Kumospace for freeform larps

Recently I ran our Reunion with Death murder mystery freeform larp online using Kumospace. I called for players from the uk-freeforms mailing list and Facebook page and the Remote Larps Facebook group. I got nine players, including four people I’d not met before.

So, Kumospace.

Kumospace is a spacial chat—a virtual space where people can form groups for conversations. As a user, you are presented with a floorplan and you move towards someone to talk to them. Then, when you are close to them, you can chat.

Kumospace is (currently) free for up to 30 participants, so it’s ideal for gaming.

Kumospace for larping

So how was Kumospace for larping? Well, it was pretty good. I created a simple floor representing a hotel function space. I had different chairs, a piano playing in the corner, and some (virtual) drinks and snacks.

The game in full flow - I've got the map open which shows the whole floor

I also created a separate out-of-character floor where everyone met at the start so we could get used to the interface.

The video and sound worked well for almost everyone—one player struggled with video and sound, but we don’t know why that was.

Video itself can be a little small (especially if you are used to Discord). You can create a pop-out which shows a larger video if that helps (but still smaller than you get on Discord).

The virtual space gave a real physical sense of space—much more so than different channels in Discord. Other characters were definitely “over there” rather than “in that channel” which added to the ambience.

Changing layout

I found changing the layout is straightforward—it’s all drag and drop. Several templates can easily be modified, which saves some work. Creating a standard hotel/workspace/bar/convention setting is easy; if you want something more outré, that will be harder.

You can add images from the web to customise to your virtual space. (I didn’t need to do that.)

Some objects are (slightly) interactive—such as a tray of drinks that adds a drink icon to your avatar if you click on it. The glass or cup slowly empties, representing you drinking it. However, it would be nice if there were more game-y icons—so things where you could add some descriptive text.

I didn’t use rooms in Kumospace, as they introduced the feature only a few days before I was due to run Reunion with Death and I didn’t have time to figure them out. Rooms work slightly differently—in a room, everyone can hear everyone else. So that means you need not be close to someone to hear them properly, which would have been better for the debrief when everyone was crowded on top of each other.

What sort of larp?

Kumospace best suits conversational freeforms/larps. Games with items and money and complicated abilities won’t work so well. Of the recent larps I’ve played, Brest or Bust and Smoke and Mirrors (both at Peaky 2022) would have been fine on Kumospace.

As Reunion with Death was designed to be run online, it worked fine with Kumospace. The only complication is abilities, but none require the GM and the players managed them themselves.

I don’t think I could have run a more complex freeform with Kumospace. For my recent SF games (The Roswell Incident and All Flesh is Grass I used Discord with LARPPorterBot; I’m not sure how I would have done that with Kumospace.

It would be great to have a standalone app to manage items/abilities/contingencies that we could use alongside Kumospace or Zoom. Maybe one day.

Feedback from players

I asked for some feedback from the players on using Kumospace. Here are some of their thoughts:

• I didn’t think I’d like it, but I was wrong. I was impressed!
• Kumospace was the perfect online platform for this. Having the visuals of moving made for a wayyyy more natural experience of joining and leaving conversations—much more like real life—compared with the breakout rooms in Discord, where you are either ‘in’ or ‘out’ and nothing in between.
• One thing worth flagging before start of play is that people might be able to hear everyone in a crowd if some people are outside the range, so piling up is a good idea. (NB—rooms, which I didn’t use, can overcome this.)
• I struggled with Kumospace—you would think they’d show you the rooms you had invitations for.  (Once I got into it, it was great.)
• Pleasantly surprised. I’d like to see it work in a way where players’ icons bounce off one another, rather than superimposing on each other.
• I liked it. The flexibility of moving around in a room (instead of changing between channels) made the game more dynamic.
• The video pictures of the other players were rather small, so you couldn’t see their faces as easily as on a regular video chat.
• I liked wandering around and finding separate spaces for a private chat. It seemed nice to have the visual “room” compared to Discord. However, in practice it ate up wifi and I found it slow to respond. I couldn’t hear or be heard until I was top of other avatars, so it got in the way of roleplaying for me.
• I suspect Kumospace changes the dynamics of games, resulting in more group interaction than two-person interaction. Not sure if this is a good thing or not.

On that last point, I remember observing that we typically had three groups of players at any one time. It was usually two small groups (two or three players together), and everyone else (so four or five players). So the players did bunch up—but I also see this in live games and on Discord.

Feedback as a GM

I found running the game was quiet)—although that may have been as much to do with Reunion with Death as Kumospace.

For Reunion with Death’s various announcements, I copied them from the pdf and pasted them into the global chat. I then made a short announcement to everyone (using the host’s broadcast function) telling them that the announcement was there—I didn’t read it out. That meant that players could look at the announcements at their leisure. (Unfortunately, you can’t post images to the chat.)

Towards the end of the game, I found it hard to read the room to judge when to stop the game. While I used the timetable that comes with Reunion with Death, I’d normally monitor the room towards the end of the game to work out when to bring the game to an end. However, this was much harder (also hard on Discord), so I used the game timetable.

Overall?

Kumospace was my first experience with spacial chat. It works for larps—especially simple larps without complicated mechanics. I intend to use it again—and I’d like to try it as a player.

Idiosyncratic RPG systems

So here’s a brief interlude for me to chunter about roleplaying systems and what feels like the constant (and unnecessary) drive for innovation.

So as well as running Fate of Cthulhu on Thursdays, I’m also playing in The Troubleshooters on Mondays. The Troubleshooters is a roleplaying game about action, adventure and mystery in a fictional European 1960s–1970s setting in the style of mainly Belgian and French comics, also known as bande dessinée or bédé.

We’re running around Europe trying to foil the sinister plans of the evil Octopus. It’s all very light-hearted fun.

The system is skill-based and seems ridiculously crunchy for such a light-hearted game. It also has some peculiar rules. Two examples follow.

Initiative

Initiative is based on your Alertness skill. So when you need to work out who goes first in combat, you roll Alertness. If you succeed, you add your tens and ones. (So if I roll 27, my initiative is 9.) Highest goes first. 

So at first blush, all well and good. Except that someone who rolls really well on their Alertness check (03 say) is unlikely to have the best initiative.

And if you fail your Alertness roll, you just take the ones. So if you roll 99, you have a better initiative score than someone rolling 01. Bizarre.

My simpler alternative to Initiative: Roll 1d100 and add your Alertness. Highest goes first. Job done—and those with high Alertness get the result they expect.

Skill check bonuses and penalties

Troubleshooters uses percentile dice for skills. However, bonuses and penalties (representing advantages or disadvantages, or particularly easy or difficult rolls) are awarded as positive or negative pips. Two pips for an easy/difficult task, five for a very easy/very difficult task.

A bonus of two pips means that any roll ending in 1 or 2 is an automatic access. Yay! That’s like plus 20%, right? Well, no. If your skill is 60%, it’s actually an 8% improvement—you now succeed on 01-60, 71, 72, 81, 82, 91, 92. So pips are worth less the more skilled you are.

It gets worse if the pips are negative. With negative two pips, any roll ending in 1 or 2 automatically fails. So, your 60% skill drops to 48% (as you are now failing on 01, 02, 11, 12, 21, 22 and so on).

So instead of just adding or subtracting 10% or 25%, we have these weird hard-to-grok pips.

(That’s actually an optional rule (known as task value)—just add 5% per pip. According to the rules, “The benefit of the task value is that it is more intuitive.” If it’s more intuitive, why isn’t it the core system?)

The play’s the thing

While I find myself amused at the system’s quirks, it’s not affecting play and we should wrap it all up in a couple of sessions. I don’t know what we’re playing then. Hopefully something with more straightforward rules.

Fate of Cthulhu #2: Sessions 1-4

Last time I gave my overall thoughts about Fate of Cthulhu. This time I will talk about what happened (for the first few sessions at least).

#1 Session Zero

We started with session zero: character creation. Although FoC suggests you can play either someone from the present or a time-traveller, it’s obvious that time travelling is more fun. So we created our two travellers: Roman Valeyard, historian, and Kasper Ausritten, anarchist manipulator.

Time travellers start with a corrupted aspect (using magic is dangerous), so Roman started as a living corpse, while one of Kaspar’s eyes was replaced by one from a Hound of Tindalos. (So we’re already some way from our traditional Call of Cthulhu investigators.)

Jon and Terry reviewed their briefing and decided that of the four missions, they would start with the stuff that dreams are made of. So we started there.

#2 The stuff that dreams are made of

For this mission, the PCs must steal a corrupted idol that contains a flake of Cthulhu’s skin (or something). The idol is being auctioned, and the GM notes provide ideas for running the assault on the auction house.

My Trello card for the idol

With all of time to play with, Jon and Terry decided to arrive eight months before the auction and steal the idol from its original owner. So we’d barely started and we were already off-script.

(I didn’t mind improvising—Fate of Cthulhu’s GM notes aren’t great and I was happy to run something different.)

So I invented Angus McBride, 43rd Earl of Sutherland and his private castle on Eigg. I decided that the earl controls a small cult worshipping Cthulhu (with his housekeeper Mrs Cartilage as high priestess).

Before we finished, the PCs had time for a quick reconnoitre (they booked themselves on a castle tour).

One thing that surprises me with skills in RPGs is how often I encounter situations where a skill would be useful, but it’s not in the game. I find Fate of Cthulhu social skills a little weird. We have Deceive, Empathy, Provoke and Rapport. What we don’t have is Persuade (although Rapport is an okay substitute) or Intimidate. And I’m not sure I’ve ever needed Provoke.

Anyway, both Jon and Terry took Provoke, and we realised our error when they wanted to charm the tour guide and learn more about the earl and the castle. Provoke didn’t really work—so Jon swapped Provoke for Rapport and got the information they needed.

#3 Stealing Cthulhu

In our third session, we leapt straight into the action, and the PCs broke into McBride’s castle, interrupted a sinister ritual, killed the bad guys and grabbed the statue.

I was pleased how I ran this. I grabbed a floor plan from the internet (search for stately home floor plans) and ran the session using that.

I remembered to use my Fate points (which I often forget to use) and compelled both PCs, so it felt more like Fate than many of our sessions. The fight was perilous—Kaspar was wounded badly as the fight with Mrs Cartilage didn’t go well. (It turned out the players hadn’t taken any fighting skills!) But they succeeded in the end and now have the idol—but don’t know how to deal with destroy.

I should say right now that I have done so little planning for this. I grabbed a floorplan during the session, and I decided where the secret temple would be there and then. It helps that the missions are not well detailed in the book—they’re so vague they are easy to improvise around.

#4 Planning planning planning

The stuff that dreams are made of ends when the PCs destroy the idol. But how do they do that? Even the scenario in the book isn’t clear on the subject. So the PCs weren’t sure what to do next. So this session was one of those discussion sessions where the players tried to work out what to do next.

We had a few “proper” scenes of roleplaying (I had fun as the voice of the creepy idol), but most of the time, we discussed what to do next. I don’t mind this—it’s easy to GM, and the players seemed to enjoy exploring their options.

So the players travelled to Arkham and started the next mission, bytes and bodies, before finishing this one. Perhaps they’ll figure out how to deal with the idol in Arkham.

(This session’s gripe about skills concerned the lack of anything related to computers or programming—particularly as the next episode is all about the internet.)

Next time

Next time we’ll look at the next couple of sessions—and find out what happens when the PCs drop the idol into some hydrofluoric acid.

Fate of Cthulhu #1: An overview

I backed the 2019 Fate of Cthulhu Kickstarter, but haven’t run it until now. I’m halfway through running The Arrival of Great Cthulhu for my regular players, Jon and Terry. We’re playing online using Discord and Trello, my go-to setup for online RPG-ing.

Fate Condensed

Fate of Cthulhu uses Fate Condensed, a new iteration of Fate that is a halfway house between Fate Core and Fate Accelerated Edition (FAE). Well, it’s mostly a simplified version of Fate Core as it uses skills rather than approaches.

This is my first time running Fate with skills. I usually run (and play) FAE, and I’ve struggled with it. My main issues are:

• Aspects become less important. It’s all very well having your high concept as best pilot in the galaxy and giving yourself Drive 4. But what if someone has Drive 5? Are you still the best pilot in the galaxy? FAE simplifies things by removing skills—you are the best pilot because your high concept says you are. (That’s not to say FAE is perfect—approaches can be hard to get your head around.)
• The presented skill list is limited. No computer use, no medic. A lot of social skills – empathy, rapport, provoke, deceive. I’m not sure that level of granularity is needed here when it’s lacking elsewhere. (We’ve used rapport a lot as that seems most useful.)

While I was getting my head around Fate of Cthulhu’s skills list, I dipped into the Fate version of Achtung! Cthulhu to see what they had done—they’d expanded the skill list to include soldier (general soldiering), medic and tradecraft (replacing burglary). 

Achtung! Cthulhu replaces lore with mythos, which Fate of Cthulhu doesn’t, but I wish it did.

Fate of Cthulhu broad concept

In 2030 (or so), the stars are right and a Great Old One has risen. It’s our heroes’ job to travel back in time and change the timeline and halt (or at least ease) the apocalypse.

So Fate of Cthulhu is Terminator vs Cthulhu. However, my players, who are now in their late 50s and with their murder-hobo days behind them, were horrified to realise that they weren’t Sarah Connor or Kyle Reese in this version of The Terminator: they are the terminator itself.

The Arrival of Great Cthulhu

Fate of Cthulhu comes with five apocalypses: Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, Dagon, Shub-Niggurath and the King in Yellow (Hastur). While Nyarlathotep is probably my favourite (it has shoggoths and elder things—both parts of the mythos I like), I decided that as I’ve never used Cthulhu in any of my Cthulhu gaming, it was about time I did. 

And so I chose The Arrival of Great Cthulhu.

Each apocalypse comes with four missions. Achieve those, and the PCs can (may?) avert the apocalypse. Or at least make it less-apocalypse-y. Great Cthulhu’s missions are:

• Destroy an artefact of Cthulhu.
• Stop an internet hacker from releasing spells onto the internet.
• Destroy a building made of weird concrete.
• Assassinate a cultist.

The players are given a briefing (which contains details of the apocalypse and the four key events they must change). The GM is then given additional material explaining what is really going on, plus some stats for key NPCs or monsters.

But not many stats—and if the players are proactive, they will quickly vary from the script.

I’m delighted with this, as I’m happy to improvise. If there were more detail, I would find it harder to improvise. But as it is, there’s just enough detail for me to understand the situation—and not too much to confound me.

Changing the timeline

Changing the timeline isn’t as straightforward as just completing the missions. If the players use too much magic or their corrupted aspects (Fate of Cthulhu has corruption instead of sanity), things can still turn out badly even though they get the results they wanted.

At least, that’s the theory.

From what I’ve seen in practice (as I write, we’re about five sessions in), modifying the timeline isn’t that clear. As play progresses, boxes are marked for the good guys (foiling a minion, changing the timeline in a good way) and for the bad guys (accepting compels on corrupted aspects, marking corruption). However, it seems easier to mark the bad guys’ boxes, which isn’t really the point. The PCs shouldn’t be making things worse.

Once boxes are marked, ripples will affect the timeline—so if things go wrong, the players can make things worse. 

But it all feels vague. So I anticipate hand-waving and improvising.

Actual play

Next time I’ll talk about what actually happened.