The Dead Undead: After action report

We’ve just finished The Dead Undead, my latest investigation for Other London: Desk 17. The mystery has been solved, and we’re taking a break while we do something else.

Goals

I had three goals.

• Playtest the scenario before putting it on DriveThru and itch.
• Use the players’ characters as the basis for some more pregen playbooks.
• Have fun.

So I achieved the first goal – I made a few tweaks to the investigation, but it didn’t need a drastic reworking, and it’s now for sale.

However, the second goal is a work in progress. As I described some time ago in this post, the players took their characters in weird directions and turning them into Desk 17 pregens is not quite as straightforward as I hoped.

Luckily, the last goal was a total success – I had fun, and the players told me they also enjoyed themselves. (They were certainly very engaged.)

It also took us a lot longer to solve than I expected. We took 11 sessions to play through, which, given we are easily distracted, probably meant about 16-18 hours of play, which is pretty good.

Other London lore

I also learned a few things about Other London.

Desk 17’s offices: We decided during session zero that Desk 17’s office was in the old London Necropolis Railway station building on Westminster Bridge Road (above the café and bookshop). I didn’t know that was a thing, but you can read about it here. (It led to a lovely moment when they brought in a witness who thought their offices were so cool!) The office stairwell is haunted by a spook who appears to be feeding on the magic of one of the PCs – that can only go badly.

Vampires and their reflections: "Can I see her reflection in the polish?" made me wonder about vampire reflections. I decided there and then that vampires didn’t reflect in silver-backed mirrors, but other reflections (puddles, chrome, modern mirrors) were fine. And the same for cameras – they show up on digital cameras but not wet film.

Vampire servants: One NPC in the investigation has a prolonged life because they drink vampire blood. I decided to keep the exact benefits vague – it depends on who you drink from and how often you drink.

Vampire funerals: What does a vampire funeral look like if vampires don’t explode in a shower of dust (and in this investigation, they don’t)? I created a vampire family plot.

Folk songs: As part of session zero, the players created the EFDSS as an ally. They visited the library and found an old folk song that told the story of a fae gang who burnt down a windmill that was blocking their view of the sunrise, killing everyone inside. That’s the first time I’ve dropped clues and history into a folk song.

Aspects-only Fate

I run Other London using Fate Accelerated. Not that we lean hard into its narrative approach, but because I find Fate to be a simple, lightweight system that is fine even if your style is mostly trad (as mine is).

However, I’ve found myself irritated by approaches recently, so I thought I’d give aspects-only Fate (from page 26 of the Fate System Toolkit) a try. In essence, a character’s aspects give them a +1 to rolls where they apply. +1s are cumulative.

I liked it. Typically, players rolled the dice with a +1 or +2 bonus instead of their usual +2 or +3 with FAE. It toned down their power and made more rolls uncertain. (I usually set the target for an overcome roll at +2, making rolls more chancy.)

Having said that, we didn’t roll dice very often – maybe two or three times a session. We only play for two hours (often much less as we are easily distracted by other things) and don’t roll many dice (lots of conversations with NPCs, but they rarely need dice).

I also tweaked a couple of other things.

Rather than refresh fate points to three each session, I’ve started them all with three fate points, but they only refresh one each session. (They can still earn them through invokes as normal.) So this means they can’t spam them as much as they might otherwise do.

In practice, this didn’t have much effect – nobody ran out of fate points.

My other change had no impact, largely because we didn’t get into combat. Instead of the usual (slightly counterintuitive) FAE stress boxes, I was going to cut them down to three single-use boxes. That would have made the PCs less robust in a fight, but we didn’t actually have a fight (the investigation’s climax resulted in a standoff in a park, but we didn’t break into combat).

The Dead Undead

I’ve put The Dead Undead onto DriveThruRPG and Itch – and also created bundles on each where you can get everything Other London related at 50% off.

Other London: The Dead Undead on DriveThruRPG

Other London: The Dead Undead on Itch.io

The Orphan Room

I’ve started the next investigation, and I know it’s called The Orphan Room. I sort of know what’s going on, but I haven’t worked out the details.

Time to get my thinking cap on.