Prodigal Son: Fresh Meat

Part Nine:

Hello.  Brad, here.  Matt thought it might be nice this week for you lovely people to hear my point of view on the RPG madness he's unleashed upon my life of late.  So, yeah, I'm not a real gamer and I don't really have the terminology at my control (NPC, that means something right?) so don't mock me too much, okay?  Appreciate it.

Matt and I have been buds for about three or four years now.  And in that time, I've had to sit through endless conversations regarding Role Playing and how this sport is the highest art of dorkdom.  I've always respected (and mostly enjoyed) his stories of The Game.  But I've never bothered with Role Playing and I've never really had an interest in it--a curiosity, sure, cuz it really does feel like it's own world outside of Film Buffs, Comic Nerds, Code Monkeys, and the like.  RPG is hardcore Nerd Behavior.  And I am in a constant state of achieving King Dork.

But, to me, it's always been a mystery.  I've never quite understood what goes on in the games or the game parlors.  I'd seen the D&D movie.  I seen the D&D jokes peppered through various pop referencey comedies like That 70s Show or Community.  But how do all those crazy dice work?  How do you compile these great adventures Matt's always talking about?  

So, it's that curiosity, that finally got me to break down and say to Matt, "Let's do this."  In the past, we had attempted a couple times to get a mini-group game going.  I'm a huge Trekkie so naturally we had talked about the possibility of doing a post-Motion Picture/pre-Wrath of Khan game.  I had even come up with a rather lame character to put aboard our outer rim vessel.  But for a variety of reasons, that game never got off the ground.

A year later, Matt and I finally just decided to do a one player game.  A test of the waters.  Would I dig it?  We've both been grooving on Lovecraft lately, so it wasn't too hard to decide on Call of Cthulhu as my introductory game.

The whole shindig took two days.

Day One:  Character Creation.  Again, I had no idea how these things went down.  Even having come up with a mini-biography for that failed Trek game I still was clueless on the creation process.  I understand that each game is different, but with Call of Cthulhu there's this character sheet that I had to complete using a little creativity and some funny shaped dice I came away with my characters' Education, Skill Sets, and even a little Personal History.  

I took my characters name Paul "Paulie" Connors from the Casablanca and Soylent Green posters hanging above the kitchen table, mashing actors Paul Henreid and Chuck Connors into one fine specimen.  I made him a Great War vet, a North Dakota farmhand--the strong silent type who's seen just enough hell to prepare him for the Mythos madness about to spill aboard the tramp steamer heading towards Innsmouth.  

Day Two:  The Story/Game

What I learned fairly quickly was that Role Playing was a serious creatively collaborative process.  For the game to really work it was going to require that I bring as much storytelling power to the table as game master Matt did.  More or less, we're writing a short story together.  Matt sets up the pieces and I with my protagonist push the narrative.

And I found that process to be incredibly frustrating.  Don't get me wrong, I had a great time.  But--I was just not prepared to write a story.  For some reason, even though I knew we weren't playing Monopoly or Sorry or the game of LIFE, I thought there were a lot more mechanics to the process.  I thought I was going to be rolling the dice every couple of seconds, move ten paces, stop MONSTER!, fight, move three space, etc...etc...I just didn't realize I was going to actively take on the roll of investigator.  That I was going to have to put on my thinking cap and solve this thing.  Who or what was killing the crew?  How was I gonna get off this boat?

In the end, Paulie Connors survived.  He killed a bunch of folks.  Cleaned up the blood.  Burned all the bad books.  And jumped overboard, swimming to shore.  Sigh.

It was fun.  But I never figured it out.  Heck, I never even quite understood how this story tied into the Cthulhu mythos.  The game was definitely entertaining, but also incredibly maddening.  Part of me thinks I played too safe.  Maybe I should have read more of the manuscripts or played around with the dark artifacts.  But I never quite felt comfortable enough with my character.  Was I playing him or was I playing me?  It was just tricky to get into that collaborative storyteller headspace.  I think I'd do better next time.

One thing is definite, Role Playing is fascinating.  I want to do more.  Particularly, I want to do more Call of Cthulhu with this plot Matt has cooked up.  I need answers.  And I want to bring my wife into it.  I think she could end up having loads of fun with this geek format.

And at the very least, I'm quite happy to have finally checked RPG off my dork bucket list.  Hmmm, is Cosplay next????

--Brad

Prodigal Son: Homework

Part Eight:

    Movies have always been a major inspiration for me.  And I’ve found them invaluable when looking for inspiration for games.  Plots, items, characters, music, or just general mood.  I can find something useful or interesting in nearly anything.  A few films stand out as especially good ‘gamer movies.’  Sneakers always felt like a great example of a party of player characters.  Each knows their job and each is quite good.  And while there is inner tension within the group, they still act as a unit.  Their banter reminds me a great deal of the back and forth of players around the table.

    Having recently run a game of Call of Cthulhu, I thought I’d give a brief list of some of my favorite inspirational films for that game.  It is hardly complete; more of a brief sample.

10.  The Ring:  Unlike the dull original, the American remake is steeped in gothic mood, while capturing a cool concept of modern Lovecraftian horror in the video tape.  Like reading Mythos books, viewing the tape acts like an infection of information, revealing too much about the nature of things.

9.  Tremors:  Graboids totally fit within the realm of Mythos monsters, and there are a ton of great moments that could easily translate into a game.

8.  Rabid:  Actually, most early Cronenberg is good for this, but Rabid always stuck out in my mind.  I don’t even know if I can explain why, but it’s on the list.

7.  The Ninth Gate:  Not only a movie about powerful books, cults, and dangerous madness.  It also features a driven protagonist with few scruples and an ability to adapt.

6.  The Stuff:  An awesome creature (?), and a good look at how you might work in a wide spread conspiracy involving something Mythos related.

5.  In the Mouth of Madness:  Though not specifically adapting Lovecraft, this is one of the most directly influenced films, and John Trent is a perfect Call of Cthulhu character.

Sorry about the balls.  It was a lucky shot, that's all.

4.  Lifeforce:  I could totally see this as the basis of a campaign.  The story is sprawling, and filled with great, classic Call of Cthulhu type characters.  And there are some cool creatures and excellent visuals.

3.  Alien:  Not only is the monster amazing, and its potential limitless, but this story of a group of workers, just trying to do their job and get paid is one of the most effective horror films of the last 40 years.

2.  Night of the Living Dead:  One of the great things about Call of Cthulhu is that characters can very easily be everymen, thrust into madness by simple chance.  On top of the horror and confusion of this film, and the highly pressurized cauldron of social anxiety created by the siege of ambulatory dead, this movie features a great cross section of average folk.  Each must figure out how to deal with, and try to survive, horror beyond their understanding.

1.  The Thing:  A great party of adventurers.  Seclusion of epic proportions.  And the film is dripping with atmosphere.  And it’s all laced with intense paranoia.

-Matt

Prodigal Son: The Pen is Mightier

Part Seven:

       After many weeks of being thwarted by bad timing and busy lives, Brad and I were actually able to get together for a second week in a row to try some more serious gaming.  First, we took a spin by a local game store, though I was frustrated not to find any of the handful of things I was looking for.  Thus is life.  And it took entirely too long to get back to the apartment after the store visit (darned rush hour traffic).  But, once we got back, cooked up some hot dogs and had some IBC (since 1919!) root beer, and watched the first ten minutes or so of the 1927 Clara Bow film “It,” we were ready to go.

    Once again on the tramp steamer, The Sophia, on a voyage between Spain and Innsmouth Massachusetts, things seemed fairly normal.  But soon enough, a crewman was found dead, seemingly cooked from the inside, with no visible wounds or damaged clothing.  This catalyst event started the real story, involving mysterious cargo, a mad captain, a young man with connections to a dangerous faction, a cook who spent a little too much time among some unsavory islanders, and hints of a shadowy battle between groups of people looking for strange artifacts.

    Brad’s character, Paul “Paulie” Connors, made it through the evening surprisingly unscathed.  The deadliness of handguns proving to be a benefit for him.  And he managed to do what so many investigators have done over the years in many games of Call of Cthulhu, not read too much, and destroy the evidence.

    What I found interesting is that Brad fell fairly quickly into the traditional attitude of players.  Struggling with what he knew/thought VS what his character knew/though.  And struggling with his own curiosity VS his character’s sense of self-preservation.  But he also seemed to get into things in general, which was a relief.

    For my own part, I felt far more confident and ready on our second get-together.  I had more written down, more of a plan of attack, and, in spite of having had a rough day, more relaxed and ready to go.  I started to feel better about throwing out some ideas on the fly, and playing with what I had written down, modifying the overall plotline as I went.  And I had a lot of fun playing the captain as he went mad.

    The end obviously left Brad a little frustrated, as he wanted to know what was going on, but didn’t really find out.  And, on the chance that his wife joins us for a follow-up story, I didn’t want to give anything away, because I already have plans for what I’m gonna do in that eventuality.  And as Brad is someone who doesn’t like being kept in the dark, I’m sure it ate at him a bit.  And I guess I’ve got some kind of a poker face or something.  If I do get a follow-up game together with him and Lisa, I think I’m going to try to run it pretty tight, getting a lot of story into one or two sessions.  Though I really like the idea, I don’t want to stretch it out, and I want to have an ending ready to go, assuming the characters survive long enough to find it.

    All in all, I finished the night feeling really good.  I felt the old magic coming back, and excitement for more to come.  And, after talking to some other friends, I may have a small group interested in something else in the near future.  I’m bouncing some ideas around in my head right now, but oddly, Star Wars keeps popping up.  Will that happen?  I don’t know.  But I’ve always liked that universe, even when I haven’t necessarily liked the films.  And, after a semi-realistic (in that death comes easy) game like Call of Cthulhu, something more action packed and outlandish could be a nice change of pace.

    Man, it feels good to be back.

-Matt

Prodigal Son: The Beginning

Part Six:

    After a great deal of work in matching up schedules, Brad and I were finally able to sit down and get the ball rolling on his first foray into roleplaying, and my first attempt at running a game in about five years.  Being Brad’s first try, I attempted, however haltingly, to give him a few of the basics.  Certain terms that will become useful.  PC means player character.  NPC is non-player character (all characters not controlled by a player).   D is short for dice.  In the gaming terms, 3D6, for example, means three six sided dice.  2D10 would be two ten sided dice.  And we went over the mechanics of Call of Cthulhu.  How to roll for percentiles, what various numbers and various statistics mean, etc.

    It being my first time teaching a new player in about twenty years, not to mention my recent extended hiatus, I was perhaps less collected than I had intended.  However, Brad picked things up quickly.  We didn’t do any serous game play, but I put him through a couple brief encounters so he could see how rolling dice worked for the game, and what sort of things one does as a player.

    The story opened simple enough.  His name is Paul “Paulie” Connors.  He’s a hand on a tramp steamer, crossing the Atlantic on a trip from Spain.  Destination, the storied town of Innsmouth.  Cargo, unknown.  The year is 1927.  After taking care of some engine trouble, he had a horrible dream about a bloated, slimy guy.  That was about it for night one.

    So, after night one, I started to get that old feeling back.  Leading up to it, and while I was going over various rules and concepts with Brad, I was pretty darned nervous and unsure.  It had been so long, and I felt so out of practice.  But as the night drew to a close, I could sort of sense the mental muscles again, feel them flexing.  Not just the storytelling muscles.  I use those a lot.  But the improvisational and preparedness muscles.

    Something I like about using Call of Cthulhu as an introductory game is that, beyond the game mechanics being fairly intuitive and not to difficult to teach, the game is also set up to be potentially brutally fatal to characters.  This means that one need not invest a lot of time and energy into the creation of a character, because they might not make it too long.  This means that, if you end up not liking how your character works during actual gameplay, it probably won’t be too long before you can make a new one, with a better handle on the game.  I don’t think that’ll be a problem for Brad, as his first character seems solid, especially for what he’s going to face.  Not to say he won’t get bumped off quickly.  He seems to have the needed skills to get into the right kinds of trouble.

    I’m feeling better in general, having finally started.  Sure, it wasn’t much.  Just a taste, really.  But it’s a start, and I’m ready for more.

    So, tonight I’m getting down to the brass tacks of setting up the next game.  Rough drawn map of the ship (boat?), list of the crew with a few important stats, and a few interesting events, all added to the idea I already had.  I’m picking out mood music.  I used some radio hits from 1929 during character creation.  But I’m thinking for the actual story, maybe something a bit more somber.  Maybe I need to get out and buy some candles?  We’ll see.

    After talking to Brad, I think that maybe introducing his wife to gaming also using Call of Cthulhu might be a good idea.  So, we’ll see how this next night goes.  Depending, I could put together a follow-up scenario, or if Paulie doesn’t survive, something totally unrelated.  And I’m putting together a new list of potential games I might run in the future, with some brief descriptions to see which ones might be of interest.

    So, finally, if only in a small way, I’m back.  And it feels good.

-Matt

Prodigal Son: The Art of the Rip-off (aka: Inspiration)

Part Five:

    This week, I want to talk about something that’s very important to roleplaying.  Inspiration.  Or, as might sometimes be more accurate, outright theft.  From day one, I’ve been lifting ideas from films and books and just about anything else I can get my hands on for ideas.  As a game master, I’ve taken plots from TV shows, events from history, and monsters from movies.  I once ran a Babylon 5 game where I took Event Horizon almost word for word.  My players hadn’t seen it, so they didn’t know where I was going.  It worked out very well.  I’ve used creepy images from David Lynch films to help set up mood.  Whatever I could get my greedy little hands on, I’d take and rework into something usable for a game.

    It was actually this hunger for ideas to use in games that helped me become more of a film buff.  I started to appreciate a wider variety of film, partly because I could find little useful nuggets in the most unusual of places.  And awful movies that many might simply dismiss could still produce gems.

    This sort of ‘inspiration’ isn’t anything new.  Shakespeare did it.  Akria Kurosawa did it.  And Quentin Tarantino made a career out of doing it.  The art comes not in the act of theft, but in what you make of it.  I bring this up this week, because, I’ve just struck gold.  As readers of this column will know, I’m trying to get back into roleplaying, and thanks in large part to the monstrously frustrating harlot, scheduling, I have yet to be able to even sit down and make up a character with my first player.  It’s getting a little ridiculous at this point.  However, a few days ago, while not getting together with Brad, due to something coming up, I ended up watching something that gave me a really swell idea.  And suddenly my plan to just run him through a simple, pre-published one-shot from the back of the Call of Cthulhu basic book was dropped.  No.  Now I’ve got what I think is an awesome idea, that will work very well as a one-shot, but could also expand into a mini-campaign with some extra players added if that becomes an option.  All spawned from watching one thing, and really liking a couple ideas from it.

    I’ve run with those stolen ideas, and created a story that has NOTHING to do with the original.  Or very little, anyway.  Not only adapting it to fit with the Cthulhu mythos, but changing era, adding an extra weird bit of science fiction, and connecting it directly to the character idea Brad came up with.  Frankly, I’m now much more excited about running this game.

    In film, you can see this a lot.  I mention Akria Kurosawa, because a movie frequently cited as the source of many remakes and/or rip-offs is his awesome Samurai picture, Yojimbo.  But what few realize is that Yojimbo is itself based on the excellent Dashiell Hammett novel, Red Harvest.  A lone, mysterious man wanders into a corrupt, nearly dead town, run by two warring factions.  Then he plays each side off the other, bringing the whole thing to a boiling point.  It’s a great story, and one can see how it could so easily translate into feudal Japan (Yojimbo), the American Old West (A Fistful of Dollars), a run-down future(Omega Doom), and a sex charged fantasy world (The Warrior and the Sorceress).  And eventually made it back to something more closely resembling its source (Last Man Standing).  Each of these films took a basic idea, stripped away the trappings of setting and culture, and made a new film.  Sure, some of these are absolute crap.  But the story remains sound.

    Now, because the nature of a roleplaying game means you can’t map out exactly how things will go, transferring a plot directly doesn’t quite work.  But, you can take the ‘set-up’ or even some of the same key ingredients.  So, for example, take a film you really enjoy, say The Thing.  You want to use it, but you’re going to be running an Ars Magica game.  First, consider what some of the key elements of The Thing are, and what makes it so cool.  First, there’s isolation.  The film is set at an Antarctic research station, and there’s a storm rolling in.  Doesn’t get much more removed than that.  Second, there’s the creature itself.  An alien that was frozen in the ice gets loose and infects/consumes people, making itself into near perfect copies in a bid to survive and spread.

    But how would that translate into a magic rich Europe at the end of the 12th century?  Well, isolation could be fairly easy in a land with small population and little in the way of long distance communication.  But you could take this one further, especially if you really like the snow motif.  Set the game in the Alps, or perhaps in half-pagan Scandinavia.  Perhaps at the beginning of a long winter?  And the Thing itself.  What about that?  Frankly, I think brining aliens into Ars Magica would be a mistake.  It sure wouldn’t work for me.  Not to say aliens in the Middle Ages wouldn’t work.  But it’s not something I’d want in Ars Magica.  And the creature seems too insidious to be a simple magically monstrous creature.  It doesn’t seem to be the right style for the fairies.  But, it actually works in a similar way to the Infernal.  So, perhaps this Thing, found under the ice when an ancient stone box is dug up, is a spawn of Hell, actively trying to infect mortal men with its corrupting evil, taking their faces to lure in more unsuspecting folk.  Now, you’ve got the basic story of The Thing, but set in the Mythic Europe of Ars Magica.

    Not every film, or book, will work quite so easily, and some will work better for certain games than others.  Creatures, items, or other details can sometimes be easier to translate.  Like, if you’re running a game of Star Trek, it wouldn’t take much to drop a Predator in, either directly, or modified as you see fit.  Nor would it be very difficult to translate the character of Adolf Hitler.  Change his species, who he preaches hate against, and what he wants to conquer, and you can still use his life story, with details changed, as the source of a compelling and particularly vile villain.  Or, what if you’re running a Traveller game, and you really want to drop your players on the planet from Pitch Black.  Again, it’s not hard.  And if you don’t want anyone to guess, change a few details.  Perhaps, it’s a swampy place, not a desert.  Maybe the temperature is too cold for the creatures during the night phase, and it’s only with the dawn that they begin to wake up.

    In changing little details and figuring out what effect that might have, you are often inspired with many other cool ideas that help make the story your own.  So, while I may start by saying “I’m going to use the ‘squid’ tech from Strange Days.”  I then have to ask what if I put this into an existing Cyberpunk 2020 game.  Well, the tech would certainly seem to blend in pretty handily, but if you add the ability to hack, or be hacked into the equation, as well as the virtual world and 2020’s version of the internet things could take a very different shape.  Boost that tech forward a few years, to the point where you’ve got squid-heads in every alley, overdosed on people’s memories.  Where you’ve got war correspondents sending back their impressions of battle, right up to and including their own deaths, so real you can feel the bullets hitting.  And where even someone without any jacks installed could still be doing some corporate espionage.  In fact, the squid units could totally remove the need for hardware jacks, making people with them seem old-fashioned and antique.  Maybe even second class.  You could have a whole underground of hackers still trying to keep up the old hardwired systems.

 
    I guess my point for this week is, never ignore what could be a potential source of good ideas, and when you’re putting together scenarios, never be afraid to steal.  Just do what successful film makers and playwrights have been doing for generations.  First steal from the best.  But don’t be afraid to steal from the worst.  Then make it your own.

Prodigal Son: Regrouping

Part Three:

    After getting together with my potential players to enjoy a game of Munchkin Cthulhu (quite fun), I found that my original plans would need to be modified.  Situations being what they are, any kind of ongoing game is pretty much a non-option with this crew.  Perhaps a ‘one-shot,’ single evening story would be a better option.  This was already an option I was considering, but it now seems likely to be the only viable one.  One-shots are fine, and can be very enjoyable.  But now that I’m invested in a return to gaming, I know that it won’t be enough.  A start along the path, but not my destination.

    I want to start gaming again.  More than that, I want to get back into roleplaying games, not just board or card games.  However, I’m not around many gamers in my daily life, so finding a group of 3 to 5 people may be something of a challenge.  Most of the people I know who do or have gamed are either in no position to get into something regular, or have incompatible expectations or philosophies.  Yet, all is not lost.  I still have these friends, even if two will be moving away in the next month or so.  We can still play something to tide me over for now.  Something like Once Upon a Time, one of my favorite non-roleplaying tabletop games.  It even deals with storytelling.

    After some discussion, I decided to try my hand at running a one-shot, single player session of Call of Cthulhu for fellow Dork, Brad.  He’s never tried a roleplaying game before, and has always been interested, and I haven’t run anything in a long danged time.  We’re both Lovecraft fans (and as you can read below, we've been getting back into reading him again), and I figure the game is simple, yet structured enough for him to understand and enjoy it.

    With that in mind, I’ve been kicking around some ideas for a possible scenario.  Brad came up with a vague idea for a character already.  So, now it’s mostly a matter of figuring out scheduling so we can create the character and run him through some madness.  I’m not quite sure yet if I want to run one of the pregenerated adventures from the back of the Call of Cthulhu basic book, or come up with something original.  For now, I’m leaning toward a specific story, The Madman, from the back of the book.  Though whenever I do run pregenerated scenarios, I tend to do a lot of work on them to make them my own.

    If things go well, I’ll look at more options for the future.  Brad’s wife has expressed interest in playing as well, though I don’t think horror is her genre of choice.  I’ll have to discuss options with her and Brad and anyone else we might recruit when the time comes.

What do you roll to break the 4th wall?

    In the meantime, I feel I should explain a bit about Call of Cthulhu and my interest in it.  I first became aware of the game through Chaosium Inc’s Worlds of Wonder and The Basic Roleplaying System, which was my first serious game.  Call of Cthulhu used the same game mechanics, with a few modifications, so it was an easy jump.  I was also discovering the original writings of H.P. Lovecraft at this point in my life (junior high), which became hugely important to my future literary interests.

    Lovecraft’s work had inspired many authors in his own time, and countless more on up through the present.  Many of those writers added to the fictional universe created in a loose way by Lovecraft, the so called “Cthulhu Mythos.”  It is this Mythos that serves as the basis for the game.  A limitless universe in which the hopes and dreams of mankind aren’t even a blip on the greater truth, a truth so incomprehensible that people are driven mad from the barest glimpse.  A blind, unwilled, uncaring universe, where beings of incalculable age and terrifying power stride worlds like pebbles of sand.  Worshiped as gods by men who try to tap into some element of their power.  What looks like magic is science beyond our hopes of understanding.

    Taking this vision of a universe with no greater plan, and with no special place for humanity, the game takes players back to the time of Lovecraft himself, the late 1920s (though the game can easily be set in pretty much any time and place).  And it puts players in control of typically Lovecraftian characters; professors, doctors, students, and the like.  People more likely to ask questions and look in those dark corners most try to ignore.  People who fight the good fight against cults trying to bring horrors into the world, against ancient creatures and strange powers.  The last line of defense in an unwinnable war few are even aware of, and fewer still capable of fighting.

    And just to add a little something, the game has rules for dealing with a character’s sanity.  You don’t just have to worry about getting punched, shot, or eaten, you’ve got to worry about seeing something ‘man was not meant to see’ or reading too much and putting 1 and H together.  When the pieces start to fall into place, the realizations are often too much for the human mind to accept, and when this happens, there is permanent damage done to the psyche, not to mention temporary insanity.  I once had a game master tell me, “if, after two or three sessions, characters aren’t dead or insane, you’re not running it right.”  I don’t know that I’m quite that extreme about it, but the game does, or should have a high mortality rate for characters.  That’s why in an ongoing game, the tendency is to have everyone belong to some kind of Gentleman’s Club, or scientific institution, or what have you.  When Professor Albertson goes missing while investigating the strange noises on the hills outside of Prague, his colleague Marianne Watson may just get the assignment to find out what’s become of him from the dean of the Archeology Department of Miskatonic University (Go Pods!).

-Matt