NoD #137 — Mythos Development

Seems to be difficult to keep up with the newsletter while also doing sports and developing the Mythos Investigation campaign. I’ll try a series of hopefully compact newsletters that focus on going over the game development to get going with this.

Mythos Investigation #2

At this writing we’ve played four sessions, so this was two weeks back. We did basic character creation in the first session, and the session break did get me some more time to set down the facts of the scenario; I went to the first session with a mental prep on the bare bones of the scenario, which was all I needed to embed the PC investigators into the scenario, but of course the need for specificity goes up as we go along. This is very much not supposed to be a No Myth game either, I shouldn’t rely too much on improvisation to fill in the scenario.

We already had 6 players in the first session, so it was “fun” to see that we’d attracted three more players for the second. Nothing much to do about that except a short summary of the creative orientation discussion we’d had last time, some summary character creation, and then into the game so we’d actually get to play some here as well.

I am very much in favour of getting more people involved in the hobby, but I gotta say I’d completely misjudged the nature of this entire Cthulhu exercise in advance. The game should have used a vastly less involved character model to account for how much less time we have in practice to dedicate to exploring any individual character. We’d probably do better with individual characters consisting of just a sanity score. Perhaps something like in Trollbabe, like “split 10 points between your Sanity and Occupation, then set your Social value equal to the lower of the two, and that’s your stat line.” Whatever other virtues my CRedux rules may have, it’s a damn heavy system.

As it is, we’re basically committed to the course here, and at this writing most of the extra overhead from having so many players has already been attacked and digested, mainly during this 2nd session where we perhaps didn’t get quite as much done as might have otherwise been possible.

But, enough of that. Whatever I may think about the technical efficiency, I love having so many old and new faces coming in for this. I just hope the players won’t sour on the sometimes slow progress of the game. We are proceeding with the game in a technically correct and intended fashion, even if it is a bit slow due to the number of players and the lack of efficient play habits as we learn how to play an investigation story game like this.

As regards the events of play, we did start the case of The Missing Girl and the Tiger, as I’m calling the affair. As the players already knew from the character creation, the scenario concerns the Twin Peaks-esque disappearance of a local teenager in the small town of Kerava, in the back country of Finland’s capital city of Helsinki. Kerava in 1920 is a growing community of ~3k people being pushed towards urbanization by the railroad station at its heart. The cogent detail for our purposes is that Kerava’s a new town growing in the middle of the countryside, and it’s a small town still. And the year is 1920, so it’s been just two years since the Finnish Civil War rocked the nation; the aftermath of that is still fresh in all the small ways that show up in this sort of narrative exercise.

One of the technical things I’m doing in Mythos Investigation is naturalistic embedding of the player characters, which means that each individual PC has their own particular angle of approach into the scenario, whatever makes sense for the character as created by the player (in awareness of the scenario’s basic hook, so up to the player to make sure the character actually does have an angle). CoC traditionally assumes that the player characters are “investigators” as a sort of lifestyle or hobby, and thus they come into the situation from the outside, motivated by a thirst for Mythos knowledge and/or murder. (Not kidding, as far as I can see most CoC characters do what they do because they yearn for occult excuses for killing other people in vigilante action. As an Investigator you sort of race to the scene at the first hint of non-Christian religiosity, ready to kill yourself some witch.)

So how early your character gets introduced into the events of the scenario just plain depends on what you chose as your angle of entry: Liisa Väre, a young maid at the local parsonage has gone missing, so whenever your character might hear of it in their particular position and approach, that’s when you get to enter play. It’s not a game of skill in particular, more of a game of preference, how you want to experience these events. I guess it’s possible to “miss the approach” by just plain creating a character whose life does not cross over with the case, but we’ll of course try to make it work.

That being said, the first session of play was mostly concerned with basic police investigation of the case: while one of the player characters was the uncle (father’s brother) of the missing girl, and another was her erstwhile boyfriend, once the initially reluctant parents reported the disappearance to the police, the police officer PC ably took control of the investigation and started painting in the picture of the disappearance.

Here’s a summary of the major facts discovered during this first session, for those who want to play along:

Liisa has been missing for a week: She was last seen on the 1st of June leaving the parsonage after work and study (she studies regularly with the parson’s own children). Her parents seemed uncertain, but the mother thinks that she was home that night. The parents think that she’s run away, possibly with the thug she’s been corresponding with.

The curious scratches: While examining the home of the family didn’t reveal much, the police officer did spot some curious scratches in the window-facing wall of the common room (where Liisa’s bedding nook was; this is a working class family living in a cottage). Said scratches were fairly high up the wall, like six feet high, and were dirtied by what might have been small amounts of dried blood. Small signs in a generally lived-in cottage, but currently inexplicable.

Alice in Wonderland: Mainly significant due to the low credit rating of the family, Liisa had left a children’s book lying around. The parents couldn’t tell where she’d gotten it, but did confirm that the girl did like reading, and had likely gotten the book from the parsonage, where she worked and played with the parson’s girls.

The path through the woods: Liisa moved between her home and the parsonage via a forest path that offered the most direct route, about a mile long. Initially checking the path for obvious signs of her getting into a mishap didn’t reveal anything obvious.

All of the above was of course discovered via the fully interactive investigation play format that you use in this sort of rpg: players declare investigative actions, the GM describes what is found, with the occasional dice roll to flavour the process. Nothing unusual in that regard, and we’d need to surely do a bunch more of that in the next session to fill in the picture of the mystery.

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, the actual topic of old-ass play reports from last fall. One day I’ll catch up to the future, just you wait.

Coup de Main #96

Session #34 of Coup-de-Gnarley according to Tuomas; he’s basically been running one third of the entire campaign’s length so far. Nice!

The winter thing is relevant because winter is a difficult time to travel and adventure; we were planning for the Knights to take a downtime period of several months over the winter, eating up their fortunes and doing various downtime projects that some character and player types feel useful for the long-term prosperity of their characters. Learn new spells or whatever. The idea was also to switch the main GMing responsibility back my way over the winter break.

I’m fairly sure this is referring to that super-weird eyeball statue in the dungeon that seems to snapshot-create a miniature figurine of everybody who passes through its room. So it functions as a sort of security camera, leaving a record of who it sees. Also seems to produce endless reams of miniatures, which I’m sure some hobbyist could find a diverting use for.

The “Prismist” here is a wizard who has, according to backstory lore, disappeared into the dungeon for some reason. Seems like she’s basically just living the good life in an old subterranean temple of Juiblex worshippers, glamouring up luxurious accomodations and charming kobolds. Stealing boats.

Coup in Sunndi #70

This was the height and climax of our epic Doom of Naerie adventure: the temple guardians of Rao, with the help of their morally legitimate not-at-all-thieves companions, had prepared in a satisfactory way for a new excursion to the cursed mountain of Death Frost Doom fame. This would be the third expedition up to the mountain after the two initial “evil party” assaults ~20 sessions ago, back in the spring. Back then the party of the time was searching for the demonic Koraktor, book of hell-law and magic spell. That didn’t go quite as planned, and as the mountain groaned awake, festering with the undead, the foundation for this current adventure was laid.

Now the heroes (a “good party” this time) had put together a formidable adventuring party intent on assaulting the mountain and stopping the dread presence (working theory: a lich) within from rolling up to enact the foretold Doom of Naerie at their convenience. Better interrupt whatever it was that was going on at the mountain, surely, rather than wait for the inevitable doom.

The party’s major assets at this point:

• ~100 clansmen braves from a few different clans, swayed by the influence of the allied Hakadaro clan, who were obviously committing the flower of their strength into this.
• The Staff of Perpetual Spring, a variety magic party prop empowered by the spirit of ecological reneval and apparently kinda deadly to the undead due to its being able to push out immense amounts of Life (Positive) Energy. Tricky to use without the Cleric class skills for such, but theoretically capable of mighty magical workings, among them destroying liches just like that. Chained to the wrist of Ben the Paladin so he doesn’t lose it.
• An Oracle of the Bee Queen, one of those Final Fantasy style shrine maiden types. The party struck a deal with her mother to take her with them, being as how the mother believed that the party’s quest was essential for the future welfare of the Hollow Hills. Notable for her skill in wielding the above-mentioned staff (she’s basically a 2nd level Cleric, albeit Summoner-trained), and for how the temple hierarchy is going to damn well hate the adventurers for ruining their Oracle. (Even the slightest taint of sin may cause her to lose her sacral status, which could be disastrous to the temple in the long run.)

So with all these ducks in a row, it just might be go time! Antti was hilariously not with us for this session, which meant that Sparrow, the temple guardian who put all this on the move and had been planning and working towards the mission for its entire span was missing out on its climax. Happens sometimes. The other players were eager to pull the trigger on this, perhaps because we didn’t have anything else pressing going in the campaign currently, so hey ho let’s go.

By the way, this description of play is going to be heavy on Death Frost Doom spoilers. It’s a particularly spectacular twist-upon-twist adventure, so maybe don’t read this if you ever want to play it.

The hexcrawling up the mountain was basically routine, what with the large size of the party and the experience we’d had in handling it with other characters in the past. The only real issue was that horses refused to ascend the dread mountain, which the adventurers solved by leaving half of the levy, 50 men, to turn back and return with the horses while a 50-man strong warrior elite continued on.

Ascending to the cursed cult site halfway up the mountain, we quickly ascertained that the situation up there was greatly beyond the immediate and obvious means that even a large adventuring expedition could resolve. The once-graveyard area surrounding the underground temple had been transformed by thousands of restless dead set in ancient formations, working upon the snows and still earth of the area. The ancient, mummified corpses of some long-ago forgotten civilization showed no sign of the discordant shambling of the horde that followed earlier adventurers down the mountain; these were under some eldritch will.

(Unknown to the adventurers, said will had a few interests: fortifying in case of a mortal excursion in force, sieving the grounds for the Koraktor that had been dropped on the ground earlier, and keeping the thousands strong loyal throng of Duvan’Ku dead under control. Your usual management stuff, but wait — the plot thickens.)

I don’t know why, but the adventurers were feeling bold here; I think they’d just bought into the premise that destroying the presumed lich at the heart of this entire affair would be a quick route to a victory. Whatever the case, they opted to cast what protection magics they had against undead, and then approach the temple further, seeing if their magics could avert being torn apart by seeming thousands of restless dead. As one of the players remarked, either they had the magics to keep the thousands of the lesser undead at bay, or their task was impossible, so hey ho and all that.

To the satisfaction of the adventurers, it seemed that a simple Protection from Evil seemed to be respected by the dead. (Ask me, that’s a crazy big risk to test in these conditions. Brave!) Furthermore, the legion of the damned split apart and divided, granting a clear path to the cult site across the open field. It seemed that the adventurers were being invited inside, and the invitation was accepted!

What followed was a quick dungeoneering affair into a location that the characters were entering largely for the first time, while the players were here for their third expedition. Not much seemed to have changed at the site since before, so it was quick going for us. The NPC clan warriors were of course quite concerned with the heart of darkness they were entering, but this was not only a mythic heroic journey that their fathers (in some few cases literally) hand undertaken in the past, but they also had the holy Oracle of the Bee Queen with them, wielding the Staff, so kinda going by the proper recipe here.

The underground temple was all quiet and gloomy, and nothing prevented the heroes from entering the holy of holies now that all the undead filth had been vomited up. Some careful searching discovered, a ha, a secret door, and behind it, the last survivor of the last expedition into this place: Ahab, from back in the Easter session (#58), was a demonic cultist who’d survived the awakening of the mountain yet gotten trapped in the temple. After several weeks of surviving on cannibalism the man was catatonic and basically useless, but for his scratching revealing the location of the secret door to the party.

(In case you’re wondering: yes, the heroes discovering a secret door that allowed them entry into the Greater Tombs by the means of a lone survivor from the last expedition just happening to be scratching on the other side of the door… not accidental. Something wanted the heroes to find their way in.)

So now we were cooking! The undead horde aboveground had left the adventurers alone, and they’d found a new section of the dungeon. The party had a few magical sensitivity navigation methods that kinda suggested choosing a way directly towards the Greater Tombs. The area featured a variety of decorative mysterious doors that hid ancient secrets of Duvan’Ku within, banal as they are. (This is seriously some of Jim Raggi’s better work, this entire adventure. I love how with the program the entire place is, players literally can’t believe that it can really all be this one-note plain doom metal.)

The players didn’t waste too much time with scouring the lesser tombs, though; at the end of the section there was a particular door that suggested that hey, this just might be the head honcho tomb. We’re looking for that lich, after all, the Unifying Will, the Doom of Naerie. So let’s take a look.

What happened next can actually be read just about word for word in Death Frost Doom, the adventure has this extended enforced setpiece second climax scene. It’s great specifically because it’s not dramatically enforced, the circumstances are just plain awful and it’s somewhat likely for players to be forced to conclude that yeah, they have to play along with this. Also, it was a vampire, not a lich.

I wouldn’t want to suggest that the situation wasn’t at all tactically sensitive, it was: the party had the Staff of Perpetual Spring that was totally capable of, well, doing the thing the players were hoping for: blasting an undead monstrosity into ashes in one fell blow. So in a sense they were totally equipped for the situation, much more so than what the adventure module expects. The adventurers just flubbed the execution.

I don’t even know if the vampire vs lich thing really, truly meant anything here. A vampire has their particular tactical tricks (turning into fog was a key one here), but a lich would have theirs as well. Let’s see, here are the major errors in the handling of the encounter:

1. Slow on the uptake vis-a-vis this being a vampire. Kinda surprising really how long it took them when they come into a tomb that is mysteriously full of fog, and they find that inside the sarcophagus in the middle is a wooden coffin filled with earth. This point feeds to the rest in subtle ways, I think.
2. Slow to realize that the vampire has a Hypnotic Gaze and that it was picking up influence with various NPCs and PCs as the encounter extended. Made it easy for the vampire to take hostages a couple of times through the encounter to deter PCs from attacking it.
3. Typically confounded by a monster that is not aggressive and wants to talk. This is hard stuff entirely separate from any particulars of the situation, I won’t deny it; police officers and such specifically train for keeping their wits and making the right calls in tense situations like this. Still, you would kinda want to either attack immediately and in a coordinated fashion, or engage in polite trust-building diplomacy. There are many awkward places to stop midway between those two, and PC adventurers often sure do find the worst compromises.
4. The big one: Ben the Paladin, temple guardian of Rao who was de facto leading the party now that Sparrow, the elder paladin, was unavailable, decided to charge the vampire during the first set of talks. He was seeking to Smite the monster, of course. This caused the Staff of Perpetual Spring chained to his wrist to get pulled clattering from the hands of the Oracle who was maintaining the party’s Protection spell and, well, their ability to actually use the Staff facilely. (The vampire dispersed into fog during the charge, avoiding the attack handily.)
5. During the ensuing retreat, letting the Oracle get claimed by the vampire as a hostage. (To be fair, avoiding that would have required instant uptake and better preparatory planning; a vampire is supernaturally quick after all, and this one’s a master of war.) This was basically the Checkmate here in these particular circumstances: the party did have 50 warriors with them, but not only were those primarily loyal to the Oracle, but also how did the party plan to escape the dungeon without the Oracle wielding the Staff to cast a large-radius Protection spell for them. Particularly when the vampire might not be as willing to let them leave as he was to let them enter.

And that’s how Cyris Maximus, the General Overlord of the armies of Duvan’Ku, obtained the upper hand over the party, at least sufficiently so to make his offer in detail and convince the adventurers to yield to his deal, pretty much as detailed in the adventure module. Kinda wonderful and rare to see something an author writes into an adventure actually occur in the prescribed fashion.

During their interaction with Cyris it slowly dawned to the party how exactly they had been had in this entire Doom of Naerie affair: Cyris was trapped within the tomb and required mortal human invitation to enter the aboveground realm, in a twisted reflection of the vampire ban on breaching a true hearth. (The Greater Tombs are magically speaking “outside the universe”, you see, and a vampire cannot enter your home uninvited from the outside, even if the outside is actually the inside, so…) He was never going to attack Naerie, and in fact every hint and clue and portent regarding that had been planted by the limited magical means available to the entombed Duvan’Ku general. Once the primary ward set upon the temple by a past Oracle (the susurrous bush) had been broken, and it was evident that no foolish mortals would be forthcoming to release him, Cyris used the particular Duvan’Ku magics to create false portents of doom (in fact falsified Fate signals that then got picked up by gods who provided portents) with the intent to lure some heroic fools to investigate and release him. Worked like a charm!

I’d worked out the magic cosmology rules that all this functioned with, so in that sense the “puzzle” in the scenario was fair, and the players did in fact even remark upon a few direct inconsistencies in the supposed situation over the sessions as we developed the situation. A few PCs had some minor theoretical understanding of the magics involved, and the players themselves had learned bits and pieces, drips and draps of Duvan’Ku lore through play. An important bit that had come up in passing in the past was that apparently part of the ancient ritual initiations of Duvan’Ku involved celebrants cutting themselves off from Fate, the divine machinery of world-control, so as to live in total damnation of strict antidivine materialism. (Sort of a big political point in how the adventurers could get so much religious backing in opposing the ancient Duvan’Ku everywhere they went.) While the players never quite picked up on that, there was no particular reason why they couldn’t have questioned why a presumably divine-opposing dead cult that specifically had anti-fate magic was causing divine portents of doom. (I know, you’d have to be stupid-involved in the specific campaign metaphysic to notice and care about the inconsistency. Still, it was there.)

Probably the single largest “clue” that everything wasn’t as it seemed, one that the players noticed as well, was that the temple of the Bee Queen could not corroborate the portents of doom that the clerics of Wee Jas and the paladins of Rao had been receiving; the reason for this was simply that the Bee Queen is an immanent spirit that doesn’t have access to Fate (which is a specific divine mechanical system on Oerth, a bit like in Exalted) in divinations, so the astral oath prescriptions used by Cyris Maximus to cause false “fate reverberations” didn’t concern the Bee Queen; any divinations asking her about the state of the world would rely on different information sources that were not being contaminated by Cyris.

But whatever the particulars of the plot, the present situation was that the heroes were well and thoroughly trapped by Cyris, forced to agree to his terms. They did negotiate a very explicit contract with the vampire, requiring him to put the undead throng of the mountain back to rest, in addition to promising mutual non-hostility with the heroes. It was a difficult situation, but ultimately the less heroic adventurers were certainly going to grasp at any chance to survive, and Ben the Paladin couldn’t quite bring himself to try to sacrifice everybody else on the altar of his own righteousness. So yes, the party would, aided along by Hell-enforced oath magic, bring the vampire out. Ironically to Naerie, specifically; the deal was for them to escort Cyris and his coffin to the city, perchance to truly enact the Doom foretold. Best fantasy epic prophecies are of course the ones that you end up enacting yourself in an effort to stop them!

The Cyrian plan actually went off relatively hitchless. There was an opportunity on the way back to town, with the vampire hiding in his coffin, where Ben realized that the only thing preventing him from destroying the vampire in bright sunlight was the oath that doomed his soul into instant and irrevocable ownership of the 7 Hells, should he betray the deal. That’s where Ben Fell as a Paladin, when he lacked the courage to sacrifice himself to stop the vampire and its unknown intentions.

The party arrived in Naerie properly cowed, clan warriors and all, knowing that they had been truly defeated by the Vampire who would now proceed to get lost in the tumult of humanity within the city walls. When some humans of all things appeared out of the night to lay claim to the coffin for their master, that was merely one more nail on a thoroughly lost mission; apparently there were some lost souls among the people of Naerie who still, after all these years, were loyal to the ancient and undying ruling hierarchy of Duvan’Ku, a nation long lost to the past.

State of the Productive Facilities

I dunno, for some reason this combination of ski’ing every day and brooding over Mythos Investigation seems to cause me to not write at all, day to day. It’s not practically a huge issue, I don’t have any pressing deadlines right now, but of course I can’t keep going like this forever. And I don’t quite know what to do with the newsletter if I can’t keep up the pace.

Everything passes, and I imagine that my Mythos brooding will grow lighter once the campaign stabilizes and I simply run out of immediate things to think about surrounding it. Then I’ll hopefully have the wherewithal to work on something else over the week, too. Normal people do in fact manage to both do a couple of hours of sports and work during a single day, I can’t see any fundamental reason why I couldn’t as well.