Published scenario roundup

Nearly two years ago, I realised that I rarely run published adventures or scenarios. So I resolved to change that, and in this post, I look back at them and reflect on what I’ve learned.

Scenarios I’ve run

So since May 2020, this is what I’ve run (all online because, well, pandemic).

• Prodigal Son and The Haunting both by Paul Mitchener for Liminal.
• The Lightless Beacon by Leigh Carr and Lynne Hardy for Call of Cthulhu (although I used Cthulhu Dark).
• Lady Blackbird by John Harper. Is it a scenario or a system? It’s both.
• Hope’s Last Day, Chariot of the Gods and Destroyer of Worlds by Andrew EC Gaska for ALIEN.
• Dad Overboard and Jingle Bell Shock by Jason Cordova for Brindlewood Bay.
• Lost in Translation and Ex Libris by Paul Baldowski for Liminal.

(The links above all go to blog posts where I talk about each.)

The best and the worst

So, taking them in terms of easiest to run at the table. (So that’s a combination of layout, writing, how much preparation they needed.) This is how I would order them.

• Lady Blackbird—concisely written situation and setting with delightful, proactive characters. Needs almost no GM preparation to run, easy to improvise.
• Dad Overboard and Jingle Bell Shock—short (two sides of paper each, mostly bullet points), easy to run and improvise with. Although I’ve realised Brindlewood Bay isn’t for me, they were both easy to run.
• Lost in Translation and Ex Libris—traditional RPG scenarios in an old-school style. Neither needed much preparation, but they both required a fair amount of reading to understand them.
• Prodigal Son and The Haunting—short, traditional RPG scenarios. However, some structural issues meant a fair amount of preparation to get them to fit my GM style.
• The Lightless Beacon and Hope’s Last Day—short scenarios, but overwritten. I found it difficult to find key information and I extracted the key points so I could run it.
• Chariot of the Gods—again, overwritten and poorly organised. Needed some work before I could run.
• Destroyer of Worlds—overwritten and extremely badly organised. A lot of work required beforehand.

Key takeaways

So the main takeaway for me is that I like to see concise writing and the layout designed to be easy to run at the table. If I have to spend time just trying to figure out how to run the scenario, well, that’s never going to endear a scenario to me. 

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the scenarios by the established big-name publishers (namely Chaosium and Free League) are at the bottom of this list.

I find the pretty, coffee-table book layout that typifies most of the mainstream RPG adventures and supplements is generally hopeless for actually running the things. I’m pleased I had digital copies of the scenarios at the bottom of this list, as that meant I could extract the text into something more usable. I probably wouldn’t have run them if I had only physical copies.

I have a theory

While I find it depressing so many modern RPG adventures are badly presented, I have a theory why this happens. I think it’s for a few reasons:

• The modern coffee-table format, with full-colour pages and lots of words clearly sells. They look attractive in the shops, they’re attractive to read (although the font is often too small for my ageing eyes), and they sell. And that’s what matters—play is less important than sales.
• A high word count creates the illusion of value. Lots of words gives the impression of quality and depth—even if those words aren’t important or obscure the key messages.
• Authors are often paid by the word and aren’t incentivised to write concisely.
• The layout person and the author are different people with different needs. Neither is specifically thinking about how GMs will use the scenario.
• There are few examples of excellent scenario layout. The existing model sells, so why change it?
• Publishers are not getting the feedback they need to improve scenario layout and design. (Are they even wanting it?)

So?

As an occasional RPG scenario writer, I try to make my scenarios easy to run. As I’m not selling to the publishers (not any more, at least), I’m not constrained by their house styles. I’m also not trying to fill a book, and because this is just pocket money for me, I don’t have to worry about making it seem like value for money.

So I write and format my adventures so it works for me—and hopefully for others. I like to think that they’re easy to run—although feedback is scarce, so who knows? (You can find them here.)

Clearly some designers/publishers understand how to lay out a scenario to make it easier to run. If there were more of them, I’d be delighted.

Chariot of the Gods #2 - ALIEN

 With my preparation for Chariot of the Gods complete (see last post), it was time for action.

Warning: here be spoilers!

First off, wow. It’s a rollercoaster ride. I had four players and Chariot of the Gods took 4.5 sessions (each 2.5 hours long) to play through. So that’s 10-11 hours of play, given that there’s a bit of admin at the start and end of each session.

Introducing the game

I took this slowly and followed the checklist I had prepared myself. I had four players, two very familiar with Alien, one who had only seen Alien and one who had seen none of the films (at least at first—they all caught up).

I had shared with them the general background for the game that I had created, and I then ran through the situation for Chariot of the Gods, explaining what the ship was, what it was carrying, and where it was going.

The players then chose characters—and I only asked that they pick Miller (the captain) and Wilson (the company rep) as I knew there was friction there (and I didn’t want the senior officers as NPCs). The others picked Davis (the pilot) and Cham (the roughneck), leaving me with technician Rye and science officer Alder as NPCs.

Buddies and rivals: Although I used the buddies and rivals set up in Chariot of the Gods, I asked them to describe how their buddy and rival had helped/hindered them in the past, which set up some great inter-player friction.

Banter

I started the game with the crew fresh out of hypersleep, having their post-sleep breakfast. The “banter” that I’d included on the character sheets was a good way to get the players talking in character and reinforcing some of the information I’d already explained. I also chipped in, playing the two NPCs.

Discord and Google Drive

I didn’t enjoy running Hope’s Last Day using Roll20, so I went back to basics for Chariot of the Gods. I used Google Drive and Discord (with the awesome Sebedius dice bot that automatically rolls on the panic table if you roll a facehugger).

I used Google Drive to hold all the background information and a document where I tracked things like stress. (In hindsight, I wish I had used Trello. But, I’ll know that for next time.)

Chariot of the Gods: the good

Chariot of the Gods was a lot of fun to run. Act 1 is a slow build and ends bloodily, Act 2 increases the tension, and in Act 3 it’s just crazy as things come to a climax. Here are some highlights.

• Everyone died. I had no survivors as everyone was in the reactor room when it overloaded. Happily, this was down to player actions and not the NPCs or monsters, so it was satisfying for everyone. It was very cinematic.
• The monsters are great. The players quickly nicknamed the Abominations “space zombies”, and the neomorph was effective (and tough!).
• We had several tense moments with the creatures. I killed two NPCs offscreen, and a neomorph killed Captain Miller in Act 2. (The captain then took over the new science officer I created, Alder.)
• The agendas worked well and created lovely conflicts and roleplaying.
• The player playing the secret android had missed that I’d sent her two characters, so it was only halfway through that she started acting suspiciously. I thought she had simply been roleplaying her persona to avoid suspicion.
• The players worked out there must be at least another creature on board as they hadn’t found the thing that had taken Ava out. I’d forgotten about that, so it allowed me to drop in another Neomorph. I didn’t use it, but I did have the players find a weird, recently-hatched cocoon I figured it had spent that last however-many-years hibernating in. So they knew there was something else out there…

The players told me they found the game tense, and even when they weren’t offscreen (the players split up a lot), they were happy to sit and watch. I think because the system is so brutal, everyone kept watching (rather than being distracted by the internet) because they knew things could turn nasty in a split second.

Chariot of the Gods: the not so good

A few things that Chariot of the Gods could have done better: 

• As I mentioned last time, the adventure could be organised better. In one session, I couldn’t find where the elevators were described. They weren’t on the deck descriptions where I expected and only found them by searching the pdf. Deck plans annotated with page numbers for the GM would have helped.
• I also found myself flipping rapidly between the events and the locations. Events would happen, and players would move around the ship which meant flipping back to the room descriptions. In hindsight, I should have created myself an event sheet for each act. (I did this with the monsters and found that helpful.)

I don’t think I played the NPCs effectively. I’m not sure that’s Chariot of the Gods’ problem, but mine. There was so much going on, and the players were (rightfully) in the spotlight that I often forgot to include the NPCs in scenes. On reflection, I should have created a Trello board—at least the NPCs would be in our eye line during play.

(I didn’t use the Sotillo. Things were racing to a climax in Act 3 and I didn’t need the extra complication.)

Stars and Wishes

I have recently started listening to The Gauntlet podcast, and I was taken with their stars and wishes. At the end of a session, you award a star to any other player for something they’ve done well. And a wish is something you’d like to see more of in the game.

Chariot of the Gods was the first time I tried stars and wishes. Everyone got the hang of awarding stars really quickly, praising other players (and me!) for things they enjoyed. Wishes took a little longer to get the hang of—it’s too easy in Alien for the players to wish for an easier, less creepy game. But I will persevere as it’s a great way for everyone to give feedback.

System

As I said when I wrote about Hope’s Last Day, I find the Alien system fiddly. It’s much crunchier than I prefer. Happily my players were forgiving and helped me look up some of the less-used rules. (For example, only when I described the reactor room did I realise I needed the radiation rules.)

However, I found a few quirks frustrating. 

• How do players tell if another character is lying? I ruled that it required an opposed Manipulation roll.
• Speaking of Manipulation, the option of a manipulated character attacking you seemed odd. We didn’t do that, but I couldn’t work out the logic of how that worked.
• There’s no Science skill! We’d have rolled that several times if there had been one.
• We never rolled for Stamina, Mobilty, Observation, Survival or Medical Aid. Instead, we used Comtech and Heavy Machinery a lot. (I’m not saying this was bad, but something I noticed.)
• I struggled with air supply rolls—I couldn’t get them out of their suits! The consumables section (and why isn’t that in the index?) suggests a roll every Turn. Unfortunately, I forgot to do that (it’s dull tracking such stuff, and it’s not usually how I run my games), so most players didn’t have an air supply problem. The PCs checked for air on the Cronus, but I ruled that the 70-year-old bottles didn’t work with their gear, so Cham and Davis went back to the Montero for more air. But I still forgot to get them to roll. (I worked out that the air supply would only have lasted a Shift at most, but it would have been nice if the game had made that clear.)
• I do like the Panic rolls, but they don’t always work out. We had a situation where Wilson (on 5 Stress) tried to manipulate Cham over the commlink and he panicked and rolled Seek Cover--which made little sense. Seek Cover works fine when you’re in a firefight or up against monster, but less so in other situations. So my advice is to hold the Panic Table lightly—and maybe some non-combat alternatives are worth considering.
• Initiative for combat is clunkier on Discord than in person. We rolled d10s, and I fudged it when players had the same number. It wasn’t the end of the world, but it wasn’t as easy as drawing cards.

I do like the random monster attack tables. They’re exciting and graphic—and each monster behaves differently. So I’ll use that elsewhere.

Unfortunately, my books are now showing signs of wear. Black pages are all very well, but they show wear quickly. And the perfect binding for the starter rules set is feeling loose. It hasn’t come loose yet, but it doesn’t feel as sturdy as it once did.

System changes

I was pleased with the changes I made.

• Banter: I liked how banter got the players talking in character from the start, and it helped get the game moving. I’ll use banter again—it’s a painless way to start a game, especially a one-shot.
• Buddies/rivals: The Session Zero questions helped establish everyone’s buddies, which got those relationships working. The players then built on that to help them earn Story Points.
• Story points: My change to Story Points did what I wanted them to - it encouraged the roleplaying I wanted to see (supporting buddies and undermining rivals) and helped keep Stress from becoming too debilitating. Was two Story Points too many? Possibly, but I will try that again before changing it. The change didn’t eliminate Stress—Wilson was often in the wrong place at the wrong time and constantly seemed to be on four or five Stress.
• Armour: My armour change sped up combat (slightly). I still made players roll for their suits, but I will keep the change for the future.

Final thoughts

We had a wonderful time with Chariot of the Gods. The adventure is tense and creepy—and with Alien’s lethality, it becomes a rollercoaster ride.

It is a complex scenario with many moving parts and could be easier to run. You will need to put the work in if you will run Chariot of the Gods. But it’s worth it.

And now I’ve finished Chariot of the Gods I can start reading Destroyer of Worlds.

Chariot of the Gods #1 - ALIEN

After reflecting on Hope’s Last Day and Lady Blackbird, I’ve started preparing Chariot of the Gods (from the Alien Starter Set). The scenario is a mash-up of Alien, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. Chariot starts like Alien aboard a Nostromo-class commercial vehicle receiving a distress call, but the call leads to an old starship full of horrors from Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. As with Hope’s Last Day, it’s a matter of survival.

At first glance, the scenario looks good, with the characters set up as rivals and buddies. But in looking at it in more detail, it needs a lot of work before I can run it.

As always, spoilers ahoy!

Aside: I’m not sure how much sense all this will make if you haven’t read it. As with others in my running other people’s scenarios series, I will talk about the published scenario first (including my changes) and then run through how it played. As I write this first section, I’m still in the middle of preparation.

The good

So here are the things I like about Chariot of the Gods:

The scenario: I haven’t had to think about the scenario or prepare characters. The scenario is a haunted house in space, but it looks like it should be good to run with lots of inter-player conflict.

The deckplans: The deckplans are good. The general production design is good and, like all the Alien materials, looks lovely.

The bad

Unfortunately, a few things about Chariot of the Gods don’t work for me—including layout, structure, characters and GM aides.

Layout

As lovely as the Alien layout looks, I find it awful to use in play. The font is awkward and the dense blocks of text make it hard to find critical information in the heat of battle. So I will have to put a fair bit of work in so I can run it. (I had similar issues with Hope’s Last Day.)

Structure

Structurally, Chariot of the Gods is a bit of a mess. The book lacks clarity in places, and critical information isn’t always front and centre.

Three act structure: Acts 1, 2 and 3 consist of a series of events. While an event defines the end of act 1, moving from act 2 to act 3 isn’t so obvious. Act 2 has four mandatory events—is it over as soon as they are over? I guess so.  (This may make more sense in play, we’ll see.)

Synthetic advice: Advice on androids and how the critters react to them is tucked away on page 32. Given that there’s a synthetic in the party, this is important information, and I need to make sure I have it to hand.

Tainted cure: The inoculation against the neomorphic motes is contaminated, but it’s unclear how that works. It’s left up to the GM—is it better to infect players or NPCs? My first instinct is to infect the NPCs first, but I’ll see how that goes.

Clayton’s samples: According to her character sheet, Clayton wants a sample of 26 Draconis Strain to take back with her. But the only way the GM knows where they are is by carefully reading the scenario (samples are in the Med Lab and one of the storage units on C-Deck). Ideally, that information would be repeated on Clayton’s character sheet (as you may give Clayton to a player after their character is, er, retired).

Deadly situations: besides the monsters, there are several situations that, if things go wrong (ie a die roll fails), the characters can die. While that’s appropriate (thinking of the scene in Alien: Covenant when the shuttle explodes), I will keep an eye on that. I’m not that keen on swapping characters during play as a character—I am usually invested in my starting character, who I like to see as one of the heroes in the story. While I will have NPCs ready as backup characters, my preference is to keep the PCs alive until the final reel.

The science module: The Cronus deckplan shows a science module on B-Deck. The module is missing, but there’s no mention of it in the room-by-room deckplan description. Instead, it’s mentioned elsewhere and easily missed (I only caught it by chance, between sessions).

Tell me more than once: This leads me to my biggest frustrations—you need to tell me more than once, and you need to make the game easy to play. If you’re describing the plans, make them complete. If your NPCs have critical knowledge, then include that their background as well.

Characters #1: Game background

Scenario writers seem to forget that the PCs live in this universe: they will know about their colleagues, the ship and the universe. If it’s a one-shot, you need to provide this information as you can’t rely on the players already knowing it. Unfortunately, Chariot of the Gods lacks this information.

So here’s what I’ve created: 

• General Alien background (taken from the rules – pages 11-13, plus a bit about the corporations and a hint of Engineers.)
• A background sheet for the Montero – about the ship, a list of the crew, the deck plan, the next steps (assuming they’re arriving at Sutters world).
• I’ve also used the Nostromo Operations Manual from this excellent site. The players won’t need any of it, but they don’t know that.

I’ll send this out in advance so the players can come to the session prepared. (Links to these are at the end of this post if you want to try them yourself.)

Characters #2: The Science Officer

I decided I wanted a sinister Science Officer aboard the Montero, in the same vein as Ash in Alien. So I’ve added a sixth character. I only plan to have four PCs, so there will be two spares.

Alder’s background: You’re an ambitious Weyland-Yutani scientist looking to further their career. This is your first trip as Science Officer on the Montero, a run-of-mill freighter with an average crew. If you impress the Company, then perhaps you’ll get a better run next time. Your job as Science Officer is to monitor the tritium in the hold. It’s perfectly safe if stored and handled correctly but can be highly volatile.

Alder’s Starting Agenda: Do your job well and get noticed by the Company. The best way to do that is for Wilson to give you a good report, so stay on their good side.

(Character sheet in the files below.)

Character’s #3: NPCs

As ever with Alien, the NPCs are there either as meat shields or as backup PCs. However, if they are backup PCs, they need a handout explaining what they really know (instead of what they may choose to tell.)

(Plus, there’s that PVP rule where players become NPCs when they act against the group. So you need NPCs for them to take over and play.)

So I created a character sheet (with background information explaining what happened to the Cronus) for two NPCs, Clayton and Reid. (With four players, that gives me eight potential characters for them to use. Hopefully that will be enough!)

Characters #4: Character sheets and Session Zero

In my experience, one-shot games live or die on their characters. And something I realise Alien does badly – Session Zero for cinematic games. (It’s not great for campaigns either, but I care less about that.)

While the Alien Starter Set includes character sheets, they aren’t great, and I’d be unhappy if I received them as a player. So here’s what I’ve done:

• Re-created character sheets for all the PCs in Word. I removed genders and added a section with brief details of what they know about the other PCs.
• Put three talents on the sheet to allow players to customise their characters a little.
• Added their agenda (and fleshed that out ).
• Added summary rules for Story Points (more on that below) and regaining Stress to save time at the table.
• Added a section on what they know about Hadley’s Hope and Space Beast (if anything).
• I created a separate sheet for Lucas, including the damage table and general rules for synthetics. (That’s me sharing the burden of learning the rules.)

For Session Zero itself, I’ve included questions for each character’s buddy and rival:

• Why do you trust your buddy? Describe a recent situation where you put your trust in them.
• Why do you distrust your rival? Describe a recent situation where they acted against your interests.

With luck, this will make the players feel more embedded in the game.

Finally, to get everyone started, I will use banter, which I found on 1shotadventures.com (itself taken from the Macdeath adventure). While I’ve given everyone the background introduction, this is a handy way to reinforce some critical background points.

GM support

I have also created a few documents to help me when I run Chariot of the Gods.

• I summarised the acts onto a single sheet I can use to check off as they occur.
• The creature details are spread out over several pages, which is a pain in play. I like my monsters to be on a single reference sheet, so I’ve created that for easy reference during play.
• Similarly, I like to see my NPCs at a glance. So I’ve put them into a separate document I can refer to.

Learning from Lady Blackbird

Based on my experience running Lady Blackbird, I want to make a couple of changes to the system to encourage the things I like to see in my games.

So I want to encourage the players to earn Story Points by driving their agendas and roleplaying their buddy/rival relationship. I need to do three things:

• Make it easier to earn Story Points by changing how they are earned
• Raising the number of Story Points that it’s possible to earn
• Making Story Points a little more useful

So I raised the maximum number of Story Points a character can have at any one time to two, and added this to the character sheets.

Story Points: Earn Story Points by:

• taking actions to further your Agenda
• supporting your buddy
• undermining your rival

You can spend Story Points to:

• Change the result of a single die you have thrown
•  Reduce your Stress Level by two

I will admit that I’m slightly nervous about this change. I hope it’s not too drastic.

Bonus rule change: easier armour: I also found rolling for armour for the monsters frustrating in play. It slowed things down and felt unnecessary. So for the monsters, I won’t roll for armour, but instead assume that their tough hide automatically absorbs 0-2 hits, depending on their armour rating.

Armour rating	Damage reduced by
1-3	0
4-8	1
9+	2

(So I’m effectively pre-rolling my armour rolls to save time later.)

I’ll use the usual rules for other situations requiring armour rolls (such as when the PCs are in their suits).

Next time: Getting ready to play

While this sounds like a lot of work, I hope to reap the rewards when I run Chariot of the Gods. I’ve done more work here than I did for Hope’s Last Day, and I’m hoping the game will go better as a result.

I wish I didn’t have to do all this, and that Chariot of the Gods was easier to play straight from the box, but it has given me ownership—and I’m much more familiar with the adventure now.

Resources

You can download the files I created for Chariot of the Gods here. They include:

• Alien background
• CotG Background
• Characters
• Miller
• Rye
• Cham
• Davis
• Alder
• Wilson
• Lucas
• Clayton (backup)
• Reid (backup)

Other resources

Here are other resources I used for Chariot of the Gods from elsewhere on the Internet.

• The Alien RPG Facebook group
• Some great images on Sgt Perry’s Heroes
• A video intro from foxtrot charlie
• Images and deckplans for the Sotillo (here, here and here)

Lady Blackbird

Lady Blackbird is the easiest published one-shot I have ever run.

Lady Blackbird is in disguise on the run from an arranged marriage and is fleeing to secret love, the pirate king Uriah Flint. However, she and the crew of The Owl (her hired smuggler skyship) have been captured and are now held in the brig of the Imperial cruiser Hand of Sorrow.

And that’s where we start…

What you get

Lady Blackbird is a one-shot scenario expecting to last 2-3 sessions for (ideally) 4-5 players. It was written by John Harper and you can download it for free here.

The whole adventure is 16 pages long:

• One cover
• Two pages of background (the general background, and the PC’s spaceship)
• Five one-page character sheets (half of which is devoted to the rules)
• One page on running the game
• One page containing extra traits that the PCs can spend experience on
• Six more pages – one for each character and a blank for the GM to use. But I didn’t use these, so Lady Blackbird is really only 10 pages

I ran it online using Facebook Messenger (for video chat) and Google Drive (to hold documents). We rolled real dice and trusted each other.

So definitely not too many words.

Characters

I’ve mentioned before about how important it is to get the characters right in a one-shot game. I believe that 50% of the fun comes from having great characters. And the characters in Lady Blackbird are perfect – all with goals and drives (called ‘keys’) that move the scenario forwards.

• Lady Blackbird wants to find her secret love
• Naomi Bishop is Lady Blackbird’s bodyguard and hates the Empire
• Cyrus Vance is captain of The Owl and is in love with Lady Blackbird
• Kale Arkham is the loyal first mate
• Snargle is the wisecracking goblin sky-pilot

While Lady Blackbird’s main goal of reaching Uriah Flint drives everything along, the other characters are neatly interwoven and react well together.

The scenario

As you may have noticed, there’s not much in the way of a traditional scenario. No complicated dungeon maps, no monster stats, no detailed NPCs. In fact, there’s barely what I would normally think of as a scenario at all – simply a few ideas for obstacles between the brig and finding Uriah Flint.

I was fine with this – I didn’t need complicated deck plans, or city maps or stats for monsters. Although I would have liked some colourful NPCs for the PCs to meet. (I can make them up, but having them there means I don’t have to.)

In terms of flavour, Lady Blackbird feels very diesel punk. (I’ve heard that it’s set in the same universe as Harper’s Blades in the Dark, but I’m not sure.) In terms of inspiration, it feels to me to be in the same spirit as Christopher Wooding’s excellent Tales of the Kitty Jay series. At least, that’s how I’m imagining it.

System

The system is explained on each character sheet, and takes up less than half a side. The section is titled ‘Rules Summary,’ but that’s misleading: these are the entire rules. There are no more.

The system is a dice pool system, with success being 4+. (It doesn’t explicitly state this, but we’re using six-sided dice. It would be weird if it was anything else.)

The system is a great example of rewarding the behaviours you want to see.

• First, experience points are earned by taking actions that further your keys (your goals and objectives)—and double points are earned if doing that takes the character into danger. So they rapidly ramp up, and there’s lots of new things to spend the on.
• Second, you get more dice by having a ‘refreshment scene’ with another character. This promotes in character chat—something I like to see in my games.

The only problem I’ve seen with the system so far is that it’s too easy. Despite setting challenge levels as recommended, during my first session the PCs failed none of the rolls. (They did fail rolls in later sessions, so maybe that was just luck.)

The refreshment scenes are inspired, though. They work well in play—it's a pleasant change to have a mechanic that rewards the players for actually roleplaying.

So how does it play?

Lady Blackbird is easy to run, provided you don’t mind thinking on your feet. The combination of the system and keys makes the characters very proactive, so as a GM you’re reacting to their plans and thinking of obstacles. We start in media res with the PCs locked up in the brig, but the are resourceful enough that it’s not long before they’re out causing havoc.

As I said above, 50% of the fun in roleplaying games comes from having great characters, and Lady Blackbird gets them very right indeed.

I ran it over four 2-hour sessions, using Facebook Messenger for video chat and Google Drive for the documents.

Session 1 Prison Breakout: The PCs escaped the brig, sabotaged the Hand of Sorrow and reached the hangar where The Owl was held.

Session 2 Goodbye Hand of Sorrow, hello Succulent Grub: The PCs dealt with the guards, refuelled The Owl and fled the Hand of Sorrow. They made their way to the Succulent Grub bar in the city of St Judasberg on Haven, where Lady Blackbird believes she can find a route to her lover’s lair in the Remnants.

Session 3 The Fight: Westor Snow (owner of the Succulent Grub) proposes a wager to the PCs: directions to Uriah Heap’s lair in exchange for the The Owl, to be settled with a pit fight between his champion (The Humungus—inspired by Mad Max 2) and the PCs’ champion. Naomi is the champion, and the PCs undertake a madcap scheme to rub a sedative ointment into The Humungus’ skin, boosting Naomi’s chances. It all works, and Naomi beats The Humungus.

Session 4: The Dark Promise. The PCs make their way to the Remnants, which we’ve learned are the remains of an ancient civilisation (their sorcerers reached too far…) and contains a graveyard full of derelict spaceships. The PCs find Uriah Flint’s pirate ship, Dark Promise, and a bounty hunter ambush… The bounty hunters are defeated, the Dark Promise stolen, and our heroes head off into the wild blue with a new career as sky pirates…

I found Lady Blackbird a lot of fun to run. I found my players were coming up with loads of mad ideas I mostly had to respond to. It was a very collaborative experience—much more so than many other games.

Given the very minimal prep I did, it did at times feel like I was walking a tightrope without a safety net. But that’s only in my mind—everyone approached the game in the right spirit and I’m sure that we could have dealt with any problems that might have arisen.

The dice pool system and lack of stats/attributes/hit points worked well. Rather than a blow-by-blow recreation of the PC’s attempt to bluff their way into the pit fighter stable and rub ointment into The Humungus (yes, really), I reduced that down to a single (difficult) roll.

Rolling the dice less often made the dice rolls much more important—and raised the tension. It also meant that we crammed a lot into our two-hour sessions. Instead of chipping away at The Humungus’ hit points over twenty minutes, we resolved the battle in a single dramatic roll of the dice.

Improvements

I wouldn’t do much to improve Lady Blackbird. I’d get rid of (or explain) the blanks at the end of the game as I’m still not sure what they’re for. And I’d like to see a few more NPCs, places and creatures described—yes, I can make them up, but it’s also nice not to have to.

Overall

Of all the published scenarios I’ve run so far, Lady Blackbird has been both the easiest to run (almost no prep required) and also the most fun. 

Hope's Last Day - for ALIEN

Hope’s Last Day is the Alien introductory cinematic scenario in the core rulebook. It features a mechanic team returning to Hadley’s Hope (the doomed colony in Aliens) shortly after the alien infestation has occurred (but a while before Ripley and the marines arrive). It’s a short scenario where the characters will do well to survive—but that’s the nature of cinematic Alien adventures.

For a great intro to the scenario, watch this short YouTube video. I wish I’d found this before I’d started playing—I only came across it once we’d played the first session.

Other People’s Adventures: This is another in my series of looking at other people’s adventures. I’ll talk about the adventure, how it played and my thoughts on what could be done better.

Setting it up

Having played in an Alien scenario last summer, I knew I wanted to run Alien using Roll20 as I liked how the character sheet worked for Alien and I wanted to use some background music.

However, that did give me some preparatory work. I had the pdf of the rulebook and starter set, so I made extensive use of the Windows Snipping Tool and grabbed the maps, characters, initiative cards and more and uploaded them to Roll20.

I’m sure I’ve said this before, but it feels like there’s way more preparation for an online game compared to a face-to-face game. For example, I would have printed (and cut out) characters and maps for a tabletop game and put them on the table, which is less work.

I created separate Roll20 screens for each level of Hadley’s Hope (and a landing page with the overall map). I also created handouts for the basic setup (with an overall map), the opening briefing (What’s the Story Mother – when I wish I’d had the video above), and the panic table and fast/slow action table.

For the characters, I copied the text from the pdf and pasted it into the characters. I didn’t populate the character sheets – I did that with the players as part of setup/session zero.

I used the GM layer on Roll20 to help me run it (there’s a great Hadley’s Hope Map in the files sectionof the Alien RPG Facebook group that I wish I’d found first.)

Session 1

I ran Hope’s Last Day with my regular two players. They chose union rep MacWhirr and pilot Singleton (I didn’t let them choose the android). I didn’t worry about buddies and rivals as I’ve found that bonds between characters work better with more players.

To start with, they weren’t terribly focused. Although I read out “What’s the story, Mother,” I think the actual goal (get the shuttle keycards and escape) got lost. (I’m sure the video would have helped.) Plus, I think they wanted to discover what was going on… Curiosity killed the cat, and all that.

They wandered into the basement and found the remnants of the battle (they didn’t search and so didn’t find the extra weapons). Then, in trying to raise survivors on the intercom, they raised Wes in Billy’s Bar. So they headed that way and saw a xenomorph trying to get into Billy’s Bar.

They attracted the xenomorph’s attention and ineffectually shot at it. It killed Hirsch (an NPC), and they stumbled back into C1. They hear a thud behind them as Sigg fell to the ground, facehugger clamped over his face. (I didn’t roll for this—I used dramatic licence.) And as our two hours were up, that’s where we ended episode 1.

Alien menace

One of the selling points of the Alien RPG is that it’s set in the Alien universe. On the other hand, one of the problems with the Alien RPG is that it’s set in the Alien universe. Most gamers have seen the movies, often many times. My two players certainly had.

So the monsters weren’t a surprise. I guess I could have changed things a little, but I didn’t want to do that—if I did that, it wouldn’t be Alien.

As a player, I found the xenomorph quite terrifying. With stress dice mounting up, when it appeared in the scenario I played in, we fled. They’re deadly. Sometimes reputation helps.

As a GM, I found the xenomorph surprisingly random. There was no guarantee what it would do once it was in combat—and it even missed a few rolls, including a head-bite.

(Incidentally, here’s a great story about using the Alien RPG to run the Alien movie, with players who didn’t know (or couldn’t remember) the film.)

Between sessions

Thanks to Real Life getting in the way, we didn’t return to part 2 for a couple of weeks. So between sessions, I made a few amendments.

• I found and shared the intro video (as mentioned above).
• I created a summary of the base layout, but I added an overview of what each area contained—because the characters would have known that because they live there.
• I found a summary of the rules on Reddit and shared them with the players.

Session 2

I started session 2 with the mission video, which clarified the mission objectives: find the shuttle keycards and leave. And in essence, that’s what happened. The PCs tried to find more guns but failed. With stress mounting, the PCs found the keycards and headed back—witnessing a near miss from an adult xenomorph, a close-up encounter with a chestburster (nasty little critters, attacked and took out the android), but the survivors succumbed to the facehuggers in the shuttle.

The players said they enjoyed themselves, but it felt off to me. We rolled a lot of dice at the climax. I rolled for the facehuggers actions and then more dice for their attack. And each time the players rolled dice, they added stress, and with so many stress dice, a panic roll was almost inevitable. And the panic rolls, while in keeping, removed player agency by cancelling actions and forcing them to freeze or scream or whatever.

Eventually, they succumbed to the inevitable, and I drew the session to a close.

So no survivors. That’s entirely in keeping with the genre, but I’m not sure how I feel about that. I would have preferred one survivor, but it’s hard to battle the creatures when you have little weaponry to defend yourself with, and you’re at the mercy of a very unforgiving system.

Hope’s Last Day with two players

I’m not sure how Hope’s Last Day plays with more players, but I had only two. (My regular gaming group is just the three of us.) Some thoughts on the scenario with only two players:

Two players results in lots of NPCs. I’m not great at playing NPCs when they are part of the “adventure party”. I’m happy playing them when they’re people the PCs meet, but not when they’re supposed to be part of the team. They hang around in the back, and I don’t play them properly. In Hope’s Last Day they just became meat shields and showed how the monsters worked.

That also meant the agendas weren’t as crucial as they might be. I like the concept of the agendas, but with only two players, I think I needed to tweak them a little.

With two players, I’d throw out the secret android. I’m not sure that helps, and it wasn’t necessary.

And given the lethality of the creatures, I’d either reduce their number or make extra weaponry easier to find. Or possibly both. My players had a bolt gun and a pistol between them, and that wasn’t enough.

I found it interesting that there’s nothing in the characters to suggest that they have lived in Hadley’s Hope before this adventure. There are no links to other (now dead) characters, and they don’t know who the guy in the bar is or anything else. They’re very typical PCs.

Roll20

And I grew to hate Roll20 this time. I had only my laptop for the last session, and I struggled with swapping between characters and maps and dice and everything. Although there’s a map in Hope’s Last Day, it’s not critical, and I think I would have been better with a Google doc and Discord (or even Trello).

One of my players pointed out that Roll20 makes it hard to learn a system because it does everything for you. You don’t learn anything if all you do is click a button to make a roll. It’s a fair point.

How did I find the Alien RPG system?

Overall, the system was fine. However, I don’t yet have a good sense of the dice pool mechanic. While I have “roll 2d6 and aim for a target number” internalised from decades of boardgames (and Traveller and other rpgs), rolling dice and counting sixes isn’t something I intuitively understand.

I found quite a few rules fiddly—Alien is a crunchier system than I am used to. And I didn’t find the rules well presented. In the heat of the battle, it was hard to find the things I needed—the rules summary I found was a great help.

I like the stress mechanic, although it gets frustrating towards the end as panic rolls trigger more stress and more panic rolls, and it’s only a matter of time before the inevitable happens. At this point the players can lose their agency—which is all in keeping, I guess, but I’m not sure how much I like that.

And sometimes, rolling stress is confusing. For example, one player ordered another to do something (using the Pull Rank talent), and both rolled facehuggers. It was easier to ignore the facehuggers rather than make them roll panic rolls and figure out what that meant.

Hope’s Last Day—changes

I’m not sure I will run Hope’s Last Day again. I ran it as written, and I’d want to make changes if there is to be a next time. (And ultimately, I’m not sure I thought it was good enough to make those changes—not when I can spend my time more productively elsewhere.)

So, in no particular order, I would:

• Tweak the agendas. I’d keep some of the PvP aspects of them (although I’d tone that down for two-player play), but I’d also make them multi-stage to push them into parts of the base they didn’t explore.
• Give the PCs other connections to Hadley’s Hope. Who are their friends? Where are their friends? I would need to be careful about derailing everything, but it would be nice for the PCs to relate more to the colony.
• Tone down the stress, giving more opportunities to reduce stress. (I need to revisit the stress rules to make sure I used them correctly.) Or make sure that the PCs know about the Naproleve drug.
• Remove the android. Or at least, make him not secret.
• Think carefully about replacement characters. They need planning more carefully than simply “here, take this NPC”. Maybe plan to send them off to other parts of the colony on missions.
• Have fewer monsters. The adventure starts with four full-size xenomorphs and one facehugger free in the base (along with one trapped facehugger and a couple of chest-bursters waiting to happen). Plus, a facehugger for each player in the shuttle. Now I’ve typed that out, that seems like way too many.

Final thoughts

Hope’s Last Day is basically a dungeon with underpowered PCs and brutally tough monsters. I’m unlikely to rerun it, but if I do I will make a few changes.

Brindlewood Bay

 Brindlewood Bay is the PbtA game of cosy murder mysteries by Jason Cordova. The players are members of the Murder Mavens book club and are all widows in their 60s and 70s. Think Murder She Wrote combined with The Golden Girls.

While play is episodic (each episode features the players solving a murder), a darker theme emerges in campaign play as a larger, overall mystery introduces occult elements.

Brindlewood Bay takes an emergent approach to solving the mysteries. The solution to each mystery isn’t predetermined; it is uncovered during play. Key to this are two moves:

• The Meddling Move—used to find clues
• Theorize – for determining whether the PC’s solution is correct.

(Jason Cordova explains how the investigation works here.)

From a distance, Brindlewood Bay looks very similar to other investigative games: the PCs go from place to place and find clues to the mystery. They then work out the solution. But I found it runs quite differently.

I’ve now played Brindlewood Bay twice. Unfortunately, for me, there are more misses than hits.

Dad Overboard

We took about four hours to play through Dad Overboard in two sessions. We followed the process, the players did their investigating, and we solved the murder.

My two players (Jon and Terry) enjoyed playing little old ladies solving murders. But while Jon bought into the “play to find out” approach, Terry hated it.

Terry struggled with the concept that the solution to the mystery was whatever they invented. He prefers RPGs where the GM has a world or scenario for him to explore. He had no problem with the system or other concepts, but he hated that I (as GM) didn’t know the solution.

I found running Dad Overboard surprisingly unsatisfying. It was easy to run—it needed virtually no preparation, and all I did during play was react to what the players were doing and offer them clues. But it was too easy—there was no sense of struggle or challenge. Moreover, when I did put obstacles in the way, they were never significant and easily overcome.

Jingle Bell Shock

Although I came away unsatisfied by Dad Overboard, I thought I’d give Brindlewood Bay another shot. Maybe things would be different with another group. So, I ran Jingle Bell Shock (a Christmas episode) for Becky, Jon (again), Liam and Thomas.

Character generation was more involved with four players and took longer, but we still took about four hours to work through the mystery.

Again, the players enjoyed being little old ladies investigating a murder—that core premise is delightful.

I struggled with some mechanics. For example, if a player rolls a 7-9 when Meddling, they receive the clue but there’s a complication. I struggled with complications, as I couldn’t immediately think of any that were relevant. And so I stored them up, and when I got to four complications, I killed off one of the suspects. (I also locked one investigator in the basement.)

And while four players are better than two during character generation, the investigation feels heavy-handed with four. For an investigative game, I much prefer smaller groups (also more genre-appropriate).

When it comes to solving the mystery, Brindlewood Bay felt like a parlour game. Once you have collected sufficient clues (such as a secret crawlspace, a bottle of pills that has been tampered with, unpaid bills), then the players merely have to stitch them all together to create a coherent(ish) story—and then roll Theorize to see if they are correct.

Once again we had a successful investigation, but once again, it felt flat.

What works for me

There’s plenty to like in Brindlewood Bay. Things I particularly liked:

• Playing little old ladies solving murders.
• Items from your Cozy Little Place. The last step of character generation is for other players to name one object that can be found in your home, and these were effective in how they changed how the players saw their characters.
• Lovely establishing questions for the locations. For example, What do you see in the grand dining room that shows just how lonely Amelia truly was? I’ll use that in other games.
• Very easy to run. Running Brindlewood Bay is almost effortless—the most straightforward published scenarios I’ve run ever. (But running a game well? I think that’s harder.)

What doesn’t work for me

• Emergent mysteries. I didn’t really enjoy running Brindlewood Bay—I didn’t like not knowing what was going on. Maybe that’s my lack of experience, but it didn’t work for me.
• Mechanics such as complications (which were fiddly), conditions and the moves I didn’t use as while they made sense when I read them, they didn’t seem relevant during play.
• I was disappointed in the occult element that Brindlewood Bay bolts on for campaign play. Nobody tries to justify the high murder rate in Oxford or Jersey or Midsomer, and giving it an occult spin felt unnecessary and not at all true to the source material.)

In summary

I doubt I’ll return to run Brindlewood Bay. However, I’d happily try playing it—perhaps it simply doesn’t suit my GM style.

The Lightless Beacon

As part of my plan to run other people’s RPG adventures, I thought I’d give Call of Cthulhu’s The Lightless Beacon a spin. It’s free on Roll20, which also means I get to practice my Roll20 GMing skills. And because I don’t have a copy of the Call of Cthulhu rules, I used Cthulhu Dark.

Spoilers ahoy!

The Lightless Beacon

The Lightless Beacon is an introductory adventure written by Leigh Carr with Lynne Hardy: the ship the investigators are travelling on is wrecked and the investigators must make their way to the nearest island (and lighthouse), which has its own difficulties (mainly deep ones).

The game is likely to end up with a furious battle at the top of the lighthouse, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing in most games, but less than ideal for Cthulhu Dark.

Timings for The Lightless Beacon suggest that it will be over in an hour, with four players. While it’s extremely short, I suspect my players will drag it out longer than that. But we’ll see.

Cthulhu Dark

Cthulhu Dark is Graham Walmsley’s excellent rules-light Cthulhu system. The rules cover two sides of A4, and I have the gorgeous hardback that Graham produced. I’ve written about it previously, and I find it simpler to use than traditional Call of Cthulhu. There are some complications in using Cthulhu Dark, though, that means I can’t quite run The Lightless Beacon exactly as written.

Doomed: In Cthulhu Dark, the investigators are doomed. They’re not expected to triumph. So this will not end well for my investigators—so I can ignore any temptation to have the investigators win.

No combat: Cthulhu Dark has no combat rules. If the investigators fight a supernatural menace, they lose. They can flee, or hide. But they can’t fight. So that rules out a climactic battle at the top of the lighthouse.

Final horror: In the scenario construction section, Cthulhu Dark talks about the final horror, that moment at the end of the adventure when the investigators finally understand the full ghastliness of what’s going on.

However, The Lightless Beacon doesn’t have a final horror—it’s just some monsters trying to recover their gold. So I changed the scenario slightly, and corrupted the deep one gold, making the gold itself evil. The deep ones turn their gold into jewellery and sell it to hapless victims who, upon buying it, become corrupted themselves (and maybe even prompting ‘the change’). I’m writing this before we play, and with luck the adventure will end with the investigators barricaded at the top of the lighthouse, monsters pounding at the door, and with one of them looking at her wedding ring, not knowing if it is tainted or not. Fade to black.

You can download the basic Cthulhu Dark rules for free here.

My thoughts on reading The Lightless Beacon

Roll20 doesn’t make it easy to use pre-written adventures. The text is contained in Roll20’s handouts, which I copied into Word for easy reading. I didn’t copy everything, and I still ended up with 6000 words of text…

So my first sense of The Lightless Beacon, a one-hour adventure is that it’s overwritten. By a long way. I appreciate that it’s aimed at newcomers to Call of Cthulhu, but I’m sure even newcomers would appreciate clear, concise writing.

Hard to use in play: This makes The Lightless Beacon hard to run in play—unless you’ve internalised everything (and why would you for a one-hour game?). Worse, the text doesn’t include the map cross-referencing, making it harder to use.

(I am sure you could present The Lightless Beacon as little more than annotated maps. It’s just a one-page dungeon, it doesn’t need all that extraneous material.)

Everything is hidden behind a dice roll: I was surprised at how much was hidden by a dice roll, including the handouts. Luckily, with Cthulhu Dark, investigators always find the clues so I don’t have to worry about that. But it does seem very old-fashioned and I had thought that 7th edition Call of Cthulhu, given GUMSHOE’s presence, had moved beyond that. (And maybe it does, maybe there’s something in the rules about that.)

Younglings: The monsters in The Lightless Beacon are embarrassing. They’re called ‘younglings’ a word that I’ve only ever heard in association with Revenge of the Sith. I’m not sure why they don’t have a more sinister name—sea horrors, or larvae. Anything but younglings.

Sea horrors (I’m not calling them younglings) have poisonous dorsal spines they can fire at prey. That means they have to turn their backs to attack anything! I’m trying not to laugh at how ridiculous that sounds, so I will give them breakable poisonous teeth instead.

Firearms: Games are scarier when the characters are powerless, and removing guns helps to remove that power. As far as I can see, The Lightless Beacon has three guns: two on the island, and one that starts with the characters. I removed (or broke) two, leaving the one gun for the investigators to find in the innards of a dead NPC. (Guns aren’t any help in Cthulhu Dark anyway.)

Dynamic lighting - bah

Roll20 integration: The Lightless Beacon is the first Roll20-sourced adventure I’ve run, and while it integrates with Roll20, I’m not sure it makes the best of Roll20. Some thoughts:

• Dynamic lighting: The plan of the lighthouse has dynamic lighting enabled, which is nice but I found it irritating in play. Once the players had visited a room I wanted that room to remain visible, but with dynamic lighting once we moved the token away the room went dark. (So I prefer the old-fashioned “fog of war” approach.) My lack of familiarity with Roll20 probably didn’t help here—I’m sure there’s a simple way to sort this.
• GM layer: The maps all have a GM layer with a few notes, but not enough. There’s a bloody stain on the GM layer in the kitchen—I’m not sure why that isn’t on the background as the investigators see it. And I would have liked more notes on the GM layer to make it easy to run.
• Scenario text: As a I said before, the scenario text is all in handouts. A quick reference guide would have been very helpful (or just better annotated maps).
• Roll 20’s Jukebox: I thought I’d try out Roll20’s jukebox feature. I used the Dark and Stormy track for outside scenes, and Existential Dread for inside scenes. (Both are by Tabletop Audio and I found them by exploring the jukebox.)

Actual play

Rotate the map?

So I ran the adventure with my regular players, Jon and Terry. They took the antiques dealer and marine biologist. Once they were on the island, they immediately sought shelter from the rain and went into the lighthouse cottage, ignoring my suggestion to explore outside. (In hindsight, I wonder if rotating the map so the investigators encounter the outbuildings first would have been better.)

They made a perfunctory scout of the cottage (ignoring everything interesting), before climbing the lighthouse itself to see if they could fix the light and prevent more ships from foundering on the rocks. 

So of course they encountered the grisly scene long before I had hoped they would.

They replaced the lighthouse lamp, but then I had the power go out. So they went out into the dark where they found the dead body there, and a generator that had shorted out. By this point they were aware of strange fish-horrors and shapes in the night, and didn’t want to hang around trying to fix the generator. So they holed themselves up in the windowless pantry, barring the door against Things Outside banging and scratching to get in.

By daylight the things had gone, and we ended the game with post-credit scenes for each character. The antiques dealer took the gold coins and was later murdered for them, while the marine biologist took the fish-thing specimen back but was discredited and became a laughing stock. So happy endings all around!

Both Jon and Terry enjoyed the simplicity and bleakness of Cthulhu Dark. They ended up with 3 and 4 Insight respectively, and I think the rule that a fight always ends in the Investigator’s death worked in the games favour. They were hiding from the creatures not trying to fight them.

We took about an hour and 45 minutes to play—so a good time (and as I suspected, longer than the hour advertised).

So what have I learned?

Roll20’s Jukebox: There’s not that much about Roll20 that I can’t get elsewhere, but I did like the jukebox. I’m not sure if the players enjoyed it as much as I did, but it worked for me.

Roll20’s GM layer: The Lightless Beacon introduced me to the GM layer, it’s not something I used before (I’m a Roll20 newbie). I can see me using that in future. (And as I said, I think The Lightless Beacon could be run from a good annotated map.)

Cthulhu Dark: Cthulhu Dark was just right. While I didn’t get the final horror I had hoped for, we had no stumbling over clues or missing anything because of a failed roll. And when they rolled 6, I enjoyed the challenge of finding a supernatural insight for them.

Other people’s adventures: I’m enjoying running other people’s adventures more than I thought I would. I still have yet to find one that really works—a compelling adventure properly laid out and concisely written so I don’t have to do so much homework to run it.

So all in all, a success.

Other People’s Adventures: The Haunting

Episode 2 in my experience of running other people’s adventures—this time Paul Mitchener’s The Haunting for Liminal which follows on from Prodigal Son. The Haunting didn’t need quite as much work as Prodigal Son, and I had fewer issues with the text. Some points though:

• The Ghost Spirit has the wrong trait (insubstantial instead of immaterial).
• It’s not clear, but I decided that P Division have asked for the police to keep bystanders away from Thornhill Hall.
• Where is Mark? At the end of the previous adventure, Mark Northcott is presumably reunited with his father. (This happened when I ran Prodigal Son.) I decided that Mark had left the house again and his whereabouts was currently unknown.
• The players may want to talk to witnesses or the press—I had a witness and reporter in my back pocket in case they were needed. (We used the reporter.)
• The social challenge to persuade the guardian spirit not to attack could be clearer—it’s an opposed roll, but using which skills? And at what level? (I said that it was a level 10 roll using Charm—but only by someone who can see the spirit.)

Countdown clock: I created a short countdown clock for the adventure:

1. Sir Tatton Northcott dies. Letter is delivered to Naomi. (This is where the players come in.)
2. Ghosts escape, the Thornhill Hall appears ghostly at night, there is an attack by a ghost. Police block access to the manor.
3. The newspaper publishes a report of the ghost attack “Mystery Assault at Thornhill Hall”
4. Charles Gardner sneaks into the ghost realm. Ghosts try attacking him, but Gardner sees them off and they keep him at bay.
5. Gardner finishes draining the energy - releasing the ghosts into the wider world.
6. P Division arrive, late as usual.

(I’m not sure if Gardner would be able to see off the ghosts in a fair fight, but I want Gardner to be tougher than the ghosts.)

On Geomantic Hauntings by Bishop Ferrar: I turned this into a handout (well, a Trello card) with the key information about draining geomantic energy taken from the text. That means the players can refer to it without me having to read it out. (There are a couple of other places where handouts might be useful—such as the press reports about the house appearing on the hill each night. This is the sort of thing that I think a published adventure should provide as a matter of course.)

Other Factions: And what of the other factions?

• P Division: Aware of the site, but are limited by what they can do and they arrive too late.
• The Council of Merlin: Aren’t interested in Thornhill, but I had one of them contact Naomi to secure the Northcott library for the council, using this as a bribe to help her reinstate her good name.
• The fae, werewolves and vampires: Uninterested in Thornhill (but they’d probably like access to the Northcott library).
• The press: Stories about the haunted house may attract cranks of all shapes and sizes from the ordinary world—so I had some ideas for those in my back pocket.

NPC stat blocks: Following Prodigal Son I changed the stat blocks as I found providing the different challenge levels slightly less intuitive than simply turning them into a modifier. So the Guardian Spirit became:

• Initiative modifier: +2 (Awareness)
• Attack modifier (melee only): +3 Poltergeist must spend 1 Will to act
• Attack modifier (Terror): +4, use Conviction for defence
• Defence modifier (melee/ranged): +3/+0 (magical or blessed weapons only - other weapons cannot harm it)

In practice I add the modifier to 8 to get the challenge level—when defending a melee attack, the PCs need to roll 11.

I did this to make it easier in the event that I have NPCs and foes battling each other: decide who is going to make the roll, then apply all the modifiers (attack and defence) to that single roll. 

How did it play: It took about two hours, and was pretty straightforward. I introduced a reporter character who followed the players into the ghost realm and I think caused them more problems than anything else. While there wasn’t much physical combat, there was a fair bit of magical combat this time and the players ended up very low on Will. Overall, a success.

Thoughts on running other people’s adventures

After running Prodigal Son and The Haunting, I have a few thoughts on running other people’s adventures:

• Running someone else’s adventure isn’t necessarily less effort than running your own. It does mean that you don’t need to generate a core story—but you do need to make it your own.
• Don’t forget that there’s no wrong way to play! (It can be harder to go off-piste when running a published adventure, particularly if you’re not that familiar with the setting.)
• If you’re preparing a published adventure, please really think about how it will be used in play. Solid blocks of text aren’t easy to skim while you’re running the game—bullet points, highlights, boxed text and handouts (with key player-facing info) are preferable. Both Prodigal Son and The Haunting could have been better thought out for actual use.

I plan to run more adventures, and I'm interested to see what I learn.