Santa Made Me Do It

A few days ago I did two unusual things, simultaneously. One, I ran a deliberate horror RPG, and two, I did it on one of those "Actual Play" video podcasts, where everyone can see just how much I've let my beard explode into crazy-drifter-man mode. My beard looks like I'm preparing to product-test the Column B item in a Stephen Colbert "Meanwhile" intro.

But the beard, while distressing, isn't unusual.

The horror thing, though. That's highly unusual. The Actual Play thing is even moreso; it's unprecedented. So: how did such alarming things come to pass? Why did S. John do such a deeply un-S. John-like couple of things?

For this, we can blame a good-natured gamer named Preston Firestone, in a Santa hat. He recently ran A Kringle in Time for some groovy gamers, and of course, I happily consumed this, and it was a good time!

I let Preston know I liked it, so, he interviewed me, and that went well.

Because that went well, the Into the Darkness Club did a followup interview, this time on video, complete with the beard. That, too, went well, so there was a general good-natured chatter about maybe-I'll-GM-something-for-youse-guys-someday, which often comes to naught, but of course, I did mean the offer sincerely.

And that was that. All done. Until:

They took me up on it much more quickly than I supposed they might. At about ten minutes to Midnight, on the 29th of January (a Wednesday), channel host and creator Thom Raley mentioned that a slot had opened up on the following Wednesday. That would be the 5th of February, just a couple of days ago as I write this. Would I want to run a thing?

Heck yeah I would. Oh ...

And time stopped for me, for just the briefest little eternity, because then I had to face the fact that the Into the Darkness podcast is a horror podcast, devoted to the creepy and the awful and the ... well, all the stuff they mention in their opening disclaimer.

And sure, I know how to horror. I've been GMing for 40 years; I've horrored.

But I am, by and large, a swashbuckly, heroicky, mostly-comedy sort of GM. My most serious stuff is my 1930s crime-drama material. I mostly use horror as an ingredient in broader fantasy stews, something to punch up the peril and sharpen the stakes.

Even when I run Call of Cthulhu, greatest of the RPGs¹ and forever in my Top Five Faves, I don't run it as horror, not primarily. I run it as an investigative RPG, with dark fantasy undertones. I don't run it "horror forward," as some do.

So I asked Thom: Should it be horror?

And he confirmed: ideally, something in that general zone, yeah.

And I could tell he wouldn't be troubled if I went for something less-horrific. I mean, they'd done Kringle, which is jokingly horror-adjacent at best (and yet, it does deliver on the channel's disclaimers).

But they'd been super nice to me, these folks, and I felt I should participate more fully than just running in my usual comfort zone like a Toast or Slimes run.

And I'm also neck-deep in my forthcoming PDF series about High-Trust Trad (HTT) roleplaying and (especially) HTT adventure design. If you follow my daily ramblings on Mastodon ... or if you followed my old ramblings on Google Plus, you know it's pretty much all I've rambled about for the past fifteen years or so, give or take a city map.

And speaking of that, I've been neck-deep in the Candle Islands, for the Hammondal project.

So it felt like I owed it, to them and to myself, to design an all-new, High-Trust-Trad, full-on horror adventure for this purpose. And by golly I'd set it in the Candle Islands.

And that's what led to me running an all-new, Medium-Trust-Trad, full-on horror adventure for them. And by golly, I set that MTT adventure in the Candle Islands!

So yeah. Not HTT at all. MTT.

TF?

And this is where I apologize to you. I'm about to get terribly unfair to anyone who hasn't been following 15 years of my rambling about HTT, a topic I've carefully avoided being explicit about here, on the blog. Search for the word "trust" here, and you will, as of this writing, find only this post, right here. If you look deeper, you'll see I've been laying the foundations but ... no Trusty GM stuff. Not explicitly. Not yet. Someday, this might make more sense in retrospect.

As I've stressed in my social-media ramblings - and in those articles to be published when they're done - trust of self is one of the most critical vectors of trust.

I mean, obviously these are excellent players. No worries there. And they're excellent horror players ... Seasoned, even. And I consider this.

So, it is with ample sheepishness (hence the beard, which should be shorn for wool) that I stared down the barrel of my own rustiness as a horror GM. As I brainstormed adventure notions, I found I had plenty bubbling up ... and they were all richly High-Trust ... in a way that made me doubt myself as the right GM to host them.

But I wanted to run the thing!

So I realized, quickly, that I'd need to put on my HAZMAT suit, grab my long copper-beryllium tongs, and haul a couple of Low-Trust Traditional (LTT) elements from deep in the emergency game design vault, not for their sake, but for mine.

And I'm being a little overdramatic, mostly because it's fun. After all, even my best HTT adventures always contain some LTT elements. Toast of the Town begins with an encounter, for example (with Alderman Calway) before it sets the PCs loose.

But I'm being overdramatic, partly, because I knew I'd be going deeper than just an encounter in the table-setting, in the Injection Line, where trust doesn't matter (because the adventure really hasn't started yet).

But I was careful, too, to select an element that would avoid the worst gravitational effects on the PCs and expose me, instead, to the worst of it.

Structurally, Familiar Sights is extremely high-trust at first glance: there's a clear problem-cluster with attached facts (including locations and NPCs) and there's a brief Injection Line, complete with an encounter. So far, so Trusty.

The PCs are familiar spirits to a powerful mage, the Wood-Mistress, Clara Loga. She's the spiritual leader and guardian of a remote village where the villagers make buttons, and every morning, Bluebird (one of the familiars) alights on Mistress' finger to join her in song on her tower balcony. Just pure cozy fantasy - the kind I'll sometimes run absolutely straight. Usually, these characters' adventures would have goals like "make sure the blacksmith's birthday party is the best ever," and with HTT it's easy to make that kind of adventure richly tactical and engaging.

But shit's about to get fucky.

Some old friends of the Mistress come to town, walking alongside the bone merchant bringing the last autumn shipment of button material, and rip his face off to demonstrate their general murderous intent, to cow the villagers and discourage heroics.

Because it turns out that, ten years ago, they and the Mistress were rich, spoiled little murder tourists, on a world spree. It ended in a great city overseas, where the Mistress sold her friends out to save her own skin, and left them for dead.

She got into the village-guardian racket to cultivate a private stash to feed her crippling addiction to the souls of those who died suffering. And she's been making sure, for several years now, that that's how everyone in the village ends their lives (which are otherwise all bucolic and buttony).

And the familiars - the PCs - are leftover spirits she can sip from. They weren't from some rando other dimension. They're all dead villagers with no memory of the awful things Mistress did. In fact, they're grateful she "rescued" them and gave them a family.

And at the start, Mistress is out of town but she'll be back in a few hours.

So that's the broad scenario: a suddenly-terrified village, Invading murder-mages, Mistress returning at dusk to murder-mage them right back, and the PCs in a position to tip the situation any-which-way, whether they prefer to restore the status quo or author a new one, according to their values and their rapidly-evolving read on the situation.

The fact that Mistress can see through every PC's eyes, and feel their location, begins as a comforting tool used to help the village, but becomes less comforting with the adventure's revelations. Then, there are bonus problems, depending on how things go, relating to the PCs' former mortal lives (like many ghosts in many a ghost story, the PCs may have some unfinished business).

A tight little setup for a 4-hour HTT one-shot. Not bad at all.

But I doubted my horror-pacing chops in particular. I know exactly how to give PCs a problem-solving playground and keep it tight for swashbuckling fantasy or a hardboiled detective run, but to make sure the horror flowed in at the right pace, I nervously reserved for myself a kind of preconceived layering of revelation: it would be less dependent on detective-work, and more dependent on a handful of NPCs feeling confessiony. I selected a half-dozen NPCs to design for this purpose, and as it happened, two or three took prominence in the run in response to PC actions: Kevin, the young apprentice to the Mistress, Wolf (Vernon Brace), a familiar to one of the murder-mages, and then Clara, the Mistress herself.

So that's the big Low-Trust Element: maintaining that deliberate hand on the faucet of awful reveals.

That way, I reasoned, I could still give the PCs full latitude of approach and resolution, but selfishly retain that one thing, and that would be enough to re-balance my certainty that I could make this a good 4-hour one-shot.

And so, like the Mistress, I confess all this, to any who've read this far.

The resulting design would currently score about a 60 on the Trusty GM Scale of 1 to 99. You know: that simplified scale I describe, in the future, in those unpublished articles? Yes, that one.

So, it's high-trust according to the soft definition I use for old modules from the 80s and 90s, but falls into medium-trust for the stricter standard I apply to my own work. So it's a kind of medium yearning to be high, like a couple of those I did in my industry days, but with a more earnest problem-solving core.

If I ever take Familiar Sights from design to writing and from writing to publication ... Probably I'll let it spread its HTT wings, and kick it up nearer a 70, by more carefully distributing the revelations where they can be found - and can be missed or reinterpreted - via PC enquiry, which will (as it always does) produce much more varied play results, since each group of PCs will have a different understanding of the problem. As it is, this group had a fairly complete one, giving them the best shot of approaching things with clear vision (the kind the Mistress could spy on).

As always: trust is only a spectrum of emphasis, and there's great gaming all along that line, of course. It's just that I've just got some commercially-dead design-styles to build a little museum for. In PDF form. Hence the fixation.

Of course, the good news is that the actual game worked out just fine. Really really well, honestly. We had a good, sometimes quite emotional game, and despite my clumsy control-rod intruding on the mix, the nuclear chaos of PC creativity still ran the show, and when the familiars ... did what they did ... I wasn't sure what was coming, and neither were the NPCs! Good times!

Soon, I may celebrate, by shaving. Because yikes.

Hope this finds you well.

---

¹Editions 1 through 6, inclusive.

Retrointrospective

Well, it wouldn't do to let the whole of 2024 pass without a blog post on record, so I'll take this opportunity to look back over this year. It's been a rough one in many ways, but, as always, there are some nice things to note, too.

Loss

The loss of my Mom casts the longest shadow over the year, partly because she was awesome (dedicated her adult life to being a nurse and a respiratory therapist, always pursuing career paths that would let her help the most vulnerable), and partly because she was unhappy in her last years, married to a guy she didn't much like. For related reasons, it was impossible to attend her funeral, and she was, contrary to her wishes, cremated.

So, Sandra did the the most amazing thing for me, and took me back to the Cumberland area so we could recognize her passing in our own way, and reconnect with some happy memories. We sure did. We went to the graveyard where she always wanted to be buried (next to my great-grandparents, who raised her and who helped raise me), and we visited a ton of old spots ... libraries, parks, the old mall, old addresses where we'd lived, things like that. We got burgers at the diner where she'd met my biological father, and played some Ms. Pac Man, which was always Mom's favorite.

That trip made a big difference. It was really good.

Marking Decades

Being an old-timey RPG designer means that most years are some kind of ending-in-zero anniversary for one or more old books of mine, and this year was the 20th for A Kringle in Time, which was already more than a decade old when I published it. While it wasn't their intent, these guys gave Kringle a nice anniversary by doing an "Actual Play" of it. Good fun!

It was also the 20th for Uresia: Caravel. The final All-Systems version remains preserved in amber as a kind of showcase of what I can do. It's still a good one, I daresay.

It's also been (approximately) my 40th anniversary as a roleplayer! The first RPG I ever got was TSR's Marvel Superheroes back in 1984. I blogged here about how bad I was at running it! (I got better!)

"I Hate These Guys"

Of course, it's been a dangerously bad year for democracy and decency. Not just here in the States, but in so many countries around the world. A toxic stew of ignorance, greed, entitlement, cowardice and bigotry (with just a pinch of nihilism for spice) are dragging critical promises into the dirt, carving nations up for sale, and threatening to darken the future beyond our ability to survive it. Even in the best-case scenario, hundreds of thousands of innocent people will die and millions will suffer.

I maintain some hope that the clown-car incompetence and fractious nature of the opposition will doom their efforts to some extent, but enough actually-competent people are helping from the back row that I think the danger might overwhelm the resistance this time.

Meanwhile, the front-row imbeciles are stressful to watch. Even if they weren't dangerous, it's a mind-rending case of "The Stupid, It Burns." But either way, the fight is on.

Work

Work has been going well. It's been a little different because normally I'm not an escapist, which might sound strange for a fantasy-games guy, but it's true. Mostly what I write is satire, and mostly my design intent is a genre-lensed glare at current events, leavened with some jokes and warmth.

This year, Hammondal in particular has been doing double-duty as escape, sometimes. It's still the same-old-me of course, so it's still "sympathetic satire," still fundamentally space opera in half-convincing renfaire cosplay ... but sometimes, I let myself just daydream in "The Light of the Candle Islands," and wish that I could live there. I'm not sure, yet, how this will bend how the city feels to the reader and gamer. Guess we'll find out.

My Trusty GM series of articles is well underway and also engaging me nicely, but in a less-escapey way. Those articles are various forms of GMing advice, design tools, things like that. They'll be released in small sets, like five PDFs simultaneously, a few free and a few for sale.

The back-burner projects, including Fly From Evil and several others, continue at their own pace, and I'm happy with how they're all going. A few are knocked back, a bit, by the election results, since materials held in storage in Colorado will need to stay there longer than we intended. We were finally able to send for our stuff this year, but held off to see how things went. And, well. See above.

Way back early in the year I showed up on a D&D podast thingy, which went really well considering I'm not a D&D gamer! It's a cheerful listen, if you need some happy banter.

Entertainment

It's been a pretty good year for nerd fun! We're digging all the things you might suppose, like Skeleton Crew and What If ...? and the new Wallace & Gromit and all of the Star Trek shows. We enjoyed seeing Wicked in the cinema. We're still being virus-cautious, but we've got a local theater where it's easy to find mostly-empty showtimes. Good for us, probably not great for the theater.

Most of my videogame time has been devoted to replaying older games. I'm doing another run of the excellent and thought-provoking Deathloop right now, and replays of some old GBA and SNES and Infocom titles.

I do still play a bit of Starfield, because I've come to accept that it's never going to get any better, and I've found it's good with the volume turned all the way off, just a mindless shooter to mindlessly shoot while I listen to news clips and podcasts and things. I've played a bit of the new Indiana Jones game.

All of my reading is for work, but ... some of it is really good anyway! Some of it, not so much. Lots of historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists. Those aren't lines of work where being an engaging writer is actually required, but now and then, one will surprise me and be amazing.

Bring the 2025 On

Life is a mix of the very-good (home-life with Sandra is wonderful, as always) and stressful (current events and health concerns) but the very-good parts are very, very good. So, overall it's just a matter of figuring out what actions we'll be taking on the stressful parts. TBA.

Hope this finds you well. I'm still around, still doin' the same stuff. I'm still active on Mastodon, and still on Discord as ghalev. Drop me a line sometime if you want to chatter. I'm slow at responding, but I often do eventually!

Risus: Thirty Years!

We're almost out of 2023!

This year has been the 30th Anniversary of Risus: The Anything RPG, the 20th Anniversary of The Risus Companion, and the 10th Anniversary of Risus 2nd Edition.

As I write this, we're at the end of December, and I feel like I should raise a glass to Risus before the year is done. I've kept quiet so far because I think it would be unseemly, nowadays, for me to parade the Risus name too much. But, 30, 20 and 10 years are worth taking a moment for, so I'll mark the triple-occasion with a story from the youngest of the three celebrants, the 2nd Ed:

It was a scary Colorado day, for the time had come to draw the Little Cartoon Bastards (the name my stick-figure "art" takes when the sticks pose specifically for Risus).

I always dreaded that part.

Not from dislike! I love the little idiots, and they represent the best of what Risus can be, but I can't draw. That's not some false-modesty thing. I hardcore can't draw. I can't-draw at a world-class level. I could fail to draw at the Olympics and win the can't-draw gold. Almost every Risus "illustration" took several drafts, and came from many false starts, and for every one that made the cut, there were six or seven that didn't, because they were worse.

But, the time had come, so I'd sit around doodling when I was hanging out with my players, hoping some of those doodles would work out.

Around that time, a Risus supporter I was following online got a guitar, and he was super happy about it, and his joy over it felt infectious, so I thought: "I should have a guitar-playing LCB for the new edition, as a shout-out to that gamer's new guitar!"

And I liked that idea almost too much? Like, I wasn't willing to let it go. I had a vibe in my mind and I wanted an LCB who would deliver that vibe: a triumphant vibe, a rock-and-roll-fantasy vibe. A happy LCB, shredding with joy.

But, see above. I cannot draw. So, it's a terrible, heartbreaking idea for me to develop artistic ambitions, no matter how humble.

I did something like 20 gods-forsaken drafts of guitar-playing stickmen. And they all suuuuuuucked.

I did many from pure imagination, and many from photographic reference. I searched the Web for classic images of triumphant guitar poses from the likes of Hendrix, Prince, Van Halen, Clapton, Page, Zappa, Buddy Frickin' Holly ... hoping that their moments of triumph could give me that triumphant vibe.

And if I could draw, that approach would have worked. I would have had the skill, the eye, the insight necessary to translate some of those moments into something sticklike.

But, see above. I cannot draw.

So, I was sad, I was adrift. I wanted a triumphant guitar guy. I couldn't let go of wanting that piece. But the chasm between my approach, and that desire, was blocking my path.

It took me a few weeks of beating my head against that wall before the tweety-birds circling my head got me a light bulb, out of pity.

It came to me when I was waking from a snooze, and I scooted to the computer to search for new references. This time, I was no longer searching for rock stars or guitar legends ... I was searching for people IMAGINING they were rock stars and guitar legends. I searched for pictures of people playing, not guitar, but AIR GUITAR.

Go ahead and try it. You'll see what I saw (well, ten years later, you'll see the equivalent of what I saw): that is the triumph I was craving. Not the reality of shredding guitar, but the fantasy of it, the love of it, the roleplay of it. The absolute frickiting nonsense of it. I wanted the joy of the daydreamer, and the air-guitar people are the people who GET that, and deliver it all the time, so I loaded my eyeballs with air-guitar triumphs and air-guitar dreams, and I stood, and I shredded some air of my own, because I knew this was was the missing piece that would snap the chasm shut, so I could stride across, as if I'd always known how.

I got it on the first (new) try. The little dude danced from my pen without further iteration. A triumphant doodle, by a guy who can't draw, of a triumphant performance, by a guy who can't play.

But we can pretend. Happy anniversary, little game (almost belated!), and here comes 2024.

May we all shred triumphant.