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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

Perfection

What would the Someone's Perfect First-Ever Game of Cthulhu look like?

It would, naturally, start with half-assed-drawing-room-comedy but--after the strange poem in the diary is discovered--shade by degrees into dawning awfulness and panic. For perfection, the details then aren't important but the ending is.

The ending would have to look like this:

-every single PC--except the new player's PC--is unconscious (though only for a round or two--we don't want the dead players getting bored)--having been accidentally shot by the new PC in a panic of bad aim and worse Luck rolls,

-the remaining newbie PC is down to only one hit point and lying on the floor,

-...and has also just lost that fifth-San-roll-in-an-hour and so now has got a brand new insanity to deal with,

-meanwhile, of course, a grotesque and squamous thing (brimming with health and hp) oozes inexorably forward in the uncanny dark,

-the player of the remaining PC is wide-eyed and frantic and performing luck rituals and madly soliciting dice advice,

-the pistol runs out of ammunition, but the second pistol--after having, in perfect Checkhov's gun style, been a source of controversy in the first act "Why would an anthropologist wander around Destledown with two loaded pistols?""I've been in the bush--I'm paranoid."--is unholstered,

-the first initiative roll with the Thing is a tie,

-the tiebreaker roll with the Thing is a tie*,

-finally the new player wins initiative, then rolls ten damage and an impale and the gibbering obscenity is annihilated...

...and in shuffle the bobbies "What's all this then?", and go to work shoveling bits of ineffable cosmic terror off the wall.

Plato held that the perfect forms of all things were forever suspended in an inaccessible realm of ideals, and that we in this sublunary reality were sundered forever from them, and could only experience failed and piecemeal versions of these seamless numinomena.

But then, he never played Cthulhu with Mandy's sister.





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*Is this how Cthulhu initiative is supposed to work? Don't know don't care. It apparently works very well. In fact: completely perfectly. So whatever.

Saturday Night, Bruised Ribs, Gameblogging

-Read Dread yesterday, the horror RPG where you use Jenga blocks instead of dice. Looks good for a one-shot. Others have also commented on how you might use the Jenga mechanic for Cthulhu or other games.

What I'm wondering is: would it be worth it to build the system out so it has a little more crunch? Possibility: like build a skill system where if you're good at something it requires you to pull one block off the tower to do it, but if you're bad it requires like 5 pulls. Ability scores generated with a d6 and low is good...or do you just end up with characters that are detailed for no reason since at least one is going to die by the end of the night anyway?

(For the uninitiated, knocking over the tower means you die, so more pulls=more danger.)

-Has anyone ever made a setting based on 2112?

I lie awake, staring out at the bleakness of Megadon. City and sky become one, merging
Into a single plane, a vast sea of unbroken grey. The Twin Moons, just two pale orbs as
They trace their way across the steely sky.

If not, why not? Get on that shit. I would play a cleric of Syrinx.

Oh wait, looks like some Randroid kinda did...

-sigh- Yes, I know, without Ayn Rand we wouldn't have Rush. And without Andy Warhol we wouldn't have the Velvet Underground. But then the question is would I trade Rush away if we could have the economy back? I should probably move on before Alan Greenspan gets dragged into this and I really get angry. Isn't this blog supposed to be about D&D?

-Yesterday Mandy ran another game. We fought a thought eater which is an ethereal skeleton platypus. We ran away from it because it was immune to all of our weapons and spells and was trying to eat our brains. She cackled. Now she is in our room where strangers are paying her to masturbate and I am on the couch in the living room writing about it.

-Marvel's Fantastic Four Supplement has this, if you're having one of those too-lazy-to-generate-your-own-spaceport days...


-Looking at Mayfair's old DC Heroes supplements... Ladies and gentlemen, I now present the least useful diagram in the history of role-playing games, (click to enlarge into full hideousness):

And it's not small, either. It's like most of a page.

No I did not just whip that up in MacPaint in 8 seconds. This is actually in the game. Someone at Mayfair just whipped this up in MacPaint in 8 seconds.

Then they invoiced someone for it.

Then someone paid this person.

Question for any Mayfair employees who may be reading: how many of the people involved in this process were high, and on what? What is the drug that makes you crave boring diagrams? Dudes, avoid the (Elliot R) Brown Acid.*

Or was it a dare?

And does that make it any better?

I mean, it doesn't even have scale indicated, so assuming someone didn't know what a wand was, you'd still..oh fuck it, I have so many better things to do.

-That was so lame I have to find an unimaginably awesome picture just to balance it out...ok...

Why is the Juggernaut of Khorne standing on a stage painted to blend in with a Hawkwind lightshow? Because that was the most awesome of all possible places for it to be standing.






*Speaking of whom....I went over to Elliot R Brown's page and found this...it's a spreadsheet the DC editors used to keep track of a Batman crossover, interesting maybe sort of...

The Philosophical Implications of The Weird

I will try to be concise: (Re-reading this now to edit it. I failed.)

Realized something while discussing psionics with Telecanter.

The Weird is a historical/aesthetic idea with a definite philosophical implication...
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A Short History Of The Super-Human In Art and Popular Belief:

Stories and Images Meant to Educate and Entertain People In The Magic Belief System Era: (existing pre-Enlightenment, fading during the Enlightenment, pretty much dead by the 20th century)

Things and effects that are super-human (magic, elves, angels, etc.) are an organic part of the universe--not just in the sense of organically tied to nature but also tied to human ideas of morality, behavior, symbolism, fate etc. Like: A black cat crossing your path is bad luck, eating human flesh will turn you into a werewolf, a vampire can only come into your house if you invite it in, etc. Fantasy as a genre is built on this implied philosophy. In short: superhuman things care about your behavior--especially in its moral or at least symbolic aspect--and react to it.

Stories and Images Meant to Educate and Entertain People In The Technological Belief System Era: (ascending during the enlightenment, in full bloom by the mid-20th century)

Things and effects that are super-human (robots, aliens, cyborgs) are an organic part of the universe, but no more so than we are, and are not tied in any intrinsic way to human morality, behavior, fate, etc. Like: The spacefungus just wants to reproduce, Mars wants our women due to no fault of our own, The Alien is built that way to survive, etc. Most science fiction is built on this implied philosophy. In short: we're products of motiveless, amoral scientific processes and so are the rest of the wonders of the universe.

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The Weird represents a transition historically (in the '30s) aesthetically, and philosophically between these two belief systems, in the words of the Man Himself:

The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. [i.e. The Magical] A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain--a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.

The Weird:

The creations of The Weird--in it's most typical form--are consistently described as organic yet unnatural. Cthulhu is weird, green slime with eyeballs (a thoroughly 20th century idea) is weird, the Tripheg is weird, things that mix the (magic) symbolic with the (science-fiction) seemingly biologically plausible (an eel with a man's face that is blind and bloated from living beneath the water for years) are weird.

Scientific belief and traditional sci-fi don't accept this category: nothing is "unnatural"--all is explicable, and magic only accepts the unnatural as an expression of something morally repugnant. In fantasy and magic belief systems, stuff Satan made is unnatural, the rest isn't.

The weird fits neither. Whatever's going on is rarely as explicable as Satan.

Therefore the fundamental underlying philosophy of the Weird is a sort of difficult-to-categorize thing. Lovecraft is the premier example. Is Cthulhu:

A) actually bad or
B) just a big alien that doesn't care about us any more than we care about our stomach parasites?

It is purposefully left unclear*: if it is A, then Cthulhu is (thematically if not aesthetically) just a Demon, which is a fantasy idea from the era of magical thinking and we can relax into the moonlight and ravens of that romantic world, and trust that if we are good and righteous or at least obedient to the signs we will get what we deserve. If it's B, then Cthulhu is just a Big Green Monster, and we can run or shoot it with lasers.

But it isn't clear: in a million ways that I will not categorize here, Lovecraft and other avatars of the weird purposefully cloud the issue. When we summon him, are we Wrong to do it, or just Incorrect to think it's a good idea? We cannot rely on our goodness or our lasers to save us, it is an unsettling genre.

The other Weird Tales authors don't necessarily hit the weird nail on the weird head quite as hard as Lovecraft, but they all seem to partake of a certain moral/aesthetic confusion not seen in earlier heroic and horrific tales: does the hero succeed because s/he is good (or at least philosophically "correct"), because s/he is clever, or neither? Does the victim die because s/he is sinful, foolish, or both? Or neither? Is the thing encountered hostile, or just an alien predator?

In a sense, the weird is a spike of uncertainty between two valleys of clarity. When thinking Magically, we know we are in a world of symbols, and that to be human is to somehow be woven into the symbols: the Sky may want something from us, but we want something from it, so that's fair and, perhaps eventually, explicable, when thinking Scientifically, we know we are stupid, but one day we may learn. The Weird is another thing altogether: can we learn about it or not? Will it turn us evil just to learn about it? Or is it simply a phenomenon we can eventually master?

The Call of Cthulhu game is very elegant in mechanically modelling this. You start with no knowledge of the premise of the game--"Mythos: 0%"--but the more knowledge you gain (the more fit you are to play the game) the more crazy you go (the less fit you are to play the game). The instability and the uncertainty grow and grow. You become more skilled and crazier, so those skills seem to be less and less relevant--or just more dangerous since there's always the chance you'll turn them on your friends. Surgery 90% seemed like such a good thing in the beginning. Just like science.

Magic has a dramatic logic (like a fairy tale), science has a procedural one (learn or die), the Weird might not have any. It is significant that Lovecraft stories do not always end with death or always with escape. They are not definitely horror or definitely adventure.

The Weird is a delicate balance, in a story or a game, to maintain. I groan when the laser swords come out at the end of Masks of Nyarlathotep, though I also was obscurely disappointed to hear about the space ships the Old Ones seem to (maybe) have had.

So: the weird is built on an uncertainty about whether our morality, symbols and emotions do have any meaning in this science-run universe or not. Whether any badness is actually bad or just "different". Magic knows the snake is evil, science knows it is just other, The Weird is not sure.

Boring academics will reduce this all down to anxieties about race: are they evil or just different? But I think the confusion goes farther than that, and to far more interesting places.

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Now that we've spent quite some time (in art years) in a science fiction era, some authors--mostly ones who are doing that thing certain kinds of leftists do where they ask science if it can truly be its own morality--are swinging back toward The Weird. Because they want to make us unsure and unsettled about whether or not our morals and symbols can be left behind. And also because artists ALWAYS use The Magical because they are all about manipulating symbols--The Alien may be written from a science perspective, but it's big and black and slippery for psychological reasons.

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The Surreal, in the classic High Art sense (which happened around the same time as the Weird Tale) is just The Weird with its connections to the Magic past and Scientific future (those two popular ideas fit for mass consumption) cut off. It is all the present. Floating Mars bars and cars with elephant heads. When the Surreal seems to rely too much on the clarity of science or magic, it ceases to feel Surreal.

So the Surreal is purer, but the Weird is more useful for games. You might not be able to understand The Weird, but at least you might be able to transition to something--the symbolic logic of Magic or the procedural logic of Science--by going through it. The second season of Twin Peaks seemed to struggle on this point: Were aliens involved? Was magic involved? Should we try to figure out what's going on before Cooper does? Or was it just Surreal?

Mandy proposes a similar division she'd call Catholic Weird vs. Protestant Weird. Protestant Weird being David Lynch and Edward Scissorhands ("clean") and Catholic Weird being Thomas Pynchon and Cormac McCarthy and Warhammer ("messy").
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Some considerations for games:

-For me, psionics in D&D feel wrong unless they involve The Weird. Since the Weird is a transition between the Magical (D&D) and the Sci Fi, I feel like the Weird and the Sci Fi can exist in a world (Gigacrawler, Rifts), and the Weird and the Magical can coexist (Mind Flayers) and all three can be together (Shadowrun, and Warhammer 40k and Warhammer Fantasy sharing the same Chaos army lists--a good and rare example of the artists successfully merging the creative and commercial requirements of the situation), but skipping straight from Magic to Sci Fi (look, now I have swords for hands! It was easy!) without a certain level of Weirdness and Confusion seems like it just ruins the aesthetic effect.

-Psionic powers as an idea are Weird when they move into the zone where they overlap with psychological ideas. Like: the Star Trek guys who can just move things with their minds are not Weird. The ones who create things out of thin air because they have nightmares about them are Weird. This kind of thing uses a pseudoscientific explanation to bridge the gap between an indifferent natural world and a Magic one where the environment cares about what we think or believe.

-The whole "Magic-is-unnatural" trope seems to reek of The Weird. When Mandy and I playtested a Weird Fantasy Roleplaying adventure and found out that Detect Magic and Detect Evil were pretty hard to tell apart in the system, it seemed like a rather keen symbol for the whole moral-confusion issue here.

-"Chaos" is a key word. Is chaos merely unpredictability (the biggest barrier to clarity in science) or is it actual moral badness? The confusion in early D&D (and in Warhammer, and in the clones) about whether or to what degree the alignment "Chaotic" just meant "Evil" is a prime symptom of the doubt at the center of The Weird. As is everything in Michael Moorcock and the other works the Chaos idea came from. I do not mean to resolve the issue, just point to it as an example of how this aesthetically Weird idea of "these parts don't fit together" and the philosophical lack of clarity almost always come packaged together.

-Since the '80s, the Japanese seem to have an easier (and sometimes oddly frictionless) time negotiating back and forth across Lake Weird from Sci Fi to Fantasyland and back again than artists in the west. It may (may) have something to do with the fact that an aesthetic of abstraction and unnaturalness are more deeply expressed in traditional Japanese art and design than in any other culture. The unnatural is totally ok. Or, if not ok, than something you might have to get used to: Akira: you're weird, deal.




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*Like we are constantly told the mythos creatures don't care about us and are alien, yet everyone involved with them practices dark arts and becomes totally weak, corrupt and, basically, Pure Evil.

Why Are We Even IN Here?

This came up when somebody (can't remember who--Alexis from Tao of D&D maybe? Too lazy to link.) ran James Raggi's Death Frost Doom adventure (still too lazy to link). (Interested parties too lazy to find them over on the right there know my pain.)

Anyway, idea is James' module starts with all kinds of ominous signs of spooky death. Gnarled trees, gravestones, a crazed hillbilly saying "Don't go up thar!" etc.

And so the DM's players were like "Ok, so let's not go up there." And, knowing their DM had prepared a whole complete rest of the world to romp around in, wanted to go somewhere else.
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Now it should go without saying that a lotta other players would've wanted to go into the dungeon on account of the ominous signs of spooky death.

Here we have an issue of calculation, where the player weighs:

A)His/her interest in keeping his/her PC alive

and, possibly...

B) His/her interest in playing his/her PC in character--(unless the PC's so greedy or curious that s/he would want to go in there no matter what)

versus...

C)His/her desire to go where the DM had something interesting ready to go.

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C is seldom spoken of but it is a powerful motivator. Players want to play, and while DMs talk frequently amongst themselves about the merits of funneling or corralling or railroading or cajoling their players into going where the fun is, players (if they were as chatty as DMs) could go on for just as long about how they do things because if they didn't they'd worry they wouldn't be actually playing.

I mean, sure my PC could go pick beets instead of duel the wicked Archbaron but that doesn't mean the DM has an awesome beet-picking adventure ready to go, or that s/he should feel any compulsion to invent one.
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A variation on this came up for me while playing during the first session of our Rolemaster campaign. I was playing, essentially, a kind of investigator, looking into some sort of mysterious culty activity.

Our boss laid out that there was this Source of Chaos somewhere, and then there was this Possible Pawn of Chaos (a high level NPC) and this pawn was located in the Thieves' Guild, and that there were 3 NPC Contacts who could help us get to him.

So, naturally, here's what I'm thinking: The Source of Chaos is where the fighting of the craziest monsters and seeing weirdest stuff is in this game, so I wanna get to that as soon as I can. Today, if possible.

I know where The Possible Pawn is, so let's call up these NPC contacts and tell them to get the lead out and get us over where he is as soon as possible so we can get this shit started.

So I go and find the first Contact, get him to take us to the Guild, ignore all the scenery/plot hooks and immediately head for the Pawn and offer this guy (turns out to be a crimelord) our services.

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Now I chatted a little, out of scholarly interest, with DM Darren about the adventure and we discussed the sandboxy nature of the campaign.

Quoth he: "You went way faster than I expected--you didn't investigate the Contacts to find anything out about them, you didn't check around for info on the Thieves' Guild before going in, and there were lots of other ways of investigating The Pawn other than just walking right up to him and offering him your services, and there's a million other things going on in the Thieves' Guild."

Sayeth I: "Yeah, but, I figured that guy was where the fun was--he had a name and everything (all the other characters were spot-named after drinks--Gin, Manhattan, Lime Rickey--my character was named Jagermeister. It was all Connie's idea, I think.). I might've checked out the Contacts if they were the only people I knew about in the game, but the way it was set up, they just seemed like road bumps on the way to my objective."

DM: "He is pretty dangerous."

Me: "Good! We kept not fighting anybody. I wanted to get to somewhere we could use the Infamous Rolemaster Crit System until we met him--we only got into one fight all night and it was a random encounter with a bunch of thieves. The Pawn seemed like he might know where some monsters were, or at least some puzzles."

Now, really, DM Darren has got stuff ready to go in every direction--but he has a great pokerface and so there's no way of knowing that when he says "Well you could go meet the guy or you could do something else..." that there's just as much crazy madness behind the Something Else as there is behind meeting the guy.

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Point is, the DM sometimes inadvertently draws your attention to things (I know I do it all the time), and some players will just move toward these things because they are there and have a name and therefore the player expects things to get exciting when they get over there--even if that's not what the DM was trying to do.

I mean, all of Call of Cthulhu works on this premise. It's called Call of Cthulhu, so the player knows that Cthulhu is over there somewhere and therefore s/he will have his or her PC do pretty much do whatever it takes to get over there, self-interest be damned. People make certain decisions because it's Cthulhu and so they think the game will be dull if they don't. In a game of sandbox D&D (or Rolemaster) this attitude can result in the PCs, in effect, railroading themselves right past a lot of options they could've had fun with.

So, yeah, if the PCs start to think the game is called "Call of The Very Dangerous High-Level NPC" then it take skill and effort to assure them that things other than The Very Dangerous High Level NPC are interesting in this sandbox. And to flag these things up a little, because, really, not everything a PC could do should result in a crazy adventure. Otherwise there'd be no point to making choices.

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P.S. If you're wondering how we fared playing Rolemaster I'll talk all about later. Short answer: It was fun and we liked.

Some Random Odds & Ends

-Austin Osman Spare: One of my Cthulhu players clued me in about this guy. A real-life CoC character. Artist. Wrote grimoires. Pictures drove people insane. Beloved by notorious dictator.

-When Keith was in town we went to Aero Hobbies and he picked up some hit-location dice. I kinda wish I had, too. I love random die charts, but I like dumb gimmicks, too. Especially dumb gimmicks which replace having to find one more random chart.

-Then I thought: they have games with decks of custom cards and the whole game is in the cards. Someone should make a game with custom dice where the whole game is in the dice. No numbers, just story-parts. People I don't know or like would love it.

-That idea TM me, today.

-Mandy's on an epic medieval Chinese movie kick right now. In "The Emperor and the Assassin" a handful of guys roll a big (6-9 foot diameter, I'd say) iron ball up to a door and use the ball to knock it down. Does anybody out there know if this thoroughly rad and seemingly terribly impractical form of battering ram was ever used historically?

-P.S.