NoD #138 — Mythos Development

Playing Mythos Investigation has been going great; we’ve gotten the first scenario done and will be starting on the second one soon. On the other hand, game prep and ski’ing are taking so much of my time that I’m not writing the newsletter regularly. Tricky.

Mythos Investigation #3

With my newslettering apparently being in recession, this AP report is a bit delayed, even if not as badly as the Coup reports I’ve been annaling. This session was played four weeks ago, on the first week of February.

The player situation seems to have stabilized around 9 + GM at this time; we had one player missing, but one new face as well. I’ve adopted a strategy of pretty much allowing the player participation numbers to settle themselves. In the long term we’re all dead anyway, and in the meantime you’re going to lose about 50% of your initial player base after three or four sessions of play in any tabletop rpg campaign, so this sort of problem will fix itself if you just plain let the players vote with their feet. You’ll be left with the ones who most need this sort of weekly activity in their lives, which is what you want anyway.

Last session we’d done character creation and introduced the basic conceit of the scenario: in a rural township, a local teenager has gone missing, and various nosy neighbors, relatives and police officers are milling about wondering what’s happened to her. As there was still plenty to uncover, we just kept investigating.

“Investigation” with this type of loosey-goosey PC party often means individual characters engaging in action without explicit diegetic coordination among the PCs; the characters do not need to know what other characters are doing, or even be aware of their existence. I’ve discovered that I personally do not actually seem to care at all about all of that; the point of Mythos Investigation is to investigate, and the players are all at the table, everybody is getting to see everything that comes up whether they have a character in there or not. I don’t even particularly care if the PCs are telepathic towards each other, unnaturally trusting and able to coordinate via “meta radio” as the local parlance has it when PCs react to events they do not know about. All of that, that’s small-minded cruft. What matters is meaningful investigative action that uncovers the scenario, and player capability for writing notes and drawing conclusions about what they learn. Don’t get distracted by the imposed hygiene of player-character correspondence, that’s an inauthentic external creative idea that does not act in service to what the game is actually trying to be.

So as per the above, the various characters engaged in a variety of investigative actions that I often found to be reasonable, inventive and incisive myself, so I’m happy about that. Eemil, the disappeared Liisa’s erstwhile romantic correspondent, shook local youths for clues (very productive); nosy investigator and lantern-jawed hero Aarne Pynn got convinced that Liisa’s father Antti had something to hide, so he spent the day at the local carpentry factory nosing around (red herring); police constable Timo Pamppu (nomen est omen, eh) kept plugging along with interviews and canvassing the local woods in an unimaginative yet methodical fashion (very productive again)… there’s a lot of these PCs, so who keeps track of everything they did; the important part is that they bounced around, each according to the player’s desires, with some not doing anything (perhaps because everybody else was already shaking every tree), some going on fool’s errands and some striking gold.

I am for the time being conducting the investigations in a naturalistic fashion, basically a lot like if this was a wargame. There’s a bit of dramatic coordination in the background (mainly in that timeline events will occur in ways the explose the scenario, as opposed to remaining unknown), but for the most part the PCs are allowed to be wrong and players are allowed to waste time. This is an explicit technical question that I’ve taken up with the group and offered alternatives; I’ll come back to the topic in a few sessions.

Here’s the main discoveries of the investigation so far in a neat list. I’ll mention the points discovered in the last session too, for reminder.

Liisa has been missing for a week.
The curious scratches.
Alice in Wonderland.
The path through the woods.

The Parsonage claims ignorance. Initial interviews at Liisa’s place of employment, the local parsonage, indicated that Liisa was generally well-liked, friends with the parson’s two daughters, and used to both study and play with them; unusual arrangement across social estates like that, but apparently the parson’s wife Toini had taken a liking to Liisa. They haven’t seen her since a week back, agreeing with the family on the timeline of her disappearance.

Local youth have juicy rumours: Liisa was apparently not the most involved with her peer group in town, apparently because she spent so much time at the parsonage; she was considered basically OK by the other teens, even a bit admired for her smarts and confidence. Eemil (the PC investigating this) pushed hard to get to the juicy stuff, though, and discovered among the youth one Hannu Pajumäki, a petty bourgeoisie scion who claimed that the parsonage girls had a private playhouse in the woods. (Hannu was apparently smitten with the elder daughter Aino, and helped the girls with building their playhouse.)

The secret life of the parsonage girls: One of the PCs is the actual parson here, but the player wasn’t with us tonight. Despite this, the police constable managed to keep natural PC murderhoboness in check sufficiently to get an interview with the Mrs Shrek and her two lovely daughters, Aino (15 yrs.) and Elsa (12 yrs.). The two were apparently fast friends of Liisa’s, and the three had been playing together for years. The book found in Liisa’s belongings (Alice in Wonderland) was claimed to belong to the girls, who professed ignorance of how it’d ended up at Liisa’s home. Personality-wise the elder sister Aino did most of the talking and seemed reasonably confident and serious for her age, while Elsa proved shy and somewhat difficult to interview. Mysterious even, as her discussion tended to conflate facts with playful fancies such as exploring jungles and fleeing from tigers and whatnot.

Antti Väre might not have murdered his daughter: Something in the Väre family’s overall behavior over the disappearance of their daughter clearly got the hackles up with one of the players, as they dedicated quite a bit of effort to nosing around in the father’s affairs. It was fun how the nosy player leveraged the fact that another PC was the owner of the carpentry factory that employed Antti Väre; unnatural PC partnership put Antti into a quite stressful situation as wild claims of him stealing from his place of employment or worse were taken at face value. Plenty of dramatic smoke, but no real results. To be more concrete, as far as the investigation could discern Antti really was an employed wagoneer and handyman at the factory, and he really did work long hours there, and… I don’t really know why the players thought that he might have what like hidden Liisa’s dead corpse at the sawmill or something like that. Whatever it was, it didn’t pan out.

Discovering the playhouse: The investigators were honing in on the children’s forest hideout from two directions now, as the young gangster Eemil had found out about it from the local youths, while the police constable Pamppu had heard about it from the parsonage girls. Both were in the woods looking for the place at roughly the same time. What happened then made for a quite exciting conclusion to the day’s session.

Constable Pamppu was having a fairly fruitless search in the woods, as he’d gotten very vague instructions as to the location of the playhouse, and the copse of woods was large enough to make for some wandering… particularly if there should be something quirky in the entire affair of the woods. Lots of wandering around, and the good constable did stumble upon a small pond that the local children swim at on occasion.

The character succeeded (failed?) in a certain sensitivity check (I’m being vague because this is Mythos, and Mythos must be investigated, not spoiled; I know perfectly well what exact laws of nature and cosmos we’re modeling here) and thus had the opportunity for a wonderful encounter the Tiger: it was sudden, the awareness that there was something in the raspberry bush that constable Pamppu was trying to cross through. Something big, something other than himself, moving in the thicket.

Pamppu failed a sanity check and drew his gun, shooting wildly at the glowing eyes and the swirling moire patterns of the beast he fancied to see. There was a roar and a lunge, and more shots as Pamppu emptied his gun in pure terror for his life.

Eemil, meanwhile, had just discovered the playhouse in the woods, following Hannu’s instructions. When he heard the shots, the youngster chose to abandon the playhouse for now and go look for the source of the pistol fire. (Eemil’s a bit of a scoundrel himself; he’s like 18 years old, but a bit of a gangster, smuggler and a Red child combatant in the recently concluded civil war. Gunnery rouses his curiousity rather than dampening it.)

High and thick raspberry thickets broached towards the playhouse on one side, and therein Eemil found the police officer in a delirious state, scrambling in the ground collecting the brass from his shots, forcing it back into the revolver so as to continue shooting, all the while wildly peering in the dim twilight for whatever it was that he had shot at. Eemil took it upon himself to sneak up on the distraught officer and take his gun away, shaking him out of his delirium.

(Unknown to Eemil, only to be discovered later: one actual bullet was still chambered as the shaken cop kept stuffing the gun with spent shells. There was a bit of a gun use risk involved here.)

Eemil took constable Pamppu back to the parsonage (closest place for help, really), as he was clearly in no shape to take care of himself. Deadly afraid of the Tiger and exhausted so he could hardly walk, who knows what the officer might do if he was left to experience his bout of temporary insanity in the woods. Plain humanity to help him out. Eemil didn’t stick around to explain anything to the various investigators who were quickly shaping the parsonage into a sort of impromptu investigation HQ.

This is where we ended the session, but just to drive the point home and make it easier for the players to plan their next moves, I did make it clear that next morning, when the good officer felt better and went back to investigate, there would be no sight of the Tiger, no sign at all of its passing, or the ferocious battle the brave policeman had undergone.

He did get a mysterious new trait from this travail, though. Called just “Tiger” for now, it was left for the players to figure out what it is. (It’s the conceit from Impossible Landscapes; a connosseur will know.)

All in all, I think that the campaign has gotten off to a reasonable start. The rules are kinda cumbersome and the action is more confusing than it’d need to be due to the large number of players, but the essential creative nature is correct: there’s a mythos scenario, and it’s getting investigated. Stuff is clearly being uncovered, you can’t miss the bouts of insanity and terror when that happens.

Coup de Main in Greyhawk

Our old school D&D campaign Coup de Main continues apace weekly. The game’s open to visitors, newcomers, inexperienced players, cats and dogs.

And, more old play reports. 25 sessions in the past at this writing, yay.

Coup de Main #97

35 sessions of Coup-de-Gnarley. This was to be the last one; as the winter approaches, the Knights Temp are doing their last delve into the Incandescent Grottoes in an attempt to loot it before the snows make travel infeasible.

So yeah, a grand success after all! The Gnarley adventures generally speaking represent the mature neo-OSR style of adventure, which from the perspective of the Knights Temp has meant that adventuring is easy and fun. The Fearmother episode a few months back was tricky, and did indeed result in losing Sven the Viking, an advanced player character, but otherwise Gnarley has been good to us: plentiful treasures in generally easy dungeons. Would visit again.

Coup in Sunndi #71

Last session of our face to face Coup had seen the climax of a major adventure arc, as the dark manipulations of the Duvan’Ku general Cyris Maximus came to fruition. In the interest of some lighter fare, this session would be dedicated to that old pastime, hunting bounties in the anarchy-ridden principality of Dhalmond.

Last we saw the bounty hunters, they’d been messing around with Dandy Boy, an a highwayman and agent provocateur who had the mutual misfortune of getting mixed with our adventurers. While the PCs ultimately failed to apprehend him, Dandy did lose his base of operations and most of his crew. While Dandy had not in fact quite vacated the principality (he’s a vengeful type, and being convinced that his paramour in Dhaltown had sold him out to the authorities, Dandy stuck around intent on one last visit with her), the PCs were forced to assume such and return to their original mission, that of apprehending the ever-jovial castle rustler Camil the Camel-Lover.

The bounty hunting team has had some luck in the past with using their own criminal contacts and tedious combing of the countryside to locate hiding outlaws. By rights this shouldn’t be quite as effective as it’s been, but good fortune makes anything work out, so the bountieers had in fact developed some passing notion of where Camil and his gang might be hiding.

Not even the Sunset Riders, my competing bounty hunter team, seemed to be intent on foiling our heroes; the Riders were apparently after bigger fish, attempting to assault the Rapala Mob, a veritable rural rebellion, to apprehend some of their prominent criminal associates. All the better for us, the Riders had competed with the PCs for the same bounties in the past.

Aside from hiring underground associates to help with searching the countryside, the actual search was basically a hexcrawl affair involving map travel and dicing to get lucky. I knew where Camil was hiding myself, while the players got sort of hot/cold hints and other ancillary intelligence through their search. Finding somebody hiding in the rural parts of the principality in this way would be fairly difficult if not for some lucky assumptions and a luckier dice roll earlier helping the players narrow the search down to a ~7 hex region.

A “fun” complication in the form of an over-leveled random encounter interrupted the search, though: one of the cursed misfortunes and major horrors of Dhalmond is that the Guardian Beast of the Temple of Iron God (well familiar to the adventurers by now), a crazy big wolf (like 10 HD), was driven insane by the divine curse on the place and has now been roaming the principality as a sort of fuck-you random encounter. It’s not likely to encounter it, and rumour has it that the Beast is specifically attracted to human sin, but it had to happen sometime, right.

The Beast is a great wolf, or perhaps some kind of dark idea of a wolf, a Child of Night whose blood breeds wolves. It carries the Moon on its shoulders (read: night falls unnaturally fast on its approach) and it is a favoured son of the Dark Powers, such that it’s in fact kinda feasible to escape from the Beast by fleeing into the Mists of Ravenloft. All in all, the encounter seemed likely to end up with either getting ripped apart by wolves, or getting lost in Ravenloft.

The players kept their calm, though, and had a minor bit of good luck as well: after falling into the “pocket dimension” of the Beast, while waiting for it to inevitably find and devour the sinners and innocent alike, the party stumbled upon a Rhennee (fantasy gypsy) caravan similarly surrounded by the world of darkness. (This was in part affected by the narrative fate that acts upon the lands of Ravenloft; it was a bit on the likely side for such a coincidence to occur.) These Rhennee were “Vistani”, wagon-bound mistwalkers who seem to have some nefarious connection to the Domain of Dread, and consequent ability of traversing the ethereal conduits that are otherwise impenetrable to mortal men.

Despite the gypsies being super-suspicious, the party was also thoroughly spooked by the distant howling of the Beast, so seeking aid from the Vistani seemed like the thing to do. We found that this was a great move to make on a lonely country road when the blood moon glimmered in the sky, too; the Vistani have their ways, including ways of dissimulating the Beast, so they seemed to be in courageous spirits despite the closeness of the wolf. One prone to anthropomorphizing the mysterious devices of the Dark Powers might even think that the entire point of this encounter was to see whether the hapless adventurers would manage to make peace with suspicious strangers.

The players were wise in decision-making and lucky in dicing, so the Vistani sent a guide with them to help them return to the world of the daystar. So overall the TPK encounter ended up whiffing entirely. Sometimes it goes like that. At least the players now knew to worry about Ravenloft too as part of the campaign setting.

The Beast encounter-slash-adventure was impressive but also detached from the overall concern of cattle rustler catchup, so onwards with the actual plans. The session was coming to a close, but we did manage to stumble upon a second random encounter of interest as well: orc slavers, bearing tools marked with the sign of a local magnate. The orcs did kinda ambush one of the bounty search parties at night, so potentially a dangerous encounter, but the dice and solid security practices made the usual clown rodeo of their pretensions.

Meeting orcs here was a bit unusual for sure, but finding ones with equipment stolen or… given from the Greedwell household sure seemed to match with some ancillary rumourmongering the bounty hunters had been doing on the way. Specifically, the players had heard suspicions of the Simon Greedwell possibly fencing the stolen cattle for Camil the Camel-Lover, being the outlaw’s money man. The Greedwell estates were in the same general region of Dhalmond that the canvassing was happening at, too, so maybe…

State of the Productive Facilities

I’ve actually been becoming more productive again as the spring approaches, and I certainly have plenty to write about newsletter-wise, but doing everything else is causing the newsletter to fall to the wayside. I don’t know, maybe I should just admit that this is a monthly thing now.

Besides the gaming, my ski’ing has been going well this winter; about 50k every week this year. The single longest hike was ~35 km in an early sampling of the “Elekko Trail”, a traditional county ski’ing event hereabouts. The actual Elekko day (when everybody and their dogs go ski the route) is like next Sunday, I think, but the trail has been in ski’able condition for a few weeks now, so why not.

I’ve also been contributing a warm body to the exercises of the local historical fencing club weekly; fun stuff, if the newsletter survives the recession I’ll dedicate an issue to explaining that in a bit more depth.

I’ve been doing some active development on the Coup campaign again, e.g. the Elementalist character class now actually exists as a basic write-up. I’m planning to write a new series of CWP issues in the near future, so looking good in that regard.

Overall it’d be straight out conceited to complain about my winter when I’m very healthy, very ski’y, and am conducting two major rpg campaigns in Coup and Mythos Investigation. Just, I’d like it if I also managed to also be more “productive” in terms of words on page per week. Now it seems that the only way I get anything done is by ignoring the newsletter.