The Highgate Club - online using Discord

In January 2021 I ran The Highgate Club, a freeform I co-wrote back in 2010 at Peaky. I’m fond of The Highgate Club—It’s a place where the people of hidden London (vampires, werewolves, sorcerers, immortals and more) gather. There are various plots involving Atlantis, a volcanic island up for auction, the return of King Arthur, Russian cyborgs, the last of the elves, and more.

Discord

I updated The Highgate Club a couple of years ago and Covid happened before I could run it in person. Given the success I’d had with other freeforms online, I thought I’d try it out using Discord.

The item bot

The Highgate Club uses items. A lot. Happily, one of my freeform pals was developing a Discord bot to manage items, and they got it ready in time for me to try. A week before we were due to run the game I had a crash course in installing Discord bots, and we tested it beforehand—it was a success and hopefully development will continue.

During play, I inadvertently installed it in the wrong channel, which I don’t think caused me any problems, but next time I’ll know better. We also found that the locations weren’t working properly, so we had to manually sort them out.

If the bot hadn’t worked, our fallback was for one of the GMs (probably Alan, my co-GM) to be dedicated to managing a huge spreadsheet.

Problem #1: Discord

While overall I think the game was a success, it wasn’t without a few issues. The first was that one player failed to join. We carried on without her, but it was frustrating. We’re not sure what happened—she struggled with Discord despite rebooting her laptop. (One thing we didn’t try was to check whether she could have used Discord on another device, or using it through a browser rather than the app. Or through a phone.)

I don’t know if the problem was her setup, or issues with her local internet connection. We had 16 people present, but nobody else had any difficulties.

Problem #2: The Decision

During the game there’s a joining ceremony and two characters apply join the club. Unfortunately, one of them was refused entry, and this upset her. I sympathised with her (I couldn’t quite see where the decision not to allow her entry had come from) and she carried on playing, albeit her game was spoiled as a result.

Mechanically, it didn’t make that much difference (as she wasn’t barred from the club) but it obviously affected her game emotionally. I’ve since tweaked the writing to make it less likely that either character will be blocked from being accepted.

As a side effect, I noted that it also affected me as well. It upsets me when players aren’t enjoying playing my games—I want everyone to have a good time. And I may have been more sensitive than usual, as it turns out I had Covid.

Problem #3: Covid

A few days after the game, I tested positive for Covid. While I didn’t have any of the classic symptoms I had been feeling below par—I thought I was fighting off a nasty cold—in hindsight I realised that I was suffering from Covid the weekend of the game.

Covid also affected my mood.

Normally after a game, I’m quick to write up my notes and reflect on how the game went. While I did sort out typos to sort out some of the smaller issues, I didn’t feel like reflecting on the session. It’s taken me over a month to write this up.

And my view of The Highgate Club was soured as a result.

Minor niggles

We had a few minor niggles.

Late starters: A couple of the players misread when the game was due, and thought it was the following day. So we started about 30 minutes late while we got in touch and waited for them. It didn’t occur to me to send reminders in advance, but maybe that was also Covid.

Discord rooms: I set up a few small (2 or 3 person) channels on Discord for people to have quiet conversations. Unfortunately, that made it hard for some people to get hold of others, as they were often in those rooms with other people and there was no way of getting them out. (Not everyone was paying attention to direct messages, which didn’t help.)

In future, I will have more channels but set the minimum number at four to make it easier for players to talk to each other.

Reading the room: From a GM’s perspective, watching the game being played is a lot less satisfactory on Discord than in person. It’s hard to “read the room” online, and I had little sense of how the game was going.

As a player, I find it distracting when you’re conversing with another player and a GM suddenly appears. All they’re doing is listening in, but it’s still distracting. So I tried not to do that—but that meant not seeing as much of the game as I would otherwise have.

Make it longer: A casualty of not reading the room is not knowing when to stop the game. I had originally planned to run from about 7:30 to 10pm, but we started late (as described above) and at 10:30pm I was flagging. I called the end of the game at 10:30, but I know that players were still busy and had I been able to read the room I would have let it carry on for a bit.

I think that’s an inevitable consequence of online play, but for The Highgate Club at least, I’ve added another 30 minutes to the run-time.

Once more with feeling

So my memory of The Highgate Club is tinged with Covid. It's probably time for me to run it again, but ideally face-to-face rather than Discord.

Not in the rulebook

Recently, I’ve been paying attention to the things I do when I run a roleplaying game. Some of those things aren’t in the rules…

I don’t know why they’re not in the rules. Perhaps they’re so obvious they don’t need to be.

Anyway, this is the first.

Making decisions

When I run a roleplaying game, I roll dice for one reason more than any other—and that’s to decide.

These decisions include:

• Answering player questions: “Is there a phonebox nearby?” “Does the store sell wellingtons?” “How far is the nearest river?”
• Deciding how difficult a challenge (such as the scalability of a cliff-face) should be.
• Deciding how cooperative an NPC will be.

If I don’t already know the answer, I let the dice decide. And I make these kinds of rolls more often than for any other reason.

If I roll high then it’s in the players’ favour. If I roll low, it’s bad for the players. And if I roll in the middle, then it’s complicated (ie, good and bad).

Sometimes I’m open about the roll and will explain why I’m rolling and the consequences, and sometimes I do it secretly. I don’t think there’s any logic to this—I do whatever feels right, although as I get older I’m more likely to be open about the roll.

In a recent example, the PCs went to visit a theatrical impresario. I knew nothing about this character, so I grabbed a name and rolled to see how cooperative he would be. I rolled high, so the players found him in good spirits and happy to help. Had I rolled low, he would have been uncooperative and the PCs would have needed to work harder (a skill roll, maybe a bribe) for his help.

The players are not the characters

I know that should be obvious, but sometimes we act as if it were so.

I certainly have done it when creating Call of Cthulhu scenarios. For example, I’d present clues and expect the players to figure them out. Or I’d expect the players to blag their way past a stuffy butler through sheer “roleplaying” alone.

I don’t do that any longer. (At least, I hope I don’t.)

After all, I don’t expect players to use their real-life fighting skills or their real-life lockpick skills. So why would I expect players to use their real-life persuasion or investigation skills?

Characters and players know and experience different things. Characters may be scared; the players may not be. The players may know that someone is lying, the characters don’t. The characters know how their world works; the players may not. The characters may understand the clue; the players may not.

So now when I present a clue, I also explain its context and what it means to the characters. (Assuming I’m not running something with a different approach to investigations like Brindlewood Bay.)

And if a player simply wants to describe how they are persuading the butler (and then rolling the dice), that’s fine too.

The players are not the characters.

Derailed by poor dice rolls

I try not to let a poor dice roll derail an investigation.

For example, during a recent session of The Dee Sanction, the players tried to extract information from an NPC—and rolled poorly. However, they were on the right track, so I said, “Mrs Brisket won’t tell you that—she either doesn’t know or won’t say. But you’re sure that there’s more to find out here, but you’ll have to try something else.”

If I hadn’t said that, the players might have thought there was nothing to find and headed off in a very different direction.

But the players aren’t the characters—the characters can put two and two together even when the players can’t.

An alternative to this is to offer success at a cost. (Fate does this.) So the PCs succeed but at some penalty. So in the example above, I could have offered the players success at a cost, such as Mrs Brisket seeing through their disguise (although ideally, I would let the players tell me what the cost was).

Wanderhome

 I’ve been playing in a few sessions of Jay Dragon’s Wanderhome recently.

Wanderhome ought to be lovely. It’s a gorgeously illustrated game about anthropmorphic animals journeying. Wanderhome is sort-of PbtA-lite—while there are no moves, the characters use playbooks and have a PbtA feel about them.

Locations are built up collaboratively, and it’s easy to develop evocative places. My favourite location was the Forest of Tumeric and Shadow, a mix of graveyard, forest (something the GM had created as that’s not in the book), and farm. We had silent gravestones, an armoured sloth, ants farming giant aphids, and a lost god.

Everything is very collaborative. While Wanderhome can be GM-less, even with a GM the players are encouraged to play NPCs (although we didn’t do this).

But…

I found Wanderhome dull. While it’s all evocative and lovely, it’s also very aimless. There’s lots of wandering around, interacting with NPCs and the scenery—but without any point. And unfortunately, I found myself bored.

I was playing a moth tender, a kind of postman. So I had packages to deliver—and I was the only character with any kind of goal. But it wasn’t a meaningful goal - and as soon as I delivered one letter, I was tasked with another. So that wasn’t particularly satisfying.

Aware that I wasn’t having a great time with Wanderhome, the group discussed how our game was going at the start of the last session. While some players were having a wonderful time with Wanderhome, others were less excited by it. (I was enjoying it least, though. I need plot and meaning in my games, I realise.) We agreed to play a few more sessions, and the GM has introduced a plot regarding a rogue wizard that will hopefully give our game more focus and will let us end on a high.

Peaky 2021

It’s been over two years since the last one, but in early October I attended my favourite gaming weekend of the year: Peaky.

And yes, still my favourite.

Thanks to the pandemic, we had fewer people than usual. That meant Peaky was a little more spacious than it had felt in the past.

And for most of us, we haven’t socialised face-to-face much lately. And while meeting 20+ other gamers simultaneously in the same space took a bit of getting used to, it wasn’t too long before it all seemed normal again.

Organising the games

As usual, I organised the games for Sunday. We had fewer games this year – we had more players than games. I think that was another effect of the pandemic – more groups were happy to start work on a game rather than get something ready for Sunday. (We also had a request from Consequences for bigger, 20-30 player games, so that had an impact as well.)

As a result, while we split into five groups, only two were writing games that would be ready for Sunday. We played three as we also ran Culture Crash, which was written at Virtual Peaky earlier in the year.

So while previous years have usually involved trying to work out how to ensure there are enough players for each game, this time I knew that we would have players spare and that most people would need to sit out at least one game.

As usual, organising this took a fair bit of Saturday for me to arrange, which meant I didn’t contribute to The Castleford Ladies Magic Circle Meets Tonight as perhaps the others would have liked me to.

The writing team hard at work. (Well, the others are hard at work, I’m just messing around taking a photo.)

The Castleford Ladies Magic Circle Meets Tonight

Based on the ribald works of singer Jake Thackray, The Castleford Ladies Magic Circle Meets Tonight was written by Phil D, Kevin J, Suey L, Christi S and me. And although I’ve put the team in alphabetical order, it was definitely Suey and Christi’s game. (I had not heard of Jake Thackray until Peaky, so it was educational for me.)

The game is a horde game for around 13-15 players. A magic ritual has gone wrong, and the main characters are the Castleford Ladies Magic Circle, and the horde are ghosts summoned by the ritual. (It’s so tempting to call them players and NPCs…)

We tried to structure the game so the ghosts had plenty of reasons to talk to each other rather than just the main characters (which is a fault of other horde games we’ve played). Our experience on Sunday suggested that we had succeeded, and little polishing will be needed before it is rerun.

Some thoughts:

• It’ll need a content warning. There’s a fair amount of filth/smut/innuendo, which is very true to the source but isn’t very modern.
• Most of the characters are women, which is a pleasant change.
• The two above points mean it isn’t for everyone.
• I would have run the horde slightly differently than Suey did, but I didn’t make a big deal of it as it’s her vision, not mine.

The Coolham Caper

Roger G, Helen J, Charlie P, Rich P and Julie W wrote The Coolham Caper, a light-hearted game of misunderstanding and misappropriation, gangsters and garden produce for nine players.

I didn’t play in The Coolham Caper, but I heard good things about it from the players.

Other games

Games that were started but not finished:

• The Shining Ones (provisional title), a Fae game for at least 30 players.
• Casino Royale, a Bond-inspired game about spies, glamour and gambling. For 30-ish players.
• An unnamed game set in Restoration Britain for 25-30 players.

Hurrah for more games!

Culture Crash

Our last game was Culture Crash, by Jeff Diewald, Roger Gammans, Heidi Kaye, Richard Perry, and Julie Winnard. It was started at Virtual Peaky 21 but has had some work done since, and this was its third outing.

I played Quilh, Watcher of Stars and I was an alien in a first contact situation. (I didn’t think of myself as an alien, of course.) The game was splendid fun, with lots of mysteries and misunderstandings.

In full costume as Quilh, Watcher of Stars

Some thoughts

• Culture Crash was long by Peaky standards – it took around three hours. It started with a workshop for the alien cultures to sort themselves out, which added to the time.
• The character sheets need some work. They’re very long, and I found it hard to find key information during the game. Some condensing/restructuring is required.
• The ending suffered from the one-big-plot problem (once the big plot arrived, everything else became irrelevant and if you weren’t involved you had nothing to do). The ending was also very GM-intensive, and as a player, I felt I had little agency. But we gave the writers some feedback which hopefully they will consider. Despite that, I thoroughly enjoyed Culture Crash, especially the first two thirds.

The Culture Crash website is here.

Looking forward to Peaky 2022

And as always, the weekend was over much too quickly… But Peaky 2022 is already in the diary.

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.

Loose ends: a Liminal mini-campaign (and some thoughts on Liminal)

I didn’t mean to run a Liminal mini-campaign. My original plan was to run Prodigal Son and The Haunting, to a) try running someone else’s adventure, and b) to try my hand at Liminal.

But the players were enjoying their characters and had questions about their backstories and I didn’t want to run more one-shots without exploring that. I also wanted to draw it all to a close (because I don’t like extended campaigns).

So this is what I did. (Click here if you’d like to see the Trello board we used. I’ve moved some of the GM-facing bits over that the players didn’t see—I originally had them on a separate board and only copied them over when I needed to.)

Loose ends

We had a fair number of loose ends after Prodigal Son and The Haunting. These included:

• What was Charles Gardner up to?
• What was Ariadne doing with the knife?
• Where was Mark Northcott?
• What was going to happen with Sir Tatton Northcott’s library?

And that’s not including the questions in the character backstories:

• Who were Ygraine’s parents?
• What had Naomi’s mentor done? And where was he?
• Who had destroyed Stephen’s pack in the Lake District?

Focussing on the characters

So rather than give the characters cases to solve, I created problems for the characters to deal with while I worked out a narrative that linked their backgrounds together. Here’s what I decided:

• Naomi: Naomi’s mentor (Dr Belnap) was secretly a member of the Shrivelled Rose (mentioned in passing on Liminal p.210), seeking their own twisted vision of human perfection.
• Ygraine: Ygraine’s parents were a high-ranking politician’s wife and a Fae of Queen of Hyde Park’s Court. However, her mother had actually been taken by the Winter King and was trapped in his realm.
• Stephen: Stephen’s pack had been killed by Dr Belnap (assisted by Charles Gardner and a crazy vampire called Suzy Shrike) and then experimented on as part of the Shrivelled Rose’s plans.
• Aaron: The vampire that set Aaron on his dark journey and into the Liminal world was Suzy Shrike (Charles Gardner’s associate).

Problems problems

Some of the problems the players faced:

• The ambitious vampire Ariadne (from Prodigal Son) approached Stephen with information about the murder of his pack. In exchange, Ariadne wanted Stephen to show her how the knife of Lethe works…
• Sir Tatton Northcott left his library (and a peculiar cabinet) to Naomi in his will. However, the Council of Merlin approached Naomi and suggested that it would be good for her if she gave them the library instead. But the players don’t trust the council…
• Having experienced two ghost realms (in Prodigal Son and The Haunting), the Crew decide to hide the library in another ghost realm in Leeds. They find a potential realm near the City Varieties music hall, but how to get into it?
•  Becoming trapped in a ghost realm at Hardknott Fort and rescuing innocent bystanders from the winged horrors hidden within. (I wrote this up as an encounter here.)

My preparation for each session was to create a list of events and moments that I thought might happen, or that I might introduce to complicate things. I tracked these using a checklist in Trello (on my GM board), which I found worked really well. (At the end of each session I asked the players what they might want to follow up on, which gave me something to plan.)

At the end of one session the players asked if I knew what they would do. I told them I had no idea—but that I had created a situation (populated with people, things and events), and then I simply reacted to their actions. While I had an overall direction in mind for the things I knew they were interested in, I had no sense what they would do from scene to scene.

Colourful characters and unpleasant artefacts

I created numerous NPCs for the PCs to interact with. These included:

• Holly Greenwood—Fae owner of a crystal shop opposite City Varieties in the centre of Leeds.
• Tiberius—an immortal Roman legionary (“I don’t know why I’m so old; I just haven’t died yet.”) and living in the Lake District.
• Karen White—fearless reporter on the trail of our heroes.
• Jurgen Heim—dark wizard, er I mean evil wizard of the Shrivelled Rose.
• Ethel Beardsley—the nun with a gun.
• Hannah Smith—PhD student who took a shine to one of our heroes.
• Suzy Shrike—the crazy vampire who sleeps in a coffin of dirt.
• Dr Cartilage—Edinburgh’s ineffectual Council of Merlin representative.
• Creepy kids—in the fae world (these had no stats or anything—just a photo of the Midwich Cuckoos and the description “creepy kids” on their Trello card).
• A lazy, video-game-playing and junk-food eating (and ensorcelled) fae lord.

Not all of my NPCs entered play, but that’s okay as I’m sure they will appear in another game one day.

I’ve been creating weird and unpleasant artefacts for Tales of Terror for years, so it was inevitable that some would find their way into Liminal.

• 

  The card for the creepy tooth egg

  Gideon Stem’s cabinet of homunculi
• A ghost bottle (created just for the game)
• Dr John Dee’s skull signet ring
• An egg made of human teeth, with a heartbeat. (This was a fae court, magically imprisoned by the Shrivelled Rose. Maybe I should write a Tale of Terror about that.)

I did these with cards on the Trello board, with a description and a photo. The players had access to the Trello, and they also added details or photos, which was great.

The players seemed to enjoy running around the “real” world. We used Google Maps when scouting locations, including City Varieties in Leeds, Hardknott Roman Fort, Holyrood Park in Edinburgh. That’s one of the things I like about a modern-day game—the detail is limitless.

Wrapping it up

The mini-campaign ended up in a fae domain that the Shrivelled Rose had corrupted. The main access was in the garage of an industrial unit, which the Crew sneaked into (excellent usage of the False Face glamour trait—Liminal’s version of Polyjuice potion).

The domain itself I modelled on Cragside, the National Trust property in Rothwell. The house was occupied by the fae lord of the realm (a lazy chap corrupted by the dark wizards from the Shrivelled Rose), while the stable block contained the laboratories—and a nursery away in the woods.

Final encounters

With their base in the fae realm exposed by the Crew, the Shrivelled Rose decided to make a hasty retreat. The Crew released the fae lord from his ensorcellment, freed his court from their tooth-egg prison, and stopped the Shrivelled Rose from escaping.

We satisfyingly conclude most of the character arcs:

• Stephen avenged the death of his pack by killing both Dr Belnap and Charles Gardner.
• Naomi cleared her name with the Council of Merlin by exposing her mentor’s crimes.
• Aaron faced Suzy Shrike and is accepted into P Division.

And Ygraine? Ygraine learned that her mother was one of the Winter King’s brides, and set off in search of answers…

About Liminal

As for Liminal itself, I never found myself completely comfortable with the rules and too often I wished that I was using Fate Accelerated instead. Often I made something up whenever we hit a grey area, and we seemed to hit those regularly. It’s not that Liminal is complicated, but it is just complex enough that we spent more time consulting the rules than I prefer.

I still prefer a looser ruleset that I can handwave, and when it came to creating winged horrors that attacked the PCs in a ghost realm at Hardknott Fort, I ignored traits and abilities and simply decided on the effects I wanted.

Liminal’s core concept

There’s something that bugs me about Liminal’s core concept though. In Liminal the PCs investigate mysteries. The difference between Liminal and other investigative roleplaying games is that the player characters are “liminals”, someone between both the Hidden World and the real world. (Liminal’s core concept is not explained until page 63 which describes what the PCs do in the game.)

Liminal comes with a good selection of character concepts (gutter mage, eldritch scholar, changeling, and so on) and the four pregenerated characters described above.

However.

All the pregens are misfits, fitting neither in the ordinary nor the Hidden World. They all have different reasons for that and they encapsulate the concept of being “liminal”. But many of the character concepts feel like they’re all firmly part of the Hidden World: Warden, Dhampir, Face, and Man in Black.

So what are the differences between those in the Hidden World, those in the modern world and the liminals in between? And should there be consequences for going too far one way or the other?

Suggestions for Liminal’s second edition

I know it’s early to be thinking about a second edition, but these are the things I would like to see in Liminal 2.0.

Core concept: Put the core concept at the front of the book! Liminal is a British urban fantasy rpg in which the players solve mysteries—this needs to be one of the first things you read (and not on page 63). I would also like to understand what the differences are between the modern world, the Hidden World, and those in between.

Character generation: Currently, Liminal character generation is mostly mechanical: focus, skills, traits. I would like to see links and bonds between the characters. Even the bare minimum of how did you learn about the Hidden World? and how did you join the Crew? would be a start. But I’d go further and include questions that bond the Crew together.

Crews: Crews are important in Liminal, and although we followed the process, we struggled with our Crew’s goal and purpose. The process system should spit out well-designed crews with compelling goals and purpose, so I think it needs looking at. And maybe a section on downtime would be worth including.

Factions: I would like to see each faction having goals and objectives (or maybe just rumours of these) to give them direction and bring them into conflict with each other. At the moment, they’re fairly static. How do they feel about the other factions?

Layout: While Liminal’s art is stupendous, the other elements of graphic design aren’t as powerful. The font is a little small and the lines are too long—which means it’s not easy to read (particularly for someone like myself in their fifties). Either have a gap between paragraphs or a first-line indent, not both. And the tables on page 33 and 41 could be more appealing. And I’ve mentioned stat blocks previously.

Skills and examples: More examples of things like social challenges (for example, intimidating and persuading) would help. We found that Lore was, without doubt, the most important skill—because it’s used both for casting magic and for general knowledge about the Hidden World, it gave the magic-using characters too much spotlight. Perhaps Lore needs splitting in two: Lore (knowing about the Hidden World) and Magic (using magic)?

A more thorough proofread: I found quite a few typos and inconsistencies. Is it Melee or Melee Combat? Hidden World or hidden world? Liminal could do with a more thorough proofread.

Enough Liminal for now

And that’s probably it for Liminal from me for a while. It’s been a fun thirteen sessions, but time to give something else a try.

 

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.