All's Well That Ends Well

Another year, another completed long-form campaign.

Last year, one of my player groups wrapped our eleven-year-long Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Last week, we wrapped our seven-year-long Unknown Armies campaign. As always, you can read the entire thing over at Obsidian Portal.

After Crux of Eternity and The Imperial City, it comes in third in terms of number of years. Probably in the number of hours, as well: I would estimate maybe 300 hours, but who can say?

It started humbly, as a playtest of the yet-unpublished third edition. (You'll note there that I call it a mini-campaign, not yet aware that it was going to last over seven years.) We largely stuck to the collaborative setting generation, but as with Crux of Eternity, I started with a handful of inspirations which were woven into the structure as appropriate:

• There's a rumor in the second edition core rulebook about Jim Morrison still being alive.
• Being well-acquainted with the old rumors that he faked his own death, I decided a long time ago that he was probably The True King of Los Angeles.
• I read volume one and volume two of the collected Suppressed Transmission by Ken Hite.
• Specifically, there was an article about Misrule that got the wheels turning in my head about an avatar of The True King symbolically being deposed in favor of an avatar of The Fool.
• Years ago, I wrote some notes about a potential game set in Las Vegas, featuring an apocalyptic cult leader in the mold of Tyler Durden from Fight Club.
• I realized this was an opportunity to tell his backstory, since I knew he was an annihilomancer who got a major charge at some point.

These elements combined to form the basic setup. While the players just knew that Hollywood producer Jasper Fitzroy was acting a little strange of late, the truth is that he was an unconscious avatar of The True King, baptized as a child to be the king of film actors by none other than MGM executive Nick Schenck, attempting to make the ultimate movie star. Magickal shenanigans prevented it from working as planned, but Fitzroy was destined to step into a kingly role no matter where he found himself, so he became a royal movie producer instead of an actor.

However, Jim Morrison, The True King of Los Angeles, never wanted the job, but he also didn't want it to go to someone who might abuse the station. And he certainly didn't think a movie producer could avoid the temptations of a powerful occult position, so he tried to think of a way to rid himself of this rival king without killing him or informing him of the existence of magick.

The answer came in the form of Iggy Williams, an annihilomancer who left Los Angeles in the early 1990s but came back in the late-2000s. Jim Morrison recognized him, but knew that he didn't want him in town, either, so he hatched a plan to rid himself of both simultaneously by convincing Williams to get two major charges by leaving town and convincing Fitzroy to leave as well. This seemed like a pretty hard sell until Fitzroy's wife died, in which case it became easier to insert new people into his life during the upheaval. And that's the very unlikely set of circumstances by which Iggy Williams became Jasper Fitzroy's personal assistant.

Since Iggy Williams had never harvested a major charge before, he didn't know how much symbolic power he needed, so it was his idea to invoke the whole Misrule thing, introducing Fitzroy to an unconscious avatar of The Fool named Pamela Kruse and then slowly making it look like his predecessor cooked the books and Fitzroy would take the blame — but he could save the rest of his family by fleeing to a foreign country.

A convoluted and tenuous plot, but a symbolically resonant one.

Unfortunately, the player characters didn't unravel the plot in time, so Iggy Williams convinced Jasper Fitzroy to flee Los Angeles and put Pam Kruse in charge of his affairs. However, that misfortune kicked off the rest of the game's plot as the characters found themselves tangled in the local occult underground. (And I suspect that failure turned a short campaign into a long one, as they sought to unravel many mysteries and bring order to the city's chaos.)

The Obligatory After-Action Report

While I have run a lot of urban fantasy and horror games previous to this one, this was my first time running Unknown Armies for more than a couple of sessions, and specifically my first time running third edition.

Many of my complaints about the system remain despite the fact that it's a pretty good system, albeit one that feels more like an assemblage of parts than a cohesive whole.

It's a very sandbox-y game, which suits my style, but I think that player-driven goals can sometimes leave the players adrift, especially because of a pattern I've noticed across a couple of games. Having now run two Unknown Armies campaigns, I like to make them grounded and realistic, and the players instantly respond to this. They make backstories, introducing friends and family members and connecting with NPCs. But this also serves to make them play the game very conservatively, as they suddenly have jobs and loved ones they can lose. As such, nobody plays the sort of ruthless obsessives that Unknown Armies seems to really encourage, especially in previous editions, and that means that they approach Objectives with a lot trepidation and very little mayhem. And that limits their options.

Note that this isn't bad — more player buy-in versus more player mayhem is a choice rather than a value judgment — but it does make the Objective process take a long time as players try to determine the safest way to handle a problem. (The recurring joke during this campaign was that we were actually playing a Camarilla campaign, given all the careful politicking.)

I also suspect that has something to do with relative power levels: both of my long-running Unknown Armies campaigns have begun more-or-less at street level. Sure, the characters might start with funky powers and weird experiences, but they don't know that there's an occult subculture out there, and they certainly don't know about things like the Statosphere or Invisible Clergy. And when you're new to the occult community, all you have is the stuff you brought with you: your career, your family, your friends.

Obviously, you don't want to lose that stuff.

But there is something very magical about a slow-burn occult campaign where you see the players go from clueless newbies staggering in the shadows of giants to people who feel comfortable solving their problems with ritual actions and weird artifacts. It's telling that we started the campaign with the player characters trying to unravel the mystery of a film producer's sudden shift in mood, and we ended with a ritual arson designed to assassinate a powerful wizard.

As for "the plot," as befits a sandbox, the campaign ranged all over the place. The campaign lasted long enough for the players to plumb most of the mysteries I plotted at the start, although as one might expect, each question yields half a dozen others. By the end of it, they are movers and shakers, having cut deals and installed their own True King as the symbolic monarch of Los Angeles, so the repercussions of this game will likely reverberate into any future Unknown Armies games I run. (Especially as the charitable foundation they created moves into other cities.)

This was also probably the most romance-heavy game I've run: everybody had some manner of romantic relationship, often forged in the fires of the secret wars of the Los Angeles occult underground. (And some characters had several romances during the game!) As noted in the Crux of Eternity after-action report, I always find that funny as I don't plan romantic subplots, but it often appears in my games, so the players clearly trust the process.

Final Thoughts

As is usually the case, I'm running another campaign on Sunday, so I don't have time to mourn the passing of this one. It always feels a little weird to end things, but there are always more stories to tell, and time marches ever oneward.

Nevertheless, I expect I will continue to think about it for some time, wondering what might happen next in that city of tiny lights by the sea...

Advice Against Quantum Ogres

Meanwhile, on a Facebook D&D group, someone shared this meme:

Accompanying the meme was the question, "What do you do if you are the DM?"

As you might expect, The Dreaded Discourse™ reigns, and there is a long conversation nested in the threads below the post. (And the original post was shared to other groups, themselves with long nested threads of The Dreaded Discourse™, so there are a thousand thousand such responses.)

Contrary to my instincts, I engaged. (I fall firmly on Team Anti-Quantum Ogre.) Most of the rebuttals were something to the effect of, "How do I run an epic game without offering the illusion of choice?" But in the midst of that, I think I gave the best advice I've ever given as a Game Master, and will probably ever give as a Game Master, so I repeat it here for you:

The players are already on your side. You don't have to lie to them to get them to like you.

I'm only being a little hyperbolic when I say that 90% of GM problems could probably be solved by keeping this in mind. Even if you're gaming with total strangers, they're there to game. They want to play a game. It's not a job interview* and it's not going on your permanent record, so you don't need to impress anyone. Just make sure it's fun, and it will be memorable without you doing anything special.

(And obviously, "lying" in this case should be assumed to mean things like illusion of choice, or "protecting" certain NPCs, or other bits of behind-the-scenes chicanery. Most GMs keep hidden information, which falls under typical player expectations for traditional sorts of table-top role-playing games. Determining and calibrating how accepting players are about hidden conspiracies, secret NPC agendas, and the like makes a good Session Zero conversation.)

As for how to run an epic game without offering the illusion of choice, it's hard to fake the actual work. You basically have two choices in that regard:

• Run a linear adventure path, and be up-front about it. Decide what you do when the players leave the rails before you get to the decision point. (If you don't have a meaningful choice in mind, why give them a choice in the first place?)
• Run a sandbox, but make sure the players have enough information to make meaningful choices. (With the requisite caveat from The Alexandrian that choosing to not do research, or failing to find information, are also choices that should be honored.)

Outside of those options, be prepared to improvise if they make choices you didn't expect, or just be honest with them. You can get a surprising amount of mileage out of, "This is what I have planned tonight," although you have to be prepared to roll with the punches if you want the world to feel immediate and infinite.

And honestly? Speaking from experience, the most interesting game tidbits tend to happen when the players go completely outside of your expectations and into no-man's land.

But remember: no matter what else happens, the players are already on your side. You don't have to lie to them to get them to like you.

* Okay, so if you're a professional GM, it's a bit like a job interview, but "impressing" those players tends to come more from actual work than shortcuts. And as with a home game, you tend to impress players the most when you validate their choices — when the players see that their choices matter and that their decisions have an impact on the world, that's when they pay close attention to your game.

Why Is This Item Cursed?

On a post about cursed items, someone wrote, "I have never liked cursed items. Why would someone make one?"

I responded with a brief table. If you want to know why a given cursed item exists, roll 1d8 and consult the table below:

1. Failed magic item project of an ancient civilization's wizarding grad school equivalent.
2. Evil wizard or unseelie Fair Folk crafted item as a magical trap or revenge piece.
3. Mundane object infused with fell magical energies as a side effect of a magical catastrophe.
4. Magic item granted as part of a poorly-worded wish.
5. Functional magic item corrupted by forgotten decades in an evil lair or by infusion with wicked sapience.
6. Perfectly normal magic item in extremely alien and forgotten culture. ("We use bags of devouring to solve our trash problem!")
7. Curse is an unintended side effect of the item's creation, and was overlooked by the creators.
8. Item belonged to a famous hero who offended a god, archwizard, or other powerful entity and cursed their favored magic item.

RPGs as Art: A System Matters Metaphor

This tired old debate* rears its ugly head with alarming frequency, and every time, I am left wanting from the answer.

Whenever someone complains about a system being "misused" — which is to say, not used for its intended or supported purpose, like using the Dungeons & Dragons game engine to run an Animal Crossing-style game — a version of the debate that I frequently encounter is that RPGs are tools, and you wouldn't use the wrong tool for a job. You wouldn't, say, use a hammer to try to turn a screw, as you're liable to ruin the thing you're attempting to build or fix.

This metaphor has never sat right with me.

For starters, table-top RPGs are art and are tools to make art. That's a bit different than attempting to use a screwdriver when you need a wrench; some of the most compelling art uses nonstandard components, like that one of the industrial robot trying and failing to clean the blood pooling around it. You know the one:

Beyond being short-sighted from an artistic perspective, it also ignores what a large swath of role-playing games do. Many games aren't tools, but toolboxes; the creators certainly hope that you'll take them, use them, and enjoy them, but once it's in your grasp, it's up to you to figure out how to use it. A lot of hacks, custom systems, and mini-games come from here: add the Objective rules from Unknown Armies; the fishing rules from Rod, Reel, & Fist; and the narrative rules from Let These Mermaids Touch Your Dick Maybe into Call of Cthulhu to get the Frankengame of your mad dreams!

(I don't know why you need rules for organizational agency, fishing, and thirsty-ass mermaids in your hypothetical Gothic cosmic horror game, but I assume you know your group better than I do. Maybe you want the game to be a little more player-directed than your typical Call of Cthulhu game, and you want to add options for SAN refreshes that include fishing and mermaid-mediated sexual healing. But I am here to tell you that if someone on the internet said you're playing wrong by making the eldritch horror fishing and mermaid seduction game of your dreams, they can go pound sand.)

And of course, I will again bang my drum that RPGs are art. Pretending that RPGs are tools ignores why people actually like a particular game, which often has a lot to do with the myriad (and often subconscious) reasons people like art. Is it accessible? Do your friends like it? Does it fulfill some need within you? Is it especially resonant with your background?

All this to say: the tool metaphor always rankles me when I see it, but I only recently realized why.

RPGs aren't tools. They're cars.

If you're not in the United States, allow me to set the scene: everywhere is too far to walk, and public transit is often underfunded, so that means you basically need access to a car to live. So cars are ubiquitous, but I suspect most people buy, rent, or borrow cars for very prosaic reasons: you had access, you could afford it, it suits your needs, whatever. For the vast bulk of people, they just need something that will get them to work and the grocery store.

These are the equivalent of the vast hordes that indie gamers mock when they wonder why someone is hacking Dungeons & Dragons 5e to make an unofficial Uncharted RPG. Such people may neither know nor care about other RPGs that would do what they want more "efficiently," they just want a game that will handle some action, is somewhat familiar, and has lots of online support in case they get stuck.

The bog-standard American car consumer just needs a car to get from point A to point B. If the brakes work, it's good enough.

Then there are the car guys.

These are people with Opinions™ about cars. A car isn't just a convenient way to get from place-to-place, it's a statement. A lifestyle. They study the breeds of car, they know their natural habitats and ecological niches. This one is built for speed and needs premium petrol and hood clips. This one is built for hauling and can add a trailer hitch and a tow reel in the front.

In this extended car metaphor, that's the sort of people who collect RPGs and dissect them. If you're reading this blog entry, chances are good you're the RPG-equivalent of a car guy. We know where the different breeds of RPG live and like to graze, and we will invent new taxonomies to explain why we know them better than anyone else.

The elaborate taxonomy of cars might be interesting to a car guy, but it isn't as helpful to the kid who just started driving to her part-time job. Likewise, the elaborate taxonomy of RPGs is probably overwhelming or boring to someone who isn't obsessed with this stuff.

That's all right. If they're interested in RPGs, they'll come around to it in their own time.

* As you might surmise, my overall view of the "system matters" debate is, "It depends." Certain systems give you certain tools to do some things more easily than other choices, but my experience teaches me that most GMs tend to run games the same way no matter what system they're using — and that they often bring their assumptions to a new game without familiarizing themselves with it. Once again, the book is less important than the thing that happens at the table, and that is the thing that ought to be judged.

No Prep Is Wasted

If you run games long enough, higher-order patterns begin to emerge without your direct input. A campaign setting is a thing better divined than made.

I have previously posted about Arctic Death, Infinite Night, my "arctic Ravenloft" campaign. (If you want the basic setup, this post has all the details.)

Well, that section of the campaign has wrapped, and as they say, the slime's coming home. They killed the darklord, did the obligatory bookkeeping, and now the wizard has built a spelljamming helm and they have acquired a vessel in the hopes of returning to the home they fled via the Gardens of Ynn, essentially causing most of the issues in the campaign to date. As for the Domain of Dread of Isiksivik, when they slew the darklord, the whole realm fell back into the world it left centuries ago.

But which world is that?

I've been ruminating on that particular question for months now, but then I remembered What Luck Betide Us. Many years ago, some friends asked me to run a 4e campaign, and I did a lot of work on it before we started. Like, I made a map of a region a million square miles in size and filled in the settlements with procedural generation before the campaign started. (To contrast, the Sorrowfell Plains map for Crux of Eternity is still mostly empty, with landmarks only going on the map as they come up in play.) While a fun exercise, I wouldn't recommend trying to build a campaign setting from the ground-up like in What Luck Betide Us, and I certainly wouldn't have the time to do it now unless someone were paying me.

Well, as with most campaigns where you front-load much of the work, that game died a horrible death after only a couple of sessions. So it goes.

But that just means that there's an unused campaign setting just sitting in my notes, one that I know fairly well because I made it up. Isiksivik can easily sit to the far north of the region from What Luck Betide Us, and what's more, the dwarf's sketchy backstory fits nicely with the overall aesthetics of the dwarven theocracy of the Farhelfik Commonwealth and the elvish magocracy of the Lanirilis Protectorate. She can just as easily be from the same world!

(The characters in Arctic Death, Infinite Night subsequently met the major campaign villain from What Luck Betide Us, because they fit well with her agenda in the service of Chaos.)

Years ago, I also teased The Wizard at the End of the World. I didn't know anything more about this entity than I put into the blog post, but I figured the rest would sort itself out in the fullness of time. In trying to solve this problem, I also solved that problem: The Wizard is indeed the second iteration of a BECMI-style Immortal, originally from the Sorrowfell Plains but now ascended after some time shenanigans, and What Luck Betide Us features the world she made during her first ascension. (I already knew she made a world, I just didn't know that it was clearly this one. But it nicely explains a couple of things I never quite figured out during the course of What Luck Betide Us.)

(The characters in Arctic Death, Infinite Night subsequently met this Immortal in her guise as the elf Archdruid Lueliten. She has ties to the dwarf's backstory and clearly has some future knowledge about what has happened and will yet happen.)

If there's a takeaway from all of this, it's the advice I gave at the start: leave gaps in your campaign creation where interesting things might go. The players don't need reams of epic backstory to jump into a game, so you don't need to make them. However, if during the course of planning or play, you determine interesting connections between your disparate, intriguing details, give them context and make them matter. (Remember: nothing the GM does matters unless it emerges at the table. This is why the other players ultimately have more power than the GM, because every decision they make matters.)

It's the Tim Powers design principle, but applied to one's own writing: in a couple of places (I'm citing this one in particular), he references doing research for his latest book, giving this anecdote, "Half the time, if it's very late at night, I find sometimes when I open some new research book, it'll appear to confirm my fictional theory, and I’ll think, 'Oh my god, Powers, you’re not making this up. You've stumbled on the actual story here.' Except in the morning, I'm sane again." Leave gaps, interrogate those gaps, and then divine your own campaign setting from what you find.

Now the only way to truly recycle all my ancient prep is to find a way to re-use plot points from my aborted Spelljammer campaign from ten years ago...

RPGs as Art: On Sincerity in Art

"Don't do fashionable science." — Max Delbrück

A mantra for 2023.

Wandering around the lonely corners of the internet in this foul year of our Lord two-thousand twenty-three, there's a repeated piece of advice that feels intensely counter-intuitive to me. Whenever someone is thinking about writing something for publication — often on one of the OneBookShelf community content sites like DM's Guild, Storyteller's Vault, or Statosphere — the most common piece of feedback I see is to write something that the author thinks will be popular. Or I see people soliciting their slice of the community for ideas, putting up a poll or open thread about what sort of thing the community wants to see next.

It doesn't surprise me that lots of those projects never materialize.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I can say that I am way more likely to finish something if I'm passionate about it, and I'm more likely to be passionate about it if it was more-or-less my idea. My idea is a relative concept — it might be a collaboration or even someone else's skeleton that I sketched out — but the key is that it's something that lit my brain on fire and I had to put it somewhere. If I produce it for public consumption, I'd rather produce a weird piece of art beloved by ten people (and perhaps hated by a hundred more) than a milquetoast piece of art that is passively enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of people and then abandoned when the media cycle changes.

(In fact, the most melancholy version of the crowdsourced art trend is seeing someone abandon a passion project because they arbitrarily decided no one was interested in it. I still dream about the guy who was thinking about doing a Statosphere supplement about archery. Archery hasn't appeared in my modern horror games, but if someone is passionate about it, I want to see what they do with it.)

On the consumption side of things, the RPG products I enjoy and get the most use out of are things I never knew I wanted in the first place. Of the Unknown Armies offerings on Statosphere, everyone talks about big, ambitious products like American Dreams or GOAD or RITE, but I've gotten the most direct use out of Three Miles of Bad Road. (I'm not even running a car-centric campaign!) I haven't had a chance to slot The Sun King's Palace into a fantasy campaign yet, but I'm definitely going to do so. I keep returning to it, tasting it in my dreams. I certainly didn't ask for a d100 horror sci-fi game, but Mothership continues to beckon me. (And there's a sentence or two in the beginning of A Pound of Flesh that features some of the best game advice I've ever read.)

All this to say: everyone has a story in them that only they can tell, in a medium of their choosing. Even if it's a lousy story, clumsily told, it will resonate with someone. Make your weird, idiosyncratic art and you will find like-minded people to play with you. Don't try to make the art you think people want to see, and don't try to make art because the topic is trendy. If you find yourself rushing to make something so you can release it while it's still topical, you've already lost.

So when you're staring down the gun barrel of your next RPG project and you don't quite know what to do, don't turn to focus-testing to tell you what to do. Brainstorm, try stuff, put your weird art out into the world. Consider this your permission to get real fuckin' weird with it.

(And astute observers will note that this applies to all art, not just role-playing games. I've watched a lot of mediocre film and television over the past month, things that were clearly focus-tested to death or tried to have Important Things To Say™ rather than honest things to say. Tell a story only you can tell.)

The Obligatory Addendum

Since the above screed largely talks about the individual (-ish) process of making art, let's talk about the uniquely collaborative activity of role-playing games themselves. (As I say repeatedly, RPGs are what happen at the table, and the rest is but smoke.) Even though the above post addresses the individual artist, it also applies to the group as a whole. If you're a Game Master, don't ignore your group's good ideas because they don't jibe with The Very Important Story You Have To Tell™. If you're a fellow player, don't ignore your other players' ideas because they don't fit your conception of this collaborative exercise.

The RPG table is going to be weird, messy, and collaborative. Your job is to enable that collaboration and have fun. (Please don't forget that games are supposed to be fun.) Everyone's favorite moments in a role-playing game are invariably when everything is chaotic and in total freefall. Lean into that, otherwise you could be writing a novel.

The Obligatory Dungeon23 Post

In case you haven't heard the good word, there's a community project this year. (Already in progress!)

Sean McCoy posted about this on Twitter and his Substack, but the gist is that you make a megadungeon by writing one dungeon room per day. At the end of the year, you'll have a twelve-level megadungeon with 365 rooms.

I've seen a lot of folks doing a bunch of pre-planning for this project, but as Sean himself says in another post, keep it simple. Divine your megadungeon via random tables and free association. (And in my personal experience, front-loading too much of the work makes it seem unattainable.) This is a brainstorming exercise more than anything else, so get ready to get weird with it.

Personally, I'm excited to see what develops. Hopefully everybody takes this opportunity to figure out how a megadungeon is put together and what they like to see in dungeons.

I don't plan on writing about my own #dungeon23 project too much on the ol' hobby blog, but I plan on keeping up with it. My dungeon is tentatively called The Crucible, although I don't know what it will become with the fullness of time. For starters, I don't think "The Crucible" is what the locals call it; they don't know that the nearby cave systems are actually connected into a megadungeon complex. (In fact, I'm not even sure anyone — including the inhabitants — has ever discovered the main entrance!)

In the meantime, here are a handful of additional community discussions around dungeon23:

Ben L.'s dungeon23 tag on the Mazirian's Garden blog

Better Legends' #dungeon23 tag on Tumblr

Zedeck Siew's #dungeon23 tag on Tumblr