Life-threatening failures and stress mechanics

Recently I was listening to Sorry Honey, I Have to Take This (an actual play podcast focused on Delta Green) and picked up a nifty idea I don't remember coming across before.

Playtesting Invisible Fires

With the Whartson Hall crew, I'm running through a full playtest of my new modern weird mystery, Invisible Fires. So far things are going pretty well; they haven't run into any major roadblocks or immediately solved the mystery. Better yet, even the players who were leery of an investigation-heavy scenario with little action have been enthusiastic, which is high praise indeed.

You can catch up on their progress - as well as the previous adventure, The Wolf Who Cried Boy - over at Tekeli.li if you don't mind spoilers for something I intend to publish this year.

The Publishing of Sir Ashby Phipps

On Sunday night I finally hit "Publish" on The Perishing of Sir Ashby Phipps. It's been seven eight years in the making.

Behold, The Perishing of Sir Ashby Phipps

Enwhartening

For reasons known only to themselves (if that), the good folks of Whartson Hall recently invited me to join one of their games.

If you aren't already familiar with the Whartson Hall podcast, it's definitely worth a look. It's not only one of the longest-running actual play podcasts, but also intensely relaxing to listen to. There's no attempt to be anything other than a group of people gaming with a recorder running, complete with awful puns (the best kind). They (we?) play in a variety of systems, especially ones that aren't covered by many of the podcasts out there - GURPS, Chill, Tekumel, Forgotten Futures, and other systems to liven things up.

Anyway - if for some reason you miss listening to me play in games, and don't already listen to Whartson Hall, hurry over and partake.

Call of Cthulhu: Rigid Air actual play

A while ago I ran a scenario from the Fearful Passages book for my gaming group. I'd initially been a bit hesitant about the scenario as written, for reasons you'll find here.

After much thought, I'd made some changes to the scenario and run it for some friends during a weekend visit. The session went pretty well, much fun was had by all, and the players made a few suggestions. I incorporated them as best I could for this second attempt.

This second attempt I recorded and have finally got around to editing down. I'll discuss the changes I made in a future post; for now I just want to get these episodes up at last.

You can find the episodes at this Archive.org page.

Trail of Cthulhu: The Fallen World from YSDC Games Day 2017

The annual Yog-Sothoth.com (YSDC) Games Day took place in October, and I was lucky enough to make it for the third time. As always, it was a great, relaxing weekend full of regrettably short conversations, delicious food, and of course, games!

I managed to get a couple of recordings, and one partial recording, and will put them up here as I finish editing them. This does mean that, for the first time, these are not my own gaming group!

Librarians & Leviathans Presents: Steve Dempsey's The Fallen World

So for clarity's sake, I'm going to try to remember to use "Librarians & Leviathans Presents" when flagging up situations like this, just to avoid confusion.

Fearful Symmetries is a campaign for Trail of Cthulhu inspired by William Blake. The characters are caught up in an occult war and must use the double edged sword of magical power to reunite Albion, split asunder by time and the Mythos. The campaign will soon be published by Pelgrane Press, along with The Book of the New Jerusalem, a gazatteer of English folklore locations and people that takes up where The Book of the Smoke left off.

Steve Dempsey, the keeper for this scenario, has been running his Fearful Symmetries campaign since May 2016, achieving 61 sessions so far. This scenario, The Fallen World, was improvised by Steve at the convention. The characters are members of the Ordnance Geology Survey (Section D). Their job is to contain and clean up suspected supernatural events, and provide a suitable mundane explanation. They have been brought in to clear up in Upper and Lower Quinton in Southern Warwickshire where a number of people have suddenly died - possibly something to do with aforementioned Fearful Symmetries campaign.

Episode 1 is now available on my usual spot in the Internet Archive*. More to follow.

*okay, yes, there's a typo in the URL. That's actually there. Due to technical problems at Archive.org, I made four attempts over several days to get this uploaded, and apparently lost the second L in LnL during repeatedly typing in all the same metadata T_T I don't think it's possible to do anything about it though. I may at some point beg an admin to move it for consistency.

Links here for quick and easy access to mp4 files, others available on Archive.org. EDIT: All episodes now up!

• Episode 1
• Episode 2
• Episode 3
• Episode 4
• Episode 5
• Episode 6
• Episode 7

Upon their backs to bite 'em: scenario playtest 2

When I said "limited blogging" I didn't realise it was going to be quite this limited...

Work, writing projects (far, far too many of them, it's a really bad habit of mine), being in quite a few games, and repeatedly but not very seriously being ill did not give many opportunities for thinking about games recently. Also, I haven't had as many opportunities to catch up with podcasts that give me ideas, or talk to the people who traditionally cause me to blog.

This latest post happens because I am finally ill enough to take a week off work, and have sporadically managed to do a spot of audio editing. Here, then, I present... well, not exactly new content, because this scenario appeared before; but it's a very, very different playthrough.

This is the second playtest of my modern-day Call of Cthulhu scenario Upon their backs to bite 'em.

Picture is actually of Coleford as I can't find any good ones of the right location, but never mind. You get the idea.

If you want a general link to choose a filetype of your choice, you can head on over to the Archive.org project page to comb through the options.

If you're happy to just grab an .m4a, here are the episodes:

• Part 1: Character Generation
• Part 2: I've Put Them Under the Gerbil
• Part 3: He Actually Bleeds Kendal Mint Cake
• Part 4: Stop Trying to Cauterise the Whole Dog
• Part 5: Ideally a Giant Fly-Swatter

Upon their backs to bite 'em: scenario playtest 1

About a year ago I was inspired by a Twitter post (coupled with a convenient fever that left me both off work and mildly delirious) to whip up a rather silly scenario for Call of Cthulhu, or at least something approximating Call of Cthulhu (claims to Lovecraftianness are somewhat tenuous, I'll admit).

Last weekend my usual gaming session was cancelled, so I threw out an offer to run a one-shot for any remaining gamers. As it happened only one other person showed up, which is normally death to RPGs, but as it happens my scenario is fairly amenable to solo play. So, we decided to give it a spin.

The scenario was a success in the end, with Nathan heroically resolving the mystery, putting an end to supernatural shenanigans, and laying the groundwork for the destruction of the cult. Somehow he achieved this without a scratch nor a single point of SAN loss. Since when were players sensible?

Anyway, the recording of the playtest session is now up on Archive.org for anyone who cares to listen - though obviously spoilers abound. I hope to do further playtests soon; the scenario worked out better than I'd expected.

Ogham II: Ogham Strikes Back

A little while ago, I happened to get involved with the creation of a sinister Lovecraftian artefact.

I had a few candidate stones gathered at the same time, and Shannon carelessly left a comment which includes the words "Man, I want one now. :)"

Well, I'd already got the Ogham and the design pretty much down. I didn't have any inspiration for a particularly different carving, so I stuck with the original. I vaguely like the idea of doing some others at some point though. I actually did this project last summer, but with one thing and many others, I haven't got round to writing it up before.

As you can see, I felt this artefact really called for a suspicious dark organic stain. Well, that's easy enough.

I actually used a hyper-strong solution of coffee for this. I dissolved a full spoon of coffee powder in a small amount of water, and carefully dripped the resulting fluid onto the artefact.

Note to self: "carefully dripped the resulting fluid onto the artefact" is ideal material for sinister handouts

The staining was applied in dozens of individual doses, left to dry in the summer sun inbetweentimes. It slowly built up into something that's at least vaguely reminiscent of ichorous stainings over decades of sacrifice, I like to think. Although it does still smell faintly of coffee. I also carefully dripped tiny amounts into the rivulets of the carving, which firstly looked authentic, and secondly helps them stand out starkly against the stone.

The odd shape of this stone made it a more challenging carve. The Ogham is oddly broken up.

Peripherals

Of course, having composed two scruffy letters for the first carving, I could hardly let Shannon down with the second, now could I?

I thought it over for a while, and decided to just go with it being something she purchased from an eBay seller. Which of course needed an origin story. And some historical ephemera. And she was doing a certain campaign at the time, and why not after all take the time to offer a mysterious tie-in to a certain NPC...

Okay, I may have gone slightly over the top this time.

The backstory

So to begin with, obviously I needed a fictitious eBay page. Luckily this is relatively easy.

I say relatively easy; it's one of those things where I've completely lost the ability to judge that. I mean, I just saved a local copy of a plausible-looking eBay page to my local computer, then used the element editing menu on the browser to change individual sections without having to plough through the database-based code (straight-up HTML is so much easier to reskin). I have no idea where that actually falls on the mean or median scales of easiness.

I enclosed a PDF copy of the eBay page with my message, since sending people whole webpages is hard.

Then I composed a message from the seller, which was supposed to be straightforward, and naturally grew increasingly intricate as I went along. Naturally, I edited this in my email program to actually be from collectorkeith, and sent this email to Shannon for her own use if desired.

Dear Shannon,

thanks for your purchase of the Celtic engraving. I'll ship it over as soon as possible; it should take 5-7 working days to arrive.

Just to confirm, the package includes the artefact itself, plus its original label from Dr Richardson's collection, and two letters that have been associated with it for nearly 100 years.

This is a really interesting piece and honestly one of my favourite curiosities. It was found buried in fenland in the 1850s near Norfolk - unfortunately I was never able to find records of the exact date. It was referred to in a couple of minor journals (Norfolk Anthropology mostly, but also Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie) in the late C19th and early C20th, as mentioned in one of the enclosed letters. The researchers seem to have lost interest around 1913 when Beidecker (ZfcP) published arguments that the markings are simply ornamental rather than fragments of Pictish. It's a reasonably convincing case but I still wonder!

I was interested to see you purchase it as this piece has actually been to Australia before! It seems the piece was purchased in the late 1920s (I can't quite make out the date) when the collection was being sold off after Richardson's murder, and shipped to an antiquarian named Jackson Elias who was staying in Australia at the time. I believe this may have been an American anthropologist of that name who published some articles on lesser-known religions and folk practices, but it's not really my area.

The two enclosed letters date from that occasion, and include some intriguing biographical notes. It made me curious what sort of trouble Elias had been getting himself into. Knowing archaeology of the time I wonder whether he'd been involved in some less-than-legal excavations and removal of antiquities, which some countries were starting to crack down on.

The piece and its letters found their way back to London sometime after the second world war. According to my notes, it was retrieved from a cache of stolen goods in 1952, and its owner at the time, a Mr Neil Wharfdale, ended up in a mental institution suffering from severe paranoia following a series of unexplained burglary and assault attempts. It ended up in an auction run by the House of Ausberg in the 1970s where they were purchased by Professor Giles Moreton of Lincoln as part of a substantial lot. He didn't have much interest in Celtic material (I believe most of the lot was Egyptian) and I bought them in 1997.

Unfortunately I've had no more luck in deciphering the mystery than the old archaeologists did. The Celtic scholars I consulted agreed that it is an authentic C1-5th piece, but one suggestion is that it's actually a non-Celtic copy (possibly Romano-British or just plain Roman) made as a curiosity or just for practice by someone without a grasp of Ogham. It could even be an example of Ogham used to transcribe another language, although I couldn't make sense of it in Latin either. Perhaps the carver used a different transliteration?

The staining doesn't appear to be blood, which was the obvious (and more romantic) thought. I suspect it's some kind of oil, possibly an oily resin or perfume used in a burial, although if it's a ritual piece it could be from the ceremony. Or, of course, it could simply be that oil has leaked into the ground where it was buried - much less satisfying but perhaps more likely.

I hope you find it as intriguing as I did, and if you do learn any more about it, I'd be fascinated to hear from you.

Best wishes, Keith

The label

Letter to Jackson Elias

The 'typed' letter - worth reading as it has Edie's annotations as well as the text below!

Adelaide, Australia

Tuesday 15th 192~

My dear Elias,

I ran across the enclosed at a pretty dull auction of a country house in the quaint little town where I've been staying. Some ancestor had a collecting mania but frankly the rest was tedious books, pots, arrowheads and stuffed birds. I thought this repulsive little enigma might tickle your fancy. The little charms were long sold by the time I arrived, alas.

Tiresomely they refused to give me the collector's catalogue, so you will be delighted to see that I have lovingly transcribed their entries for you and now type it up for your delectation. I hope I have it right, but peculiar dead languages are rather more your area than mine, dear boy.

As you predicted, a foreigner of some sort has been loitering in the neighbourhood where you were staying. I had Norris approach him (with the utmost discretion, I do assure you) and with a little tact elicited the information that he was on the lookout for 'an old friend' with a predictable resemblance to your good self. I do trust you have not been agitating?

Norris was, with his usual skill, able to convey the impression that he might be willing to assist in this matter, and report that the foreigner showed a disposition to accept the offer. Tell me how you'd like to proceed, and don't go out without your revolver.

I ordered the books you requested from Blackwell's, and will send them on to your hotel. It will cost a pretty penny but if you say air mail, so it is. In the circumstances I say you ought to keep them well out of sight; I believe the staff at Blackwell's are beginning to look askance at me. I did call at the Bodleian, but even they drew a blank at this 'Sand Bat' of yours. I suppose the Antipodes aren't exactly their focus.

Yours and all that jazz,

Edie

The catalogue record

These copies of the catalogue are also annotated by a grumpy Edie

Carved stone of Celtic design found in bogs near Norwich. Originally buried in a bark container, which also held eight charms or amulets (holdings R-83N/hap1 to R-83N/hap8). Appears to depict a bearded figure, originally identified as the Dagda, but questionable due to lack of the distinctive club. Possibly a tribal chieftain or priest. Gordon (1896, Norfolk Archaeology) suggested the 'beard' is a symbolic representation of breath or speech, and the projections to the left are a harp, making this a bardic figure or possibly Áillen.

Carved with 36 ogham glyphs around perimeter. Left perimeter damaged at some point and the glyphs crudely repaired, leaving bifurcating set of glyphs. Lower part of stone and parts of carving stained with dark substance.

Transcription below from Winstable (1857).

Fngluimglupnazctulurle q u g ahnaglzta g n g

Inability to identify clear Old Irish words led Kleinhoff (1903) to suggest a druidic code and Rhys (1906) to argue for a Pictish origin.

Billings (1911) suggests an abbreviated or shorthand message to fit the available space, and identifies possible Primitive Irish words within the passage:

1)

finn-gl[as/an/é] ... ma[c/g] lu[gh] [b]námae c[a]thu rí ... leth-... ná-glé-se [do]gní

great brightness ... mac? lug was.enemy battle king ... half... not-bright.emph he-make

Finn-Glé (name)... Son of Lugh the Enemy? [perished in] battle with the King... half... no longer bright (emphasised; a play on death and his name?)... he did.

2)

finn-gl[as/an/é] ... im-gal[af] .... c[a]thu rí lé[g]- guth-gáeth...

great brightness ... was-valorous ... battle king with/reads voice-wind

Finn... showed courage... the king (with/who could read) voice of the wind (epithet for a chieftain?)...

Billings argues that, like most early Ogham stones, this was a grave marker or tribute, and is simply a more compact form of language used due to the limited space. A similar phenomenon is common in Latin engravings.

This is another one of those areas where I had a lot of fun. Well, frustration and fun. Coming up with plausibly bad interpretions of the Ogham, without spending as much time on it as the actual fictional Celticists would over the years, and without actually learning Old Irish (I'm fine with just the modern Celtic languages, thanks) was a tricky one.

Skills as described vs. skills as used

So I was visiting Dan and Arthur over the holidays, and we had many conversations about roleplaying, of course. One of them eventually pottered around to musing on skill interpretation. Or, to be a little uncharitable, skill misinterpretation.

Here, as usual, "skill" means an aspect of an RPG's mechanics which determine your competence in a specific field of activity. In some cases things we would normally consider to be Attributes or Statistics or something work in a way similar enough that we can also consider them here. White Wolf's dots, for example, are basically the same whether they're in an Attribute or a... whatever you call the other things, I forget.

Let's take as read for this article that a skill has four components: a Name, an optional Fluff, a Description, and an Application. The Name is literally the name of the skill ("Ignite Fish"). The Fluff is a bit of flavour text which some games include. The Description is the section of the rules which explains what the skill is, and may give specific mechanical subsystems, special uses, examples and so on; descriptions may be very mechanical or largely narrative.

Finally, the Application is simply the way a given set of players actually uses the skill in their games. This does not necessarily correspond to any of the above.

Fractal Mythos Knowledge

I had some thoughts about the Call of Cthulhu Cthulhu Mythos skill while listening to some podcast or other - I can't remember which one now. Possibly RPPR. You can read a tome about Hastur and suddenly know about Ithaqqua. Or you can sometimes know about byakhees, and sometimes not. It's weird.

An idea came to me that you could introduce a fractal approach to Mythos skills (and indeed others, but let's stick with Mythos for now). This would be a tweak specifically for games where there's quite a lot of Mythos going on, and particularly suitable for long-term campaigns focused on a subset of the Mythos but including elements from other factions.

As it's Call of Cthulhu specific I've posted it on my Call of Cthulhu blog. But feel free to comment there or here as suits you.

Why so Cthulhu?

So here's something Dan said to me over the extended gaming weekend that was my New Year:

"I'm surprised just how into Call of Cthulhu you are."

And that got me thinking. Why am I so keen on Call of Cthulhu? Or, to take a step back, am I especially keen on Call of Cthulhu? And if so, why and in what way?

A suuuper quick precis of my gaming history. Fighting Fantasy gamebooks aside, I first encountered the concept around the age of 12 when I was on holiday in the states and bought a copy of Dragon magazine. Over ten years later I started running D&D 4th edition for some librarians, and a few months later was finally invited to try out a tabletop RPG. Since then I've played a few White Wolf one-shots, quite a bit of D&D, various random one-shots and playtests, some Warhammer 40K, and a moderate amount of Call of Cthulhu. I've also listened to podcasts of and read the rulebooks for a few other systems, like Traveller.

I've run one short campaign, which was D&D 4th edition and based around adapting existing scenarios. I've written a scenario for 40K that I haven't yet run, as well as a game about lizards. When I have ideas for future games, they are generally for Call of Cthulhu.

Call of Cthulhu is what I tend to default to, and I'm working this out as I go along. Broadly speaking, there are factors which tend to make me actively gravitate towards it, and there's also more passive reasons why I just find it a comfortable fit.

System

One of the things that I think Call of Cthulhu genuinely has going for it is the system. It is simple, reasonably robust, reasonably genre-appropriate, and broad. It takes almost no effort to understand the mechanics well enough to play ("this is a percentage, roll under it"), and not much more to memorise most of the rules. Character generation is quicker than most other games and choosing names frequently seems to be the bottleneck.

I enjoy games with much crunchier rules too - both Warhammer 40K and D&D are much more complex. But if I want to throw someone into a situation and just get on with it, or to start playing myself, Call of Cthulhu is the most straightforward option.

It's also flexible enough that you can use it as a rough approximation for a very wide range of settings. It doesn't handle all genres well (in particular, anything heroic tends to fall down on the combat, and it's not crunchy enough to be tactical) but you can use almost any setting. Modern day? Historical? Ancient world? Future? Traditional fantasy? Gothic? Cyberpunk? You just need to tweak the skill list to get something that's useable. I'm not saying it will be great - I'm saying it will do.

Puzzling

Call of Cthulhu is often used as an investigative game, and I find that tends to suit me. I am an inveterate prodder at game realities, and as a player I frequently find myself having to bite my tongue to avoid roleplaying a detective. I always want more information, to try out theories, to see what happens.

Call of Cthulhu has several advantages here. Firstly, it's often played explicitly as an investigative game where you are trying to puzzle out what happened, which makes it a great fit. Secondly, because it's usually quite an ambient experience rather than one where you're in constant peril, there is usually a lot of room for asking questions, testing out theories, and going to gather more information; while there are situations where "let's just try my idea" will get you killed, they're relatively few compared to a combat-focused game.

For what it's worth, my limited experience of White Wolf games was that they also offered a satisfying amount of room to play around with ideas and with in-game abilities in creative ways.

A third aspect is that the setting lends itself to quite thorough investigation, because the mysteries you're solving tend to be weird enough that eliminating the impossible isn't always a good idea... while fellow-gamers don't necessarily want to indulge quite as much as I often do, Call of Cthulhu tends to get them more onboard than many other games.

Source material

Obviously, Call of Cthulhu is broadly based on the work of HP Lovecraft and associated folks. I quite like these. I wouldn't go so far as to call myself an actual fan, honestly. There's plenty of problems with both Lovecraft's stories and those of other people. Lovecraft had a whole bunch of prejudices, and in a way his taste for short stories made it difficult to get into the work as deeply as novel authors allow. The related works are a very mixed bunch, divergent in genre (Clark Ashton Smith is a different beast from Howard, Derleth or Lumley, for example) and in focus. Some authors are keen to write genuine horror, which I flee from with alacrity.

Still, there's something in it which appeals to me. There are mysteries, and slow unfurling writing full of description (keen readers may have noticed my own verbose tendencies) and fantastical events. I like the old places, and the ancient tomes, and the peculiar people, which appeal to me far more than, say, reading about men with guns being manly.

Genre knowledge

Tying into the last point, I think one of the reasons Call of Cthulhu does genuinely appeal to me more than many other games is that I have a much better grasp of it. It's one of the few games where I actually know the source material, in many cases better than everyone else I'm playing with, and feel I have a good grasp of what I'm doing. This is because Call of Cthulhu is based on books.

To cut a long story uncharacteristically short, my family were never great TV watchers and we didn't even have a TV for most of my childhood. Between that and other factors, I just never got into TV. I could say that I was reading instead, or doing school clubs, both of which are true, but honestly I've just never developed the habit or skill of watching TV. In the pre-iPlayer days I was rarely organised enough to reliably watch a particular show. Nowadays I'm too skittish and sitting down to watch something for an hour feels like a huge investment of precious time - I prefer something that feels less passive.

The end result of all this is that I am, for a nerd as big as I am, spectacularly unversed in most of the mainstays of pop culture. I never watched Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, The X-Files, Xena, Ally McBeal, Twin Peaks, Seinfeld, Frasier, Law and Order, Saved by the Bell, Beverly Hills, The Fresh Prince, Byker Grove, Dawson's Creek, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Shield, The West Wing, any police procedural whatsoever, any soap whatsoever - I can't even compile this list without reference to Google because I don't even know what the shows are that I didn't see. I saw a handful of Futurama episodes at university, caught up with Firefly on DVD years later, and somehow managed to watch a good proportion of the episodes of mid-run Buffy. I did see quite a bit of Dr Who on video, and found the resurrection of the show disappointing enough that I lost interest years ago.

Similarly, I never really watched that many films, and the ones I did see tended to be fairly light-hearted and family-friendly. I did, however, read ferociously, mostly in the areas of nonfiction, fantasy and sci-fi.

And all this means I am equally spectacularly at sea in terms of the tropes of most of these things, which is a real problem because most role-playing games seem to either be specifically based on film and TV, or at the very least to be heavily influenced by them.

The RPGs I find easiest to grasp are Dungeons and Dragons, Call of Cthulhu and Warhammer 40,000. I really don't think that's an accident. All three are primarily based on books (yes, even 40K - the game itself consists of books, which have fluff in them, and there's lots of tie-in books too). I am familiar with a lot of the stuff behind all three. Traveller I've still never played, but it feels like it could fit with the fairly dry and hard-but-not-annoyingly-philosophical tone of a lot of the books I read in my younger days.

Setting

In terms of actually playing in or running a game, Call of Cthulhu has another big advantage in that it's a real-world game. This it shares with World of Darkness, though that gameline massively dilutes its advantage with an incredibly complex layer of supernatural stuff.

When you're starting out as a player, you don't need to know very much specific. It helps if you have a rough idea how the period you're playing in works, but even that can be worked around. You do know how the real world works, and have a broad idea of how things like shopping, social interaction, law and order work - especially given some narrative wiggle-room. The weirdness of the setting is specifically an unexpected and alarming element which is disruptive to the PCs, so you're not actually required to know anything about that ahead of time.

For the GM, it's also a boon, because it's really easy to run. You can use real-world locations and history, and improvise rapidly based on actual facts you know about reality. It's easier and quicker to guess plausibly how a certain NPC might behave, or how a town might respond to some bizarre events, than it is to make a similar judgement about a fantasy world. You can use actual maps to decide where players can go, rather than having to invent new locations on the fly. Plus, the players can use their understanding of real history, science and so on to follow what's going on; they don't need to have read up on the metaphysics or magic laws of your setting, and have everything patiently explained to them "which your character would already know, of course".

GMing

I think this ties in to a more general point that I find Call of Cthulhu relatively easy to GM for.

I feel like I wouldn't even know where to start with a D&D campaign, and I'd have to invest a huge amount of effort to create a situation that might be playable in order to dangle it in front of potential players. And I'm sure any of the people I game with could run a better one. Maybe I just lack confidence. I certainly enjoy playing D&D, and I've actually got the broad strokes of a couple of worlds from my 4e campaign, but coming up with all the geographies and combat and faction motivations seems like a lot of hard work. And it must be said, so far everything I've suggested to the usual group has been met with absolute silence, so not a lot of encouragement over there.

Writing a single scenario for Call of Cthulhu is a relatively limited feat. Okay, okay, yes, I admit I personally end up putting preposterous amounts of work into writing really robust investigations over long periods. But the principle stands! You can come up with one idea, play around with it and see if it seems to have any meat on it. If so, you can flesh it out as a standalone scenario and then stop. There isn't the same expectation of presenting a long campaign that some other systems have. I think the absence of an XP system is one of the factors here; because doesn't offer the satisfaction of gradual increase in power and new exciting abilities, there's less expectation of long-term play.

Also, Call of Cthulhu is legendarily fond of prewritten adventures. I've only actually run a couple, but there's a widespread acceptance of them in the gaming community. You can GM by selecting, reading and running prewritten adventures, rather than writing all your own material.

If you do want to write scenarios, though, I think the "real world, but with weird elements" makes it really accessible. All you really need is one weird spin. I've got a huge list of ideas waiting to one day be scenariofied: they're inspired by things ranging from weird stories, to stories in a completely different genre, to purely mechanical challenges ("can you write a scenario where X?", to historical and political events, to slightly odd stuff that's happened to me in real life, to nursery rhymes, to advertising.

I've written an entire scenario based on a photo someone posted on Twitter. I think it's genuinely good.

I just don't have the extensive genre knowledge or game experience to comfortably write scenarios for most other systems. I'd want to play a hell of a lot more White Wolf, for example, before feeling I had even the slightest idea what to do with them.

Circumstantial

Finally, it's probably worth accepting that a fair bit of the reason is purely circumstantial.

My friends include several very experienced GMs who can easily run a long and satisfying D&D campaign. Since my own foray collapsed for timetabling reasons, there's been no reason for me to try. Those slots have enough D&D in them already and it's better than I'd do.

Besides the regular online gaming, most of my games consist of irregular weekends of board and roleplaying games. These are of uncertain duration, and it's unpredictable how many people are available - usually three, sometimes four, occasionally two (including me). Experience of trying to run D&D on a roughly similar model was very poor. However, these are good occasions to try a one-shot that lasts four to eight hours. Of the games available, everyone is reasonably keen on Call of Cthulhu so it makes sense to run that. We sometimes experiment with other one-shots, but there's not huge enthusiasm and of course it's a lot of upfront time investment learning a system.

Because I live a long way from my existing gaming groups, I have limited opportunities to play or run games, but plenty of opportunities to think and write about them. Call of Cthulhu lends itself well to this because it's focused on prewritten scenarios, and because most of the game content you need consists of NPCs and clue chains rather than combat. Writing up mysteries is, I think, more satisfying to do than writing up potential combat because you can put together a coherent whole situation, whereas with combat it's all hazy until the sword hits the goblin.

If I write a one-shot for Call of Cthulhu, I'm reasonably confident that at some point I'll be able to find players for it. That isn't the case for campaign pitches, as that requires a lot more investment from everyone and is competing for a very limited amount of weekly gaming space.

I have a suspicion that if I'd come into gaming via a different group of people, I'd be happily running around with White Wolf and a fistful of storygames.* I do like mechanics; I like crunchy games and simulationism and worlds I can poke. At the same time, I like satisfying narrative and tropes and acting and silly voices. I'm a big reader, I've done some acting, that could be me.

And if storygames didn't all seem to be so freaking miserable.

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Now it could well be that if I decided to sit down and write up a load of D&D campaign notes, I'd be able to come up with something worthwhile. It's a tough first step though, and one I've never really felt the encouragement to try, because given my current gaming setup I'm not especially optimistic I'd ever get to use it. I mean, I like the idea of running another D&D campaign, but I also like the idea of being toned and muscular or writing a novel. So far, none of these seems likely.

Musings on Monomonsters

I recently read through The Derelict, a one-shot scenario for Call of Cthulhu released for Free RPG Day (I bought my copy the normal way, though). This post will contain massive spoilers for that scenario, so be aware; proceed with caution.

Some of you may remember my post about Monster Balance in Call of Cthulhu, which is also relevant here.

The Derelict

So, the scenario features a group of Investigators who rapidly find themselves trapped on an iceberg with two wrecked ships.

After finding signs that the crew of the other ship were massacred in a way that doesn't look like either humans or polar bears, they eventually realise they're being hunted by an inhuman monster.

The villain of the piece is a "sciapod". This is basically an Ice Yuan-Ti, for those of you with a D&D background. Okay, it's a huge ice merman covered in chitinous armour, which is invisible (with one specific exception), carries a bow that conjures steel-hard ice harpoons, and likes to eat humans.

The rest of the scenario will likely consist of the Investigators cautiously making their way around the ships finding some more horrific scenes, and potentially a couple of mildly useful items. They will almost certainly be picked off one by one, though a couple might escape to dubious safety on the ice waters.

Going Solo

Prompted by my reading and my reservations about the scenario, what I actually want to talk about today is the use of single entities as antagonists. Specifically, I want to consider some of the drawbacks and difficulties presented by this situation.

In many ways, I think you can sum this up simply as having all your eggs in one basket.

The eggs take a variety of forms: psychological threat, mechanical threat, persistence of the problem, capability of the antagonist, and so on. Regardless, packing them into one bundle tends to give you a blunter and more fragile tool to work with.

Coming back to my previous article, the Monomonster is going to be a Beast, Hunter or Final Horror because as a lone operator it can't really be anything else. In theory it could have a dual role as a Gatekeeper or Messenger as part of a larger storyline.

One Man Army

The most prominent of the issues is physical confrontation, so that's where I'm going to start. For this section I'm focusing on scenarios where the monster* presents a direct physical threat to the survival of the PCs. This may not actually be its primary danger, or its preferred way of interaction, but in a direct confrontation the monster is a serious threat.

A lone monster of this kind is significantly more powerful than any one PC, in terms of whatever combat-equivalent features in the game. Usually, it is at least as powerful as all of the PCs combined. There's often a straightforward reason for this, which is that if the monster wasn't this powerful, it wouldn't present a credible threat to the party.

*I'm going to say "monster", which should not be taken to assume a D&D perspective on all this.

From a structural perspective, the danger of the situation is twofold. Firstly, the monster might win. Secondly, the monster might lose.

Yes, I am feeling glib today! How did you know?

To put it another way, every combat* encounter between the monster and the PCs takes on an existential nature. If the PCs do somehow manage to defeat the monster, then the scenario is effectively over. The psychological threat is lifted, the mechanical threat ceases to exist, and although the GM may have some narration or investigation to offer in closing, this tends to feel like a wrap-up. The PCs can achieve a sudden victory, but with only a single opponent to confront, it's difficult for them to slowly gain the upper hand or see the odds growing in their favour.

*I'm just going to say "combat"; there might be other forms of confrontation that work in equivalent ways in specific games.

For the GM, this poses a challenge, because if there's any possibility that the PCs might defeat the monster through a series of inspired decisions and lucky rolls, well, there's a possibility that the PCs might win through a series of inspired decisions and lucky rolls. And if that possibility crops up five minutes into the scenario when the PCs first encounter their opponent, that will make for a very short gaming session. In the case of The Derelict, if the PCs somehow manage to kill the sciapod shortly after reaching the wreck, there really isn't anything left except gathering some backstory.

An obvious and common solution to this problem is to ensure that the monster cannot, in fact, be defeated through a series of inspired decisions and lucky rolls. The sciapod (to continue with our example) has 45HP and deducts 5 points from any damage inflicted; the PCs have three firearms with 6 bullets apiece dealing roughly 1d10 damage. Now, hypothetically, this means the PCs could deal 90 damage to it, killing it twice, without even taking extreme successes (extra damage) into account. The chances are astronomical through. If the PCs understood what was up very quickly, were all together with weapons drawn, and managed to launch a surprise attack on the (invisible!) creature before any of them were killed, it might just about work. Or it could continually roll 100s. I'm not going to say never. But it's incredibly unlikely.

If that thousand-to-one chance comes up, though, the scenario may fall flat. It doesn't actually have to happen that early, either. It just needs to happen at a point when the narrative momentum points in another direction.

Hero Al-Jaf and Bugsy Warburton have finally discovered the horrific experiments behind their predicament, and realised they need to ransack the Science Building where Dr. Sinister's notes and equipment may provide them with a faint chance to escape alive. As they prepare to leave the office, they hear the terrifying sound of the Slatcher gnawing at their door. They turn tail as the Slatcher bursts through, firing wildly in a desperate attempt to buy time.

In a stunning display of serendipity, three bullets strike the Slatcher in the sensitive nostril region, overloading its nervous system and destroying its brain. With the hulking creature dead, our heroes have no particular reason to go to the Science Building, and begin to shuffle awkwardly home.

If you have a number of monsters stalking the PCs, this isn't a particular problem. Even if each monster is supposed to be extremely tough, the players will probably understand that they got really lucky and still shouldn't try to confront the remainder outright. But with only one, you have nothing left to play with.

We're All Dead Here

The parallel problem to this is that the monster can win too easily.

Remember, because we have only one monster in this scenario, that monster is overwhelmingly powerful. It is capable of defeating at least several of the PCs - which, given mechanical variation and raw luck, means that it's almost certainly capable of killing all of the PCs at once. Often this is deliberate; the intention is that PCs will either escape the monster, or work out a way to overcome it indirectly using the environment and information they can accumulate, or increase their capabilities (either mechanically or in terms of knowledge and resources) to the point where they can in fact defeat it.

Because the monster is so powerful, any time there's a confrontation with the whole party, there is a risk that the monster will kill them all. While that risk may ultimately be part of the scenario, once again it can feel very unsatisfying if it happens too early, or at a time when the narrative momentum isn't pointing that way.

If it does come down to combat, then, the GM has the difficult job of reining in their beast. They need to calculate fairly precisely just how much damage it should wreak. If they simply follow the mechanical potential of a rampaging monster capable of killing the entire party in a few rounds, there may come an abrupt end to the scenario. Conversely, if they restrain it too far, the psychological threat can be lost; this not only affects the narrative, but can cause further complications because players become tempted to keep fighting. After all, if the creature doesn't attack as ferociously as they expected, this may be their best chance to defeat it!

The psychology of the players, and indeed the player characters, can get convoluted, especially with metagame considerations coming into play. You can of course resort to saying "hey, this monster could easily kill you all, but I'm giving you a chance to get away," but there's a real risk that this will puncture the immersion too far - players may end up feeling that everything is under the GM's sufferance and become dissatisfied.

Basically, then, the difficulty for the GM is knowing when to stop. On top of choosing a narratively and mechanically appropriate amount of havoc for the monster to inflict on the characters, bearing in mind the psychological effect of that havoc and the tropes that will be evoked by it, the GM also needs to have in mind a pretext for stopping that feels satisfying given the nature of the monster.

Scaling

Players can be surprisingly stubborn about backing down. It's not super surprising though. After all, often the whole point of encountering a monster in a game is to fight it.

I think one of the particular difficulties of a monomonster is that it's difficult to give a useful sense of scale. By which I mean: exactly how much of a threat does this thing pose?

Of course, there are some exceptions. If a monster is genuinely meant to be overwhelmingly dangerous beyond anything the PCs could dream of, you can generally find a way to demonstrate that just in description. In that case, the scenario is about staying as far away from it as possible.

When as a GM you have many monsters, you have options. The most straightforward is that you can have some of them attack the PCs (or some NPCs) and show roughly what kind of threat they pose. A Venusian Gnarker might charge a group of guards, only brought down by a relentless barrage of gunfire after smashing several aside. Several Chibblers might spring upon a PC, and when the party can wrestle them off, it shows that four PCs can cope with about four Chibblers without getting too seriously hurt - but the hundreds encroaching on their base will be a problem. They might know that one unarmed cultist is a relatively manageable threat, but that they can't really handle the fifty who are meeting downstairs.

In particular, you can expend some of your monsters to demonstrate the scale of the threat. Was it easy to kill them? Hard? Terrifyingly difficult? Okay, now you know what you're dealing with. And that was just the hatchling...

What scaling is about is informing the players of the situation. You are trying to convey a sense of appropriate threat, bearing in mind the tropes and conventions of the genre, so that the players understand what it means for them to take various courses of action. This is all part of the general GM's role, just as in portraying an NPC you try to show the players what kind of NPC and situation they are dealing with (with reference again to genre tropes).

With a monomonster, you can't easily do this.

You can have the monomonster attack someone else, which can work well, though it depends on how the players interpret the power of that victim. There's also a risk that the PCs think this is a "rescue the NPC!" situation, because they haven't yet worked out what they're dealing with. Finally, some kinds of monster don't work well here because they should really move on to killing the PCs.

Another classic is leaving evidence of the destruction wrought by the creature. This is potentially very potent; in particular, it allows the PCs to study the scene at their leisure and learn a lot about what the creature can do. It can include witness accounts and scenes of carnage. However, it can be difficult for players to grasp what these mean in mechanical terms. Is being able to wipe out a roomful of police officers evidence of appalling power, or just that the police are a bit useless? Are we supposed to be scared about this for practical reasons, or aghast at this tragedy, or is it just the kind of thing that happens? How did those police match up to us, anyway? Of course, this depends on things like system. In D&D, you don't know whether a dead NPC is 1st or 20th level unless you're told. In Call of Cthulhu, people are mostly fairly equal, but skills can make a huge difference.

It is possible to have the monster simply attack, working on the basis that the party will mostly escape. This might work absolutely fine, but it's risky. There's that aforesaid worry about killing everyone, especially if they don't realise they're not supposed to fight back. Or the monster getting killed by a fluke.

You could also end up with more complicated situations. For example, killing off even a single PC early on might leave the game feeling flat for their player (even if you get a replacement, your investment can be diminished). Characters might be sufficiently injured or traumatised that it's actually difficult for them to do very much, especially in a game with injury mechanics. For example, a sprained ankle or fear of darkness could leave a player struggling to contribute. If the game has resource management, such as mana or even ammunition, it's possible for someone to burn through a lot of their resources in this kind of preliminary encounter and have little left for the main scenario.

In addition, while a monomonster can manifest new abilities or increased power over time, it can be very difficult to plausibly do the opposite. Monsters achieving new stages of evolution, greater manifestation onto the material plane, absorbing enough souls to breathe fire? There's precedent for that. Monsters losing the ability to breathe fire, or weakening, except due to protagonist intervention? That just feels like pulling punches. And if you try to repeatedly scale up and down, it will certainly begin to feel arbitrary.

Agency

Somewhat strangely, I think another issue with this kind of scenario can be player agency. Now, it's tricky because there's also a loss of character agency in many of these scenarios, which relates to most of them being horror. But I think the monomonster setup does tend to limit player options as a consequence of the limited range of narrative resolutions.

Let me try that again in less portentous language. As I've said, there's a significant risk of the narrative falling flat because the monster, or the party, are killed off at an unsatisfying time. The power of the monster tends not to leave a lot of leeway for error, which tends to mean limited scope for players to test ideas, explore and take risks. This can either result from player caution (including playing strongly into trope on the assumption that this is the only way to meaningfully engage with the scenario), or from GMing that steers into Quantum Ogres and railroading territory.

Let's take the sciapod as our example.

Freedom of Movement

The scenario obliges them to land on the iceberg. It then mandates that their boat is disabled, and the radio destroyed. This immediately removes two choices: the players cannot decide to have the characters call for help, including further information, nor can they decide to try and escape. This is a story about being hunted by a monster on a shipwreck, not about being chased by a monster across the Arctic and beyond. Fair enough, unless you're running a total sandbox you do need to decide what sort of thing you're trying to do in a scenario, especially in genres where GMs are expected to devote effort to building up backstory and providing realistic details, which require planning and research.

Informed Decisions

The players may wish to gather information about what is going on. This is a sensible choice and also in-genre; protagonists faced with an unusual situation do generally try to puzzle it out, and in horror genres this often overrides caution. The players aren't prevented from information-gathering, which is good. However, the majority of the information is generic atmosphere-inducing detail, demonstrating the power of the sciapod and the danger they face: the crew thought up several logical ways to protect themselves against something, all of which failed.

It's interesting to learn what happened here, but it doesn't actually help. Notably, they can't find anything that explains what the sciapod is, its weaknesses (spoiler: none) or how it behaves, any of which would increase their ability to make effective decisions. A very notable omission is any clue to the secret means of seeing through its invisibility, which is very much out of left field.

I suspect this is unusual. Stories of this kind often involve the protagonists observing the monster's behaviour (or the clues it leaves behind) and slowly learning of its quirks and vulnerabilities, eventually equipping them to escape or defeat it. This helps them make informed decisions, offering agency. On the flipside, there is a risk that the scenario becomes a series of scripted reveals, with the players needing to progress though a whole clue chain before they are allowed into the endgame. Again, this is a bigger risk with a monomonster, because a monomonster is a bigger threat allowing less margin for error. With multiple monsters, they can gradually gain the knowledge to take on increasingly powerful monsters, or test out leaps of deduction and survive being wrong.

Other possibilities are significantly curtailed by that invisibility. It deprives them of information about what's happening, including the ability for characters to observe the creature and interact with it. It's technically possible to overcome the invisibility, but the solution is bizarre and isn't spelled out anywhere, which means the players don't really have the option to work towards discovering it.* The invisibility is an unusual trait for a monomonster, though. Shapeshifting and similar abilities can produce some related issues, but typically you can at least see the monster when it's attacking you.

Technically you could try and work it out by experimentation, but it would be insanely dangerous, and I'm still not sure players would work it out. It's also very hard for the GM to help out without just telling them the answer.

Judging the Odds

The sciapod's superhuman strength and toughness, and ability to kill at long range while being totally invisible, make fighting it largely pointless. My impression of the scenario was that by info-gathering, players would mostly judge that the monster is far too powerful to confront. It's made clear that a large number of hardy sailors taking sensible precautions, including some decent improvised weaponry, were unable to stop it.

While that doesn't stop the players trying, I think that is a reduction in effective agency. Within the context of horror, signs that an enemy is overwhelmingly powerful in a fight is typically a flag that you are not expected to fight it. Players may not mind their characters dying, but if you're confident the attempt will be fatal, it turns the choice to fight from "part of your range of interactive options" to a specific narrative decision or a last resort.

The players' choices seem very limited here, because there seems very little they can meaningfully do either about the sciapod, or about their own survival.

They can't call for help. There's nowhere to run to, and they can't actually see what they're running from. They can't really hide and it wouldn't achieve anything. They can try to fight back, or just defend themselves, but the scenario makes a concerted effort to show them how ineffective it would be against this inhumanly powerful and resilient creature (which is, let's remember, able to kill them with one shot at long range while remaining totally invisible). They can't observe the creature's behaviour and exploit that, because it's mostly invisible and doesn't seem to have any behaviours other than killing, and also trying to watch it is insanely dangerous.

Why is this about monomonsters again?

Okay, so I'm using one creature from one scenario as an example. They're not all the same.

Basically, a monster story tends to have one of two satisfactory narrative structures. In the first, the characters begin by fleeing and hiding, gradually gain knowledge or resources that improve their odds, and finally defeat the monsters in a series of climactic encounters. In the second, the characters begin by hiding and fleeing, gradually gain knowledge or achieve small victories that improve their situation, and finally find a way to make their escape. In both cases, what essentially happens is that over time, the monster's relative threat decreases until it is less than the characters' growing ability to achieve their goals.

In an interactive roleplaying game, things tend go to in unexpected directions at best. There's no special reason for a confrontation with a single monster to escalate nicely to a dramatic finale. This is especially true as players do not usually have perfect knowledge of the relative capabilities of their characters and the monster, or the odds in play, and are not necessarily aiming to construct a satisfying narrative. You wind up with situations where the players are expected to encounter the monster early, to identify that it is a threat and that they cannot defeat it, but for them to also somehow survive the early encounters, despite the fact that the monster is motivated to kill them, and capable of killing them.

Achieving this balance is particularly difficult with a monomonster because the GM cannot easily use convenient variation in the number of opponents, or their maturity or armament, or their apparent intelligence, to vary threat levels. Instead, they have to control the monomonster's behaviour to ensure it does not kill the players in the early encounters. Because it is controlled in this way, the significance of the players' choices is reduced, and thus their agency. In addition, as I mentioned in scaling, if the GM tries to vary the threat posed between encounters (and in particular, specific abilities) the players will struggle to make informed choices.

With multiple monsters, the GM can open with a Chibbler Larvae encounter to demonstrate the threat. It doesn't need scripting: they can design the Larvae to be moderately threatening and leave the players to respond as they wish, with confidence that the characters will survive and emerge with some understanding of the threat. When the characters encounter apparently more intelligent Chibblers, or find signs that a huge Chibboth has passed nearby, their players can make informed guesses as to the consequences of their next actions (run, fight, hide?). The GM can also scale threat up and down: once they've avoided a Chibboth, they can find a couple of Chibblers in the next corridor.

Except, I'm missing something. Quite often when monomonsters are used, helplessness is the point.

We're All Doomed

The story structures I mentioned above are either defeating or escaping the monster. I suppose third and further structures include the monster gradually picking everyone off, typically except for one surviving female character and possibly a cute pet. You can potentially view this as a Final Horror incarnation of the monomonster, from my Call of Cthulhu typology.

Some of those are effectively lone protagonist stories with a supporting cast, which you can view as working the same way as my two above, but being less appropriate for group play. Others are all about the characters' helplessness, which is fine if you enjoy that sort of thing, but rarely leaves much room for player agency.

I would tend to view these as being more suitable for a game specifically designed to produce a particular narrative - a storygame, in other words. I don't think they're a great match for more traditional roleplaying, because when characters don't have much agency, the GM needs to work very hard to give players agency to set short term goals they can achieve. These may be in-game goals like discoveries, acts of heroism and so on, or player goals relating to bringing about particular scenes or narrative elements they feel invested in. These are necessary because more traditional goals like "defeat the monster" or even "survive" aren't really within reach.

Players need to be thoroughly on board for this sort of thing, because if you find yourself in a monster scenario and try everything you can think of to defeat or escape the monster, only to learn that neither was physically possible, it will be massively frustrating. Essentially, it leaves you playing the wrong game. You want to be playing with the grain of a game: doing the kinds of things that are meaningful within the paradigm you have adopted.

If the monster is unstoppable, you want to be setting and achieving goals like "I stay alive as long as physically possible", "I radio HQ with as much information as we can get our hands on so they can stop this spreading", and "I make one hell of a last stand".

Of course, it's also quite possible for this kind of narrative to be a natural outcome of a monster story where the characters just get themselves killed, through bad luck or bad planning.

On the plus side, this is probably the genre best suited to a monomonster - it actually works quite well. The monster seizes a single victim at a time, and then stops to consume them, torture them, meld with them and assume their identity, and so on. The others can flee while it ignores them. In some ways this is actually better than with multiple monsters. Since you aren't worried about PC deaths if you're using this structure, there are relatively few problems. The main ones are ensuring players are on board with this, and that they don't get too bored if they're eliminated ten minutes into a six hour session.

The Great Escape

So you're faced with a terrifying monster, and just want to escape.

This one comes down very much to the other parameters of the story, because those determine how difficult escape is, and indeed what "escape" means. Are you trapped in a submarine? On a base in the desert? In a forest? In a city?

Monomonsters, being incredibly powerful, are a natural fit for the escape plan. However, they do also have some obvious drawbacks, the main one being that escaping from one thing is generally an awful lot simpler than escaping from many things.

Very broadly speaking, if the characters can determine where the monomonster is, they can sensibly proceed by getting as far in the other direction as possible. Similarly, it's well worth making Herculean efforts to lure the beast away, conceal their trail, block its passage or trap it even temporarily. It may even be reasonable for one character to sacrifice themselves so that the others can escape pretty much unhindered.

For example, let's say the creature is basically mortal, just incredibly tough - it can't pass through solid matter. If there is a way for the characters to separate themselves from the creature with a nigh-impermeable barrier, it's well worth doing even if it's extremely difficult, because achieving it will solve most of their problems. If there are two parts of a space station, and they can sever them using a complex series of explosions jury-rigged from food supplies, they are safe from the monster. While a perfectly good solution, the players may end up focusing on this to the exclusion of whole swathes of a much more complex scenario.

Of course, this isn't always a bad thing. It may be very effective for the players to feel that they're making good progress in their escape at times, and other times have the psychological pressure of knowing the monster is near. The GM may well be able to come up with ways for the monster to eventually resume the chase, hopefully without leaving the players dissatisfied.

The advantage of multiple monsters here is that the players know they do not only have to content with one enemy. This means concocting (potentially) cheap shots is not worthwhile; they should pursue more general escape plans. They can't be as confident in their safety simply because they know where one monster is, or even because they trap one. In addition, the monsters can (deliberately or accidentally) herd them via their own movements, or else force them to take risks to avoid being driven in the wrong direction. The players have to consider pincer movements, or the risks of fleeing one enemy at high speed only to run headlong into another.

Plus, if the numbers of the monsters are uncertain, it may never be clear when they are actually safe.

A second advantage here is the possibility of tiered success. For example, the players could make definite progress by cutting themselves off from part of a monstrous horde, then gradually see more and more of their pursuers drop away as their plans succeed. Or they could make the difficult decision to leave a holdout where supplies are running low, pass through a densely-populated region to make quicker progress, and then try to shake off pursuit. They might accumulate pursuers as they make mistakes, and have to shake them off. They might even be able to turn some of the monsters against each other, or otherwise have the monsters' sheer numbers become a disadvantage - "surely that bridge won't bear the weight of four such gigantic beasts?"

The Nature of the Beast

The personality of a monomonster is an important facet of the puzzle. Because it's the main (or only) challenge in the scenario, its nature will shape the kinds of encounters the characters tend to face.

Murderous

A fairly basic monster is simply murderous: it has an instinctive drive to kill. This can make it both simple and difficult to deal with. When it notices the PCs, it attempts to kill them in a fairly direct way. Since our monomonster is also very powerful, this tends to mean it will kill every PC in sight unless they manage to escape it.

The difficulty here, then, is making the murderbot clever enough to present a practical challenge, but not clever or fast enough that the PCs cannot escape it. It probably shouldn't just fall into pits because the PCs stand on the other side, but it shouldn't be able to unerringly hunt them down. If the murderbot is both overwhelmingly powerful and inescapable, there probably won't be much to the scenario once they first meet - it will chase them down and kill them all efficiently.

Useful options here include weaknesses and incapabilities. If the murderbot can only come out in the darkness (a fairly common trope), the PCs have some limited opportunities to move about, gather and use resources, and make preparations in relative safety before their next encounter. Similarly, if the murderbot is too large to fit through vents, the PCs may be able to escape from a confrontation, while keeping them highly restricted: they can't afford to spend long in one room, and they're limited in terms of where they can safely go at all.

Not all Murderous monsters are instinctive or even stupid - you can use a ruthless assassin, for example, and The Predator is probably a decent example - but the impulse to kill is typically stronger than any other motivation.

Hungry

In some ways, the Hungry beast is even more simple, but it's also potentially more complicated. That's because it actually has two motivations: kill things, and eat them. These can interact in interesting ways.

When a Hungry beast detects the PCs, it will tend to try and kill them. However, if it does kill someone, its desire to eat will often trump its desire to kill. This gives the PCs an opening to escape, counterattack, or attempt a cunning ploy. Whereas the murderbot would simply move onto the next victim in an efficient flurry of death-dealing, quickly killing the whole party, the Hungry beast has no reason to do so until it's sated its hunger.

Hungry beasts can be cautious, like many real-life predators who are wary of prey's defences and the simple risk of their food getting away through their carelessness. Others are so driven by appetite that they have no such qualms, and fling themselves ravenously on any potential food. Either behaviour can give PCs opportunities to trick, distract or otherwise control them. Similarly, many Hungry beasts aren't exclusively PCvores, so the players may come up with ideas to use food stores, wildlife or even NPCs as distractions and as bait.

Sadistic

In my limited experience, monomonsters often seem to be treated as Sadistic. I think that's because this is the most convenient for GMing purposes: just as the GM is playing a game with the players, the Sadist is playing a game with the PCs. The GM is trying to create a sense of threat, and the Sadist enjoys scaring the PCs. The GM doesn't want to end the scenario too early because it's fun; the Sadist doesn't want to kill the PCs too early because it's fun.

Sadists tend to have at least a moderate level of intelligence because it's sort of hard to be sadistic otherwise. They deliberately make things more challenging for themselves, allowing victims to escape and avoiding the use of their full capabilities. While a monomonster can wipe out the whole party at once, the Sadist simply doesn't want to.

To a large extent, this works well. The Sadist has a perfect excuse for being irrational, inefficient and frankly slipshod about killing off the PCs, even though it's perfectly capable of doing so. However, you can reach a point where this begins to fray under pressure. If the PCs begin to demonstrate that they can in fact take on the Sadist, it should begin to make more of an effort and fewer allowances. Unless the Sadist's goal is quite specifically to play a complicated and genuinely dangerous death game with the PCs, its behaviour should change in response to their capabilities.

For example, a Sadist who resents the intrusion of puny mortals into its lair, and is now sadistically terrifying them before devouring them, might logically stop to think after a mortal successfully hurts it, and move on to simply devouring them. A Sadist that relishes the sense of power over helpless fleeing victims would lose that satisfaction if the victims turn out to have a very sensible plan to destroy it, and abandon the game (it's basically a bully, after all).

One of the difficulties I had with The Derelict was that it's ambiguous about the nature of the sciapod. It's described as wanting to kill everyone, but also as eating human flesh; however, it doesn't seem to behave as though driven primarily by hunger, but if it wants to kill everyone it can do so almost effortlessly. The designers perhaps intended it to be sadistic, but this kind of thing needs to be clear to the GM. I also feel slightly that making a single powerful and sadistic enemy is perhaps a bit overdone.

Humanlike

A clever monomonster, sentient enough to act like a human, can have very complex motivations and conflicting goals. For example: the Slaughter Spirit wishes to kill you all because it thirsts for death, and will actually try harder if the situation is challenging out, of pride in its power and a wish to show contempt. On the other hand, it resents having been summoned by a wizard to guard this place, and sometimes the wish to sabotage its master's goals overcomes that bloodlust. It also hates wizards in particular, so magic-using PCs will earn particular ire and frenzied efforts to kill them. But it's also afraid of wizards. It is bored after centuries of guarding, and doesn't really want this brief excitement to be over. And so on.

This is potentially very good from the GMing side - it gives you a lot to work with. However, it can also be hard to put across this amount of detail to the players. This can make it hard for them to usefully interact with all your nuances, and the ability to interact sensibly is pretty vital in the survival-type scenarios that tend to feature monomonsters.

Erratic

I suppose a final type of monomonster is simply Erratic. While it does have goals and motivations, it doesn't pursue them single-mindedly. This can explain why a monster doesn't relentlessly attack, pursue or even pay attention to the PCs.

An Erratic monster might be stupid, animalistic, mad, malfunctioning, struggling against a controlling force, or just alien. In some ways this can be useful to a GM: they can change the monster's behaviour as necessary to ensure the scenario doesn't end with an unsatisfactory splat.

The downside here is that as I said, learning how the monster behaves and how to interact with it is one of the few things players can actually do in most of these scenarios. After all, monomonsters are overwhelmingly powerful. "Winning" the scenario normally boils down to either tricking the monster to death, evading it long enough to escape, or learning enough about it to defeat it. Either option really calls for the players to work out how the monster ticks; otherwise it is liable to feel like GM fiat.

Stunlocks and the Action Economy

I've been talking with a fairly Call of Cthulhu mindset, but let's take a step back here. Some games have more of a tactical combat approach.

The classic problem with monomonters here is extremely well-known: it's basically one of actions.

The PCs are typically a group of 3-6 characters who each get to do one(ish) thing on their turn. The monster is typicallly a single entity that can do one thing on its turn. Although the monster's individual actions are typically more powerful and can often affect multiple PCs, it's still easy to end up with the PCs running circles around it due to their ability to do multiple things at once.

As a basic example, while the monster is fighting one PC (100% of its actions) the other 3-5 PCs can act freely. They may choose to contribute to the combat, but they might also be healing, preparing equipment, executing a complex plan to trap the monster, performing a powerful ritual, summoning help, running away, bombarding the monster with hindering effects, and so on. Generally there are multiple PC actions available to counter the efforts of the monster, while the monster has one set of actions available to counter the efforts of the PCs.

The archetypal problem is the Stunlock. An effect reduces a target's actions or even prevents actions. If PCs are able to create such an effect, they can use it against a monomonster to deny 100% of its actions for the turn. While they are totally unopposed, the PCs either unleash a flurry of powerful abilities, or carry out a difficult plan. In some cases, PCs can repeatedly inflict these effects to keep the monomonster Stunlocked and make the encounter flat and boring.

The issue here is that abilities in a tactical combat game tend to be weighed on the assumption of multiple opponents. Stunning powers are not inherently overpowered, but can become situationally overwhelming (I've discussed this sort of thing in my many posts on soft attacks). Against a single powerful opponent, any impairing effect is generally hugely valuable. Alternatively, designers react by making the monomonster highly resistant to such effects, to the point that many abilities are largely useless. A common result is the Save or Suck - depending on the your roll, your soft attack either bounces off harmlessly, or is devastatingly effective.

This sort of thing alters the relative effectiveness of different characters depending on the types of powers they can bring to bear. If a monomonster can be stunlocked, characters with potent soft attacks are devastating. If it can't, those characters who aren't designed for massive damage or tanking can feel very underpowered against them.

Games may try to address this by giving special rules for monomonsters. For example, recent editions of D&D allow designated powerful monsters to take additional actions during the turn - perhaps one reaction for each PC present, or a secondary attack that happens at a different point in the initiative order. I've also seen auras used as part of this strategy, with PCs potentially affected each round by some harmful or penalising effect.

Big Sack of HP

A related issue is that where games use a hit point-type system, monomonsters have a different sort of power curve from fewer weaker opponents.

Let's say we have two combat encounters: one against ten ogres with 1n HP, and one against a giant with 10n HP. Let's say these are equally challenging in some game-mechanical sense.

In the first case, the ogres can make up to ten attacks each round. If the PCs can inflict 1n HP to an ogre, the number of attacks drops by 1/survivingogres. There is an interesting tradeoff of attack types: a fireball might inflict substantial damage to five ogres but kill none of them, for example. The PCs must decide whether it's worth spending a turn injuring several ogres so that they'll be easier to kill in future, or whether it's better to cast a single-target spell that will probably kill one ogre and reduce the incoming attacks. The fireball also tends towards averages (some ogres will probably be damaged) while a single-target spell might miss completely.

With classic D&D mechanics, the giant works very differently. It makes one attack per round. Okay, it might make five, or it might make a single multi-target attack... let's just say it makes Y attacks. It continues to make Y attacks until the PCs inflict 10n damage to it, at which point it makes no attacks because it's dead. The PCs do not have tactical decisions about concentration of fire, because they cannot split fire. They can choose to use their most powerful attacks, or they can be less effective for no reason - it's a simple calculation.

Yes, they could do things other than make damage-dealing attacks, but I'm only concerned with damage here.

Not only is the combat less interesting in that sense, but the PCs also have less control of the situation.

In the ogre example, the PCs can choose to whittle down numbers as soon as possible, or use tactics (like area attacks) that kill the ogres faster overall but allow more incoming attacks in the short term. They can also do things like try to distract, bottleneck or otherwise impair the ogres' ability to bring all their numbers to bear. It's within the PCs' (and players') ability to try and shift the odds in their favour, rather than simply attacking whatever's closest.

In the giant example, the PCs can't use these tactics. They can't choose to focus on reducing the number of incoming attacks right now versus winning the combat efficiently. They can't necessarily choose to eliminate the threat to the squishy wizard first - it might be possible to distract the giant from attacking the wizard, but perhaps its attacks affect the whole party. They can't divert some proportion of the giant's HP and an associated slice of its attack effectiveness away from the combat for a time.

Even in Call of Cthulhu, which has a very basic system designed to model plausible events believably, there's an extent to which combat becomes a resource management exercise, which makes direct confrontation with a monster very tricky, because it often does come down to "can the party's 5 actions a round attached to vulnerable bags of hit points overcome the monster's 1-2 actions a round attached to a much less vulnerable bag of hit points."

Games do try to address these things. I've seen 4E D&D solo monsters built with several "forms", so the monster changes its behaviour and power based on injuries. Some game systems do allow specific injuries, which can reduce the power of the monomonster's attacks in a vaguely similar way to killing off some of a monster group. GMs can also use straight-up roleplaying to have monsters become wary, frightened or carelessly enraged by injuries.

I've Been Saving That

The last point I think I want to make about monomonsters is that they create an extremely strong incentive for the use of one-shot nova abilities, because killing or hampering 100% of your foes is generally the best outcome you could hope for.

I think this may be more of a problem in games which make less of an attempt to offer tactical combat, simply because these games are more likely to include flavourful abilities that can be devastatingly effective but are extremely limited in their use. This may be a deliberate decision (just once in a while, or even just once, the character can take someone down hard), or simply an unplanned organic result of the interaction of abilities, or careless writing.

The main contenders here are, I think, of two kinds. There are danger-balanced abilities, which are extremely powerful but balanced by a very high risk, so that it's foolish to use them often. There are also limited use abilities, which you just cannot use often.

The easiest example of a danger-balanced ability is psychic powers in Warhammer 40,000. It is (okay, in theory) extremely dangerous to use psychic powers, especially if you do so at full power, and so it's best to save them for extreme situations. However, they can be devastatingly powerful. So, if you can invoke a psychic power to pretty much guarantee defeating one target, but it's very dangerous, it is well worth doing so against a powerful monomonster.

The classic limited use ability is actually equipment. A lot of games allow you to occasionally pick up very powerful single-use items. Those such as vortex grenades, arrows of X slaying, scrolls of celestial annihilation or blade oil of banishment may give you a very strong chance of destroying one target outright or at least inflicting massive damage. Another category is single-use buffs and debuffs: you can become invulnerable for ten minutes, or reduce one target's strength to that of a quail, or turn the whole party into frost giants, or trap a target in temporal stasis while you pile up vast quantities of explosives.

There can also be abilities or effects that aren't intended to be near-flawless kills, but can be used that way because of the way they're designed. If players routinely try to pull these off GMs tend to either houserule or find ways around it, but it's often when faced with a desperate situation that the player first tries to pull it off. For example, there are several powers in various White Wolf games that are vastly more powerful than the designers seem to have intended. A GM will not necessarily have a comprehensive strategy for implementing these in a balanced way, especially if the PC first comes up with the idea during a boss fight.

Unfortunately, if you have a much-foreshadowed climactic encounter with the elder dragon Droom, what usually doesn't happen is the party valiantly battling it for several rounds, both sides escalating their attacks dramatically until a final strike with the Arrow of Dragon Slaying brings down Droom. Players are usually pretty canny, and it's obvious that the sensible thing to do is open up with your most powerful attacks in the hope of ending the combat as efficiently as possible. So what you actually get is the much-foreshadowed climactic encounter with the elder dragon Droom in which the hunter looses off the Arrow of Dragon Slaying the very second Droom swoops into view, killing him instantly. Droom ends up being all talk and no action; the band of nameless goblins they encountered in the forest played a bigger part in the story and came far closer to defeating the heroes.

There's nothing wrong with using these items like this, and it can feel narratively satisfying - the natural point for the powerful item to be pulled out just as it's most needed. Similarly, a hero calling on their most dangerous powers at the moment of greatest peril is very fitting. However, there's also a danger of such items or abilities transforming a climactic and dramatic occasion into a damp splat. It's particularly important to bear this kind of thing in mind if such one-shot abilities crop up moderately often, since you can end up with players routinely storing them up to win easy victories over powerful monomonsters, while what should be lesser battles against multiple opponents are relatively difficult. That's not bad playing - it's very sensible, tactical playing - but it can still become unsatisfying for everyone.

Ths isn't a big problem, it's just something a GM needs to be aware of. It's potentially better to throw out battles with several potent enemies, or one quite powerful enemy with some moderately powerful allies, so that these abilities can turn the battle around without ending them in the first round.

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As usual, a load of rambling with not much in the way of conclusions, just some things to think about. I don't say GMs should avoid using monomonsters or anything like that, it's just that there are quite a few aspects of their interaction with mechanics, narrative and (in particular) the actions of the PCs which it's worth thinking about when planning and running a scenario.

On failure, its outcomes and its implications: psychology

I feel like it's been ages since I was able to put together anything substantial for this blog. To be fair, nothing I write now is ever likely to compare to the insane (in relative terms) popularity of my post about animal companions...

And also to be fair, it's been a very busy few months and I'm ill. But still. I do enjoy writing for this blog and feeling like someone appreciated it.

This is going to be a miniseries about failure in RPGs, or at least in some RPGs. I fear it may be a bit dry and very rambly. Still, I present it for your delectation, or at least to keep you mildly diverted on the bus.

So a while ago I wrote some responses to a Walking Eye episode about Numenera. Very little of that is relevant right now, so let me pull out the bit which, randomly, sparked this week's post-game conversation. It is is in fact talking about Dungeon World, for some reason.

Call of Cthulhu Scenario Tag Cloud

I think this is pretty self-explanatory? It's a tag cloud of all Call of Cthulhu scenarios published professionally, but not magazines because I forgot them and can't be bothered to redo it. Sorry.

alone beast beyond black blood children city curse dark dead death devil dreams evil eyes flight ghost god halloween hell hill horror house island king land light london lonely lost madness man moon mountain night project return rise sands sea secrets shadows stars terror trail war watcher water world yellow

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