So our agents have now had six months to chase Dracula and Edom. So how is that all working out?

Well, the game has been fun. Or at least I hope it’s been. So we got that going for us. But longer-term play has definitely shown both the positives and negatives of both Night’s Black Agents and the Dracula Dossier campaign.

First of all, while it makes for great advertising copy, using a novel as a handout turned out to be a complete bust. It’s simply too big for most people to digest. They don’t want homework. They want clues. Now, you can just open it to a random page and start investigating, but putting that into practice isn’t as easy, at least not in my opinion, as the game book makes it out to be. Ok, there’s a link to this NPC from page whatever, but that may not have anything constructive to do with what they’ve already experienced. It’s nice to say “well improvise,” but that’s just not realistic. Corresponding to that, there aren’t a whole lot of other relevant handouts and what there is are only available in add-on packs. I mean. Jesus. I wasn’t in on the Kickstarter, so how much do I have to spend on this thing?

The second issue is combat. It’s not Gumshoe’s forte, but I think it’s fair to say that combat is more or less a mainstay of thriller movies. There’s a variety of additions, and they do a decent job of taking a more or less lackluster system and adding some complexity, but it’s still not great. You do get some really cool narrative stuff out of it. For example, we have someone who regularly uses distraction moves to give a shooter points and that’s resulted in some very quick and cool scenes. We also had someone use the “smash against object” thing to kill a possessed wild dog. But while the narrative sounds good when I write the games up afterwards, during play what it boils down to is a formula where you add six points to your roll–3 to guarantee a hit and enable the possibility of a critical if you roll 6 and the additional three for a called shot to the heart adding 3 damage.

So it isn’t any good? No, really, it’s quite good. It’s an amazing sourcebook and the entire concept of the campaign is fantastic. I’m able to plot out things and I have lots of pre-made encounters and ideas all set up and ready to go. But pretty much every session, I’m spending an hour or two writing notes about what’s going to happen in the next session. The idea that you can just roll with the punches isn’t anything I can do. It’s more a setting book than a campaign.

The final issue is that it’s tough to keep a campaign going on roll20 for an extended period of time. We’ve gone through a pretty constant churn of players who can’t make this or that time. And without the bonds of friendship that you’d get in a real world group, it’s harder to get everyone to make the commitment to schedule around someone’s special snowflake schedule. If I was going to do another campaign, I think I’d work on finding players on a somewhat longer basis before transitioning to a campaign and I’d probably do a lot more interviewing about peoples’ expectations.

It all started out so innocently. We’d done a Trail of Cthulhu one shot. Hey, we seemed to like the system. Maybe we’ll try a Night’s Black Agents one shot. So we get to the second session and being somewhat insecure, at least for a GM–a position which requires more than a big of ego–and also because I’m feeling a little out of my depth, I ask if people are enjoying the game.

Oh yes, they are. A lot. And, to be honest, I am as well. Back when I was a larvae in high school and my first summer of college when I moved back home, I ran three games: Runequest, Call of Cthulhu, and James Bond 007. So espionage and horror comes kind of naturally to me, even if we never mixed the chocolate and peanut butter back in high school.

Now when you talk about Night’s Black Agents, the elephant in the room is the Dracula Dossier. For those who don’t know, it’s a huge improv campaign posited on the notion that a little group of British Secret Service agents in the 1890s came up with the idea of recruiting a vampire as a British intelligence asset. The mission failed, and the novel Dracula is a redacted version of the mission report, issued as fiction to distract from the reality of the mission. This little group formed an internal unit within MI6 called Edom that has since tried several times to recruit a vampire and is back at it again. It’s an absolutely amazing concept for a campaign that’s matched by an equally amazing set of resources. And loads of people talk about how much they’d like to run it or play it, but a lot fewer people actually try because it’s so complicated.

And did I mention that the scenario I picked for a one shot is perfect as a lead in to the Dossier?

There’s no question, running this campaign is insane. There is nothing like it. It’s a terrifying high wire act over a pit of wolves with vampire bats nipping at you…

First, it’s just a ridiculous amount of material. When I first started gaming, D&D modules were either 16 or 32 pages. (The ratio of 16 being a function of TSR’s printer.) The Dracula Dossier consists of The Director’s Handbook (372pp) which is the main “campaign book,” the Edom Files (194pp) a set of additional scenarios many of which have clues about the Edom organization and Dracula, The Edom Field Manual (114pp) which is both a GM resource book on the Edom organization and a handout for agents, and the Dossier itself, a completely rewritten and annotated version of the novel Dracula (490pp). That’s 1,170 pages of material. Plus assorted handouts replicated from the above.

And it’s not a standard campaign, it’s an improvisational one. They get the Dossier, the entire novel Dracula, with all the material cut from the final edition, plus additional material from Pelgrane Press. That’s their handout. Four Hundred and Ninety pages. Then they pick up clues as they want, chase them, and as GM, you have to react.

From the GM’s point of view, that amount of freedom and information is terrifying. To help you, the Director’s Handbook has a list of NPCs, locations, organizations, and other sources. Each one comes with several different versions that you can mix and match as you like. In one Dracula Dossier game, Van Helsing may be a long-dead Vatican agent brought in to clean up after the messy Edom operation. In another game, you might make him a member of Edom, still alive and running things behind the scenes, kept alive by regular infusions of vampire blood. In one game, Dracula may be running a string of orphanages as blood farms, in another Edom may be using them to experiment on children, and in a third, they may just be a red herring.

There’s enough going on here that it’s not really practical to just “wing it” at the table. Most of the NPCs/locations/etc have at least several hundred words of material written about them. So I’ve been doing a lot of prepping, really more preparation for a game than I’ve done in my 30-something years of running games. I started with a read through of the Director’s handbook and quickly realized, it was far more than I was ever going to take in.

I needed to make notes. Lots of them. That led to a bit of a side trip as I invested in a whole bunch of new pens–I love good pens–even good cheap disposable pens and nice notebooks (think Moleskin but different) for the purpose. Then, I restarted reading my way through the Director’s book, taking relatively primitive notes along the way. Ok, I like this idea, I’ll make her work for Edom. Oh, that sounds terrible, I’m going to leave him out of the game. And so on.

Then the metaphorical red pen came out. A lot of my ideas changed after reading further because all of these NPCs and organizations and so on interact with each other. I started to see ways I could use this or that resource that only made sense in context of being linked to someone else. So I took my scrawled notes and rewrite them into a more organized final framework.

For the overall conspiracy, I ended up going backwards, and figuring out some big things like who Dracula’s Wives are, where his castle is, how big Edom is, what “legacies” (descendents of past Edom operatives–or as above maybe some of them are still “alive”) are in play.

One thing I haven’t found very useful is the conspyramid. I think the problem is the campaign just feels way too big for it. I look at the pyramid and I just don’t see where anything we’re doing in the game fits into one. There’s too much here and too many options. The Dossier materials also only list a Count Dracula cospyramid and I’m finding that Edom is taking over the position as “the baddie” rather than the Count. So I’m juggling two conspiracies and right now trying rather desperately to think of ways to move them from pursuing Edom to pursuing Count Dracula.

But at least, I have a frame of the campaign and I’ve written up a few little side missions and how I feel different NPCs will work together.

For week to week planning, we made a friendly agreement between players and GM to fill me in at the end of sessions about where they think they’re going. Then, between sessions, I make notes of all the clues they found in the session we just played, and then I go through them and make sure I have good followups ready, and I sketch out a brief idea of how I expect the next session to go, and I come up with a new group of clues to move them to where I think they’ll go after that.

Of course, that can all fall apart. The “next session” stuff has worked out really well, but I’ve been far less successful at keeping that second session ahead. My players always seem to go in a different direction and once we’re playing, it always seems to make perfect sense to me. So I go back and reorient, then try to figure out where I can fit in the other things at a later date. Ironically, one of the more irritating aspects has been that I can’t get them to a good location to actually hand them the Dossier itself, which is beginning to drive me crazy.