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 (combined with the extra trust-drop from the Actual Play format) 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.

Hammondal Echoes

Hammondal is pure game-design (with bursts of writing) at this stage, so it's harder to blog about in some ways since there's less to look at, and a lot more abstraction, and lists, and abstractions of lists and lists of abstractions (really; I do that).

The high-end supernatural stuff has taken a decidedly Slavic bent, as I always kind of assumed it might, but I wasn't really sure until it started happening on the page and in the notes. The religion stuff has gone closer to my usual GMing preferences (going back to my teenage years), and less an attempt at anything "generic" (I'm half-good at generic fantasy, but that means I'm half-terrible at it, and I'm leaning into my strengths, here). The mystery elements are gaining depth and subtlety. The military and political elements are morphing into something more tragic and less nasty (it could be that the Sunday Night Dragon Show is giving me more than my fill of nasty, so I'm leaning away from that). The mercantile elements continue to make me giggle. Now and then I poke at the neighboring towns even though they're not in the book, but because they exert gravity on things that are.

It's at its hardest to write about because I'm writing it, so there's that old writer's superstition about Talking Your Design (I may have rephrased the old superstition).

But, there are finally enough random development snapshots to post another spray of images.

Two Related Design Decisions

Today I want to ramble about two closely-related decisions in RPG design, both relating to Hammondal.

A couple of months ago, I realized that a significant portion of the city, especially among the Boranese mercantile cultures, are living puppet-people called the Mantoche, the "cloth-hearted," and other assorted slurs (some Imperials still call them Dudmen, an old name for scarecrows).

These people are, physically/visually, like the puppets of Avenue Q, or Meet the Feebles, or of course Henson, etc. Anyone who's known me for a long time will recognize that this isn't a new interest for me in a fantasy context (going back to the early days of the Blue Room and even before that) but it's just that ... some things come into their own, on their own time, and in this case, it's time to get things started.

Thematically, those who know me also know how critical "scarecrows" are to me in RPG design, and the Mantoche manage to be scarecrows on multiple levels, and I've really loved writing about them, designing their many roles in Hammondal and in the larger mysteries of the Candle Islands and of the hidden kingdoms of the Thrice-Nine Lands.

But even over the course of the last couple of months, my design intentions toward the Mantoche have changed. Initially, I was (seriously!) considering just stealthing them into 20% of the city's population, describing them in a roundabout way that could be interpreted as living puppet people ... or not interpreted as living puppet-people ... depending on the reader. I was going to imply, in a deniable way, that they are what they are.

But here I am talking openly about the Mantoche. You've perhaps caught the prior glimpses of their existence in the development snaps, but I wasn't being explicit about who they are, as I am right now.

So that's decision one. Decision two:

For a long time I had considered writing Light of the Candle Islands entirely in-voice, which is to say: entirely in multiple voices from within the game world, where every page is a translated artifact of some fictional document, shedding varied and contradictory light on the experience of the setting.

I have long since stepped back from that. While in-voice writing is an excellent way of presenting some parts of RPG design, it's not the best method I have for presenting every aspect of RPG design, and Hammondal is full-bore RPG design that needs every tool I have in the box. It'll do me no favors to force myself into constrained design as a matter of vanity.

There are a dozen reasons behind each design choice, and these two choices are pretty different, but there's one point of overlap, which is just boring old efficiency.

Writing around the Mantoche takes roughly four times the wordcount of just writing about the Mantoche, openly and directly. The direct approach lets me underline their thematic and tactical importance, and lets me get right to the fun of playing them, whether as PCs or NPCs, and there's a lot of fun to get to.

Similarly, for many crucial points about the city, an in-voice method of describing a given piece of design takes from four to eight times the wordcount of just writing it as me, as S. John, and delivering the same payload. I like my books dense with gameable material, even if that makes me more than a little old-fashioned.

These are not new lessons. Every fantasy GM who ever decided to include a pterodactyl but not come out and just say it's a pterodactyl knows the drill, and every RPG writer who loves to indulge in in-voice work does, too. Sometimes, both are worth it (Hammondal still includes in-voice sections).

Sometimes, the decisions, and exceptions, will merge. The Mantoche are, in many circles, a disrespected and distrusted minority, and that is the kind of thing that in-voice writing can express in ways that omniscient writing can't.

Anyway, like the bit about mercantile law, this is what I mean, when I talk about RPG writing and design. Hope this finds you well, and gaming.

Spin the Wheel

I have Strong Opinions on matters of fantasy cartography. No shock, I know! One of those opinions is that you should never draw to fit the paper. The way I fight that tendency (because it can be really hard not to) is I do a lot of preliminary work on a much, much larger canvas than the target output.

One of the other towns on the same island as Hammondal is called Choragus, and it's not nearly a "city" by any definition, but it's Calembour's only other seaport bigger than a fishing village, and it's got drydocks for ship repairs and shipbuilding, so despite its modest size and relative youth, it's pretty important. I'm just beginning to map it as a kind of brain-break from writing Hammondal's book. The map began like this:

Pretty humble stuff; it looks like I'm playing one of those casual videogames about building public transport ... which isn't too far off from the kind of abstract thinking on display. The red lines are major overland roads (the roads maintained and patrolled by the prince); the brown line is a secondary overland road (the kind sort-of-maintained and sometimes-patrolled by more local administrators). The blue line is the course of a river about to dump into the sea a couple of miles to the northwest.

These are just details from the Calembour map, blown up to scale and placed on a large wheel of green I call the Potter's Wheel. It's about 25 inches wide (a bit more than a mile in scale). Meanwhile, the actual final map will fit somewhere on a letter-sized sheet.

That white cross-like thing in the middle is a masking mockup showing me potential "live areas" of the final map. Neither its position nor rotation are final ... currently everything is perfectly north-oriented. But the area inside the cross shows us where the map might end up someday. Anyway after about a day it looked more like this:

I've let the phantom cross go a bit transparent so we can see more of what's going on. Now I've got a semi-final take on the natural shape of the river, and I've added a local tributary that's too minor to have appeared on the Calembour map. I've also drawn in those major roadways and it looks a bit more like a place. Then I let it sit for a couple of weeks because I was busy with Hammondal proper.

Tonight I started to really break ground (and dredge river):

I've widened the main river a bit, drawn in a couple more (local) roads and what might be a couple of town streets by the time we're done, and I've begun mapping the port and the three drydock bays (currently shown filled rather than drained because it feels clearer, but who knows how it'll go in the long run). There's also a single orange building (the river beacon), and some placeholder boats (carefully excluding any of the Boranese hull-shapes, since it's illegal for them to dock here; Hammondal has a monopoly on dealing with the Boranese).

But what this capture really shows off is the point of the Potter's Wheel: I can spin it, and I do, constantly, because another Strong Opinion I have is that you should never keep drawing from the same position relative to the map, or relative to North or any other direction, because doing so can exert a weird lateral gravity on how you see and design a town, and I don't want that ... so, (especially during the earlier stages) I constantly, randomly spin the entire map and just as often flip it (make it a mirror reflection of itself) as I work. Here, it's been returned to something nearish the north-oriented original, but visibly canted ... but I was spinning it constantly as I went.

Anyway that's the Potter's Wheel method. Eventually, as the town takes shape, I'll begin to see where it's really centered, and what it's really shaped like, and the final framing will take that into account, but until then I don't let the shape of the paper, or any specific orientation, drag the map down.

And it's just fun to spin it.

To Everything, Turn, Turn, Turn