, character that is often in the background, but not necessary to plotlines to take over when they are present.  Another thing we like to do, if it’s just for a session every once in a while is let another player run the character.  It’s fun for the player, often, to give his/her spin on the character.  Or the GM simply bumps him/her into an NPC position and plays the character (sometimes I have other players roll for the various checks, but I run the character…)

Never just off a character because the player’s not showing up.  They will not appreciate it.  And you might lose a player permanently.

Some examples:  I have a player that works in the film industry — he’s either working all the time for three to ten weeks, or he’s dead broke.  Either way, a bout four months out of the year, he can’t afford to make it to the game, since he commutes an hour to get here.  No problem:  his characters were very important, but not in a position that they couldn’t be the force off stage (like his battlestar commander), or the guy that goes missing in the jungle, only to reappear at a crucial moment in Hollow Earth Expedition.

Another was having trouble at home and needed to get out of the group for a few months.  No problem: we switched to another game until he came back, then picked up where we left off.  (I tend to rotate campaigns to keep things fresh, anyway.)

One player went to Scotland for a year:  her character was badly injured and has been in rehab therapy, only just getting better in the last played adventure.  She’ll be ready to go in a few weeks, when her player returns.

The best advice I can give:  never burn your bridges.  You never know if someone will hove back into your life a couple of decades later (as has happened with a few people), whether your girlfriend or boyfriend will dump them and they’ll be back, or if they get a schedule change.

Foremost, don’t just chose gamers…chose gamers that are friends.  Do things outside of gaming together when you can.  Friends last.   And they usually show up.

I’m not a LARPer.  I’ve never been ashamed of being a gamer, but I never thought going out of my way to let everyone know the levels of my geekiness was a good idea.  Nevertheless...courtesy of Nick Edwards: