The Dracula Dossier

Posted on June 30, 2017 by Numtini

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:Â 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 wolvesÂ 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,Â 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,Â 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’veÂ 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, butÂ 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.

Cthulhu Edition Wars

Posted on April 5, 2017 by Numtini

I don’t think it’s particularly a radical statement to say that among some people, 7th Edition Call of Cthulhu is controversial. I don’t quite get it myself because I love 7th and think it’s the best edition ever, but the vicious anger that some people have towards “crap-thulhu” seems to be as sincere as it is forceful.

This weekend, I developed a theory. I’m playing in a Call game and we had a rules dispute with the GM and he wrote off something as “7th edition crap” and overruled something that would have given a couple of us an escape from insanity.

Here’s the thing. I wondered how it played out in 6th so I pulled it out and read the rule. It was the same! I have 1st, 5th, and 5.61Â and I poked at them as well. I found that the “new 7th edition rule” actually goes back to first edition. I’ve played from first edition. I didn’t remember it. In fact, I remember reading it in the 7th edition rulebook and thinking “oh that’s clever.” I started to look at some of the other rules that I had been surprised by in 7th, even some I’ve had online discussions about, and discovered that they too had been part of the game for several editions.

Whodathunkit?

I did notice that some of these weren’t really highlighted in earlier editions. They were in text boxes or things like that. Easy to overlook and far better integrated in the new edition–even though in my opinion there are plenty of issues with the new edition. And most everyone selectively reads when they first pick up a new set of rules and often there’s a sort of free floating general consensus about what rules everyone was going to ignore.

So after all this, what I wonder is how much of the animosity towards 7th edition comes from the actual differences and how much comes fromÂ people actually reading the rules (because they know it’s not just a new layout) and the book being organized well enough to actually notice the rules they never knew were there?

Gumshoe Thoughts

Posted on March 10, 2017 by Numtini

Let’s be honest. I’m middle aged and in gaming terms, that makes me an old bat. I’m set in my ways and in gaming terms, this means I find a lot of the more narrative games like Fate to be, well, a little weird. They’re just not structured enough and it’s not so much the crunch vs. narrative because I tend to like streamlined systems. It’s more that I find myself thinking “we’re not playing an RPG, we’re just playing pretend like my six year old. And the simple fact is that I’m too dull and structured to do that.”

The one exception to this has been Gumshoe, the system that runs Trail of Cthulhu, Night’s Black Agents, and others–soon to include a King in YellowÂ themed game. It’s oriented towards investigation and there’s no rolling for clues, you just get them. If you spend a few skill points, you get additional information to pad out the story, but you still don’t roll. And you don’t need to spend for core clues, you always get what you need to move the story forward. Skill rolls, like shooting someone or sneaking around, are based on a simple d6 roll and skill is exercised by spending points to adjust the roll. It’s definitely not the kind of old school system that I’m most familiar with.

That doesn’t mean I was comfortable with the system, it’s more that I was fascinated by it. There were things that attracted me on an intellectual basis. I have tended to fudge a lot of rolls myself as a GM. And I’ve noticed the sillinessÂ of having every character in a group of six roll for the usual library research, spot hidden, etc. in Call of Cthulhu. Well, what’s the point of rolling if everyone knows these are the research skills you need, takes them at some relatively high level, and you have six people with 50%-80% rolling until someone gets a success? They’re getting the clue. Why not just give it to them?

I also find the spend system fascinating. Again, it’s not so much that I sat down and analyzed the whole thing, it just felt like a really interesting concept. The whole notion of choosing to make a spend, choosing when the character or NPC is going to get a good roll or just an average one, intrigues me. I also liked the concept of additional spends for extra information on clues because it lets you fill in the blanks without

There’s also a certain level of fatigueÂ with Chaosium. I know they had a lot of economic problems, but I would think those are mostly past them. Yet, their production is relatively low,Â and they seem to be going with fairly safe choices. Also, I love Glorantha, but I think they over estimate Runequest’sÂ potential as compared to Call of Cthulhu, and it seems like they’re looking backward rather than forward. Pelgrane, on the other hand, is pushing new boundaries. It feels like the kind of games and scenarios you want to be running. The company feels fresh. It has an attitude. It’s taking risks. It’s doing new things, even if they sometimes don’t quite work. In a lot of ways, it’s what Chaosium was when I first started gaming back in the 80s.

So I started to check outÂ various Gumshoe products and it’s embarrassing to say exactly how much I’d spent on them before I ever ran a game or was even sure that I was going to like the system. Finally, I had the kind of eureka moment that’s one of my favorite scenes in Young Frankenstein: “It could work!” (But hey, I’m not sure…)

There were things that left me skeptical. Only D6es? No funky dice? That’s actually a hard one for me. Yes, my dice rolling these days is mostly clicking a button. But I love dice. In particular, I love percentile dice. Proper percentile dice, one colored and one white,Â each numbered 0-9 twice.Â Was I really ready to give up my bags and bags of oddly shaped solids in favor of the venerable cube?

And would it feel as comfortable to throw clues at players without them rolling? I have also listened to way too many “actual play” podcasts where someone walks in a room and says “I use notice and forensics” which is definitely not how I want game play to come off. I didn’t want that. I want some effort on behalf of players. On the other side, I’m not comfortable with one side of the table telling the other what to do. Players make player choices. GMs make NPC choices. The notion of seeing someone has “flattery” and telling them that they talk to Jane Q. Criminal, complement her appearance, and she tells them that Cthulhu lives in the sewer? That’s more than I want to do, but I worried that without that level of intervention, the system would fall down.

Well, I’ve finished my first full adventure running the system, a Trail of Cthulhu game that ironically was using one of the new scenarios forÂ Call of Cthulhu 7th edition. I’ve also dipped into a NBA scenario as well. I guess the system ran pretty much how I expected it to. I’m still not entirely comfortable with combat rolls because I feel like I don’t really quite have them internalized the way I have the BRP/RQ/CoC system. On the other hand, I first ran RQ in 1982… So it might take awhile.

The clue gathering has worked well. My players are all newcomers to the system, so they tend to take the initiative to describe their actions rather than simply saying they use a skill, and I’ve been able to weave in any GM intervention in what I hope wasn’t a too overt way. At the least, it didn’t offend my sensibilities. So yeah, this is working for me. There was a point where there was a simple “notice” clue and it felt extremely natural to just look at the character sheets and tell someone that they noticed something. It also let me make choices about who was going to get a clue, which let me give some attention to the quieter players. (I could do better here.)

In terms of difficulties, I felt like I wasn’t being hard enough on the players, not because of the giving away clues for free, but because I don’t have a good enough sense of the system to be providing enough of a challenge. I tend to play fast and loose with NPCs when I generate them and it’s going to take a while for me to figure out what a “strong” or “weak” NPC looks like. Also, generally as a player, I tend to be extremely parsimonious with any sort of consumable. So taking an NPC and recognizing I am meant to use all their points in this one fight is a push for me personally.

I like the sanity system in Trail a lot. Gumshoe has a “stability” system to measure psychological strain that applies to all of its games. The Cthulhu version adds a separate “cosmic horror induced insanity” to that. To me, this means I can throw psychological damageÂ at players without worrying that I’m going to drive them permanently and cosmically insane. It’s easy to write that off as taking it easy on PCs, but I’m thinking the opposite, the fact that it’s relatively easy to recover from heavy STAB losses means I’m more likely to push that button because they’re not going to go cosmically insane. And that’s important to me because I’m just not one of those Keeper’s who’s interested in slaying my PCs. I tend towards the long pulpy creepy campaigns. (Oddly, the game I look forward to most as a player is Dungeon Crawl Classics. Go figure.)

One thing I’ve found surprisingly hard is choosing what skills to use for what. I know it doesn’t really matter–they’re out to get the clue and the “art” of GMing gumshoe is in allowing them to do so elegantly. Still, it bothers me on some level, and I have this desire to “do it right” that I suspect isn’t really in the DNA of the system. That’s more of a problem with NBA than Trail.

Combat is a mixed bag and I’m still not sure how I feel. I’ve run both Trail of Cthulhu and Night’s Black Agents, which are pretty much at opposite ends of the combat complexity. I’ve been surprised at my reaction to rolling everything on a d6. I can handle that. I even got some nice d6s with an elder sign instead of a 6.

Night’s Black Agents probably represents the extreme combat orientated flavor of the system with a plethora of “thriller combat” rules. I was very dubious, but the players took them and ran and I left convinced. In our first session, we finally got to fight with the big bad that I’d been waiting for. One player did a refresh for an elaborately planned move, then did a second parkourÂ move to distract the baddie, and a second player then did a called shot to the head, and spent enough (including a bonus for the distraction move the other player made) that with a rolled 6, managed to pull off a crit. It was a huge combination of alternative rules and narrative bonuses and at the time, I was mostly reeling in shock, but damn if it wasn’t both clever and cool looking back at it. One shot. One kill.

NBA also includes enough additions to the combat system to get around some of the problems.Â Hand to hand and some weapons actually have a negative damage modifier (ie d6-1, or d6-2) and can result in zero damage. NBA lets you do called shots, which guarantee damage. And for the professors and so on in Trail of Cthulhu, occasionally whiffing seems to fit with the setting.

So really, I’ve become a fan of the system.Â It feels good to me for the moment and I look forward to when I know the rules unconsciously and can be a bit more spontaneous. Until then, there’s always printed handouts.