New Jam: TRUE BELIEVERS (Part One)

I have a lot of games on my shelves that I've never actually run. Even if it's just for reading, there are lots of things that you can get out of a game book. Some I wouldn't ever consider running for my existing groups, because they'd be a bad fit in terms of material, rules systems, or what have you. Some of them I've been trying to get on the table for a long time, and every once in a while I lift them off the shelf and leaf through them longingly.

One of those is WILD TALENTS.

I love supers games, and I've been a big fan of Dennis Detwiller and Greg Stolze for a long time. WT is a powerhouse of a game, bulging at the seams with great ideas and tools for play, and powered by a sleek and deadly (yet flexible) system that iterates on the great One Roll Engine first seen in D&S's earlier WW2 supers game, Godlike. It's an embarrassment of riches for a supers GM to dive into, but -- as the authors admit -- it's sort of a niche-within-a-niche game.

Now I think I might actually get a chance to run this bad boy, this summer. Our Wednesday night group is running up on the finale of our Deadlands game powered by Primetime Adventures, and I am enthusiastic about making WT the game that succeeds it.

I have always loved supers games, since I discovered Villains & Vigilantes in high school -- it was my go-to game to introduce new players to roleplaying for years, until Mutants & Masterminds came along and improved on practically every part of it. My natural instinct is to run something that's broad and Marvel-esque, but WT has a particular focus that is leading me down a path that's much more eccentric and interesting.

The focus of Wild Talents is on characters that believe in something deeply. In the canon setting, the super-powered Talents believe so strongly that they can bend reality to suit their whims. I'm not going with that particular concept, but I wanted to do a story about characters who were passionately committed to... something. Characters who are strongly invested in something make a good focus for games generally, as they have something at stake. In a superhero game, that's doubly important; even if you're not playing a game where the PCs are iconic heroes, they need to believe in something pretty strongly to put on a costume and go fight crime.

That was the other thing I strongly wanted in my game -- costumes. Really, if you're not interested in wearing a costume, what the hell are you doing playing a superhero game? There are any number of games out there where the characters are effectively super-powered beings minus the trappings of spandex and masks. Why would anyone want to play a superhero game without the trappings that differentiate it from every other genre out there?

So tossing around the idea of characters with strong beliefs (maybe even obsessions) and costumes took me in a direction I wasn't expecting. I toyed with the idea of the heroes being "grinders" (a term coined by Warren Ellis in his great cyberpunk comic Doktor Sleepless), early adopters of new body-modification technology that effectively made them super-beings. I liked the idea of heroes (and villains) belonging to a subculture that was obsessive, radical, committed, insular, underground, taboo, freaky.

It seemed to me that there was some juice in exploring some of the psycho-sexual side of superheroics that Alan Moore dragged out into the light in Watchmen, even if I was doing it in a slightly more irreverent way.

Promotional still of porn star Kimberly Kane as Wonder Woman

The above image convinced me that the line between superhero costumes and fetish gear is thin at best, and that perhaps the reason why it took Hollywood so long to "get" superheroes was a fear of that side of the costume image. With the right group of fearless players, this could be exciting territory for a game.

And there was one more element that made all of this come together for me in a way I hadn't expected...

The Eternal Question

If you've spent as much time lurking in the cranky morass that is RPG.net, you know that, like the seasons, certain questions and topics come around again and again. Sometimes with depressing regularity. It doesn't matter what shiny new game Jason Morningstar's just come out with, there is always someone that wants to complain about the rules in Rifts and hash out ideas for "fixing" it.

The question I'm coming around to, the one that people always seem to be asking and wondering about, is: How much prep should I do for a session?

I gave some thought to this after talking with my friend Colin on the weekend. He was surprised when I said that for my Rocket Robin Hood game Sherwood, I had actually been doing a fair amount of prep ahead of the sessions. Yeah, despite the fact that it's a light and frothy game full of zany chases and sword fights and rocket bikes, that's a game that's taken me a fair amount of heavy lifting, in a narrative sense, to get off the ground.

I had come to Sherwood having just taken an extended absence from the Big Chair, and part of doing more formal prep was getting my head back in the game. The more I have on paper for that game, the happier I am. And Sherwood is what I think of as a "B" game, a side project -- something that's more of an amusing sidelight to the main events of games like Sunset Empire or Shadowrun: Disavowed.

Yet, for some of those more "meaty" games, I am perfectly comfortable with a half page of scribbled notes in my spiral-bound notepad. Often, for those games, I will scratch down some ideas for a handful of scenes that could happen, any ideas I have for some choice dialogue, and notes for anything important that needs to play out (like a scene requested by one of my players in our "Next Time On..." segment at the end of an episode).

For me, the answer to the Eternal Question is this: Do as much prep as necessary.

Early on in a game, I do a lot of preparation and research for the campaign as a whole. For Sunset Empire, I kept reading until I felt I had a good enough grasp on the world of 1884 London to fake the rest. For Shadowrun, I read my way through enough of the 2nd Edition sourcebooks that I had my head in the world of Seattle 2055, and I could start assembling my own vision of that world. Once that early work is done, I don't need that much work to maintain the flow and consistency of material, and more of my prep has to do with thinking about play (and recording it in my journal) and responding to what the players are pursuing / interested in.

For a one shot, I often do a fair amount of formalizing things on paper -- I actually wrote quite a bit of material for the Slasher Flick one-off I ran at STRDEXCon, for example. I think part of that (which is probably of a piece with Sherwood) is "writing myself into the world", if you can follow that. Once I've got it firmed up in my head, less prep is necessary. When I run a Firefly one-shot at a con, I can fall back on the work I did running that game as an ongoing feature. It's a world I'm comfortable returning to.

For me, the question boils down to this: How much work is necessary in order for me to feel comfortable running this game and make it fun for everybody?

That's the tipping point on prep for me.

Leaving Londinium (Part Five)

It was always my intention for Sunset Empire to lead to this point -- to climax with the vampires seemingly having won, taken London and driven to the player characters to a very dark place indeed. The point being to raise the stakes as high as possible, then see what happened next.

See, the thing about the heroes of Sunset Empire is that they are all, as I've said in previous entries, excellent case studies in how imperial power crushes people down. None of them have a personal stake in propping up the existing power structures, and indeed many of the characters would be just fine with the world they know being wiped clean.

The question is, when these characters have an opportunity to literally change the world -- what will they do with that opportunity? What kind of future will they build? Will it look like what came before? Will it be a brave new world? Or will they wash their hands of the whole problem once the vampires have been dealt with?

There was an assumption on my players' part earlier in the campaign that this was a game that would fit neatly into the Buffyverse canon, and indeed I have done my best to see that a lot of the elements would work within that framework -- but only to a point. I always remained quiet when they made that assertion, because I knew that my third act was something that would have been impossible for the Buffyverse to ignore or forget. And it would indeed have the possibility of changing the setting forever. (It's a pedantic point anyway, as the Buffyverse never made mention of a Victorian space program or steampunk golems or a large settlement of faeries living inside London. Never mind.)

The discomforting thing (for a GM) about creating such a third act is that it places a great deal of responsibility on the shoulders of the players. I have a great deal of faith in my players' abilities to "bring the awesome", but I have played in a great many games where players balked or froze up when presented with the opportunity to make big, bold moves. They preferred the comfortable presence of a series concept that was smaller in scale and more personal.

But there's nowhere to go but forward, full steam, now. Jump on Mr. Fogg's airship, grab your sword, and get ready to kick out the jams one more time.

God save the Queen! 

Leaving Londinium (Part Four)

Warning to my players. Possible Spoilers ahead, as I peel back the curtain on some of the story stuff happening... read at your own risk, or else wait until the season wraps.

One of the first story problems I had to deal with, approaching Season Three of Sunset Empire, was the presence of a character that I fully expected would be dead by the end of Season Two...

William Gull. They HATE this guy.

Player characters are a contrary lot. They invariably act in ways that GMs have great difficulty predicting. That's a good deal of the fun in roleplaying, of course. But sometimes it throws you for a loop. And despite the fact that the player characters pretty much universally despised William Gull, the grouchy, willful leader of the Royal Magisterial Corps, damn if they didn't rescue his ass from certain death at the hands of Mithras.

It was my intention to let Gull go down fighting, in an epic duel of magic with Mithras that would at least highlight his formidable spellcasting prowess. But Mudlark and Matthias teleported into his office at the last moment, spiriting him away before the vampire lord got a shot at him.

So my first realization was that I had to give Gull a "third act". He had to change in ways that made him more real, and less of a cardboard bureaucrat that made the heroes' lives difficult. Gull would sincerely want to right as many of the wrongs he'd inflicted on London and the Corps as he could, before his injuries, physical exhaustion, and the long term toll of several strokes (and basic old age) caught up to him.

The second part of Gull's presence was that, since the players had made such a great effort to rescue him (despite their personal feelings), I had to give them some tangible rewards for that action. The easiest part of that was that Gull is remarkably well-educated and informed in the occult lore accumulated by the Corps; despite the loss of the Tower library and archives, Gull knew much of the important information that the players would need to plan their attack against Mithras. Gull explained the origins of the shadowy dome over London -- created by an ancient magical artifact used in sieges, known as the Eye of Ahriman. (The idea being that the Eye creates an expanding zone of shadow that both demoralizes the enemy and kills crops. Of course, vampires have an entirely different use for it...)

There is more that Gull must do, if he is to convince the prickly Lucy that he has truly changed... especially since he allowed Prime Minister Gladstone to be subjected to a ghastly death as a vehicle for a message from Mithras.

It is worth noting that part of Gull's change of heart has to do with a thematic concern about the character of Lucy. Lucy's deal is that she has no power or place in the world -- she is the quintessential marginalized female in a male-dominated (Queens Victoria and Titania notwithstanding) Empire. She was born to servitude, essentially, and much of her personal conflict so far has had to do with defying figures like Gull and the leader of the Watchers, Lord Emerson, as emblems of that male power and privilege. With Emerson dead (as seems common with the Watchers' Council, their headquarters in York was dynamited by the vampires' Fenian allies) and Gull at least making an attempt at reconciliation, it directs her ire towards Mithras himself. And Mithras is quite capable of symbolizing all the worst elements of male power and the cruelty of Empire.

I picture Mithras looking like Ciaran Hinds from HBO's Rome. Cold and severe.

Here is Mithras' speech from the end of Episode 3.1, "Anarchy in the U.K.", to serve as nightmare fuel:

“It has been almost eight hundred years since I last faced a Slayer. I must say, I relish the opportunity. The last one was great sport. She was a good swordsman, but not good enough. I defeated her… but that was not the end of my sport. For you see, I know the secret of your line. Strike one Slayer down, and another will rise. That was troublesome. So I spared her life, and merely cut off her arms and legs. I kept her alive, in a deep, dark hole, for seventeen years. Seventeen years of darkness, and silence, with no hope of release. She was quite mad by the end. It was my seneschal, Valerius, who finally convinced me to grant her mercy. He was right, of course, because she had been a worthy foe. I roasted her alive on a spit, and fed her to my men. The meat was terribly stringy, and quite tasteless, of course, but it was intended to be symbolic.”

“My advice to you, girl, is to run. Get away from this city and this country. Find yourself a husband and raise fat children and forget. Forget what destiny demands of you. For Valerius is dead… and with you, I will not be merciful.” 

 

Brr. Tomorrow, more inside stuff from the end of Empire.

Leaving Londinium (Part Three)

We continue with our introduction of the main cast in Sunset Empire...

Dr. John Hooke, Golemnaut. This big bruiser was once a scientist working for Queen Victoria's secret space program, the Icarus project. His experiments with galvanism on the Golem of Prague -- stolen from its keepers -- led to his body being electrocuted and his mind transferring into the mighty clay creature. After a tussle with some alien plant monsters who were attempting to stop the Icarus project, Hooke managed to shanghai the intended pilot and journey to space himself in a fabricated golem body developed by the program.

*whew* Complicated.

Hooke has been in orbit for months, conducting experiments. With the Corps under siege, he's due to make a fiery return to the scene and join his friends in battle. The only problem is, there is no perfected re-entry protocol for the Icarus capsule. Landing it in the ocean might result in Jack sinking to the bottom of the Atlantic -- if he even survives the crash landing.

And then there is the intended Icarus pilot, who has joined up with the vampires and given them all the secret information he learned as part of the project. All in exchange for a new body to replace his war-ravaged frame -- and he's got his sights set on the Golem of Prague, sitting idle in the Tower...

Mudlark, Goblin thief / schemer / shit disturber. The most unlikely hero of the bunch is a Faerie named Mudlark. All he ever wanted was freedom, but the Faerie Queen assigned him as her emissary to the Royal Magisterial Corps. This was presented as a great honour, of course, even though it amounts to ongoing imprisonment for Mudlark.

Mudlark has a way of stirring up trouble everywhere he goes. Last season, he was recruited by a member of the faerie underworld named Black Peter to do a little job, in exchange for wiping some of his own debts clean. Black Peter convinced him to dig up the severed head of a mythological giant buried in the courtyard of the Tower. What could possibly go wrong? It turned out that the head provided some kind of mystical protection for the Tower, so now Mudlark blames himself for the dire events that have placed London -- and the Faerie Queen herself -- in danger.

Matthias Von Hess, Werewolf Knight. The newest member of the Corps is Matthias, a knight in an order of German werewolves operating out of the Black Forest. Matthias was seconded to the Corps at the beginning of Season Two (a replacement for John's other character, Jack the golem). His arc in season two mostly concentrated on his cousin Reinholt, another werewolf operating in London as an envoy from the knights... but not so virtuous. Reinholt had been operating as a lycanthropic serial killer, after being corrupted by the Unseelie Faeries. He did his best to frame Matthias as responsible for his own ill deeds, but ultimately fell to his cousin's claws in battle.

In Season Three, Matthias has convinced the werewolf knights that they must intervene in the vampire invasion of London, luring another powerful group of supernaturals into the widening fray.

Tomorrow, I'll start discussing my process approaching Season Three and share a bit of what's been happening so far.

Leaving Londinium (Part Two)

Let me introduce you to The Devil's Dozen.

That's the name the enlisted men of the Royal Magisterial Corps have for a circle of elite agents that act as Gull's field agents investigating supernatural threats. For the most part, they are player characters. (In the first episode of Season 3, I revealed the names of a few more of the Dozen who the players hadn't met -- including Victorian notables like gentleman adventurer Phileas Fogg, real (?) court psychic Robert James Lees, a shadowy character named Spring-Heeled Jack, and Alice Liddell -- once the charming young heroine of certain children's books, now a dangerous madwoman who has christened herself The Red Queen. There are others, but I digress...)

Miss Lucy Pelham, The Slayer. Lucy is -- there's no polite way to put this -- not a nice person. Prickly is a word that often seems to come up around her. We can forgive her lack of social graces, as Lucy has been groomed from an early age to serve at the whims of fate (and the Watchers Council). Now she has been pressed into service by Gull, who treats her even more like a piece of property than her former masters.

Megan was interested in playing a character that was at once both physically powerful and socially vulnerable. She was inspired by early suffragists who wore a symbol that marked them as "property of the English Empire", and this became a metaphor for Lucy's place in the world and also that of most of her teammates. They were designed to be heroes that existed in the margins, tools of a decadent and crumbling age. Unlike most of her fellows, however, Lucy has no intentions of accepting her lot in life.

Megan has described her as a "caged animal". I think of her as having a little of Johnny Rotten in her DNA. (There was always a bit of "punk" in this game.)

Dr. Bernard Gladwell, Former Ectomancer, Presently Ectoplasm. Bernard is a rebel among the Watchers, an expert on the occult who was transformed by his time spent in Africa on a quest for ancient lore about the Slayer's origins. He is a magician who specializes in magic focused on ghosts, and his life's work was a spell that summons a previous incarnation of the Slayer to serve as an advisor to the current wearer of the mantle. (Like many things Bernard did, this was done with good intentions but infuriated Lucy, who saw it as an indication that her servitude would continue even beyond her own death.)

Bernard returned from Africa profoundly changed by his experiences, and wanting to change his superiors' attitudes toward women in particular and other races in general. He was seen as a dangerous maverick -- he had "gone native" on his journey, they said, and they pushed him to the margins of the Watchers. Of course, Gull had no interests in Gladwell's political beliefs, nor did he care that the Watchers considered him a heretic. He saw a capable magician that could be used for Queen and country.

Throughout most of the game, Bernard has been tormented by the fact that he sees ghosts everywhere he goes, especially in the Tower of London itself. He has regularly turned to opium to keep an even keel, something else that Gull didn't care about -- so long as Gladwell was able to fulfill his duties.

And, oh yes, at the end of last season he was abruptly turned to dust through a series of unlikely yet inevitable events. This season, he's a ghost. More on that to come.

Tomorrow, I will introduce you to three more members of the main cast.

Leaving Londinium (Part One)

Note: This series is going to be talking about some of the issues involved with working through the third and final season of Sunset Empire, my Victorian vampire hunting game. While I don't foresee there being Spoilers here, my players may want to skip these posts until the season has wrapped if they are concerned about dissonance or displeasure caused by a peek "behind the curtain".

This past Saturday, I returned to the Big Chair to begin the third season of Sunset Empire. I will admit, it's been a while since I've run what I think of as a "meaty" game -- it's been almost a year and a half since I wrapped up Shadowrun: Disavowed and just over a year since the end of the last episode of SE season two. I was a little worried that I'd be rusty, and I'm not sure this was my best session ever, but I got through it and I'm reasonably happy with how it's going so far. The players seem happy, and I'm satisfied that I got most of my cards on the table so we can proceed from here with style.

For those who haven't been sitting at my table for the past four years, I'll start with a little background on the game, so the rest of this makes sense.

I've always been a fan of Victoriana. There is something about the image of fog-shrouded streets by gaslight, carriages rattling along cobblestones, the fashions, the hats. I'm a sucker for a Sherlock Holmes movie (notwithstanding the horrible Robert Downey, Jr. vehicles, which irritated me in ways I can't go into without scatological detail), a fan of Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen books, and books that spin things in a new direction like Gibson and Sterling's The Difference Engine. Mark Frost's Sherlock Holmes meets the Cthulhu mythos novel The List of 7 made a big impression on me. For years, I'd been wanting to run a big, crazy Victorian game that played on all those things I love so much, and I kept shelving the idea for the simple idea that I didn't think I knew enough about the era to credibly portray the world.

What made it possible for me to run Sunset Empire was a decision to do the research that was required to increase my comfort level. I had done some casual research when I was prepping my games American Nightmare and Deadlands: Hell on Earth, and developed some skills that I felt were up to the task of building up my Victorian knowledge. The good news was that there are a lot of great resources for Victorian games already available on the good ol' Internet. I had access to great maps, photographs, and the ability to look up little bits of ephemera with incredible ease. If I needed to know the names of steamships in Her Majesty's Navy, in 1884, I was only a few clicks away from sweet satisfaction.

I read some good books, including Stephen Johnson's excellent The Ghost Map, and began reading through the few game resources on Victorian England I had collected over the years. The White Wolf supplement Victorian Age Vampire: London by Night was particularly useful to me, providng me with a good introduction to the setting and a handful of important characters for my game -- including the game's villain, Mithras. I also found that there was lots of great inspirational stuff in the old TSR "Amazing Engine" book For Faerie, Queen and Country, a gem I managed to snag off of e-Bay for very damned little. This inspired a good deal of the business in Sunset Empire revolving around England's other Queen of the Victorian era, Titania, her kingdom, and it also provided the name of the organization the heroes of the campaign worked for: the Royal Magisterial Corps.

Slight aside: It appears that, like my friend Rob and his Cold City game, that I was slightly ahead of the publishing curve with my gaming interests. Rob got stung twice by Ken Hite publishing material that was ideal for his game -- his Jason Bourne meets vampires game Night's Black Agents and his upcoming The Nazi Occult not having come out when Rob really needed them. For myself, the excellent The Kerberos Club by Ben Baugh and an outstanding new edition of Cthulhu by Gaslight happened to come out after I'd already done all the heavy lifting for SE. Ah well.

The core of the game is the idea that Queen Victoria has a semi-secret branch of the army (the Royal Magisterial Corps) who make their headquarters in the Tower of London. This branch of the army deals with any supernatural / extraordinary threats to the Empire, and patrols the borders where it intersects with the Faery realm. The Corps is lead by the greatest magician of the era, William Gull, a man who the world knows as Queen Victoria's private physician (and who is suspected of being Jack the Ripper in certain absurd conspiracy theories, like the one outlined by Alan Moore in From Hell). My take on Gull is based on the Victorian Vampire London book, which describes Gull as the Queen's advisor on occult matters. I thought that was too tasty not to steal.

Tomorrow, I'll tell you all about the heroes of Sunset Empire.