Call of Cthulhu Tips

Somebody asked and I got nothing better to do for a half hour, so here you go:

-You are not always going to get fear. Some players are capable of genuine fear while gaming. Most aren't. If you can't, don't worry about it. Fear mode is nice, but there is also Argento Mode, with sudden discontinuities and mayhem and panic. I recently ended a session with a player gently escorting a screaming cop into a hotel suite where Jez was fondling the toothed bosom of the wolfmother, Cole was on a bed with 3 dead naked teenage boys and Mandy was rolling a 01 maximum impale to fire completely blind ("I'm not looking, I'm not looking") at the first lady and save the world. That would be Argento mode.

-Fear mode looks like that.

-Do try to get an emotion. Disgust is pretty easy. You don't necessarily get emotions by thinking up brand new ideas so much as by describing whatever idea is there in enough sensory detail that people are actually imagining it. Tactile detail is probably the best. Like ok, there's the old Cthulhu statue and then there's You run your hand across the surface and it feels like--Have you ever run your hand across someone's skin in the morning? Like that--only also stone, like unaccountably warm. And bulbous, like tumors emerging. Just one emotion all night is ok.

-If you have someone capable of fear: run the game and start with any emotion you can get. Attachment to an object, liking an NPC, pride in the PCs accomplishments, whatever. If the emotion is negative (disgust, etc.)--good. If it is positive, sour it--have the enemy ruin it, brush it aside: "Your machines, your knowledge, they will not save you, your hope is hopeless" Most negative emotions are adjacent to fear. Just push them until they are fear.

(-And, of course, if you have someone truly fragile: then stop. Don't be a dick.)

-A scary thing: the familiar or otherwise comfortable thing suddenly being alienated from you. Your friends don't know you, your dog has no eyes, the human is not acting human, etc.

-Another scary thing: the skin is part of our immune system. Our first and most visible barrier. It is The Horror Threshold. Things that get past the skin, are under the skin or push through it, disrupt it, these things are horrible. If you can make players think about The Body it'll get you into The Mind pretty quick.

-Design the adventure with at least 2 powerful images. Just think of two things that interest you and are compelling. One is the first intimations of the horror, one is The Final Horror. Something fucked. You're good.

-Don't knock yourself out with the Mythos. You look up some mythos thing and you know what it'll tell you? Lovecraft mentioned it in 4 separate lines in 4 separate stories and each time it was some whole other thing. You know what Lovecraft would do? Make up something totally fucked up. Just do that. Worry about whether it's Hastur or Nyarlathotep later.

-Funny is good. Funny is great. In fact, let yourself laugh. Like sometimes if you are GMing you want to not laugh because you've got this adventure to run here but seriously, you do not have to Be A Fan Of The PCs, but be a fan of their players, and their jokes...

-...and their anything else they do right. If there is a phrase or image or line they come up with that is just perfect, say that. Stop the whole game and say that. In general: when anything cool is produced by players, encourage it. This has two effects: encouraging the player and showing everybody that its ok to go ahead and act--this activity will be rewarded.

-Try to remember who is insane. This can be hard, especially when the full mayhem is running:

Me: "Alright, the man with the leech face leans in, putting his face completely around your face and trying to sort of kiss you"

Guy playing a character based on his alcoholic Native American healer uncle: "Well, I'm still hallucinating, so..."

Me: "Yeah, right, so you are looking into his gullet and you see you are looking down into the coils of the great snake from which all of the world emerged in the time of the kicking rabbit and the blood clot boy and..."

Guy: "Well then I'm going to try to get _further in there_ "

Me: "Ok, so you grab it by either side and push your face into its mouth..."

And to think I would've missed it had he not reminded me...

-Likewise: try to remember who is on fire.

-SAN checks for seeing monsters and what all are gonna happen, but remember to run SAN checks for just mundane badness like seeing dead bodies and accidentally shooting civilians and suchlike sundry minor devastating incidents. Lose a few here and there once in a while. If you look at the stats for like a Nightgaunt, you don't necessarily lose that much SAN for seeing one--but of it's built on a bed of disturbing events...

-Purity has its limits. No matter what, Lovecraft stories aren't about 4 people. Definitely not about 4 people who are too terribly interesting. You're already not going to recreate a Lovecraft story. Just go for something good and twisted.

-The basic Hunter/Hunted structure can be bolted to almost anything. Even in the middle of an adventure. If the PCs are not moving toward the Horror, have the Horror move PCward.

-Things that make Call of Cthulhu easier:

*One insane PC does the work of a wandering monster. Essentially, when a PC starts getting jittery, play on it, use it to your advantage, that PC is the show now. Squeeze as much adventure as you can out of that PC.

*Everything is normal except the stuff you added in. In fantasy and SF you get an Oskar Schindler thing going on Oh with a little more effort you could've put something weird there and there and there. In a horror set up you just need a normal world. Just describe it creepy.

*Supernatural horror is pervasive: psychic emanations or dream echoes or what-all can pretty much account for any weird thing happening in the vicinity of the Horror. You don't need too much of a reason to have something strange happen all of a sudden.

*Stats are easy: Monsters therefore can be thought of as having hit points of 1 or 2 or 3 times human or 10 or whatever. The monsters have some chance to hit the PCs (60%, 70%) and some damage they do when they hit. Describing them and making them horrible and keeping them around just long enough that fucked up shit has time to happen while the players are encountering them is the key. In general, monsters have lots of hit points and don't dodge because they are implacable. But whatever works, really. Unlike D&D monsters, they don't have to actually be that mechanically tough for players to register them as dangerous or that mechanically interesting for the players to register them as interesting. Because it's the only monster in the game and you have essentially spent the whole game making them feel dangerous and interesting.

-It helps to have at least one person who will roleplay-as-in-act at the table. This lets other people know its ok and will be fun and not superfluous. In our session Cole did a great job of being the cop who was like: Well, I understand you are an indigenous person and you got your, uh, native medicine understanding of this, uh, Humbawamaba kinda thing and all I know is there's like a baby goat coming out of this guy and if you're telling me it's some kinda spiritual thing I'm with you because I ain't never seen that before. And then everybody sees that that's fun when the player acts and it lets them know its ok to do that and then it goes.

-Build the goddamn adventure around the way the goddamn players act and react. Horror is, basically, about a person with a personality and then a Horror that personality faces. Ripley and the Xenomorph, Rosemary and the Baby, The Torrances and Jack, the anxious Lovecraft narrator guy and Cthulhu. Everything between them (the physical set up, the plot) is just there to help dramatize that conflict. If the players reactions are giving you so much there isn't time for some structural device the adventure-as-written gives you, that's ok. Just let that happen. So long as you fit something horrible in before everybody goes home, it's all good.

-You can skip the resistance table--just roll d10+stat vs d10+stat for any contest or somesuch. BRP is an extremely robust system. Probably the most robust yet devised, you can fuck around with it and bolt all kindsa shit onto it and it still won't break--at least for human-scale conflict.

-Horror games have 3 parts: the parts where your PC investigates, the parts where you--the player--are scared, and the parts where you act. If your party is incapable of fear then the second part in the middle is a kind of acting (acting scared). Give players a chance to do all these parts and go with whichever ones seem fun for that group. All have an ability to shape the adventure, let it.

-I like to start with a picture, like in yesterday's post. Gets the PCs right into the scene and gives them the feeling there is something concrete to investigate. The "here's a bunch of guys" or "here's the crime scene" photo gives you a lot of details without you having to describe each one and trying not to lampshade the right detail by drowning it in a series of irrelevant details. Also, if you don't feel like you'll have words to describe The Horror when it comes, you can try to find a picture of that.

-Back of Cthulhu's head unwitting courtesy of this person.

Bacon and Eggs: A Chill of Cthulhu Production

So I ran a Call of Cthulhu game. Chill style. Meaning just I did Cthulhu modern but everybody had a psychic power (no S.A.V.E.).

But it's Cthulhu, therefore using your psychic power drives you slowly (or quickly) insane.

Simple and effective Chill of Cthulhu paranormal ability mechanic:

1. Dream up an Abnormal Psych Textbook style psychic power ( Scrap Princess took Pyrokinesis, Migellito took Psychic Being Convincingness, Cole took Tactile Postcognition, and Ian took Heat Metal)

2. When you want to use it, decide the percentage chance you want to try to succeed at. Roll under and you get to do it.

3. Then roll the same percentage you chose again to see if you lose d6 SAN on account of you just opened your mind to Forces From Some Fucked Place Your Head Goes When You Do That.

_____

This is the second time I've run this adventure--it's part of a 3-legged campaign my home group runs when the requisites are all in the same city at the same time. That version is non-psychic and 1920's. One of the players in that game is playing occultist, writer, cannibal William Seabrook.

_

Each version starts with the investigators on their way to (in the 20's) London, Paris or Berlin or (in the present-day) London, Berlin, or Tokyo.

_

The problem is the Poison Idea. If three people have the idea at any one time--Ragnarok comes. (Two people had it at once one time--that started WWII).

_

So after their dying uncle or psychic yoga master tells them to stop the idea from erupting the PCs pick a city from the 3 where it is feared the idea may manifest and go. They get on a ship or a plane, depending on time period and look at one of these 2 pictures.

Of these NPCs, some have information. William Seabrook got it outta them by asking around if there was a shipboard poker game. Cole got it by touching guy #7s chair and postcogging the vile presence within him.

Now Cole is, as anyone who has rolled with him will tell you, a great player. He is both irresponsible and proactive. Which is what you want.

Can I vomit on guy #7?

Ok, fail a Con check.

I succeed.

You just open your mouth for a second and hang there with your mouth open like this.

Meanwhile, in the restroom, Scrap Princess rolls a Maximum Impale to disarm the smoke detector and she then has the most relaxing possible smoke break.

Ian charms a stewardess and then--to create a distraction--decides to use his mind to melt, well, whatever instruments he could see when the cockpit door opened.

Is this group God's Gift To The Horror Game GM or what?

And Migellito tried and failed to keep everyone calm. He did however talk a little boy reading Lord of the Flies (#3) through Ian's post Sanity-loss screaming fit, so that was nice.

___

I like these psychic power rules--not a single monster, cultist or freak has appeared and already we have 2 insane players and are a luck roll away from a plane crash.

__

In the 1920's the London segment of the adventure involved kidnapping a patient of the Doctor With No Face, an ambulance race, and taking him back to the hotel to chop off his ear.

In twentytwelve it involved wearing fake moustaches, failing to pick a lock, and--most disturbingly--leaving Scrap alone in a hotel room.

So Scrap has a dream about an egg which her character doesn't realize is a dream (until Scrap reads this AP report). And decides to burn the hotel down.

Did I mention Cole thought guy #7 had eggs for eyes on the plane? Cole thought guy #7 had eggs for eyes on the plane, anyway....

Meanwhile the boys are at the hospital doing exactly what the girls were doing in the hospital around the same time in the 1920a--being in the basement of the hospital in The Terrible Revelation Room fighting a faceless nurse trying to inject them with Unknown Chemicals and thereafter a Doctor whose fragile eggshell face cracks open to reveal some fucked up horror movie stuffs inside and failing SAN checks and being around broken glass. The main difference was the girls brought shotguns.

Meanwhile Scrap decides to go to a bar a block away from the room he just signed into using his real (convict) name and then promptly arsoned.

Things progress on both fronts. We get to hear the following exchanges:

"I grab it by the tentacles and hit the guy in the face with the doctor's decapitated head."

"So you lose d6 SAN for using your pyrokinesis and then d6 more for using it to harm a human being"

"It's not a human being, it's a cop!"

We finish with a lone PC rolling initiative against everyone else in the back of an ambulance taking him away from two buildings he set on fire and toward one that his friends just did, from which unfortunate edifice two of our heroes are fleeing (one in terror, one because it is the absolutely entirely tactically correct and commonsensical thing to do) while our fourth hero staggers through the flames humming "I am the egg man, koo koo kchoo" and asking where the cafeteria is.

A fine, fine game is Chill of Cthulhu.

Satine runs a game...

<---(Satine shown here totally not in the middle of running a game)

So my 5th level thief, Blixa, started life as a Warhammer PC. He then, through the magic of FLAILSNAILS Google + games, has migrated through the D&D retroclone Swords & Wizardry, then AD&D, possibly Mentzer red box-era D&D in there, Labyrinth Lord (another clone), Lamentations of the Flame Princess: Weird Fantasy, and now, for his greatest challenge ever, we took this 3d6-rolled-in-order schmuck and kitted him out with skills, feats and dailies so he can roll 4th Edition style (and his little dog, too)...

And--god help us--our girl Satine is the DM.

Actually Satine's been DMing a lot lately since she started organizing twice-weekly games at Meltdown Comics* but since I've been in another country all winter this was my first chance to see her actually go to the comic book store and see her do it. Some notes:

-Did you see that episode of Axe** where Satine lost her PC and was saying how she'd lost the last one 15 years before? You know how she lost that one? Hell hounds. You know what she had us fight? Hell hounds.

-4e's much-lauded balance relies on several assumptions, one being that your PC has 4e stats. Mine doesn't. He's got a 7 strength, 7 con and his best score is a 14 dex. I had to self-balance by trying as hard as possible never to ever do anything that required me rolling the dice. Which is exactly how I run Blixa in every other game. (Thieves suck) (Yet oddly this thief is one of the highest level FLAILSNAILS PCs.)(And people die like flies in those games.)(Go figure.)

-Satine's good at describing things as they happen "It explodes and there's a shimmer of light..." etc. and has an admirably relaxed attitude toward the Rules As Written. We're doing group initiative f'r'example. World hasn't ended yet.

-So I'm in a ring of fire, right? Because I brought flaming oil with me and these are ice hell hounds...

-Best 4e moment of the night: So all the other players are totally new to the game--this is their first campaign (and they're so sweet). This one kid is trying to shoot a hellhound with an arrow and decides he'll run so that me and my ring of fire are between him and the hell hound, then shoot an arrow through the flame, so it catches on fire on the way and then hits the hell hound. Excellent***.

-Worst 4e moment of the night: The brand new girl (the D&DMelt crowd is about 20% female) with her psion has seriously this 4 page character sheet and has to wade through it like a bucket of pint tar every round. Satine did a good job of priming the kids with "Hey you can do whatever you want, these are just some of the things you can do" but still, a 4e sheet is a lot to handle and poorly organized. And the fact that the online builder does it for you means the new girl wasn't along for the ride in making all these numbers happen so she doesn't remember them.

-Kinda What You'd Expect 4e moment of the night: The new girl finally finds the part of her character sheet where she can use her brain powers to make the hellhounds fight each other. Everybody is like Whoa, you're awesome! She seems much happier and more relaxed and pro-active once we're out of combat rounds.

-So there's one of those situations where you grab an NPC to interrogate and eventually--you guessed it--the NPC loses an ear. That always happens. Do you blame Tarantino or Lynch or do you blame ears? They look so cut-offable.

-The kids love Satine. It's cute. I hope they aren't traumatized when she kills them.

______________
*Hollywood geography lesson: Meltdown Comics, by dint of being in central Hollywood across from Guitar Center and also massive, is sort of the Hollywood funtelligentsia's front lawn, like you take the MGM executive you're trying to talk into producing your Alita Battle Angel movie to eat at Toi across the street and then go buy an Alita Battle Angel comic book so you can go "See she looks like this?" and then he goes "I get it, I get it...I'm seeing...Cameron Diaz?" and then you cry--with the much smaller and less vinyl-toy-infested Secret Headquarters in Silver Lake being more the same cohort's den/drawing room, like where you go to meet up with the other screenwriters and special effects guys and DJs and go "Cameron Diaz? I know, right, but I'm getting 9 figures just for the treatment so fuck it".

**There's currently some propaganda telling you to join the marines at the beginning of the video. Don't join the marines.

***Even if there's no way I would've let him do that. Unless maybe he coated the arrow in oil first. But hey, adventure is the aestheticization of physics

Dwimmermount Actual Play Slice

James Maliszewski: What are you preparing?

Tavis: Two Sleeps

Ryan : Yeah.

Zak: Awww, man, I'm always hoping we'll find a way to kill someone with Ventriloquism

T: Alright, Ventriloquism

(.....dungeoncrawling occurs......)

J: I have to go soon it's almost midnight and then I turn into a pumpkin and I don't want anyone to see that on camera.

Z: I always suspected. Ok, let's just keep running due south until we meet a monster...

J: South? There's a monster! Well...you hear some orcs up ahead anyway, they sound like the other ones.

Z: Ok, we only have 5 minutes! We have to kill them with ventriloquism! OkOkOk we put a pool of oil here and stretch a chain across the doorway like this and we stand on either side of the door like this...

T: And we Sleep them

Z: And then you make your ventriloquism go like 'Oh no! What do we do with all this treasure after killing all these orcs?'...Oh and throw caltrops in the oil!

T: I love this game.

Seconds later 2 orcs are in the trap and Ryan is begging for death after running out to cast Sleep and getting arrowed through the heart. Tavis refuses to oblige and begins hauling him back toward the dungeon entrance. I roll my eyes at the ways of wizards.

This Is Mostly Just Here So I Can Remember What Happened This Week

_Last session they went to the Ice Labyrinth--still trying to capture the Ice Medusa.

_Didn't but fought the king of the Royal Fist Monkeys. Near TPK. Everyone's down from monkey fighting but Connie. Until the king tried to bite Connie and she shoved a sleeping potion in his mouth and he rolled a four. Took his crown, cut their losses, and headed back to civilization, screw catching medusas. (Got attacked by a witch that sinks their boat on the way home, but whatever--they have a rowboat.)

_New session:

_So then like new player coming in--Izzy. She is used to straight up 3.5, she's a Raptoran which is like a bird person but not a birdhead kind of bird person. She's speaks elvish. Like Izzy does, not her character--like actual Drow. So does or did Satine. Her PC has this Elvish name but we can just call her Mi.

-Also here's a twistment: Kimberly Kane decided to go druid, she is not elvishnamed. Her new character's name is Dirty D. No, her barbarian did not die. KK just got real excited about Call Lightning.

_Same dog though. Or same dog family. She's up to Sueno 7. She swears Sueno 7 is making it to 20th level.

-Anyway so they like show up and go drinking. And so like I get to roll on the chart with the bars in it in that book I wrote, they walk into the Frigid Cudgel where the bartender has a ferret

-...that is actually a polymorphed wizard. Which fact is on my chart in my book for some reason. And KK knows this because she's a druid and can talk to animals.

-So then I get to do a ferret impression. Always a pip.

-Life goes on, an objective is selected by the players. (One of those Red Marches days where they could pretty much make you go anywhere if they were perverse enough.) It is across the sea.

-I just realized I implied like I do ferret impressions all the time. Which I don't. This isn't Ferret Guard. Satine's old character had a ferret. But I think she died before anybody could talk to it and find out like the feelings it had and who it really was inside. Or was it a weasel? Need continuity cops. Are you still reading this?

-They catch a boat manned by some Drownesians.

-Things progress. At some point I have to solve the following physics problem:

If you fire a Type III-era Fireball at the surface of the ocean directly beneath a giant mutant mindcontrol starfish* that is chewing on the side of a boat which that starfish is approximately the same size as during a combat round where that starfish has been frozen in time, what are the chances that the boat itself will catch on fire (which of course consideration is the reason for the water's surface being targeted and not the aforementioned radially symmetrical megachinoderm)?

-Now they are playing an organ where the pipes are shaped like life-sized petrified people screaming.

___

*The answer to the question you have about the mindcontrol starfish is "Yes". My mental powers work even without me putting a fish on your face.

Serpentor v. Hargrave

"Sorry guys, I just woke up."

"No kidding."

"No I mean my character just woke up."

"Anyway, you're all fighting purple people and one has a raygun."

"Oh, man..."

(this turns out to be cake, actually, so we slay them, collect the raygun and then we keep looking around until...)

"Gilgamesh the Macho, a giant tick falls on you from the ceiling and rolls...very well actually...I'm using the Arduin crit tables for these and..."

"We attack and do stuff!"

(stuff is being done)

"So Gilgamesh the Macho you have a very serious wound coming from your neck"

"I'm torn between keeping on fighting--which would be the most macho--and tending to my gushing tick wound..."

"You should heat up something metal and then press it to your neck to cauterize it, then you'd be macho and medical."

"Well the Arduin crit I rolled on you just says 'You die in 3 rounds'"

"I saw Serpentor do that in GI Joe #50 and it worked."

"Well you can't ask for a better authority than Serpentor, I'll give you a saving throw to survive"

"Ok..............(roll roll)..................YES!"

"ALL HAIL SERPENTOR!"

("Who's Serpentor?")

"Ok, so Cobra Commander knew this dentist named Dr Mindbender and....

And that's how it was revealed that Serpentor is a deity of Wessex.

Games I Ran In 2011

By location, just the LA group:

Not that you care, but I just discovered the pie chart maker. Just marking time until I decide if there's any point to using one to make a drop-die chart.

Chatter On The Wire About Monkeys, Parents And Horror

And by wire I mean Twitter.

Here's Rog, postgame:

Kim Kane: Dear god @ZakSmithSabbath is a sick DM!

Mandy :We gotta remember to keep quiet so monkeys won't get us

Rog: These monkeys are the talk of the town

KK: Where is the ice medusa?!!

M: We'd find her faster if we weren't always interrupted by monkeys

Adam: Can't believe we had to fight my parents. That is like sooo embarrassing!
A: My suggestion for title of your next blog post on last night's game: "Parents just don't understand."

KK:We totally killed* your parents, it was soooo Midwest.

A: I woulda gone all Menendez on 'em--just as soon as I finished all that important running away and cowering I had to do.

Zak: (to players who had to leave early) They decided to crack open the glass ball and fight the jewelled monster. it didn't go well

Carloine Pierce: it was a terrible idea. Not like it was gonna get out lol. Oh well! Still fun :D

M: I'm bored of killing monkeys!! I think squamous monster is a challenge

C: True, but it's a challenge most of us are useless against lol :D

M: Almost everyone has some magic item of some sort

CP: The Ice Medusa probably isn't even home :/

K: I have magic & rage but only 9 hit points :(

M: I think we can do it!
M: I can help on the hp front, rage won't help much though
M: unless you rage with a magic weapon! i have lvl3 rage too now




_____
Note: Adam's parents were knocked unconscious and then the mysterious hourglasses hanging around their necks were crushed, at which point they disappeared. Had they been actually slain, the consequences might have been...different.

Royal Fist Monkeys Are Trying To Kill You

This is a Player Service Announcement.

Dear My Players:

Royal Fist Monkeys are trying to kill you.

They are small and white.

They have large stone-and-metal gloves on their right hands, encrusted with precious gems.

They are trying to kill you.

They hate you.

You broke into their ice house looking for fun and profit, they have decided you will never leave.

You have observed these things:

They are fearsome.

They are organized.

They are horrible.

They do not die fast.

They know how to use both fire and flaming oil.

They killed Roger's guy.

Their Royal Fists are capable of delivering one punch doing d8+8 damage. After the punch they bite for d4+4.

You know because you have seen this happen 24 times.

There are many other dangers and wonders in the Ice Labyrinth of Hakleth besides Royal Fist Monkeys.

But you will never see them if you fight Royal Fist Monkeys all day.

Tips:

-When you're in a big echoey room with a bottomless pit, and Kimberly Kane is like "Hey what's over there?" and I go "Are you yelling that across the room?" and Kimberly is like "Uh, yeah, sure" then be all "NO, NO KIMBERLY DON'T DO THAT! THE ROYAL FIST MONKEYS WILL HEAR US AND CHASE US AND THEN WE WILL BE FIGHTING ROYAL FIST MONKEYS FOREVER AND ALL DIE IN THIS HORRIBLE ICY MONKEY DUNGEON"

-Actually, that's the main tip. I can't think of any others right now.

________________

To Any Other Readers Of This Blog Who Play Google + Games Or Are Thinking About It:

If any of you have characters hanging out back at the FLAILSNAILS Cantina, you have heard the bartenders of Earth-Amalagmated-FLAILSNAILS have started a betting pool on the success of this expedition.

Here's how it works:

You chip in 100 gp.

You say who you think will survive, who will die, how successful you think it will be that week, you make any other crackpot prediction you see fit.

There are no penalties for extra incorrect predictions beyond the first, so go ahead and make as many as you like.

Whichever player is the most right gets all the gold (and associated xp). If there's a tie, you split it.

Here's the deal so far:

They are in this maze looking for an ice medusa name Moroschka--trying to capture her and bring her back alive.

The Royal Fist Monkeys make traps. They are alerted to the PCs presence. They have 6HD. The last time there was a fracas there was 17 of them.

Other hazards have included an ice lamprey and some kind of emerald ooze. One each. Neither was too much trouble so far.

The core contestants on any given day may include, but are not necessarily limited to...

Kimberly Kane as Miss Mold Pig--5th level Bloodthirsty ADD half-elf barbarian. Accompanied by her (relatively lucky) dog, Sueno #6.

Mandy Morbid as Tizane Ildiko--5th level Curious Fancy tiefling cleric of Vorn and 1st level Barbarian. Accompanied by her wolf, Ursula. She has recently been reduced to 12 wisdom and has begun hallucinating after looking at a rug.

Caroline Pierce as Smacky the Fighter--5th level Laid Back human fighter. A very experienced and careful RPGer.

Darren, who plays a 4th or 5th level Sneaky Laid Back dwarf and tends to show up an hour late, save everyone and then leave.

aaaaand...

Connie as Gypsillia--4th or 5th level Sneaky ADD Greedy half-elf thief. Like Kimberly, she is impulsive yet has never died.

There are several other players in the mix potentially, but since all of them either have erratic schedules right now or you can't really find out much about them on this blog by clicking the 'players' tag (or watching old Axe episodes) then I don't think it'd be fair to make you guess what'll happen to them. These four have been taking point lately in most of the recent games.

Gotoallthedungeonsandplayallthegamesforever

So Jeff was like ok Zak you have your thief and your talking dog that can talk because he sat in the chair that maybe raises your ability scores or maybe makes you goo and it raised his intelligence and which is named Abe Lincoln Vampire Hunter because of how he was named after a guy on the internet who..(ok well that's a long story, anyway)...ok point is anyway you are going down into the Caves of Myrddin with a few newbies who have never been.

So we did and didn't really find anything because we mostly spent time looking for vampires but found dead minotaurs instead but then so one of us decided to take a dead giant playtpus beak and use it as a fulcrum to steal the talking-dog chair and slide it away on dead snakeman bodies which didn't work and we got like no experience points that day.

However the upshot was when we went back to where the one guy left his donkey it had been all sucked by vampires. Aha!

A clue!

So I'm like:

Before returning to the Caves, Blixa would like to consult a sage:

Oh sage, how long must one give a donkey nothing to drink but holy water
before the donkey's blood is saturated with it?

And Jeff is all:

Sages are hard to come by without considerable travel and expense. However, you can consult the Abbot of the monastery, who will talk to the elder brothers about the issue. They suggest that for best results start the process after taking the donkey to mass on a Friday, then have him drink a vial every day at breakfast for three days, then on that Sunday have the donkey attend mass. He should be good to go for the rest of the weak, providing he doesn't commit any serious sins.

You should donate at least 100gp for the advice, one of the brothers explains to you rather shamelessly. Getting a donkey in to mass will require at least another 50gp in donation/bribery.

So I shelled out and the ass saw the angel and all that and then it's like the next day in real life and I am working and I see this thing pop on the Google + :

Need 2 FLAILSNAILS players with PC ready to go for Caves of Myrddin pick-up game right now!

Because Jeff was supposed to be going to this Nightwick Abbey dungeon but that didn't work out so then he started this game at whatever I'm tired in the morning and I was like ok Abe so then I get there and look at this 2 more newbies.

And I say: Gentlemen. I have a plan. Sit with me and watch a donkey and wait for vampires, first level guys.

And they were like yeah. Because of there's a reward.

So then we did it and then there's not just two vampires that I expected but four whole other different vampires including a Gilligan one and a Tattoo from Fantasy Island one (who bit the donkey) and I was like man a lot of vampires and then rolled a four so missed and Jeremy rolled something low but then our level one wizard caught three vampires in his holy-water-soaked net and then he threw a bucket of holy water on them and then I disintegrated one (long story) and so there was just a Gilligan hat and treasure map left but two of them escaped because they were fog.

Then we followed the map and got a magic sword.

Then we went to town and were like Drinks on us! And rolled on that and got in a fight and lost three hit points but man you should've seen the other guys because one was married and one was inveigled in love and one was a pig.

Then the guy who was all supposed to be running a dungeon got his internet working and so we went but then Boner the vampire-killing-helping thief was a pig but I was like come on with us anyway pig since you have a map and we fought zombies.

Also it was hard because it was made of geomorphs so the rooms were all where are we.

But anyway the moral of the story is that even in Lamentations of the James Raggi Wants Your Character Dead Fantasy Role Dying if you're fighting zombie on stairs then a talking dog and a smart pig are actually more useful than they might first appear because guess what are zombies coordinated? No they are not and they trip a lot.

So then after all that I had to go because I had to GM and my players were like hey and I was really tired because I had been up all night in dungeons-of-opportunity and then the girls were going into The Ice Labyrinth!!!!!

So first they chased down a white leopard man who was following them from last adventure and they were like he's our hogtied trap tester now and sure enough there's a trap and they shove him in and yep there's a pit with mastodon bones and a Royal Fist Monkey trap.

So then they fight the white monkeys that climb and hit with jeweled monkey fists. Then they went more into the dungeon and were like oh there's an alarm idiot tied up and the idiot starting howling and calling the monkeys so Mandy shot him and then all the monkeys were clambering forward.

So trouble happens and I roll d20 monkeys are coming...17. 6 HD each. With Royal Punching Fists.

Adam showed up at some point and he only had a Type IV character so I was like "whatever, we'll do a quicky conversion" but his crazy animunchkin sleep spell still only caught 3 then Kimberly Kane hucked a lantern at them.

Now I know some of y'all have some modernist notions about lanterns not making particularly effective firebombs but I figure: ten foot corridor, 17 monkeys, 3 asleep. That is a lot of fur in one place is what I figure. So now many of the monkeys are alight.

Mandy summons some monsters. Frogs. Then summons again and gets...roll...fucking fire elemental. So there is a lot of monkeys on angry fire hopping fighting frogs and 11 are on fire but our heroes remain surrounded with only a cul-de-sac and I had to sleep which reminds me I should calculate their xp.

But so anyway I wake up the next day in Glorantha because Runequest and I was like Barry Can I Just Use My Stormbringer Guy and he was like No You Are A Primitive Tribesman! And I was like fuck I better learn this magic system because jesus look at this strength and dex.

So then the other two primitive tribesmen were pretty much catching deers a lot and rabbits and getting bronze stuff from dwarves while I was just like Man, please spirits of the mountain guide my arrows which I didn't even shoot all day. And my guy's Size was 6--did I mention my guy's size was 6? SIZ 6 means you're a Runequest midget.

Anyway so then we went around and met lizard guys on birds and they were just like Hi and then we told people and then we got captured by the Bald Boar tribe and they sold us to someone else who tried to read our mind and then this chick tried to poison Arcadayn and I was in the stables with the horses and I was like WHAT DO YOU EVEN DO IN RUNEQUEST BECAUSE THIS PLACE IS CRAZY AND I'M PRIMITIVE and then we tried to escape and I bit a guy on the leg while Arcadayn rolled a 100 (which is bad) for like the fourth time and fell off a wall and they just decided we were crazy and sent us to some other lady who gave us porridge. I hope I get my stuff back.

So yeah.

Oh, and Bone Hill tomorrow.

Constantcon is fun.

Ex-Flumph Attacks Actress, Thwarted By Dwarf In Airport Bar

Notes from yesterday's game:

-I went to all the trouble of converting the Midkemia "Where's your PC been during that session s/he missed?" table to an easier-to-use format and used it but it seems kinda dull, really. I've switched to using the "Lost In Faerie" table from The Great Pendragon Campaign.

It consists of a What you were doing in Fairyland section, with stuff like:

1-3 ...captured by giants and forced to cook their hideous provender.

and a Why you're back section with stuff like:

13-14 He hid from their mocking laughter

(Rules in many Pendragon books assume the PCs are male knights. Even stranger, they assume you are using their rules to play Pendragon. What Greg Stafford doesn't know won't hurt him though, I figure.)

It's also better at explaining how the PC disappeared after killing a squid four weeks ago and just now turned up in a 12' x 14' room: she took a wrong turn and goat-horned sprites crawled out of the walls and took her away--then she ran off and said There's No Place Like Whatever Hellhole My Friends're In and Taaa-Daa we're back.

Me: "...and you returned because...d20..."

Kimberly Kane: "4"

"The elves thought you ugly or uncouth."

"I hate elves."

"Which is weird because you're half-elf."

"Yeah, I'm a self-hating half-elf. That's why I drink."

-While KK's barbarian was lost in Faerie and forced to sing for the elves in exchange for their scorn, the real actual KK (who can, oddly enough, be seen above on the lead singer of Aerosmith's shirt) was on some webcam porn site and forced to play Magic: The Gathering for money.

"The guy was nice and trying real hard to make it fun for me but I was just like What? There's no story, it's just cards? Can't I just make you cum? But I beat him though."

-Yeah I lost my dog and wrote a blog post about it and swore revenge. Kimberly's dog is just called "Sueno #5". Or, was. Until that mechastirge trap. Can't remember if they healed it or whether we're on Sueno #6 now.

-So they're going through this temple dungeon and they find the scriptorium--they spend a half hour looking at the books. So I rolled on the 100 random books table. Got "architecture-history" and "demonology". Which, the way I see it, if you're looking through a temple trying to find a demon is about as good as you can roll. Of course this book explains how temples like this are usually laid out. Of course this book has a ritual you can use in it...

-Not that it did anyone any good. They barricaded themselves in the book room and waited for the monster to come to them and the wizard died of a self-inflicted stab wound trying to hustle up some blood to compelte the ritual to control the atrocious Orth...

-The nice thing about tentacle monsters with five attacks is you get to use your random hit location dice. "It has you by the right arm and...right leg". It would've killed Connie (desperately smoking the charm cigarettes she got last week to no good end) had Mandy not run over and caused serious wounds.

-Likewise causing serious wounds was Darren's dwarf.
Look at his jetset shit:
-everyone spends an hour looking through the dungeon without him
-the monster attacks and Connie gets 20'ed by it and it's chewing on CP's head
-Darren suddenly pops up in videochat from the airport bar in Portland or something (escaped from Fairyland, I guess), fights the monster, delivers the killing blow
-then he gets on his plane, leaving everyone else to sort out getting the monster back to town and sailing home

It really tied the hovel together

Blogger ate my original post after I wrote it, so here's a very short version of the actual play report:

Satine Phoenix (behind a chair, long story), Connie, and Caroline Pierce...
go into the snowy marsh to find the foxwitch...(oh and blogger how much do I have to type so that the formatting won't stick Caroline behind the Keith Parkinson picture down there? This much? this much? More than that? I don't really understand or want to right now I have to go to the store and get this coconut bliss ice cream from the store for Mandy so just let me knwo when I can... Ok, right so anyway into the Hagwood to find the foxwitch...(like that only more fox-er.)

The foxwitch sleeps CP and Satine and they wish the party cleric was there but she's sick in bed so cleric heal thyself..."Oh no I'm sick and not actually eating sushi like I am in this picture" says the cleric.


So the muscle of the party is gone and the thief is the only one left. This could be a total party kill.

So then anyway the foxwitch begins to install str 17 Satine and Str Caroline underneath her small stone house in with the phalanx of other exhausted women under there who are all doing the Atlas thing holding the foxwitch's house out of the marsh and keeping it from flooding and so her carpet being ruined.

Connie then decides to throw a sling stone at the women holding up the house.

This works and causes the house to pitch forward and the foxwitch has to wake up Satine to help her hold the place up.

But then Connie 20s the foxwitch in the back with a mace and runs inside the house to try to drag the carpet into the mud.

Foxwitch freaks, follows.

This then causes considerable strain on the women holding the house up.

CP wakes up.

Things become increasingly confusing.

Satine fires a crossbow into the melee and the witch dies with a bolt through her neck.

They manage to get all but four of the women out from under the house before it collapses--they might've gotten more if Connie hadn't stayed inside to loot it.

RIP Gleichman, August 12, 2011-Oct 28, 2011

Do two wrongs make a right?

"Let me tell you about my character..." that would be wrong.

"Let me tell you about my dog" that would be wrong.

But...let me tell you about my character's dog.

Once upon a time there were some people waiting for me to play game with them. They spent their time joking and laughing about a guy who was arguing, quite earnestly, that you shouldn't name fictional characters after real people.

And then my head popped up on their G+ windows, and they said hello and they told me this guy Gleichman had claimed the novel Abe Lincoln Vampire Hunter was bad because it might make people think Abe Lincoln was actually a vampire hunter. I said my thief now had a dog and he was born here. I rolled up a war poodle. About the silliest thing on the table.

They said "What will we call him?" I said why don't we name him after the guy. Which was about the silliest way to name him.

This being a basic D&D game and my character being a level 1 thief, the predictable thing happened--everybody joked the dog was way more useful in a fight than my PC.

...and kept joking about it. Because the dog went everywhere my PC did and my PC went everywhere there was videochat D&D game on while I was awake and working at my drawing table for the last three months. And saving everyone. Everywhere from Bone Hill to a land of smiling halflings where he was dyed rainbow colors--which is about as silly a thing as could possibly happen.

In the Caves of Myrddin--where he died nobly, after helping kill a pair of giant shrews, covering two hopeless low-levels and his worthless master's escape from a pair of vampires named Lenny and Squiggy. Which is about the silliest way you could possibly die.

But despite all the intense silliness of Gleichman's entire existence, here's the thing: when the actual player characters die (especially these low level PCs in these videochat games played by mostly RPG veterans) the players are just right there in front of you going "alright--them's the breaks--haul out the 3d6"--maybe they're just putting a brave face on it and trying not to seem like a n00b, but they, the player, are still there in front of you, being alive, so it's like whatever (at least so far). But Gleichman? He had no existence except in the minds of 10-15 gamers spread all over the world, who will now imagine him no more. And he was so loyal and so brave. He always rolled better than me and he hauled us all out of the fire so many times. With infinite patience, he saw my 3d6-in-order thief up 5 levels in 3 months. We had his teeth silvered--near the end--to fight the undead, but it did him no good. Poor guy.

Gleichman is, to me, a little slice of pure Old Schoolness--slain by two 8th level monster and a DMs total lack of belief in balanced encounters, rolled up on a DIY random table by the guy who wrote the table, purchased by a player who hates pets in games out of pure mechanical practicality, completely devoid of background o, preposterously over-powered next to the PC who bought him, and ridiculously under-priced at 25gp, and yet, after a few sessions, I loved his dumb, silver-toothed, rainbow-colored carcass. And I don't think I was the only one. "Character background is what happens between levels one and six". What happened between levels one and six is at the beginning of every session when people saw my face pop up on G+ they said "Oh, Zak--you're bringing Gleichman, right?"

Go easy, little guy. You were a good pup. Your leash was Rope, 50' and your food was bugbears and goblinflesh. You died a soldier, because I rolled a 1.

DMs of my PC, Blixa, should know he now carries an extra quiver of bolts with the steel heads removed and replaced with wooden ones, 3 vials and one wineskin of holy water, 5 cloves of garlic, a mallet, and has five wooden stakes.

Oh, and...

(rollroll)

"29 Wolfhound. +2 to hit vs. same-size foe. (11 hp)"

Wolfhounds look so dumb.

Almost as dumb as poodles.

I think I'll call it Abe Lincoln Vampire Hunter.

'Keep' Cheat Sheet + Tekumel Violence

1. First:

Quicky Keep, for if your PCs decide to attack it (click to enlarge)



2. Yet Another Appalling Tragedy Caused By People Not Listening More Carefully To Me

So CKutalik ran us through an Empire of The Petal Throne dungeon--I mean "City Buried In Accordance With The Sublimely Inscrutable Belief System of A Lovingly-Crafted Yet Ineffably Alien Culture Whose Imaginative Majesty Only The Most Refined Minds Could Possibly Hope To Grasp"--and, though my guy got through all right and I had a great time and got to use the Medium power to travel to the land of the dead and ask Ckutalik's previous TPK'd party how they got past the sacrifice-door, (which tactic is shaping up to be the "ask the Paladin if it's evil" of Tekumel) things did get a bit hairy. Prompting this post from our DM...--oh sorry, I mean our "CBIAWTSIBSOALCYIACWIMOTMRMCPHTGM"...

About 50 comments later...
30 comments later...
A few hours after that...

___________________________________

I Love It When A Total Lack of Any Plan Whatsoever Comes Together

A few successful experiments simultaneously performed today:



-Small Group/Big Party. Jesus Christ this game generates an ungodly amount of paper. I dropped it in front of Mandy and her sister and told them to each pull out two of the megajillions of PCs they've somehow managed to leave alive over the last few years. The party: cleric, wizard/fighter dwarf, wizard-elf, illusionist. 2 PCs per player and afterward it felt like one of those games that you want to just talk about (for no particular reason, to no-one in particular), because it was just right and good and the way it should go. Again: recommended.



-Hideous mongrelized systemclash: So 4 PCs. Two native to my usual AD&D20 hybrid, one from a straight AD&D game, one from Dungeon Crawl Classics. Pretty much just figured out saves and bonuses when we needed them. Not a problem. Each wizard used the spells native to their own system. Different wizard schools, y'know.



-Wavecrawl Kit Hounded by the militia and level-drained back to one, Mandy's PC decided she'd had enough of the Isle of Oth. Naturally, her other PC agreed. Her sister hadn't played on Oth before, so she was all whatever, and the foursome took to the Sea of Ignorance and Pain, sailing to aid Vornheim in its hour of undead-sieged need--at least until they thought of something better to do.



So it was 7 days at sea. Doing nothing but rolling on the Wavecrawl Kit. The first encounter of any consequences was...



38-Lone maiden and several swine. Secretly, she is a witch and has transformed all of the crew, her harpy allies are currently off seeking land but will return soon.



The hitch here is, by coincidence, one of our PCs actually speaks hog (old house rule--wizards can pick animal languages). Squeee squee, trust her not! We've been transformed by her abominable sorcery!!! Well naturally that started an argument. Said argument might've actually been a total slaughter if it'd occurred to me to rule that the wizards having their tongues turned to vipers meant they couldn't cast spells. Still, it came gratifyingly close to a TPK which is the best result of all: all the PCs almost die, but none actually do, on account of last minute lucky dice. So I've decided not to be too hard on myself. Still: keeping track of weird persistent effects is something I'm always tryna work on.



After passing a Goblin Grubship, this came up...



72- Passengers heading away from PCs native land. One is a PCs mother. What the hell?



Turns out it's the mom to Mandy's Librarian (Yuan-Ti) PC. After some bribes and crying they decide well screw Vornheim, let's take mom to safety in the Goblin Empire (the goblins are on good terms with the snake people). So goblinward sailed they...



So then, a storm, a slain albatross, pirates scared away by a judicious use of phantasmal force (always seems less useful if you actually attack people with it), then more pirates--this time goblin ones, who quickly took off once half were dead and their boat was on fire.



-Boat chase mechanic: each side rolls a number of d20 dex checks equal to the number of hands sailing (not "sailing or shooting arrows at the other ship", just those devoting their full attention to sailing). Whichever side gets more successes moves a round ahead of- or up on- the enemy.

_______________

A very good day at sea. What I particularly like is the Wavecrawl Kit is not just managing to cough up adventures, it seems to be impressing in the players' minds that the way you decide to travel is important, and that choices about how to go have consequences. Going by sea feels very much like its own thing--which it should. And the world is feeling like a world, not dressing on stories.



Pleased.

Small Group/Big Party

Short Version of This Post:

Two-player-1-GM games usually feel suboptimal but if both players are in control of multiple PCs, it's really fun. So if you;ve never done it, I hereby recommend trying it next time you've only got 2 players.

Long Version of This Post:

It's odd: you can play Monopoly with 3 players and it feels like you're really playing, you can play chess or 40K with two people and it's feels fine, but somehow playing an RPG with just one DM and two players always seems a little too quiet to me.

I've had many fun games with two players (including, most recently, an unfortunate but diverting episode involving Ghost Monkeys & Draculasers courtesy of Ben A and Forrest H ), but in general I would always take a third player if offered one.

So's: Last night/this morning Arcadayn ran two of us through a beta version of Goodman Games' new Dungeon Crawl Classics game.

If you haven't heard, a distinctive feature of this PostRetroClone is the "adventure funnel"--each player starts with 2-4 zero-level classless schlubs with naught but stats, a few cp worth of items, a randomly rolled profession, no armor, and second-rate weapons. These luckless citizens then are run through an adventure, some of them probably die, and then each player turns one or more of his or her surviving schmucks into a "real" PC with a class and everything in time for the next adventure.

My take on this whole idea is it seems pretty fun if you've got time to do that. It might be kind of a pain if your first session has like 8 players in it.

My most powerful impression from this session, though, was that for a two-player game multiple PCs seemed like an ideal and well-thought-out idea and just Goldilocks right.

We each took 4 bare-bones Joneses with names and jobs and took turns deciding whose guy would open the next door. Having 4 PCs, you start out thinking one or two of them (the ones with the especially average stats) are kind of expendable, but after a while you begin to like them all. Like: Oh, hey, this guy has a +1 to dex, maybe he'll climb up the statue.... And then hey, Mr 13 Dex is now a local hero at the table for ten minutes.

You use your guys like a skirmish wargame, but the density of interaction is enough that, even in a one-shot, they begin to develop identities and quirks and specialties. Maybe it was just the quality of my fellow dungeoneer, but the complexity of possibilities you generally feel in an 'ordinary' game was there--it felt like we were playing a "full" game the way it was meant to be played--as if 2-player D&D were as natural as 2-player ping pong.

It wasn't like having henchmen or hirelings either--who, at least for me, usually just feel like light-entertainment at best or a pain in the ass to keep track of at worst. These guys were totally "ours"--unike hirelings, making them open the spooky skull-head door was not automatically a sign of contempt.

So, anyway: whether or not I'm using DCC or the "funnel", next time I can only rustle up two players, I'm gonna have them bring along some extra PCs and see how it goes.

One Way To Do It

Thanks to Constantcon I have had 7 DMs in 7 days. It gets you thinking about different ways of doing the thing.

I'm gonna use how Jeff Rients ran his game as a kind of case study because...

A) Jeff has his well-known gameblog that is widely-read in the same circles that this one is, so it's interesting to compare how he runs a game to how he talks about gaming

B) Jeff's very good (actually, pretty much all the GMs I've run with were good, but Jeff definitely has a very distinctive GMing style and his specific experience running convention-type games showed through in his G+ game both in construction of the adventure and in the way he ran it)

C) The way in which Jeff was good points up some specific elements of "old school" style
_______

So, some notes on how Jeff rolls:

-Everything is good.

You roll a 19 to hit, Jeff goes "Excellent!" and smiles. You roll a 1 and give the monster an extra attack, Jeff goes "Oh, perfect" and smiles. You think of a clever plan, Jeff goes "Wonderful!", you think of a ridiculous plan that will kill you, Jeff goes "Fantastic!" Obviously part of this is just he keeps the energy level up. Another part is subtler: he isn't a negligent, indifferent god, but he sends a similar message: if you live, he will be happy and will have had fun. If you die, he will be happy and will have had fun. So rely not on his mercy.

An advantage of this attitude is it allows you to do...

-DM nudging toward bad ideas

When a lot of GMs say "There does not appear to be any other exit--except maybe if there's one at the bottom of the pool. If you want to swim down and check..." it means there definitely is an exit down at the bottom of the pool and it would really speed things up if you'd go down and check.

When Jeff says it, it means "It would amuse me to see you drown while looking for an exit at the bottom of the pool with no light source." Or at least his very friendly smile seems to suggest it does.

Many GMs are against nudging altogether. Jeff isn't, he just gives the impression that his nudges are nudging you toward doom. Which has the same effect in the end as no nudging at all.

-The dungeon is fuck-all on paper

I have often noticed this when reading Jeff's blog--he seems full of good ideas but the complete dungeons he posts are just pretty much rooms with monsters you fight in them (and fight in a normal way: they hit you to do damage and vice versa). The clever tricks, traps and inventions he's clearly capable of coming up with are not the centerpiece of the dungeon.

In the game we played all we really did mostly was go from room to room, try to find the right path, and occasionally fight things that did damage or, occasionally, had poison broken up by a few rooms which had natural features that functioned as simple traps. Also, the pitch for his dungeon was, on paper, super-dull: you are all the same race and class (basic halflings) with average stats (1st level and 3d6 in order--my PC was literally only one point different from someone else's) all from the same village, with the same accent, and all starting in the same place.

So why was it good? Because even though very few moving parts were in play Jeff made sure everything that was there mattered. How?...

-Every detail was given something to do in the adventure.

The halflings were short: that mattered (climb checks). Halflings don't have infravision: that mattered (worried about maintaining light sources). The dungeon was windy: that mattered (blew out a torch). We started out unarmed: that mattered (grateful for any sharp object we could find). We didn't know which way to go: that mattered (we needed to map our way out). A contributing factor to all this was...

-Every single thing that happened made us afraid we were going to die.

Giant cricket? Have to climb a wall? Fuckfuckfuck. We were worried. Clever convention one-shot trick: he didn't tell us how many hit points we had. This was huge, but more huge was the logic that went into it. Every single feature of the admittedly sparse environment could have killed us--or at least that's what we thought. So we paid lots of attention to every nook, cranny and crawly.

-The lack of a 4th wall was consistently used to storytelling advantage

"In the TV show the Sleestaks were just guys in these rubber costumes so they didn't move very fast, so you guys can easily outrun them."

"You're not sure you've knocked down all the stalactites but you sure made enough noise doing it that I get to roll again on the wandering monster table. (glee)"

-The adventure fit the social and logistical format

We had an adventure totally fit for a small group of players who didn't know each other, did not necessarily know the system they were running, and who wanted to be done in 2 hours. It required cooperation, but did not require spontaneous on-the-spot inter-PC or PC-to-NPC acting.

-An aura of total awareness of the details of the PCs and the environment

Jeff's descriptions were good, but really, if you looked at the transcript of Jeff DMing and the transcript of anybody else I played with DMing this week, you wouldn't see that many obvious differences. However, if you listen to the way he talks he projects this aura that no dice roll surprises him--it's all part of the story "Oh, well since you're still woozy from the smoke in the last room and you're distracted by the phosphorescent fungus you don't quite see straight and your blow glances off. Luckily your torch is still lit".

Again, there are not that many elements in play (no magic things going on to speak of, no complex NPCs, no list of individual skills for the PCs) but each element is there (light source, orientation, distances) because Jeff is fully invested in making it try to kill you, and so knows it, and knows how it works in this scenario, and knows how to describe a fight with it. It's like every threat, even if it's just a narrow ledge, is that end-of-level custom-designed boss the DMs been waiting to throw at you.

-Quiet but firm control of the flow of the game

I have heard "Ok, initiative time" probably 300 times this week. Jeff, on the other hand, went "All right, Anthony, please roll intiative for your side." Probably because Jeff is a con veteran and is used to groups of strangers playing and wants to keep the game rolling steadily along and knows all the little things you can do to do that without anybody giving you static. I don't know if Jeff runs things the same way when he has players who know each other but it works very well with players who don't.

-The "Jeffish" elements were the least of it.

Yes, there were Sleestaks, yes, Jeff described rooms with Scooby-Doo references, but these obvious hallmarks of Jeff's lighthearted gonzo-ness weren't the impressive thing. The impressive thing was how despite all this silliness, we were genuinely afraid to die and happy when we didn't and how very serious our little halfling lives seemed to us.
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Rather than the aforementioned negligent and indifferent god, Jeff is a highly conscientious and amused one. Which is is equally scary, really.