Courage of my Convictions - Death Trap Dungeon Speech

Go ahead, stick your arm in there, you know you want to...

So, earlier today I was reminded of my extended Killer GM Syndrome Rant... 

And now you're thinking, Zack you hypocritical asshole, you're the one who ran Grim World a few weeks ago, who posted a thought about jackasses making traps have consequences when they are disarmed, who is designing a Death Trap Dungeon as his part of the mega-dungeon to run for Extra Life (go donate if you haven't) and just posted a Facebook event for a Dread game where you included in the description "Fair warning, I'm hoping that this will be intense and nightmarish..." and linked to the Scott Walker/SUNN O))) song "Herod 2014" as the thematic inspiration which has been described thusly in the Quietus...


Take 'Herod 2014' for example, which is ostensibly about a mother hiding her firstborn from the king's terrible edict:
"She's hidden her babies away
"Their soft gummy smiles
won't be gilding the menu.
"The deer fly, the sand fly
the tsetse can't find them.
"The goon from the Stasi
is left far behind them.
She's hidden her babies away.
The potential to further explore Herod's slaughter of the first born is ignored, thankfully, in favour of a different kind of horror, one that is hard won and slow to reveal itself. And one that is explored with an efflorescence of vivid imagery:
"She's hidden her babies away
"And why bring them out
with no shelter on offer.
"The nurseries and creches
are heaving with lush lice.
"Bubonic, blue-blankets,
run ragged with church mice.
"The Havana has died
in the clam-shell ashtray.
"She's hidden her babies away."
And by the time we get to the 'punchline' - his vision is revealed as a retreat away from reality. A retreat away from sanity. A retreat away from existence itself. This horror is pure shock not schlock and Lovecraftian in its intensity:
"A R-e-a-c-h-i-n-g L-o-n-g A-r-m-e-d
vet ape
feeling hard
for a breech birth.
"I gaze up at the night,
at the asterisk's blazing,
"till they straighten,
and like tiny spines,
fall to earth.
"I bite down on this,
as I dance
and I pray.
"She's hidden her babies away."

And yeah, that's all true... I can't really deny that, what I can do is set expectations, as I think I tried to outline in my rant. So when I ran Grim World, I told my players that Death was a strong possibility, and that I wanted to see a PC die because I wanted to see just how Grim World made PC death cool. And the PC death that occurred in Grim World was cool, didn't happen because of me even, when the players figured out the ritual to stop Chaugnar required a human sacrifice, the Templar volunteered and through his Death Move became an unstoppable murder machine bent on stopping Chaugnar at any cost, which though it made it hard for me to build a challenging encounter with the Templar basically getting a critical hit on every roll, it was awesome and tied into the "Be a fan of the players’ characters" principle.
Similarly, for Dread, I'll do my standard Dread spiel on part of the fun being giving into the tension, intensity and horror of the game and that death is an expected part of the second half of the game. So then, consider what follows a rehearsal of my Death Trap Dungeon speech that I'll give on Saturday.

Recently Cast Pods - From the Lair of the Ginger Giant

Plate available for purchase here...

Two new pods have been cast, our second Actual Play of A Red & Pleasant Land, using the World of Dungeons 1979 Planarch Codex hack... Antagonist Relations Actual Play: Pudding Recipe. And a status update podcast where the Ginger Giant and I discuss the games we've run recently and those we'll run in the near future... Antagonist Relations Podcast - Episode 16 - Status Alert

Left Wing of the Day of Judgement

On Friday 11/9 I finally had the pleasure of running my 19th Century Whaling inspired "Left Wing of the Day of Judgement".  This commentary won't do the session justice at all, as it's a little far removed from the game since I've been busy with a new job, but I wanted to get it up anyway.

I had six players, which I think is my ideal DREAD group size, allowing a nice mix of characters to be played without having so many players that not everyone gets to contribute.   Of the characters I wrote up, the ones in BOLD were played.

• The crew of the Eryine, an American whaling ship captained by the mad Captain Danby, obsessed with hunting down the legendary Kraken...
• Harpooner - Former Slave 
• Crewman - Young Sailor with a Secret
• Cabin "Boy" - Runaway Youth
• Steward - Immigrant, former Italian Nationalist
• Third Mate - Haunted Whaler
• Oarsman - Indebted Yankee Intellectual
• The Crew and passengers of the Dachshund, a British scientific expedition led by Sir Alastair Finch, a noted British biologist studying the elusive giant squid...
• British Lady of Standing - Recent Widow
• British Naturalist - Former Duelist
• Irish Carpenter - Former Criminal
• Army Officer - Veteran of the Russian War
• Hydrographer - Drunken Widower

I managed once again to fool the players with a twist (or several)... First by having very little action on the whaling ship, as a fierce storm and Kraken attack destroyed the ship.  In the midst of the wrack, two of the PCs, the Naturalist and the Carpenter, had their skin indelibly stained by Kraken ink with several tumbles of the Jenga tower...Setting up twist the second, where the PCs found themselves either rescued by American Christian Evangelical missionaries (the cabin "boy", Yankee Oarsman and Hydrographer) or imprisoned by the same missionaries (the stained Naturalist and Carpenter and the Former Slave).  From there things slowed a bit, as the players gradually (or suddenly) deduced the good Christian's were actually also racist cannibals.  Both halves of the players decided to make a break from it at the same time and they came together with a near simultaneous sneak attack, wherein Citizen Ben proved that he could portray quite a bloodthirsty and ruthless 11 year old girl...  They quickly escaped the compound and found a native awaiting them, immediately recognizing the Kraken Ink staining the Naturalist and Carpenter and taking the players to meet the mysterious Captain Lewis who had been exiled from the missionary colony.

The second half kept the momentum up with the players realizing that the volcanic island was beginning to erupt and having to wade through waves of rats (brought by the Europeans, they had killed all the flora and fauna on the island).  The Cabin "Boy" was nearly lost in a wave of rats after yet another tumble of the tower, but the other players risked their own players to snatch her from a rodent death. The group then found themselves on a beach where the natives worshiped a monstrous idol of an unnamed squid god and found Captain Lewis, lacking arms or legs, his skin also stained by Kraken ink, guarding a raft while the worshipers danced in a frenzy around a bonfire.  Captain Lewis told them the Kraken would demand a sacrifice in exchange for their escape from the island, so the Cabin "Boy" attacked him with a machete, slicing open the skin of his face which let tentacles escape and began Captain Lewis' transformation into some a cephalopodic freak.  The PCs commandeered the raft and managed to escape the island as the lava reached the shore, fleeing into the storm at sea.  At sea, the Kraken re-appeared, as tentacles crashed against the waves around them and the Naturalist and Carpenter fought dark urges inside them, brought to the surface by the ink staining their skin.  The Naturalist succumbed and leapt at her fellow boat-mates, but was quickly taken down.  The game ended with the remaining PCs giving the Carpenter the choice of falling to their knives or taking his chance in the ocean and he chose to go overboard.

All in all, it was a blast to run, it felt like I kept the tension and action going strong (for the most part) and it definitely re-invigorated my love of running games.  Unlike my Circus Freaks DREAD scenario, which I still plan to write up and publish (as discussed here).  Afterwards, I gave @ironsolo, who is thinking he wants to write and run his own DREAD game, the character questionnaires and my notes, which were embarrassingly  almost entirely notes on the music I had in my various playlists for the game (Character Creation, Storm, Island, Climax).  For serious, here is the entirety of what I had written up for the "plot" of the game:

• Acts
• Storm/Kraken - PCs covered in Kraken ink...
• Island - Lava flow looks like squid on the mountain, sulfurous cave, stockade that missionaries live in
• Escape - volcano threatens to erupt, need to find their way to Captain Lewis

Since the plot as I ran it was largely impromptu, even more so than DREAD games I've run in the past, and since the wacky twists are a little ridiculous: it's not a game about being on a ship, it's about being on an island, an island that looks like a squid, with crazy racist Christian Cannibals, and swarms of rats... and also native Cthulhu cultists, I rather doubt it would write up as well as the fairly straight forward Circus game which was just Circus Freaks vs. Monster.

On the plus side, I took a lot of what I did in DREAD and applied it to my last Reign game, which was much more fun to run (and hopefully play) than my last lackluster installment of that game.

Here to take you out is a live version of the SWANS "Eden Prison" which I used the soundtrack to the Kraken Attack/Storm that the Left Wing of the Day of Judgement opened with... (from the amazing live double cd set We Rose from Your Bed With the Sun in Our Head)


Swans, "Eden Prison" (Live At Brooklyn Masonic Temple) from self-titled on Vimeo.

"Left Wing of the Day of Judgement" - Character Previews

Here is a preview of the characters to be played in the "Left Wing of the Day of Judgement"

• The crew of the Eryine, an American whaling ship captained by the mad Captain Danby, obsessed with hunting down the legendary Kraken...
• Harpooner - Escaped Slave
• Crewman - Young Sailor with a Secret
• Cabin Boy - Runaway Youth
• Steward - Immigrant, former Italian Nationalist
• Third Mate - Haunted Whaler
• Oarsman - Indebted Yankee Intellectual
• The Crew and passengers of the Dachshund, a British scientific expedition led by Sir Alastair Finch, a noted British biologist studying the elusive giant squid...
• British Lady of Standing - Recent Widow
• British Naturalist - Former Duelist
• Irish Carpenter - Former Criminal
• Army Officer - Veteran of the Russian War
• Hydrographer - Drunken Widower

More on Dread and the "Left Wing of the Day of Judgement" here...

And lastly, a little visual preview...

DREAD Thoughts & "Left Wing of the Day of Judgement" Preview

So, gentle reader, as you may have noticed, I reference DREAD quite a bit on the this blog.  Here it is again, in case you forgot..

Currently unavailable from Amazon, which I have not seen happen in a while and they're still publishing slim scenario books, so hopefully it's just between printings, but it's also available in PDF from DriveThruRPG and when I think to look in my local game shops, I usually have no trouble finding it.

Dread is a game of "diceless horror" where the schtick is that the sole mechanic of the game is a Jenga (or generic tumbling block) tower, which is much more interesting and intense than it might sound.  The players pull a block when they want to take an action where success or failure matter.... So trying starting a car on a bright sunny day, not a pull...  Trying to starting a car whose battery is run down as the ax-wielding maniac is smashing in the back window, now that's (at least) one pull.  When the tower collapses, bad things happen, injury or misfortune early in the game, death.

The other place where Dread shines is in character creation.  Here again is the example I gave in my Character Creation - True Background vs. Limited Future Choices post.

The GM comes up with characters for the scenario, in my last game the players were all circus freaks, and then comes up with questions for each character that the player answers to define the character.  For instance, in my Circus Freak game, one of the un-played characters was the Circus Strongman, below are his questions:

• What happened to you when you were nine that made you swear to yourself that you'd never be weak?
• Even though you're the strongest person you know, you hate physical violence, why?
• What intellectual pursuit of yours would surprise people if they knew about it?
• Why don't you feel comfortable socializing with the other performers?
• You don't enjoy being a circus performer, but why don't you leave the circus?
• What nationality won't you admit to being descended from and why?
• What happened that made you afraid of being underground?
• When the going gets tough, how do you respond?
• The elderly clown Juventas died of a heart attack recently, what shameful thing did he see you do three months ago?

As you can see, in answering the questions, a player gets to determine many of the details, secrets, fears and emotions of a character.

Well, last night, Citizen Ben his first game of Dread, an zombies in a blizzard scenario of his own creation, that I got to enjoy playing in and it reminded me of some tips, tricks and thoughts I had about writing/running a good game of Dread and then a preview of the next Dread game I'm running, a 19th century Whaling/Nautical inspired game, "Left Wing of the Day of Judgement"

Theme and Mood, pt 2: Mood

As I wrote previously in my earlier post about Theme, Mood has always been the easier one for me to convey.  It's always been much easier for me to focus on conveying a Mood, especially for a single session or adventure, than it has for me to focus on reinforcing a Theme over an entire chronicle.

This doesn't mean, though, that as I plan my upcoming campaigns that I want to let Mood out of my sights.

Character Creation Part Deux...

This was going to be a response to Citizen Ben's comment on my Character Creation - True Background vs. Limited Future Choices post, but it got pretty long and I decided to just promote it to it's own post.  Ben's comment and my response below the jump.

Character Creation - True Background vs. Limited Future Choices

I'm gearing up to run my new Reign campaign and was chatting with Bob, a friend who'll be playing Reign but has otherwise played 4E D&D almost exclusively with  dashes of Mage, Mazes & Minotaurs and Dread thrown in as well.  As we chatted I realized how different character creation in D&D (and similar games) can be from a game like Reign.