And that's it (Curse of Strahd)

Iron & Gold

And that is it. A hundred thousand words and months of play, all done.

I have to admit that, although I can certainly see areas where it could have been run differently and possibly better, I have no urge to run it again. Well, okay, I might run it if people asked me, or if I came up with a sufficiently different set of characters, but I wouldn’t do it soon.

I might collate all off the character writeups I did for this one and post them for the benefit and amusement of any Iron & Gold GMs.

I have an adventure in Icons sitting around, so maybe I’ll post that next.

Thoughts about the end of Curse of Strahd

That is, the end of the mass of text I have produced, not about the various endings of the campaign, which I might talk about after I have posted the ending.

So I finished the Curse of Strahd with Iron & Gold, and in the end, I wrote over 100,000 words, which is more than I’ve ever written for a novel. (My novel attempts end in the 20K-30K mark.) Part of the reason is that this had a structure, even if it was largely a peripatetic one. At that, I skipped chunks of the campaign I didn't care about: I never ended up getting involved with the hags, and never saw the werewolf den, never dealt with Izek or the mad mage.

Is it great fiction? No, of course not. It’s a journal of a role-playing campaign. Different forms.

So partly I was thinking, Could I turn it into a novel, even if I never intended to publish it? (If I wanted to publish it, I’d have to change a lot of D&D-isms to avoid Hasbro’s wrath.) Could it be a kind of practice in that way?

Maybe. I mean, I have been going back and fixing what my friend Jim has called infelicitous phrases, and adding character reactions before I post. (When playing, I gloss over them, but before I post it, I go, oh, hey, shouldn’t you see how they respond to that? I mean, I know how they respond, but I should indicate it in the text.)

And there are things I like about it — I like the Tsolenka Pass, especially the sequence on the roof; I like the fact that Ireena has been around the land a bit, even if she hasn't been to Krezk yet (necessary because of the trap that is the pool). I like giving Ninefingers the agency of being the guy who knows about trapped structures.

But structurally, it would need changes. Here’s what I think I’d have to do, at first blush and in no particular order.

• Largest, what’s the point? Yes, it’s an adventure but about what? There are a couple of hints as to things that might be important to the characters, but they either don’t get followed up or show up full-bore without foreshadowing. I’d want to play up the possible Felewin-Ireena romance. That would probably add an extra layer for Strahd to come in, jealous. Uthrilir’s cursed relic is spoken of, even in the very beginning, but it doesn’t have much of an effect. Adding a scene where someone other than the snow maidens tries to take it, and Uthrilir becomes a dervish of madness. There are also hints of a deeper feeling between Hrelgi and Uthrilir, and I’d want to create scenes that would reflect that.
• Heck, the big four need arcs of some kind. Ezmerelda, who exists largely to be fill-in for skills the PCs don't have, would need to be a realer character.
• It’s kind of peripatetic, a series of adventures and not until the second half does it seem to have a single focus (looking back on it).
• If I decided on a point, I’d probably have to change how they get to Barovia (or whatever I’d call it). Walking through the mists is the easiest way but it also has the least effect on the rest of the story. (Of the hooks, faking an invitation from Kolyan is probably the most directly connected to the characters, but that didn’t fit with where I had left the characters in a previous adventure.)
• “Death House” is a fine adventure, but how does it reflect whatever I decide the point is? I was groping toward a change in the Felewin-Ninefingers relationship, and I could emphasize that (and Ninefingers’ comments during Death House get brought back during the Amber Temple and in Ravenloft. Also, there are some monsters that show up in Death House and nowhere else — I’d want to think whether some of those should be eliminated or brought back later on. It’s also a sixth of the adventure; is that the right amount? I feel like it’s too much if it’s not connected to everything else. If the story were about, say, overcoming Strahd, then it should be connected to Strahd, rather than being an example of evil acts uncondoned by the main baddie. (Such things can exist, of course, but do we want them to be the first sixth of the book?)
• The section with Doru and Father Donavitch seems a little free-floating, but it does introduce us to Strahd, so I think that’s okay. Maybe play up the business of “Do we kill Doru or don’t we?” a bit more. In fact, I skim over an awful lot of stuff in the first part for all that it feels slow in retrospect. I ended up using some of it with the returns to Vallaki and Barovia, but not everything. There are things hinted at that make no sense if you don’t know the campaign. What happened to the maidservant in Viktor’s household? What is going on with this cult? And we just skipped the business of Izek because it wasn’t interesting to me, but it might be a way of bringing out feelings about Ireena, and giving her a bit more action.
• If the loss of Ireena is to mean something more, it should be played up a bit more. There should be reactions, is what I’m saying.
• The winery and Berez seem tacked on. I mean, they follow logically from the events, but they don’t seem integral to any story we’re picking.
• Since I’ve only posted to the Tsolenka Pass, I shan’t comment on anything after that, but the narrative does gather speed. I would need to examine that and see if it’s the kind of speed I need.

Anyway: those are a few thoughts.

(And I couldn't publish because I've wasted the first rights on the Internet. Oh, well.)

Addendum, months later

Okay, I’m about to post the last chapter and then the epilogue, so I’m going to expand this.

First, as a campaign. Hanging out on Reddit in r/CurseOfStrahd was helpful; I see why it’s so popular, and see the passion that players and DMs bring.

I think I would have been too much a slave to the module if I hadn’t converted it to another system, though there is the possibility that I converted monsters to be too easily defeated. More on that later.

I didn’t play Strahd as lethally as I could have. I think I could have presented him as a much more dangerous foe.

The campaign world doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s too small for the population: the land doesn’t have enough area to feed everyone; there doesn’t seem to be farmland, butchers, blacksmiths, chandlers, and so on. As written, the population is ninety percent soulless, and those people offer no sustenance to Strahd. (“Strahd periodically feeds on the blood of Barovians who have souls, but he can't draw nourishment from the blood of the soulless. He can tell at a glance whether a Barovian has a soul or is merely a shell.”) Presumably one can befriend a Vistani group and place an order for an import (subject to Strahd knowing you have it), but this can’t be an organized thing. Assuming that the castle has about ten encounters when you’re in it, using average numbers for dice rolls, there are at least 41 vampire spawn in Barovia. What do they eat? Six are in the Amber Temple, where there’s darn little blood to drink, although there’s an interesting story where the defenses in the Temple are bad because the vampire spawn have been laying waste to the other monsers…or going to the room where the mountain people hide because, yay! Possible food.

>Also, unfair thing I just thought of: I didn’t start the campaign with beginners or even the equivalent of level 3.

I certainly slanted the campaign to avoid things I didn’t care about. I didn’t really care about Izek, so he never showed up. Argynvostholt got scant attention, and I never figured out a way to fit in the werewolf lair. I could probably have done more with Van Richten and with Lady Wachter’s house and cult, but I didn’t see a way to fit them in as things unfolded. Heck, even Mad Mary or the hags might have got a mention.

Didn’t happen. I shrug. I don’t much regret that.

The ending was rather anticlimactic. Given that I had set up that Strahd was in his coffin, perhaps it couldn’t be otherwise, but I suppose I could have had something other than undead attack — perhaps a group of Vistani who had some connection to Ezmerelda and possibly had Van Richten as prisoner. If I were to do it as a novel, maybe.

The epilogue is meant to address a couple of loose threads and then get out.

The change in systems meant that teleportation was much easier, and part of the in-universe reason they evaded Strahd for the entire time was travelling by rend. However, while it made the monsters that much more fragile (only five injury levels, except for Strahd, connected to the Heart of Sorrow), the PCs never got much less fragile. I’ve discussed this before — that a swarm of rats is a nuisance by the time you get to fifth level and can be ignored by tenth — but in Iron & Gold, a swarm of rats can kill you regardless of your experience. Some wins, some losses.

I feel like Felewin & co. are now powerful enough that they would need either an extraordinary foe or one that specifically aims for their weak spots, so I might be retiring them…or hauling out a D&D adventure for levels 10+ to convert. (I dislike levels generally but they do have that advantage: you can certainly scale your adventures to your adventurers.)

Villains - a taxonomy

Image from Fainting Goat's Deluxe Super Villain Handbook

Right now I'm thinking about villains.

Coming up with an adventure means (for me) coming up with villains. And a villain group is more likely to give a player group a decent run for its money than a single big bad. (Not always true, but mostly.) So while a single big bad is easier for me to conceptualize, it's also easier for the players to win because of a lucky shot.

That is not necessarily a bad thing, but you don't want that all the time.

Wait, let's back up a minute.

Let's make up some terminology. For bad folk facing a group of heroes, you have:

• Big Bad is a single monolithic force who just overwhelms the heroes. Your Galactus, your Kang, your Dr. Doom, your Dormammu, your Amazo, your Starro, your Prometheus, and so on. The intent is that taking on this force directly is going to be tough. Sometimes the Big Bad can be defeated by a trick (“simple garden lime!”) and sometimes you gotta think outside the box. Sometimes it's just overwhelming force (I'm thinking Doomsday here, who defeated the whole Justice League to show how tough he was), but that concentration of force will come at a cost. Depending on the story, the Big Bad might have other resources, which could include any of the other types of bad folk.
• Puppeteer is a weird hybrid: a single opponent but usually a set of punchables in front of the heroes. He can be treated as one of the other groups; we say no more about him today.
• Villain Group is a group of opponents. Usually they have better teamwork than your heroes, at least in the beginning. This is your Masters of Evil, your Hyperclan, your Injustice League, your Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. I feel like there are more memorable Big Bads than Villain Groups, but comics have been around a long time, so I'm probably wrong. If the evil cult has a small group of super-powered leaders (vampires, demons, aliens, whatever) then it's an Agency headed by Villain Group.
• Horde is a special category I made up for “overwhelming numbers but no individual distinction” such as the Brood. They have a goal, but you're not working against an individual, you're working against all of them. A sudden uprising of zombies, for instance, might be a horde. Hordes are often subservient to a big bad (because it's more satisfying to cut off the head of something) but they don't have to be. (If they're not subservient, then all of them have to be exterminated, which might not be what you want for your campaign.) A Horde feels to me like it often engenders horror, whether it's aliens taking over bodies or the dead rising.
• Agency is a group of non-powered opponents, probably with some kind of tech support (really good weapons, for instance). Like a Horde, they have to be disabled in some way, usually by getting the government to pull their funding. Examples might be AIM or Hydra or SHIELD or maybe the Church of Blood.

(Individual heroes can also have equal antagonists, but that also is outside my remit today.)

You can mix and match: perhaps the Agency hires or creates a Villain Group. Perhaps the Puppeteer tries to make use of a Horde. Maybe the Villain Group hires the Big Bad, and then there's a personality conflict that involves violence and property damage.

Now, it's fun once in a while to have the Big Bad show up, trash everything, and then be vulnerable to one of the heroes' attacks. Can't be the point of the session, it seems to me (having run more than my share of pointless sessions). You want some kind of equivalence.

I don't have a deeper thought at this point. My tentative conclusions are:

• Memorable characters of any kind usually repeat.
• A Big Bad who is simply defeated by a trick is usually not memorable.
• A Horde can be frightening but usually isn't particularly noteworthy.

Still more thoughts about Crisis at Crusader Citadel

Icons

Yeah. So I ran the first half last night, and I have more thoughts. There are tons of spoilers here for a forty-year-old adventure, so be warned.

The session had its ups and down. It dragged. One of the players even talked about the AD&D mindset: plan what you're going to do, down to the number of torches! Do it, but the dice rolls will introduce complications. I think that just kills momentum. It was fine when we had all Saturday to play, but that's not the case for me anymore.

A thing I sometimes do is map an adventure onto the time available and say, “Okay, this is the halfway point and if we’re not here by this point, I have to make adjustments on the fly.” If I had done that, I think it would have been better; I should have said, “It’s really about two fights, we have three-and-a-half hours, we need to be starting the first fight within an hour.” I didn’t do that, so we got through part one in a little over three-and-a-half hours.

(I suppose that’s a kind of railroading, but given the purpose of the session, I think that’s acceptable. In an on-going campaign, I would find some other way that’s less choo-choo.)

We'll skip the real-world stuff that I had no control over, except that sometimes uncontrollable stuff happens.

I don't feel a need to run the second part as-is. I might run the whole thing again some day to try out ideas to streamline it.

I should have realized the setups for the fights drag because I found just that such a slog in solo play. Yes, the adventure seems to be basically a premise for two big fights, but getting the pieces in place is a hassle, and there has to be a better way to do that for 2022 gamers.

Let's briefly re-cap the scenes and what I think they bring to the adventure:

1. Part One:
   • Meet at the Harmon Building. (Get a clue that TEACHER is on the fritz.)
   • Get everything recapped by the reporter in the lobby, plus a bit of additional information. (Info: the name of the detective in charge of the task force, more info about the Crushers.)

   • Maybe be interviewed by the reporter. (Possible plot twist that doesn't pay off anywhere. You could maybe make it pay off; as it is, it gets negated, so it's just a colour point that might eat up a lot of time.)
   • Get to the police station (again, in both solo play and with people, this turned out to be a problem) and meet the detective. (Essentially: “Yes, we'll let you help! Why don't you take over?”) That gets you into the next part...
   • Get maps of Manning Enterprises and plan the ambush (setup).
   • Have a longish fight in the ambush.
2. Part Two:
   • Meet Dr. Patrovich and hear what the real plan is. (Informs you of your next goal.)
   • Meet escaped Crusaders, if any, an plan assault. (More planning.)
   • Fight.

Looking at that, getting to the police station is a hang-up. Both times I've played it, it was a problem: at least one character didn't have real movement powers. In a comic, we'd skip over it (“Minutes later, at the precinct…”) but with players at the table, you have to figure it out.

In retrospect, I might put Broyko, the police detective, at the Harmon Building, being interviewed by the reporter. How do we get to the police station then? Pfft; he’s got a car.

(Okay, in a modern interpretation, I wouldn’t even be in the lobby: I’d have the Crusaders have a website that’s acting weirdly, but the PCs figure out where the next theft will be — it’s not hard — and put the SWAT teams in the mix as plants in the building, and the reporter nearby. Adding more people is not going to make the Manning Enterprises fight crowded: it's already crowded AF, and that gives heroes someone to save. Use the stock characters from the rulebook.)

In a similar way, the fight in the second half rewards a lot of planning, but do you need that with a system like Icons? Retcons can carry a lot of weight here, and I'd give them a temporary Quality like “Intensive planning session” that they can activate for a retcon. (“Ah, we covered this...”)

There are at least two ways to get into the Citadel without being detected. If they need to brute force it, they can. Once they're in the headquarters, that second fight can start.

The storm is never explained, or made evident, besides the possiblity that an escaped Crusader might be dripping wet. If the player character powersets permit, I might even dramatize the storm by having lightning strike Patrovich’s plane and the PCs have to rescue him. It would give them a chance to do something else heroic, introduce the storm, and introduce Dr. Patrovich. It's a thought.

Anyway. Give the players ten minutes to plan. Execute the plan. Anything that they would reasonably have thought of is an Intellect test or an Advantage on the way. Do you remember that or did you think of it? Leave it to chance. Do you really want it to have happened? It’s a retcon.

So maybe it becomes something like:

1. Everybody tries to contact the Crusaders website; all fail to leave a message, so they know something's wrong. You out and out tell them; maybe there's a test in there for people with an appropriate specialty that gives them more information. Everybody gets five minutes of spotlight and they can use computer skills they happen to have.
2. Everybody figures out that the Crushers are probably going to attack the Manning Enterprises that night; you can do that as an Intellect test, or guide them to the info some other way. Maybe one of the heroes is listening to the police band radio; maybe they've researched the thefts; maybe they get the information off a conspiracy website. If some character really doesn't have a way to figure it out, they meet another character who drags them along.
   • Maybe the Crushers aren't hiding that they're going to show up.
   • Heck, maybe the Crushers sent a note: “You haven't been able to stop us yet. Tonight. Manning Enterprises, midnight.” Of course, they show up at ten p.m.
3. At Manning Enterprises, the Crushers show up. You have the fight, along with SWAT teams, Jessica Anderson, and J. B. Curtis, who get to actually show up in this version.
4. Part Two starts with rescuing Dr. Patrovich from some weather-related problem. He tells the heroes the problem...and that there's a deadline: The governor is sending in the military tomorrow at dawn.
5. Ten player minutes to plan, but in story it's half a day of intensive planning. Use retcons at outlined.
6. Fight.

Anyway, it's an idea. (Now that I've started thinking about it, no doubt I'll have ideas about what the various Crushers should actually be doing when the heroes break in. And the issue of how many Crushers versus how many PCs should be addressed.)

I wouldn't necessarily do things like this if it were an adventure about a mystery or one of the characters making a life choice or something like that. But this is an adventure about two big fights.

And...Portal City

Superhero RPG

I was working on Strange City, which has its own rationale, but it is a somewhat complicated environment for someone who doesn't care about the other stuff and just wants to test out the system (I've used it for Mutants & Masterminds but I'll probably also use it for other systems.)

Anyway, I use Portal City. This is a small city on the Great Lakes (I play it as Canadian, but, hey, I'm Canadian). It had mystery men back in the 1940s and occasionally has visiting supers, but the PCs are really the first heroes who have stayed in town. (There's a certain flavour of “If you were really good, you'd go off to New York or even Toronto.”)

Here's what I've established for it so far:

• Lack of supers doesn't mean lack of superpowers. There are people with powers in town, but for various reasons they don't want to be spandex-clad supers.
• There's a certain amount of anti-mutant sentiment, so the twelve-step group dealing with “living with your mutant power” goes to a certain amount of trouble to keep the members' identities hidden, from the world and from each other.
• There is a university or college.

Incidents or anecdotes vs adventures

All

I've never formulated this quite this way before, so it seemed significant when I backed onto saying it on Facebook. Here it is, with more waffling and watering down.

One of the things, it seems to me, that separates an incident from an adventure is that the players try something in an incident and either succeed or fail, and then go on with their lives.

A lot of random tables are like this. “On the road, you meet (rolls) 1d6 robbers who take your weapons and your gold.” Then the PCs go on, now poor and weaponless, because the real objective is to get to Riverden. Maybe the PCs later meet and trounce the robbers because they recognize a weapon or something, but it's largely kinda anecdote-ish. When they write their memoirs, the PCs will not assign it any particular significance except as a throwaway sentence: Because robbers took my money, I arrived in Riverden with nothing but the clothes on my back.

In an adventure and your commercial fiction, the incident is elevated; it becomes part of the whole try-fail cycle. The robbers take the gold the PCs need to hire the cleric to deal with the illness and yadda yadda yadda.

Part of that try-fail cycle is consequences—in one case, the theft leads them to arrive in the new city penniless; in the other, it impedes what they're trying to do. If they don't have a goal, you can't really block them on that, so how can there be a meaningful failure?

One of the ways you deal with giving something significance in improve is reincorporation. The PCs find the robbers; the villain returns. Something like that. So having something recur is a tool you can deploy (as a GM) to make something more memorable, but that doesn't really give it significance.

Now, you can give things significance even if they didn't start that way. Let's use a superhero example instead. The heroes have to rescue a cat from a tree. Even if the cat is odd—it's a leopard escaped from a zoo! It's a phase-shifting cat that resists any attempts to grab it!— that doesn't make it more significant to the evening. However, if it's part of something bigger it becomes significant. Maybe the leopard escaped from the zoo as part of microtremblors that Earthquaker is causing in the area on the way to the bank/scientific lab/alien embassy. Maybe the phase-shifting cat is a foreshadowing that the evil Empire of Ghosts is invading our dimension.

I've mentioned this sort of thing before: if they vanquish the enemy too quickly, the encounter loses significance (We've still got two hours left!) so you can give it significance back by making it part of a larger event.

This has bad personal implications for me because I suck at the continuity between sessions and picking up the threads that are left behind, so I have to think about how to record the dropped potential threads in such a way that they're easy to pick up and reincorporate in the future.

Creating a cult?

Any superhero

A confluence of two things (needing to create background for Strange City, the four-part Friends of Jackson Elias podcast on cults, which I recommend) has me thinking about cults.

Now, from a story point of view, cults are often used to create hordes of nameless mooks who fight to the incapacitation. That's fine, but there could be other stories or other uses. For instance, in a superhero game you might want to have a significant NPC fall into the clutches of a cult, or you might want the Hunted to be a cult, or you might want the super-powered villain to be granted powers by a cult. But to do that, your cults need to be a little more nuanced.

What do cults do (narratively)?

Okay. So what do cults do, from a story point of view?

• They provide disposable mooks, as mentioned.
• They can pursue relentlessly (because it's their sense of self being threatened).
• They take members away from the characters.
• They enable the entrance of villains.

There might be more, but those are the ones that strike me immediately. Let's concentrate on that third one, because that one has the most to do with the cult.

Is there magic in this cult?

So the first thing I think of is, “Does the cult have real access or fake access to the supernatural?”

In most superhero game environments, there really is some kind of access to evil demons, spirits, other-dimensional entities, trapped gods, and so on. So: Does the cult have access to one of those? (And you can ring changes there, like this is the aftercult after the demon was exiled, this was a fake cult until the amnesiac joined who was actually the exiled demon Nialliv, or whatever.)

• If the cult has real access, then at some point, the players have to see it. The adventure is building to fighting the evil thing or stopping the ritual. The evil thing might be a bunch of misguided supers or maybe a freed demon or some kind of world-altering magic, but it exists.
• If the cult doesn't have access, then you have to decide what the real goal of the cult is. The adventure is building to freeing someone(s) from the cult. You can still introduce super-powered beings; most game worlds have those available for hire. But the cult as it is isn't about freeing Cthulhu or Ba'al or even Christ.

(Or not defeating the evil thing or not freeing the person. But you knew that, so I'm not going to mention that sort of thing again.)

This decision affects your adventure, not the design of the cult, but since this is a tool to an adventure, we do it now.

What do they say they want?

Look, relatively few people join a cult whose avowed goal is "release the evil world-destroying demon.' Even the Rapture fans who want to bring about Armageddon are doing it because they're sure that they will be on the side of good. (This is, I suppose, the equivalent of voting for the Leopards Eating Faces party, because you're sure that your face is safe.)

Whatever the thing is, that's what people are joining for. People tend to join at a time of confusion or uncertainty, and that's your goal. The supporting character wants protection from these eeeevil mentalists? The cult is an organization teaching useful mental protection techniques.

Real world things that have been used (and this isn't all of them, by a long shot, just a sampler).

• Tolerance and inclusivity (go ahead, look up Jim Jones)
• Ecological help
• Self-control
• Personal improvement generally
• Improve your money situation (this tends to be part of multilevel marketing scams instead, but "don't have financial worries" has certainly been used)
• A supportive community
• Personal fulfilment

What does the cult really want?

You probably want to specify this in two ways:

• The vague general goal, which could be “Make me money!” or “Free the voice in that book so it can give me money!”
• The specific, actionable goal, that your heroes are going to interfere with

I mean, if you only come up with one goal, great, but if it doesn't lead to a plan by the bad guys, then the good guys can't interfere. And if it's too specific, the cult doesn't return after your heroes interrupt the summoning. Now, sometimes that's okay, but sometimes you want the cult to hang around. “Oh, the Wave of Shimmering Light...those guys are bad news.”

(It occurs to me that you can use the same general step for creating an evil villain-based multi-level marketing campaign, too, but I digress.)

How do the heroes get involved?

So you have a vague idea of what the bad cult is doing, and you know why Feckless NPC joined. What does Feckless have to do that leads the heroes to the specific goal? Do the heroes find out about it because they're just researching the cult to find out if it's safe for Feckless? Or does Feckless have enough extradimensional energies in the body from various superhero-adjacent romps that it's specifically Feckless who has to be sacrificed for the incantation at midnight to work?

From those things, you should be able to generate a cult, have some idea of what they're doing as a recruiting tactic, and how the heroes get involved.

The Bureau of Extremely Foreign Affairs

M&M

In my games, we sometimes deal with the Bureau of Extremely Foreign Affairs, which started as the Canadian department for dealing with extraterrestrial civilizations. There is a bureaucratic arm and an investigative arm.

For this week's adventure, I have modified the BEFA for superheroes. They are a subdivision of the department of Foreign Affairs, and they deal with extra-normal political entities.

While high technology and super-science might not fall into their remit, magic almost always does. Trade something with fairyland? They deal with the excise taxes. Granted a boon by a Lovecraftian cosmic horror? They put a dollar value on it or determine if it's dangerous to the public safety. They also deal with the local equivalents of Atlantis or Themyscira. Heck, they might be responsible for extradimensional refugees, or be the department that calls your heroes when Galactus arrives. ("He has refused normal methods of communication and I am sure we don't want a repeat of the Thanos issue. The deaths and rebirths alone cause an incredible number of headaches.")

In the Dr. Why adventure, they can occasionally borrow from the Department of Defense a magic-sniffer (who is not without her own problems) to find, say, a previously-shielded magic power source of unknown provenance, which might indicate illegal trade, smuggling, or the existence of a previously-unrealized pantheon.

And just having thought about them this much makes me want to do a short BEFA adventure.

In Medias Res

Any

I was listening to Encounter Party! (a podcast...an actual play that works very hard on editing it down to less than an hour) and it was close enough to fiction that I was thinking about the differences between roleplaying and fiction, and something came to mind that might be useful for writers and GMs.

Interrupt NPCs.

That is, they have lives of their own. They're presumably doing something at the point when your PCs or protagonists interact with them. What? It doesn't have to be something big or obstructionist; a character might be there to help (an Uber driver, a doorman) but it's still the beginning of a shift to be dreaded or the middle of a weird day, or the end of a long one.

And other characters were actually doing something else. That guy at the beer store has a list as long as your arm to complete before going home for the weekend, and it's 3:55, buddy. The concierge at the hotel has just been taken to task for helping guests but at too high a cost. The gossip just wants to tell somebody in her group that she just met StupendousMan and really, it looks like he's wearing lifts.

Even the people who don't look like they're doing something significant might be doing something else in their heads, too. That professor going into her office is fuming about her placement in the published proceedings. The old guy pushing a broom is thinking about the argument he had with his wife.

So maybe part of coming up with an NPC is name, attitude, and what they were doing.

Player Types Revisited

Wayyyy back when, Aaron Allston formulated a list of player types in Hero Games' Strike Force and it's been reproduced and copied ever since. I thought I'd take a look at the list and maybe ring some changes on it.

The list: Reproduced here with Mr. Allston's terms but my descriptions, so we're not committing accidental copyright infringement.

Also, I'm using male pronouns here, because I'm old and that's my habit. I'll try to change them before I post this to a gender-neutral "they/them" but please forgive me if I miss one. Point it out and I'll change it.

Type	Description	GM Should
Builder	Wants to have an effect on the world	Let them change the world
Buddy	Here because friends are here	Draw them into roleplaying, or ignore them, depending on circumstances and your needs
Combat Monster	Optimizes character for combat and wants to hit things	Have something to fight every session
Copier	Wants a character just like certain other popular character or just like the character they play in every other game. "Yeah, a boxer, but a stealthy sneaky one who lurks in the shadows and throws knives."	Understand the player's goals and try to meet those; also, let them know in advance if their version will have restrictions.
Genre Fiend	Knows everything about the genre you're playing, and will correct you.	Find out what the player's expectations are and try to meet them.
Mad Slasher	Here to blow off steam from a long week at work	Either have a group of mad slashers or get rid of the player.
Mad Thinker	Wants a clever solution to everything	Have a puzzle of some kind every session, even if the combat isn't one
Plumber	Wants to plumb the character, right down to third-grade teacher's name and response to the Trolley Problem.	Provide different kinds of situations and problems to illuminate different parts of the character.
Pro From Dover	The best at what they do. And nobody else better be as good or better.	Let them shine once in a while, and don't step on their toes
Romantic	Has relationships. Not just of the heart, but rivalries, enmities, friendships, frenemies, and so on.	Provide NPCs for all those kinds of relationships.
Rules Rapist	Exploit every edge condition and loophole in the rules	Figure out what the player really wants or get rid of them.
Showoff	Take the spotlight and keep the spotlight	Survive this phase or get rid of the player
Tragedian	Tragic things happen, and always to this character. Not all at once, of course, but spaced out.	Give the character heartbreak, betrayal, loss, and more.

One of the things that stands out to me is that there are certain player types where the advice is basically, "Get rid of the player." I don't fully agree (in my experience, the actions are often a response to other problems that have nothing to do with the game, and while they might damage your game right now, the player often deserves a later chance). Still, there is a tremendous reserve of "We've been excluded, so we have to include everybody" in the gaming communities I've been in, and I've committed that sin myself, so I understand it. Still: it means that the types Mad Slasher, Rules Rapist, and Showoff are there so you can recognize them and get rid of them. The Buddy isn't actively damaging to your campaign.

I suppose that's useful advice, but you can't do much else with it.

The other advice really boils down to, "Find out what each player wants and give it to them if you can." Sometime that's easy (the Combat Monster).

I think the biggest jewel here is: Not everyone wants the same thing.

The general set of game mastering suggestions you can draw from it:

• Find out what each player wants.
  • Make a list; we don't all want the same thing every time.
• Let them know what the limits are on providing it (say, the Copier's demand for a certain character type).
• Let each character be unique. Give them the spotlight in the way that each person likes: Let the Pro from Dover be the best at what he does, let the Tragedian wallow in angst, get the Romantic tangled in heartstrings, give the Plumber a visit from that obscure person in the backstory.

Know whether your game group's equivalent to disadvantages are a quick point grab (the three different things you could do in Hero that amounted to "Hates criminals") or a plea for stories of that kind. I have been guilty of both; I remember that early in my Champions career I had a Hunted that was, well, pointless, and I wasn't really interested when he did show up. On the other hand, after a gaming drought, I carefully crafted every aspect of my character to provide story activities. (Hint: If you're going to do this, give the list of possible story activities to your GM; as a GM, I find it awful when I get a character who has obviously been designed with care and I have no idea what to do with those qualities, aspects, or disadvantages.) (Second hint: We're older now; more than a page of backstory is probably too much. The way I feel today, three-quarters of a page and six story seed bullet points is probably enough.)

The Minion Escape

SYSTEM: ICONS

Generally applicable to Superhero games, but I'm using ICONS as an example. I'm also going to assume that the heroes involved don't have reputations as killers: your minion has a different approach facing the Elongated Man than facing the Punisher.

So the heroes stumble into the bad guy's minions, and there's a fight. Maybe the heroes knock them all out, but maybe there's a point in the middle of the six minions to two heroes battle when two minions have already fallen, but the rest are still up.

It'll depend on circumstances, but why don't the minions flee?

I mean, sure, if each minion has the Quality "Fanatically Loyal to SKULL" then they fight to unconsciousness, but most minions aren't fanatically loyal...that's part of the reason they're minions. The villain went down to Thugs'R'Us and ordered a half-dozen, or something.

Do you have to fight until you defeat all the minions, every time?

Well, when I put it that way, no, of course not.

Again, circumstances: sometimes the minions have to go through the heroes to get out, so they're fighting instead of fleeing. But normally, why don't they try to run away after the battle turns against them?

Heck, why don't they try to flee as soon as the heroes show up? Maybe the villain has planned for it: "I want you four to steal the Illudium Q-36 Space Modulator, but if the Great Gang shows up, just cheese it. Make sure the Security Code Generator doesn't get caught—flush it down a toilet if you have to." Maybe not.

If you want a mechanical way to do it (and I don't recommend that, because it's just minion-on-minion action), roll Willpower against the number of heroes, with each additional minion being added like combining effort. If the minion succeeds, well, fear of the boss has won over good sense and the minion stays to fight. Minion qualities can add or subtract 2 to the roll.

Or roll your D6: A 1 is fleeing. As minions get taken down, that fleeing number gets higher. When 1 minion is taken down, the minion flees on a 1 or a 2. When 2 get taken down, the remaining minions flee on a 1, 2, or 3. When more get taken down, minions flee on a 1 through 4. At some point, the remaining minion just wants to leave or hide or surrender.

Your fled minion might be a source of future events. Maybe the minion gave the information to the boss, but maybe not. Maybe the minion hid until the boss was caught. Maybe the minion joined an opposing gang. Maybe the minion started a course, "Escaping from heroes," that's taught at the Annex (under a different name). Maybe the minion was scared straight. Or maybe the minion starts an anti-supers campaign against both heroes and villains because normal people shouldn't have to put up with such fear.

Investigation in games

SYSTEM: ICONS

This is actually specific to ICONS but it could be adapted for any game with a degrees-of-success mechanic.

Investigation is sort of odd in games. For some games (the various GUMSHOE games, for instance), it's their jam. For other games, it's a roll to give people the info so they can get on to the next encounter.

So you can roleplay the investigation, with the players talking to various characters and hours of playtime can go by, and that's great, if everyone's on board with that.

On the other hand, you can reduce it to a roll or a series of rolls and have a handout or handouts for the players, and it's done quickly. "You spend two hours researching shipping companies, and this is what you get."

Sometimes you want one, sometimes you want the other. And if you're writing an adventure to be played by anyone other than the group you know, then you have to take both mindsets into account.

I don't know if anyone else produces adventures with areas where there are investigation or similar tests. What I've noticed that I have started doing is this:

Topic (whatever the test is about
Difficulty	3 or 5 or whatever
Pyramid test?	No or Optional or Required
Time	How long is this test going to take? Sometimes the time is implicit in the task.
Everybody Knows	This is the background information. Bombs are bad, the Noble family has three kids. You barely have to ask this stuff.
Marginal Success	Do they get information on a marginal success?
Moderate Success	Anything for Marginal Success, plus whatever is here.
Major Success	Anything for the previous two successes, plus whatever is here.
Massive Success	Anything for the previous successes, plus whatever is here.
Consequences	This might be obvious. (Boom or no boom, when disarming a bomb.) But that goes back to something else. If there aren't any consequences, why are you making them roll? If you've got the information listed here, it means two things: There's a consequence to not getting some of it You're okay with them having all of it. Sometimes players roll well, and if you don't want the info to change things, don't make it available. Have it show up only after the computer contacts the alien probe or something.

And...here's an important point...where possible, I list the source they find stuff from, so I can improvise a roleplay investigation if the players are into that. So some stuff is just in the records ("Ten minutes of Googling tells you the basic rules of cabotage in Canada"), some could be tied to a person. ("Mrs. Johnson was the one who saw the ghost.")


Also, I've been looking at Encounter Theory and trying to use that to guide some of the adventures I'm writing now. Anybody else heard of it (Plot Points podcast)?

Superheroes don't miss

SYSTEM: ANY

Having watched Thor Ragnarok and Justice League on two successive days, this morning in the shower I came to a realization:

For the most part, superheroes and supervillains don't miss.

Oh, they fail to do damage...but they rarely miss. They catch the thickest part of the armor, or hit the magical bracelets, or hit the suddenly-manifested shield, or fail to hurt someone because they are invulnerable, or their omniforce field disintegrates the bullets before they hit.

When they do miss, it's part of the hero or villain's schtick or niche: lots of foes miss against the Flash or Quicksilver, because a big part of his thing is being so fast that he moves out of the way. Batman frequently can't be seen (but his foes tend to be more in the human range than the supervillain range.) Spider-Man is so agile that foes miss him.

This is just a narration thing, but I suspect it will give much more of a superhero feel to things. A failed roll doesn't mean a missed shot. For some heroes or villains it will, yes: figure out who that is. But for everyone else, figure out a list of reasons why the super's attack failed to do damage.

(I'm sure I've read this advice before, but coming to it myself makes it more powerful. I'm going to try it at the Drop-In on Wednesday. Of course, those who go to the Drop-In and read this will know I'm trying this, but that shouldn't matter.)

Some GMing Thoughts

SYSTEM: Any

I'm hit and miss on Johnn Four's GMing newsletter. A lot of it is very D&D-focused, which doesn't mean anything to me. But today he had a couple of pieces of advice that I'd like to re-spin in my own way. And this is basic stuff, because I don't seem to grok advice from Robin Laws and Ken Hite on designing choices into adventures. (I suspect it's terminology, and I feel like there's an insight on the opposite side of the advice, but I'm not getting there.)

Anyway, restated tidbit #1: If there's no interesting results for both making and not making the roll, don't make the roll. I'm not saying there's no point to randomness. (Hey, I play ICONS—of course there's a place for randomness.) Some details are totally fine left to chance. "Do we have Fainting Goat Snack Cakes to distract the demon cow?" "I dunno, you have the Gadgets power; roll on it to see if you can scrounge together a tasty non-meaty treat."

But if you just assumed they'd find the clue about Thutmoses III, don't make them roll to find the book on Egyptology was open. Say, "And the book on Egyptology is open with a passage about Thutmoses III underlined." Or you're pretty sure the bad guys will just execute them if the minions actually defeat them in battle? Use a pyramid test, and instead of determining if they get into the secret base, the pyramid test determines when they get to the headquarters. They get in early, they get some tidbit that makes things easier (they might prevent the launch of the nuclear missile, even though they'll still have to beat the bad guys) or if they get in late, something else has happened that makes it tougher (every time it takes them three pages to eliminate the pyramid test, they have to face another batch of minions...and every pyramid test after the first means another missile readied for launch, for example).

And if someone has an appropriate Specialty or Quality or background, maybe they just get the information or do the task. They can ask to roll if they want more.

Restated tidbit #2: Doing something is better than debating about doing something. Sometimes a dilemma is a part of your hook or your climax. I understand. As a player, I've sometimes had characters had to make tough choices, and they didn't always decide the way the GM thought they would. A scene with the character's romantic interest is doing something. This isn't about that. This is about the entire group waffling about what to do.

"Well, if we go after Dr. Mind-nought directly, we get at the root of the problem, but if we do that, innocent people might die while we're attacking him...but if we stop the people, then Dr. Mind-nought will have a chance to get his hooks into more people and then innocent people might die..."

I'm not suggesting railroading here. But no matter which way they go, the characters do something, and while they're debating it, nothing is happening. And I'm also not suggesting there be no debate. But gaming time is limited. One of three things is probably going to happen:

• They go after the mind-controlled thralls.
• They go after Dr. Mind-nought.
• They split up and go after both.

(In my example, they're not going to ignore the problem and catch a movie.)

Given that one of those three things is going to happen, give them a chance to state the pro and con of each choice, give them a couple of minutes to talk about it, and then force the issue. Ask each player what the character does, and they'll split up or attack one or the other. If they split up, you'll have to interweave the two scenes to keep both groups engaged, but at least they're doing something.

Is one choice optimal? Sometimes. Are they going to get to do both things anyway? Maybe. Obviously, they get to go after Dr. Mind-nought whether they go after the thralls or not. If the choice is between Bank robbery by Cashflow or Hostage situation by Strongarm, maybe they're choosing which adventure to play tonight, and this will eventually lead to the discovery that the villains are tallying up their villain Q scores, to figure out who can be used as a distraction by the others.

Anyway, two thoughts for designing and running your adventures.

What Street Level means to me

SYSTEM: ANY

Someone was asking for a street-level system over on G+ the other day, and I had answered before I really examined my assumptions. So here we'll take a quick look at street-level supers.

If I say I want a street-level hero, then I probably mean Black Lightning. Or Arsenal. Or Batman...wait. Do I mean Batman? Or Spider-Man? I mean, the Bat goes up against Darkseid on a regular basis, as part of the Justice League. And while Spider-Man whups a certain amount of hoodlum butt, I never think of someone like the Green Goblin or Doc Ock as street-level, so why should their arch-foes be street level?

But on the other hand, if we measure a hero by his or her occasional opponents, then anyone who has ever been in the Avengers or the Justice League is not street level. (And over the years, they've had pretty much everybody.) Even though the Justice League has a number of decidedly cosmic foes, it has also had members like Vibe, who it's pretty safe to say is street level. And Black Lightning.

And, frankly, it can't be power level, because I don't think that we can count Adam Strange as street level, even though he's just a dude with a raygun and a rocket pack.

Where does Squirrel Girl fit? I mean, her whole raison d'etre seems to be to take down cosmic villains with a plucky attitude and a set of frankly silly (uh, sillier than usual) powers.

So it can't be occasional opponents and it can't be power level. What about regular opponents? Well, for the early part of his existence, Jim Corrigan as the Spectre confined himself to thugs and hoodlums. In those days, he was the spirit of vengeance. Star Lord has, well, the kind of powers that would do him okay in Hell's Kitchen, but he is a regular in cosmic stories.

There is no hard-and-fast rule, especially as characters wander between titles and teams. So the term "street level" has got to be a guideline, a kind of wish list, rather than an absolute.

With that out of the way, when you say a character is street level, here's what it means to me. Your definition might vary.

• The character isn't that powerful, or that really intense power is limited in some way. Perhaps OmniNom can turn anyone into a piece of bedroom furniture given their true name, but most people don't even know their true names. OmiNom has to be like any regular trained person...until finding out the person's true name...and then exacts retribution. Or Hulkette can bench press a tank, but has normal tensile strength problems when trying to lift or move heavy objects.
• Some guys with guns are an actual threat. Kitty Pryde and Colossus probably aren't street level by that metric. Batman might be; every once in a while, they get a lucky shot (when guided by the plot).
• The usual stomping grounds is a neighbourhood or city, and it's a noteworthy event when the character goes elsewhere.
• The usual foe hasn't got ambitions beyond the city. There are no plans to take over the world, but rather plans to knock over the 7-11. Or bank. Or maybe get that valuable item out of the vault. Or revenge. If he or she gets hold of an unstoppable robot killing machine, the most likely use is to rob jewelry stores.[1] Again, it's a noteworthy event going up against a foe with bigger plans.

These aren't absolute; characters can be really powerful and be limited mentally or morally, or have sworn an oath to defend this patch of land. But really I need three out of four of these for a character to sometimes be street level.

It feels more like scope, though that's not all of it. Spider-Man is street level mostly because he chooses not to deal with world or nation threatening problems. Cosmic characters talk about worlds and universes where street level characters talk about buildings and streets. They save the world or the universe on a regular basis. (Must be tough to get insurance on Rann.)

In an RPG, lowering the available points/dice is an easy adjustment, but if everyone's on the same page, you might not need even that. 

1. And then drive the Unstoppable Killing Machine out of town to unload it, but the cops are still following it, so you have to kill or disable the cops, and then the spy satellites have it, and it's just sitting there...with a load of bullion...waiting. Killing anyone who comes near. Man, that sounds like a setup for a story.