A Black City Post - Tower of Astronomy, First Floor

Kind of a lazy morning here, so I thought I'd post a piece I was editing for the Black City.  It shows the huge gap between jotting quick notes for use in a home game, versus the amount of text you might need to explain to someone else how something should work in game.  The first floor of the tower feature features a gate opening mechanism where the aliens mechanized a ritual to summon a Lovecraftian entity; that's one of the themes in the ruins, not necessarily original, the exploitation of dark magic and how it's gone horribly wrong and created these sprawling ruins.

For contrast, the previous write up of the Tower of Astronomy, back when I was brainstorming, is part of this old post:  B Tower of Astronomy

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B Tower of Astronomy

The Tower of Astronomy is a twisted spire of impregnable black rock looming over the southern part of the city; a long stair climbs to the sole entrance, a doorway 50' above the ground, where a pair of Watchers (orange level) flank the door.  The Watchers fire force beams from their eyes, forcing a save vs paralysis to avoid being thrown off the stairs, in addition to the normal damage.

Beyond the Watchers are large half circle doors (orange) of permalloy that retract back into the walls allowing access when a passkey is presented.  A spiral pattern is engraved on the doors.

The Inhabitant from Carcosa
The only creature currently in the tower is a wraithlike spirit that became trapped here after crossing into the tower from the gate to Carcosa.  Passage through the gate drained much of its animus, so it appears misty and indistinct with pinpoint eyes.  It hides in alcoves and watches from a distance, ambushing a victim after a group splits up to explore or is distracted by the mahcinery.  With each successful level drain attack it makes, it's appearance solidifies to portray a haggard man in Renaissance finery.  After two successful drains, the spirit has enough vigor to pass back through the Carcosa gate.  In life, the thing was a noble from a doomed world absorbed into the corpse city of Carcosa, and the ghost is a thrall to the King in Yellow.  After crossing over, the ghostly nobleman makes his way across the Lake of Hali, to report to the King about the gate.  A serious foray from Carcosa is soon made when the King learns of the new world to spread madness and despair.

Ghostly Nobleman of a Doomed City
[ Omitting the stat block, uses stats as a Wraith ]

Lower Floor - The Gateway Apparatus
Directly across from the door is a large, arched portal, obscured by flowing mist.  To the left of the room is a broad stone table, stacked with metal tablets.  The center floor is dominated by a pair of nested magical circles inscribed on discs.  Running along the right side of the tower is a complicated mechanical mechanism comprised of tubes, cables, and armatures; the mechanism arches into the air high above the circle and also projects upward through the ceiling.  The mechanism thrums with power.  All of these areas are further detailed below.

The Thaumaturgic Circles
The interior of the tower is glistening black rock, polished to a mirror surface and highly reflective.  The floor is made of basalt blocks, but the central section is a 30' diameter circular disc, slightly raised above the level of the outer floor.  A thaumaturgic circle and a five-pointed star are carved into the large disc.  At each point in the star, there's a small platform for standing, and a hand post topped by a crystal globe.  Within the center of the 30' diameter disc is a smaller disc, also inscribed with thaumaturgical circles, but this circle contains a stone rectangle with a manacles.

The stone rectangle is long enough for a human to lie on, and there is a body-cavity depression carved into the stone surface.  There are two pairs of manacles, for ankles and wrists, and when first encountered, the manacles are open.  They clasp firmly on anyone that puts them around a limb, sealing fast with no apparent mechanism.  They are enchanted adamant, and are impregnable; only a Knock spell frees a captive once a manacle is closed.

The Portal
If a character approaches the portal, the mist dissipates, and a scene along a mournful lakeshore is viewed through the arch.  Across the lake is the faint ghost image of an ancient city.  If a character steps through the portal, they are drained of 4 constitution points (temporarily) and find themselves on the shore of the Lake of Hali.  This is Carcosa.

Once on the other side, the portal is vague and indistinct, detectable as a faint shimmer in the air, like a heat mirage.  For the next 24 hours, any wandering monsters have a slight chance of detecting the portal and crossing into the tower.  After 24 hours, the portal obscures with mist again and disappears on the Carcosa side; only a Detect Invisible identifies the exact location once the portal has disappeared.

Above the keystone of the arch is a 2' tall bronze metal tablet inscribed with dots and alchemical symbols, resting in a niche.

The Stone Table
Stacked on this 10' long basalt table are 7 bronze tablets, each 2' x 4' and about an inch thick.  Carved into each surface is alien dot-matrix script, mathematic and alchemical symbols, and a pattern of random lines and dots.  The lines and dots represent a star pattern for the star charts on the next floor, but this isn't immediately apparent to the characters.

The tablets contain the coordinates for calibrating the Gateway Apparatus to open the proper gate.  There are 7 tablets on the table, since the 8th tablet, the Carcosa Tablet, is already loaded over the portal.  If the party learns how to open gateways and experiments by loading other tablets, here is the list of tablets and destinations.  Note:  A Read Languages translates alien script and identifies the title for each tablet.

List of Gate Tablets:
1  The Black City
2  The Great Library
3  The Moon
4  Unknown Kadath in the Cold Waste
5  The Plateau of Leng
6  Lightless Cavern of N'Kai
7  The Isle of the Unknown
8  The Lake of Hali (this tablet is already loaded)

[ I may add a brief description for each location.  For instance, the Black City location offers a view into the city's past, 80,000 years ago when it was teeming with alien greys and their monstrous servitors.  Certainly items 7 and 8 I'll use for my home game, but if this ever reaches print, I'm not sure the etiquette for referencing someone else's published work, it's probably wise to get the author's permission. ]

Behind the stone table is an alcove with a shaft leading up to the second and third floors of the tower.  The aliens used levitation to move between levels, but rungs were provided for their earthbound Plastical servitors.

The Gateway Apparatus
This massive arcane machine thrums with nascent power coming up through the floor.  There is a trapdoor hatch (orange) nearby that leads to a maintenance shaft running alongside the vibrating power conduits.  The shaft leads to the Transit Tunnels (dungeon level 1) and then continues all the way down to the Warrens of Decay (dungeon level 2).  A simple set of metal rungs allows descent.

The machine consists of a large switch, a series of five joystick controls, and a large button.  The switch turns on the machine, which hums more noticeably.  Immediately, the thaumaturgic circles in the nested discs begin to glow with a blue light.  Over on the bronze tablet above the portal, the star coordinates also begin to glow.

The joysticks are locked in place.  They can be pulled slightly up to unlock them, and the glowing dots on the bronze tablet star coordinates move out of alignment.  The portal to Carcosa immediately closes.  There are five joysticks, and each tablet has five dots for guiding them into celestial alignment.  As the joysticks are moved, the armatures of the machine shift and move, and the view of the night sky on the next floor up shifts to align with the proper constellations.

The large button sets off a cacophony of fluting sounds, chimes, and harmonics from myriad bronze devices hanging off the ceiling.  The music sounds discordant, atonal, and oddly mathematical to human ears.  The quality of the music changes as the joysticks are realigned to ensure proper harmonics for the summoning.

Experimentation
The aliens used the Gateway Apparatus to unseal portals to other times and places by summoning the Opener of the Way through the music of the spheres.  The proper ritual sequence starts with placing an appropriate bronze tablet above the portal.  A living sacrifice is manacled to the sacrificial stone in the inner circle.  The machine is powered on with the large throw switch.  The joysticks are used to align the projected lights on the tablets with the celestial dots on the tablets, and the joysticks lock into place.  On the second floor of the tower, the view of the night sky shifts to the correct celestial quadrant, though this isn't readily apparent from the first floor.  Five ritual contributors step onto the five points of the star and place their hands on the crystal orbs.  The button is pressed, and the "music" of the spheres begins to reverberate through the room.

The ritual can take 5 to 30 minutes of the atonal music before the Opener of the Way, an avatar of Yog Sothoth, arrives.  For every 5 minutes of ritual time, a spell level of magical energy is drained by the orbs, or a point of wisdom (temporary ability score loss) is taken from one or more of the contributors.  If the ritual takes 25 minutes, 5 total points of spell levels or wisdom are taken by the orbs.  A single caster could contribute three 1st level spells and a 2nd level spell to meet the entire requirement, or it could be apportioned amongst all the contributors.  When the Opener of the Way appears, its a bizarre globular monster composed of silvery spheres - it materializes in the central thaumaturgic circle.  Standing in the presence of the Opener of the Way is terrifying, and the characters at the orb stations must make a Save vs Spells to avoid falling away in fear.

The Opener of the Way is fully formed after about 5 minutes, and the new portal opens.  The Opener consumes the sacrifice, absorbing the victim completely (treat as disintegration).  The machine is safe to shut down, dispelling the Opener.  If no sacrifice is offered, it grabs for any character that abandoned an Orb station before leaving; if none of the stations were abandoned, a random character is selected from those standing outside the magic circles.  A Protection from Evil spell wards a character outside the thaumaturgic circles.

Through trial and error, players may discover the proper sequence to align the machinery and summon the Opener of the Way.

The Opener of the Way
[  Omitting stats for the avatar of Yog Sothoth, the All-in-One ]
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That's the first floor, at least...

Scooby Doo Cthulhu Gaming

Good news - my group loves the idea of playing detectives and investigators in the SCD, the NYPD Special Crimes Division, last week's campaign idea for my upcoming Cthulhu campaign.  I'm sifting through my Trail of Cthulhu scenarios and Chaosium's backlog to identify a good set of adventures to relocate to New York.  We're still undecided whether the rules will be Trail of Cthulhu or Call of Cthulhu; we like the Trail clue system but the Chaosium combat system… and we didn't discuss whether the 1920's would be more fun than the 1930's.  But campaign planning is moving forward.  Joy.

However, sifting through all these published scenarios brings me to a soapbox moment, a mini rant on what I call "passive plot hooks", or Scooby Doo Cthulhu.

The suggested plot hooks for most Cthulhu scenarios involve the players being asked to perform a service or investigation on behalf of a friend, loved one, relative, or an employer, usually with no direct reference to the occult or supernatural… and yet, miraculously, as the players get involved, it becomes obviously clear within a short time that this is another full blown Occult Investigation™.   Over and over again.

When every scenario starts with an innocuous letter from an old friend or relative seeking help, and leads to madness and insanity, either credulity stretches beyond belief or you stop picking up the phone and opening your mail.

I understand why scenario writers resort to loading pre-existing relationships onto the players; those loaded relationships create instant motivations for the characters, and a bit of cheap emotional resonance with the subject matter.  "You have to go to Dunwich for Aunt Patricia's Christmas dinner, she sent you a letter with an invitation, and just happened to invite all of your colleagues for dinner as well.  You wouldn't want to hurt her feelings."  Sure, it always starts  as Christmas goose and tarts, the cultists and the awful rites to Yog-Sothoth only come later.

If you are running an endless parade of one-shots, with new characters that begin as ordinary folks with no previous Mythos experience, then I suppose it makes sense their first induction into the world of occult horror would come indirectly through the benign summons of a friend, relative, or mundane employment opportunity, which goes terribly wrong when a monster shows up.  But if you try to run your campaign in this mode, you end up with Scooby Doo; no matter where the Mystery Machine goes, there's always an occult mystery that needs to be solved by the gang at the precise moment when they're driving through.

This is why they're passive plot hooks.  There's no looking for trouble; trouble always finds the crew of the Mystery Machine.  No matter how cute you think are Daphne and Velma (or Fred), I'm asking you to say no to Scooby Doo Cthulhu gaming.  (I was always partial to Velma).

My first task when identifying scenarios for use in the SCD campaign is to ruthlessly strip the passive plot hooks and reposition the entry point of the scenario so that it gets on the radar of an investigative organization like the SCD. This might mean advancing the inherent timeline a bit, or moving the action closer to the boiling point.  So be it.  Let's take a look at a few popular introductory scenarios that are burdened with Scooby Doo plot hooks, and flip them around to work with the SCD.  (This technique would work great for your Delta Green setting Cthulhu game, too).

Edge of Darkness
"Edge of Darkness", from the core book, begins when the player characters arrive at the bedside of a dying man, Rupert Merriweather.   "The investigators are all friends, relatives, past students, and former colleagues of the man."  How convenient.  The characters go on to learn that Rupert had a dark secret, and if the characters don't take up his cause, something terrible will happen. "Ruh-Roh, Shaggy."

Let's change the entry point but leave the rest of the scenario intact.  With no one to turn to, Rupert wrote a letter on his death bed and had his last words sent in a package to the local police, warning them about a coming horror.  Whenever anything weird and unusual shows up in the mail, like Rupert's rambling death bed letter, occult journal, and weird Egyptian box, it gets routed to the mail room of the SCD and ends up sitting on a shelf somewhere.  It's not until the actual murders and disappearances start to happen in Ross's Corners, the place where Rupert warned the horror would begin, that this plot hook bubbles up to become a potential case.

The desk sergeant:
"We got a note off the wire about a mutilated woman's body found out near this small town, Ross's Corners.  Yeah, I never heard of the place either.  Normally I wouldn't pay attention to an isolated murder, and just let the locals handle it, but I remembered this kooky old guy sent us a box a week or so back with a letter, saying that once he was gone, bad things would start happening out at Ross's Corners."

"O'Malley, maybe you should get your team together and consider looking into it.  I bet Charlie in the mail room remembers where he put the box with the kook's letter and book.  You never know - this could be a real SCD case after all."

Mister Corbitt
The collection Mansions of Madness features "Mister Corbitt", and this is another popular kick-off scenario.  In this case, one of the investigators just happens to be the neighbor across the street from a guy that may or may not be a major sorceror.  Apparently, our nosy future investigator likes to peer out the venetian blinds at his neighbor, and sees him carrying a mysterious bundle into the house… and something flops out of the bundle that looks like an arm!  Yikes.  It's totally reminiscent of Hitchcock's Rear Window, which should be awesome.

Unfortunately, the approach is a bit too passive for the SCD campaign.  Our investigators are professional detectives, not the local babysitter and her friends who spy on the neighbor out the window and imagine dark things going on behind closed doors.

Let's keep the basic facts the same, where the babysitter or neighbor actually does think she saw something weird, and calls the local police.  A nervous teenager isn't a big priority, so by the time a patrol car swings by to speak to the sitter and knock on Corbitt's door, the man is already gone again.  The officer snoops around the house to allay the babysitter's fears, checks out the weird looking green house in the back, and then drives off.  All clear.

The player characters get involved when they're called down to the morgue to check out a corpse - our local patrol officer was seen a bit later at the gas station, getting torn to pieces in broad daylight by some kind of "thing", only there was nothing there.  Wounds just opened up spontaneously on the screaming cop.  The terrified gas station attendant can relate the whole incident.

Desk Sergeant:
"We've got a report of a patrol officer being lifted into the air and ripped to pieces by an invisible monster over on 3rd Avenue, in broad daylight.  O'Malley, why don't you take someone over to the morgue and check it out.  They've got a witness down at the precinct giving a statement - the gas station attendant.  Make sure you test him for booze.  If he checks out, it sounds like we might have a case. "

The group is able to trace the officer's dispatches, so they'll end up at a similar starting point - looking at Corbitt's house from across the street while speaking to the babysitter about the arm she thought she saw flopping out of a package.  But this entry point is more action oriented and horrible, and the investigators will also have a nifty coroner's report and toxicology analysis on what really might have happened to the dead officer.

So that's what I'm doing the next few weeks - reading through these old scenarios, seeing which ones can be positioned to work in the SCD campaign, and fixing the plot hooks.

Lauding the Wiki

One of the cooler things we've put in place the past month or so has been the Gothic Greyhawk campaign wiki.  I had asked for recommendations some time back, and folks suggested a few platforms - we started playing around with the free version of Obsidian Portal.

I wasn't interested in posting backgrounds, NPCs, and using the wiki to organize the DM's content - the typical stuff (I use OneNote on the laptop).  Instead, we've been using it to keep track of the group's public information - their expedition equipment and gear, treasury, list of magic items and resources, that kind of stuff.  This has been a huge advantage for enabling player planning.  Take the list of scrolls, for instance.  In between game sessions, anyone in the campaign can peruse the list of scrolls and see what's in the group's arsenal. Ditto with the magic items.  My players wouldn't have been nearly as successful in some of the recent knock-down fights without the ability to collectively discuss the resource pool and brainstorm in between sessions on how to deploy their resources.

They've even taken to bringing tablets so they can pop out to the wiki if necessary and look stuff up.

There's also a body of standard procedures that always gets written down and lost - marching orders, overnight watches, standard memorized spells.  Putting those things on the wiki and defaulting to the standard procedure has also stream lined play and maximized table time.  I dislike spending game time on stuff that you should be able to write down once, and just reference and update.

It's still a work in progress, but you can see what we've done with the wiki here:
Gothic Greyhawk on Obsidian Portal
List of Magic Items
List of Scrolls

*Smitty, one of the players, put together that nifty Gothic Greyhawk banner.  Thanks man!

Fear with a Handful of Dice

It's a common question, especially if you're going to run a horror game, or run D&D with a nod towards weird horror like LOTFP.  How do you scare your players?

After all, the typical gaming table is not conducive to generating fear.  It's a bunch of folks, usually in a brightly lit place, munching on chips and cracking jokes.  We're playing a game, after all.  The monsters, no matter how fearsome, may be well-known and "banal".  The cosmic horror and inherent atheism of Lovecraft can seem a bit quaint these days.

However, the method to generate genuine player fear is simple, and involves two basic elements - investment and atmosphere.

Investment
Disposable characters and an uninteresting setting are the enemies of your fear.  The players need to genuinely care about their characters before they'll feel any concern about the game situation.  I don't mean copious back story.  Even the "hopeless" 1st level fighter can suddenly become interesting when he manages to survive to level 2, and the player starts to identify with the character - he's become the underdog that's bucking the odds.

As a DM or Keeper starting a new game, that might mean doing something as simple as asking each player to say one thing they like about their new character.  The idea here is so basic it's almost too obvious - the players need to care about what happens to their game-world avatars before they can feel fear and concern for them.  Still, this is an important idea for the game master to remember - the prerequisite to generating fear has nothing to with the game master scaring the players, and everything to do with the players creating an opportunity to be frightened by having a stake in the outcome.

Once there is some investment by the players, even situations that are directly threatening will be sufficient to generate fear.  A banal monster like an ogre in D&D will frighten a low level group of adventurers, if the group cares about keeping their characters alive.  There is a preoccupation at times about using unique bestiaries and monsters, but the ability to calculate the odds, and recognize that the group is hopelessly outclassed, is an effective, direct way to generate fear.   Published bestiaries serve your ends for this technique.

"Oh no, that's a Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath! Run!"
"Crap, energy draining undead - we have no magic weapons - run for it!"
"Ugh, not killer bees - again.  Save or die.  Run!"

Atmosphere
I like the term "narrative distance" to describe how the events of the game world can be so serious, but the group is cracking jokes and laughing about other things out of game.  It's important to the social side of gaming - I'm no fanatic when it comes to trying to run a "serious" table.  But it's a good practice to quiet things down once in a while and restore focus to the game world when you need to introduce something creepy.

Staging can help - some game masters advocate dimming the lights or doing something with the physical environment - but I rarely use those types of techniques.  I do recommend tactics like changing the speed, tone, and volume of your delivery, keeping your descriptions vague, and creating ambiguity.  Start with progressively more revealing glimpses of what’s to come.  Using unique or unknown monsters, with equally unknown capabilities, reinforces the ambiguity.  An entire post could be written just on narrative presentation and creating creepy descriptions by teasing the information.  There's an art to ramping up tension through description and pacing.

But atmosphere ultimately boils down to destabilizing the player's control over a situation by presenting the unknown.  Withholding or teasing descriptive information creates uncertainty in the minds of the players.  New monsters, with unknown capabilities, prevents planning, and this also blocks the players from controlling the situation.

Random effects and creatures that force saving throws are excellent for building a fearful atmosphere because of the uncertainty they engender - the player has limited control over the dice results, but the effect on their character can be both massive and negative (like petrification, or Call of Cthulhu's insanity rules).

The fear from the previous section, fear from a known but direct threat, is more like stress and anxiety, but still creates that cathartic feeling of relief when the situation is survived; fear of the unknown, built up through atmosphere and uncertainty and loss of control, is sharp and much more powerful.  I suggest you work at making both a part of your arsenal - and good luck!

Post Script:
Over at Jack's place, he posted a few articles this week on using terror and horror effects in gaming, and pushing those effects onto the characters.  It got the wheels turning on the interrelationship of fear, terror, and horror, and when should they be targeted at the player, and when should they be targeted at the character.  It's an interesting question!  This piece is looking at achieving player-focused fear, but it's made me want to review some of my favorite gaming moments that provoke terror or horror and see what makes those situations work.

The Battle of Tharizdun, Part 2

This is the continuing chronicle of my player's efforts to enter  THE FORGOTTEN TEMPLE OF THARIZDUN, after meeting fierce resistance in the place's upper room.  (This is game report 57)

The players were in a bad spot after last week's game.  Their thieves were on the front line, their fighters were pinned by humanoids, and reinforcements were coming up the stairs.  The good news was that the players used all those detailed pictures to plan during the week!  I saw plenty of chatter over email, involving looking through the backlog of scrolls, unused spells, and even consulting the rules (on AD&D Fighting Withdrawals) to figure out how to turn the situation around.  They came to game night loaded with ideas.

The bad news is those reinforcements they heard showed up almost immediately, in the form of 5 nasty trolls followed by a giant troll.  Back when we played minis-heavy D&D, I'd used blocks of wood if I didn't have enough miniatures, so we've got a couple of trolls represented by wood blocks in there.

The party won a miraculous initiative, beating the trolls with enough segments that Forlorn and Konstantine were able to layer a couple of fireballs on the left side of the battle before those trolls were able to attack after closing.  I've got to give my players credit, they are committed to taking dice out of the DM's hand by layering damage and ensuring kills, rather than spreading the damage around.  They'd rather overkill than leave a 1 hit point monster.  After a handful of bad saving throws by me, at least 3 of the trolls were eliminated, and the giant troll on the stairs was in bad shape (and then dropped by a flurry of magic missiles).

Meanwhile, the clerics were freed up enough to start using Hold Person to drop norkers, and Mister Moore went Invisible (getting the spell off before being attacked) and he was able to escape from the back corner.  As an unarmored person with 120' movement, he's able to move 24 squares when using a battle grid, and that was enough for him to skirt the entire melee and get back behind friendly lines. The AD&D combat movement rates are silly.

In the next phase of the battle, the group started to execute fighting withdrawals to get the thieves back to safety, and Leonidas and Kobra formed a front line with Mordecai (they're a little hard to see past the trolls).  The AD&D Fighting Withdrawal is interesting, because the monsters get to follow for free, if able - the fighters never broke contact, parrying the whole time, but still able to reshape the battle field.

Monster reinforcements kept coming up the stairs, and the clerics had been working on a solution - while Mordecai was holding the line, Donavich rummaged through the scrolls and found the scroll with Blade Barrier.  Unfortunately, there was an obstacle separating the sets of stairs, so the Blade Barrier only blocked the right stairs, but at least one big creature ran into it and got chopped to mince meat before the rest of them decided to forebear.

Meanwhile, Mister Moore used Slow on the surviving trolls and norkers, giving the front line fighters much-needed breathing room - we used pennies to indicate monsters that were slowed.  Then he switched to tossing fireballs with the wand of fireballs towards the open stair case where reinforcements were coming.  Multiple waves of foot soldiers ended up incinerated.

As monsters realized the right-hand stairs were blocked by the whirling blades of death, they started to jam the left-hand stairs, with some reinforcements coming out every round or so.  One group managed to clear the stairs area before getting incinerated by Mister Moore's fireballs, and they charged Shy, Boris, and the bear.  Boris's heroic brown bear was finally dropped by a norker, after soaking a lot of troll damage earlier in the evening.  Boris prepared a Cure Light Wounds to heal it, but was clubbed by a norker and the spell was ruined.  The trolls are only attacking every other round due to Slow, and one of them is down while it regenerates - the party is scrambling to burn it quickly.

Right  near the end of the night, an ogre appeared at the top of the stairs, leading another  troop of norkers. However, the party has formed a solid front line of fighters, with clerics performing a bit of spot healing, and Mister Moore is blasting with the wand of fireballs.  It no longer looks like a TPK is about to happen, but Boris, Shy and the Bear all need help.  The arcane casters have exhausted all of their attack spells, except for the wand of fireballs and whatever they have on their scrolls, but there is a fair amount of healing and clerical magic left.

The gigantic battle at the beginning of THE FORGOTTEN TEMPLE OF THARIZDUN will continue next game session.

Weapon Specialization Poll and More Fighter Ideas

Back when we started our AD&D experiment a month or so ago, I asked the readers whether they use Weapon Specialization or not in their AD&D games.  Here's what said about it:

DO YOU USE WEAPON SPECIALIZATION IN YOUR AD&D GAME?

Yes; Love it - (30%). No; Unearthed Arcana was the devil - (50%). What? - (18%).

I'm not a big fan of 1E's Unearthed Arcana, where weapon specialization appeared, so maybe those 18% of folks that said "What?" have the right of it, never having cracked open a copy of UA (along with the 50% of UA haters, where I tend to sit).  So far we are soldiering on without specialization; however, I don't mind beefing up fighters and have the impression (still to be tested) that they get left behind at higher levels compared to the other classes, and we intend to run this game through to high levels.  But I don't like what specialization does to limit weapon use .  If we were to implement that particular rule option, I would let someone specialize in a coarse-grained class of weapons, like all bow weapons, all two-handed weapons, or all one-handed weapons.

One of the commenters (Peter) mentioned that Dragon 104 had a good analysis of specialization, and it was a good read.  Len Lakofka's column runs the numbers and shows how a 2nd level fighter with specialization takes out a 4th level fighter without specialization, and has a good shot at besting a 5th level fighter without specialization, too.  That's a big jump in power - like gaining 2-3 levels by specializing.  If you consider the fighter is similar in base line power to a monster of the same level, that means your 2nd level specialized fighter is nearly a match for an ogre.

I don't think the door is totally closed for us, though.  Specialization was in base AD&D 2E, and one of the clones I like (ACKS) beefs up the fighter by giving all fighters a "cleave" ability - basically a free attack anytime you down a foe.  The nice thing about the ACKS cleave is that it applies equally to monsters; if a monster downs a PC, it gets to cleave too.  I also appreciate the LOTFP approach, where the fighter is the expert on to-hit rolls and is the only class that advances in fighting ability.  The point is, newer designs (post-AD&D and classic) have all done something to give the fighter a stronger combat presence.

Prior to our AD&D conversion, we were using "weapon by class", where magic users did a d4, all other classes a d6, fighters and dwarves did a d8 for damage or d10 for 2-handed.  That did a good job of giving the fighters a decent niche without major rules surgery.  But with the move to AD&D we're back using the quirky "damage by weapon type" along with S-M/L damage dice - that's too big a part of the 1E experience to omit!  If we don't do a form of coarse-grained specialization, the next easiest thing would be to reimplement cleave for fighters and monsters.

Welcome to the SCD - A Campaign for Cthulhu Gaming

In which the phrase, "Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes", takes on a wholly different meaning from the Godfather movie.


My Monday blogthulhu posts the past month or so have been promoting a theory on structuring a Cthulhu sandbox to maximize player choice and avoid common problems in horror gaming.  Now it's time to bring it all together in a sample campaign structure.  This is for 1920's or 30's Cthulhu gaming, but the theories behind what makes this type of campaign structure work apply to historical and weird horror gaming in other periods, as well.

The Campaign
It's the 1920's in the Big Apple - gangsters, prohibition, the jazz age, and the Harlem Renaissance.  But even on the mean streets of the city, there are some crimes that defy explanation, some events that can't be solved through conventional policework.  When New York's Finest and the suits at One Police Plaza are confronted with bizarre enigmas and mysteries, those cases get shuffled to the NYPD's Special Crimes Division - the SCD - and their set of dusty offices down near the archives.

Special Crimes is an unpopular assignment with the rank and file; folks that make detective there get stuck on long assignments and rarely make sergeant or lieutenant in the boroughs or precincts.  Detectives in the division don't exactly buck for promotions, either.  It's a close knit group with a lot of secrets, and officers get a bit distant after they've experienced a few SCD cases, as if they've seen too much.  The chief has tried to have the division closed a number of times, but the commissioner keeps it open, and there's someone in the mayor's office that has a vested interest in the group.

The Big Apple attracts all sorts of creeps and cultists; sorcerers seeking forbidden tomes, high society dabblers in forbidden magic, decadent art collectors, crazed wizards, and blasphemous deep one cults among the shady crews near the docks.  Somebody has got to stop all these nutcases from calling down their ancient horrors, and that group is the SCD.

Characters
Players in the campaign take on the role of detectives in the SCD and the various contractors that work with the police.  The great thing about the police procedural genre is there are always contractors and adjuncts to the department getting pulled into cases.  Because of the occult nature of SCD's cases, the department employs psychics, sketch artists, hard-boiled private detectives, a local priest, and even a few scholarly professors, for those times when they recover indecipherable eldritch books or strange relics.  A psychologist might be a regular consultant for profiling perpetrators.  A nosy reporter or journalist could be in on the secret, helping to piece together clues while keeping the horrible truths off the front page.  Players will have some wide open choices.

NPCs and Organizations
A campaign like this will have a ton of familiar, recurring NPCs; you've got all the folks in and around the NYPD, the political side of the force, characters like the commissioner, the chief, and the lieutenant in charge of SCD.  There's constant pressure to stop the bad guys while hiding the truth.  Then there's the folks that support the genre, archetypes we can borrow from Film Noir like the street pigeon, the cop on the take, the femme fatale, the gangsters, and the movers and shakers in New York society.

There are a lot of interesting organizations that can be worked into a New York city-based campaign.  The Fate (from the Delta Green setting) has existed for centuries in New York, so I'm sure there's a 1920's version that can be used as a secret power behind the streets.  Organized crime will be a big influence.  I'll probably transplant the Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight from Boston to New York and put that occult society in the background.  There might even be a government branch related to Project Covenant that could be an erstwhile ally from time to time.

Themes
This campaign uses two Cthulhu gaming themes from the D20 book - Hometown Heroes and Badges and Guns.  New York is big, but the cast of characters will be small enough that the Five Boroughs (hah - five Burroughs) and their varied neighborhoods will become familiar, with locations and regulars that recur over time, like the university and its library stuff, the denizens of the favorite pub, the coroner, and the beat reporters for the daily news.

Badges and Guns gives the players a bit of formal authority and the power to bring legal and governmental resources to bear, but constrains them in other ways - like the pressure to keep their exploits off the front page of the newspapers, and to get things done quietly without embarrassing the mayor.

Solving Common Problems
Let's look at how this structure solves some common problems with Cthulhu gaming.

Active Plot Hooks
One of my biggest gripes with most published scenarios are passive plot hooks; plot hooks that are related to the character's relationships and backgrounds, and not their jobs or activities.  The first problem solved by an organization like the SCD is that it provides a funnel for active plot hooks.  There's a backlog of cases, and the Keeper can introduce new crimes all the time, because the organization is actively taking on cases that fit the occult profile.  It's The X-files for the Five Boroughs.

Target Rich Gaming
The second benefit of the plot hook input funnel is what I call target rich horror gaming; there may be one or two high profile cases at any given time, but there's also a backlog of unsolved cases in the player's hands.  This is the top level of player agency, the opportunity to prioritize and pick and choose from a couple of different options.  It may not mirror how a real life department would work, where priorities are usually set by superiors, but choice is important to how I run games.  The players aren't puppets and they'll get to pick most of their assignments.

The next level of agency is making the actual investigations themselves non-linear, with clouds of clues and multiple paths of victory.  This one's all on the Keeper.

Replacement Characters
The last benefit of a campaign structure like the SCD is easy replacement characters.  By tying plot hooks to the activities of the organization, individual characters can come and go if the death toll or sanity loss mounts.  The campaign keeps chugging along.

Open Questions
I've been thinking this would be a 1920's game, but there are some compelling reasons to consider advancing the timeline to the 1930's.  I get to assume all of Lovecraft's 1920's stories are true and actually happened in the campaign's past; this lets me play with aftershocks, perhaps moving some of the key players to the city.  The rise of the fascist dictatorships in Europe means I can have Nazi agents in the city looking to carry out Hitler's occult agenda - robbing the Natural History Museum or raiding a private collection.  The players can be there for the forming of the early Karotechia.  However, by moving out of the 20's, I lose the charm of the prohibition era, with its gangsters, speakeasies, and glitzy jazz music.

The other open question is whether I should use Trail of Cthulhu or Call of Cthulhu.  Trail would work really well for a game based on police procedurals; the Trail skill system supports ultra-competent investigators.  But I'll put it to a vote - the players would probably prefer COC style character attributes and dice rolling.

There's an official Chaosium supplement for the city, Secrets of New York - that's going to the top of the reading list.  Miskatonic River Press has been threatening to release some New York based scenarios for a while, so that would be an immediate add, too.  I'm going to work my way through the various Chaosium collections looking for earlier scenarios that would work well in the city.  I'll also be skimming some of the Trail collections for suitable investigations, like Arkham Detective Tales, Stunning Eldritch Tales, and Shadows Over Filmland.


Readers:  if you have favorite scenarios that you think would work well in New York, I'd be grateful for recommendations!  I'd also like to hear any thoughts about using the 1920's versus the 1930's for this kind of game.  I have no problem replacing the plot hooks, transplanting a mansion scenario to an urban brownstone, that kind of stuff; I'd never run something as is.

I have some time to get the details of this campaign together - we've got plenty in the queue for the AD&D game before having an opening to start some Cthulhu one-shots, probably in April.  I like that this campaign could be episodic, with short adventures - we could do an investigation every few months for a change of pace, continue the regular D&D campaign, and then run another SCD one-shot in between major D&D stories whenever I need to scratch the COC itch.

Now I just need to find a great kick-off scenario.