RPG a Day 2020, Part Twelve – Sending a Message to Players with Love Letters

Posted on August 12, 2020 by fakedtales

I first heard about Love Letters in the Gauntlet’s podcast and I instantly knew it would be something fun to play with. The main games I heard of using Love Letters were Apocalypse World and Monsterhearts, but I’ve used them in a number of other games. One of my players even used them in a D&D game last year.

So what is a Love Letter?

It’s a small letter written to a character rather than a player. It can cover some downtime actions, a time jump between seasons of a campaign or what a character was up to when a player was missing. Start out by addressing the character, mention the situation they’re going through and include a couple of the following:

• Some open questions for them to ask, “Who called you away on urgent business?”
• A binary option or two: “Did you report your indiscretion to high command or hide it?”
• A mechanical flourish, like a custom move in a PbtA game or a saving throw: “If you report your indiscretion roll +Charm. On a 7+ this infraction will be overseen, on a 10+ you won’t have internal affairs watching you in the next mission. If you hide your indiscretions, roll +Guts; on a 10+ you hide all evidence, on a 7-9, what did you forget to hide?”

That sort of thing. I have some specific examples below from Masks:

First of all I have a dream sequence. The group got caught and put into a hallucinogenic dream state. For this kind of thing you could run a long sequence where the GM has to run the scenes for each character back and forth, which would in my case cut out 75% of the group at a time. As this was most of the way through the season I figured I knew enough to create the nightmare sequences for the group and gave them Love Letters to read at the start of their next session. Here’s one for Apollo, a liquid metal boy who was using The Newborn playbook:

Apollo’s nightmare

This meant that even though the hit of information was pretty quick, it got to play with Apollo’s specific origins and neuroses. It allowed a chance of fighting back against it all and most importantly for Masks, filled him with angst.

Next up we have a combination of Love Letters which I used between season one and two. At the end of season one, The Periodic Table of Evil made their presence known to the world, pretending to be a new superhero group. Given the sheer amount of them, they took over the city. This meant there were different options for some of the group. I folded the following three to the group only saw the opening statements about what they did during the summer. Our fourth player’s character was trapped in the timestream and the player wasn’t about that week, so he would return to the present after the Love Letters had been dispersed.

The players saw, “What I did during my holiday” followed but “I sold out”, “I retired” and “I went underground” as the three options which couldn’t be duplicated. They decided between them who took which action.

Steel picked this option
Apollo chose this option
Stalker chose this option

I also gave personalised Love Letters to each of the players for their characters as well, so help add some more lore to the world and events to establish the setting for season two. Here’s Steel’s. She’s the Reformed playbook and a former supervillain’s sidekick. Her alter ego was best friends with a socialite who was the former sidekick to the most popular hero in the city.

Steel’s summer

I definitely recommend this as a technique, especially if a campaign’s had a bit of a break or a season gap.

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RPG a Day 2020, Part Eleven – My RPG Reading Stack

Posted on August 11, 2020 by fakedtales

I have a stack of books on one arm of the sofa. Sometimes it gets moved over to the coffee table or the little end table next to the sofa. They’re all on my reading list and some have been there for a while. They’re a good reminder of what I need to go through. At the moment they include Misspent Youth, the second Yellow King book, Fellowship’s three tomes, Hillfolk, Girl Underground and Heart.

My pile of books on the arm of the sofa.

Some of these are recognisable from my wishlist of games to run. I’ve actually already read Heart and Shadow Operations in PDF form, I’ve even done a readthrough of Heart on Twitter but the physical book’s different. The texture of the cover’s nice, even though it’s not the fancy edition. The smell of the book is evocative. It brings back memories of the smell of the AD&D Player’s Handbook which I used to own. I finally finished reading Yellow King: Paris to a level where I feel I’ve processed the information, so that’s gone back and been replaced by The Wars. I reckon I’ll get through all the books and then revisit them when I run a campaign. Hillfolk was a rare charity shop find which is cool. It was £10 a book for it and the expansion. The PDF is a real sod to read as there are many columns and the sidebars aren’t defined enough. I want to read it as the scenarios look really interesting, but I feel I’ll need to go through this physical copy to better deal with the layout. As much as I like the look of Trail of Cthulhu, I had similar problems with focusing on the PDF and need to get a hard copy of that, too. Fellowship was all done on DriveThruRPG when there was a sale and looks really interesting. Girl Underground’s the only physical ‘ZineQuest 1 title I bought and I’m pleased as it’s small and lovely looking. Then there’s Misspent Youth which was from Robert Bohl’s closing down sale. Again, it looks gorgeous in the physical edition, but mainly for the scrappy style it has.

Seeing the books out in a stack definitely helps prioritise them compared to the books on my iPad. I can kind of keep up with the library on my iBooks, but things drop off quickly, especially if I’m using a few PDFs to run a game as those end up taking precedent. Then when other things get added it creates a block of titles which push everything else down, such as when I picked up the Star Trek Humble Bundle. I’m writing this a couple of days ahead, so I can’t even tell what’s going to be the recently read items in iBooks. Let’s have a look…

My virtual stack. You’re lucky as you’re seeing this without all the cracks my ipad has.

Let’s see… I was talking about Belonging Outside Belonging descriptors to an old GM when defending my dislike of stats in the ‘height’ and ‘weight’ fields in traditional RPGs compared to more narrative looks. I realised I hadn’t actually downloaded the preview copy of Venture, which is why that’s there. Star Trek Adventures is a 2d20 System game which I bought on a Bundle of Holding as I’ve been in a big Trek mood. Sanctum, like Venture, I owned but hadn’t got round to downloading yet. Cartel’s a late arrival but I’m curious about what it’s like. Root’s from Free RPG Day, there’s a third party Quest adventure as I want to see how people are using it. Cortex Prime’s another PDF that’s conquering me slightly like City of Mist, but I’m eager to work my way through it. Finally there’s Wanderhome, which I’m trying to resist backing just because I’ve been backing a lot of projects.

I love having most of my roleplaying game collection on my iPad, even though it’s horrendously cracked, but there’s something very nice about leafing through a physical book.

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RPG a Day 2020, Part Ten – Games I Want to Play

Posted on August 10, 2020 by fakedtales

My list was as follows:

Earlier this year there was a whole thing about people listing a dozen RPGs they hadn’t played or run and wanted to. I joined in as it seemed like a fun thing to do. Back then it was pre-lockdown and made for a nice, actionable list of games to run at community RPG nights along with my weekly group.

• Brindlewood Bay
• Comrades
• DIE
• Fate of Cthulhu
• Girl Underground
• Good Society
• #iHunt
• Pasión de las Pasiones
• Quietus
• Trophy Gold
• Warmer in the Winter
• The Yellow King

A game I want to run, a kind of Shadow Over Innsmouth meets Murder She Wrote

There are some games like Spire and Heart which I’ve run before and would like to do, then others like Band of Blades which I’d booked myself in for running with my weekly group. We got maybe half a dozen sessions into Blades before lockdown and started Dishonored as something light which I needed to do for a review. That game took longer than expected and my community nights took a while to get off the ground.

As of August 10th, I’ve run two of the above games, Pasión de las Pasiones and Trophy Gold. I’ve bought several more RPGs which I want to run as well, some of which I have.

The Socialite, one of the playbooks from Good Society.

Squamous and Quest were two games I really wanted to test, while Alice is Missing and Fellowship are something I want to try in the near future which aren’t on the list. I’m sure there’ll be more, as well, but I’m still eager to get the games on my list run. I’m also trying to balance out the amount of time I spend running and playing games so I don’t render my partner an RPG widow, so I also know I’m on a strict clock and unlikely to get all twelve run. I want to get at least half of them run by year’s end.

One of the many Alices who may be missing.
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RPG a Day 2020, Part Nine – Light and other minor spells

Posted on August 9, 2020 by fakedtales

Back when I ran AD&D I kind of stumbled into good bits of DMing from time to time. Not always and I didn’t really know to weaponise them as much as I should have, but I had my moments.

Potions were one of the first things, where I’d write in the Dungeon Master’s Guide what colour each potion was and the group would have to figure out what they did. They could identify them or test them on someone (to help this, each potion had 1d4 uses).

A spooky potion

Anyway, this is about light. Ages before “Okay, what does that look like?” as a common mantra, I would ask that about people’s magic. Light and Magic Missile were my favourites. I didn’t really know the limits of Light and I didn’t really care to. When a player cast it, I asked how it was created and what it looked like. For one player they would have the tip of their staff glow. Another had an object he touched, which could be a players’ sword or someone’s eyes. One had glowing fireflies around them and some would just say, “I don’t know, it just gets brighter” and you know what? That’s fine too.

Gandalf, using a light spell

Magic Missile would often get aspected to whatever the theme of the magic user tended to be. It could be a lesser version of their more favoured spells (a little fireball, for instance). Flying skulls was a favourite. Most of the time they’d be some kind of glowing balls of light or fire.

Magic Missile!

Even in a more traditional game, it’s definitely worth asking what the special effects of magic look like. It also means player innovation can shine with problem-solving using the minor differences their special effects might bring, like the magic-user casting Light on someone’s eyes.

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RPG a Day 2020, Part Eight – Shades and Other Props

Posted on August 8, 2020 by fakedtales

I was running a campaign of the Cubicle 7 Dr Who Adventures in Time and Space RPG when my group started to get a real habit of using props to represent their characters.

Not this hammer, but another, similar hammer.

It started with a hammer, as we had one laying around and The Student (our Time Lord) had a cosmic hammer instead of a sonic screwdriver. Steve, the player of The Student, kept it around and was fidgeting with it a lot. Shaun, another member of the group, started out playing a pre-career David Bowie until he felt he needed to change it up. He took on the role of a gambler from the future who was on the run from debt collectors. To represent how different his character was from the last one, he reached around for something to use. We didn’t really use miniatures as I’ve been a big theatre of the mind person for years now. He grabbed some 3D cinema glasses as we had a small stack of them floating around, despite never remembering to take them the few times we watched a 3D movie. That became his character instantly. He wasn’t just a gambler, but he was a gambler with hi-tech sunglasses he never took off whether he was indoors or in the 16th century. People treated him a little oddly for it, but it was an affectation encouraged by the prop. We also had a time agent who’d had all memories of his successful missions wiped and his time traveller wrist thingie (I forget the name) broken so he could travel through space but not time. He kept looking at his watch as his equivalent to the shades. Finally we had Parker who didn’t have anything, but that suited his character. Parker was a big old scoop of vanilla ice cream with no real traits or desires other than to watch action movies and order take-out, making him the perfect straight man to the rest of the cast.

Also not the same sunglasses, but a completely different pair entirely.

As a further note, I like the idea of some kind of representation of characters in games. I don’t really use miniatures on a grid or anything, but if folks want to bring them along to represent their characters then that’s cool. After a game of Monsterhearts at Dragonmeet by the fantastic Richard Williams, I copied his idea of putting a bunch of actors and models’ headshots onto index cards and using those as character pawns. Even better, rotating the same stacks meant a kind of meta-continuity between them where folks would begin to associate some characters with certain roles. I feel having a physical prop like a pair of sunglasses, gloves (I’ve had that happen before) and other items as some kind of reminder of the character to be an evocative tool. For Shaun, wearing the sunglasses meant we knew we were talking to his character.

Some of the Periodic Table of Evil from our Masks game.
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RPG a Day 2020, Part Seven – Couple’s Roleplaying

Posted on August 7, 2020 by fakedtales

My partner doesn’t really do roleplaying games. She’s played The Quiet Year once with my writing group, although she reckons that’s not really a roleplaying game. Then most recently there’s Fall of Magic which again is RPG-adjacent enough for me to get away with. I think the game of Fall of Magic was a little too wacky with two very odd, very different crab singers, but I can hopefully get her to try it again. Lockdown’s tricky for that, as our lodger is the only one of my regular roleplaying group who didn’t get on with it.

The lovely map from Fall of Magic

One of my favourite experiences of roleplaying with her was during Grant Howitt Day. During Battle Wizard Hats, she made a wizard who was… fine. One of the players had repeatedly narrated her actions for her and halfway as a grudge she made a Spreadsheet Wizard. As a man in deep romantic love with Excel, I of course approved. To be honest, a Spreadsheet Wizard felt pretty much in keeping with the level of oddness and fun which Grant Howitt games are known for. She managed to use her magic far more effectively and seemed to be far more comfortable, even if some of it was out of spite. It was nice to share my hobby with her, even briefly. I’m already blessed with a partner who plays board games with me so much (and cursed with never being able to win a game of Scythe or Lords of Waterdeep against her). I’m also pleased she’s managed to tolerate me talking about RPGs so much over the years. Hopefully at some point in the future I’ll be able to get a game of Good Society and possibly Warmer in the Winter arranged, which she’ll be up for joining.

Some of the hats from Battle Wizard Hats
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RPG a Day 2020, Part Six – The Endless Forest

Posted on August 6, 2020 by fakedtales

In the troupe D&D 3.5 game my group ran, I hit a turning point when I realised I was back to being a Forever GM and the sole person running the game. I had to do something more with the campaign to make my mark and signal that this was the start of a new era in the campaign. My brother had was visiting occasionally at weekends and joining in with the group’s game. He was a good, if slightly feral roleplayer, often forced into leadership roles and often demanding of their acknowledgement as the smart one of the group.

He returned briefly and made an elf ranger called Thorn. Thorn was an elf ranger with high charisma and little else going aside from wanting to romance the monk character of the player who always played anime women. That’s another story which started out creepy and ended up kind of adorably (they adopted a kobold).

Creepy trees

Anyway, the forest. I would use a forest as a kind of pitcher plant for adventurers in the future, but this was my first go. The group had to head in for a reason I can’t even remember. Recovering an artefact or something similar. They set out, did their usual bickering and eventually found a massive forest which was evidently the adventure site. It was creepy enough at first, as the forest seemed to go on far more inside than out. My brother’s character went out ahead to scout and we had a break. At that point I told him the following: He had been replaced and not to worry as his character will be fine, he’ll even earn XP like the others. He was a changeling who served the forest, which ate adventurers. It needed people split up and isolated, taken into the lower places where it could work on them.

Thorn suggested splitting up the party and to go with the evil magician of the group, Servus, played by Steve. He was a high elf blood mage, frail and sinister. Steve and Alfred were good friends, so when Thorn said he’d protect Servus, Steve believed him. When they were going through the wetter, wilder places and Thorn said he’d be able to keep Servus’ spellbook safe. When it was handed over, Thorn stabbed Servus in the back and left him to die in the woods before turning into a flock of birds.

The others didn’t fare much better. The monk, Astarte, climbed a tall tree and at the top could only see endless woods and giant birds watching her. Down at ground level were undead adventurers, their faces covered with flat metal plates, their bodies moving in ways no longer caring about moving like humanoid bodies should.

Eventually they found one of the ways down the bottom. I put on the Silent Hill 2 Soundtrack, which still evokes these scenes in myself and some of the others. Astarte was caught and nailed to a table, barely able to fight off the undead adventurers and get out. Eventually they found Servus and the real Thorn.

It was a little clumsy in places, but it was a good shot of horror in a D&D game, it changed some of the characters and their relationships. Later on I’d experiment with a very different kind of endless forest in Dungeon World which ended up much worse. I’ve more recently found this horror easily found in Trophy Dark, a story game which is specifically a tragedy about adventurers going into a forest that doesn’t want them there to take something which doesn’t belong to them. I heartily recommend it if you want this kind of horror game.

Beware the stag man
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RPG a Day 2020, Part Five – Touching Tributes from Players

Posted on August 5, 2020 by fakedtales

I’m going to preface this by saying there’s no reason for players to give gifts, it’s not something I encourage or demand, but it’s really lovely when this kind of thing happens.

I started hosting fortnightly community RPG nights for all of 2019, missing one week and deputising one player to run in my stead for that time. It was fantastic and at the moment we’re still all social distancing, so I’ve had to move my sessions to online spaces instead.

At the end of 2019 I was sent a Christmas card from Alex, one of the players who’d been in the community nights for a long time. He mentioned about how much he’d loved his time in that space, which was really touching, a good sign that the nights were doing exactly what I’d wanted. Then there’s this dolphin pen:

Dolphin pen!

Yep. It’s pretty special. Michał and Joanna brought it for me, saying they felt it fit my running style, which… yeah. They’ve got me there. It’s made a great pointy stick at the dolphin end, and I’ve made sure it gets used in games like Pasión de las Pasiones.

Pasión de las Pasiones is fantastic, check out the quickstart

At GenCon UK I was running a game of Spycraft in what was pretty much a massive tent in a Butlins. There were only two players and this being Living Spycraft they both came with Snoop characters. When there was a power cut, they both left without really saying anything. I sat there, not really sure what to do but busily making notes for my home campaign. They showed up, having gone to their chalets to bring beer. I’m not even a beer fan, but it was a really nice gesture, so I drank with them as we waited for the lights to come back on and to play through. Out of the games I ran that weekend it was one of the most fun, and the kind of mission where two Snoops and a briefcase full of legal documents won the day as effectively as a group of bikers and combatants. I miss Spycraft, and would love to see a Forged in the Dark version one day.

One of my Living Spycraft adventures, found pretty much only through web archives.
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RPG a Day 2020, Part Four – Vision as a great narrative prompt

Posted on August 4, 2020 by fakedtales

“Okay, what does that look like?” is a question which has become a constant in my games. I love it as a prompt and I’d only really noticed that I keep asking it recently.

In some RPGs you start to get that thing of, “use whatever skill, just roll something,” but that’s not great. As an example, in Trophy Gold one of my players asked about checking out a statue of Saint Hester for anything untoward. He had ‘Gods’ as a skill, but also ‘Trances’. He originally said whether either of those would do, so I said they would but he’d need to tell me which one and explain what searching the statue looked like as there would be potential narrative consequences. Gods could be knowing how the statues are carved, what the symbols mean and whether anything interesting’s there. Trances would be sitting, meditating and trying to get visions about something out of place.

Games like Blades in the Dark are great for that sort of conversation. As the GM can’t ask for an action roll, it’s up to the players. If they ask for something potentially quite unorthodox you can always ask what their action will look like to sort out the settings for the position and effect. Action rolls are a negotiation in BitD, so the narrative needs ironing out a little just to know where you stand.

Finally there’s the glorious, “What does that look like?” when a player character messes up an enemy. “What does it look like when you destroy this skeleton?” lets the player know they can go hogwild with how to describe what they’ve done.

So if in doubt, ask your players what the thing they’re doing looks like, whether it’s to ascertain better what they’re doing or to add flavour & grounding. I mean, asking players in general is fantastic and should be encouraged, but this in particular has become a mantra for me of late.

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RPG a Day 2020, Part Three – Plot Threads

Posted on August 3, 2020 by fakedtales

Peter Molyneux, famous video game designer and hyperbolist, mentioned a kind of ‘trail of breadcrumbs’ when talking about Fable 2. The idea was that it would be a sprinkling of golden glitter which directed you ahead to your mission, so you wouldn’t focus too much on a minimap instead of the world itself.

It’s a little tricky trying to do the same with RPGs. I’ve run games so long I’ve been accused of being a railroad GM, but I’ve also run games with such an open sandbox that players sit around, unsure what they’re supposed to be doing.

I’m not 100% sure of the right level of visibility of the breadcrumbs for groups in general, although your players can often help. I had a real problem in my Tremulus campaign. The default setting is a small town and it suggests that players have characters who are fairly recently returned to the town, having originally been from there. We had one player who followed that remit, while the rest made basically vagrants. One was a hobo, another was a travelling conman who played at seances until he stumbled upon a real one, then the third was a gravedigger who lived in his van and did have a relative he was a bit distant to. The system gets you to generate a bunch of plot threads for local mysteries and then hopes the players will solve them.

The problem with this game came when the player who followed the remit left the group. Everyone else was wondering why they stayed in the town and why they didn’t just leave. The worst thing was they were right. They didn’t have any motivation to stick around. I called in a ringer as a player, who I briefed on my problem. He made a local boy who’d left and come back to play politician. Getting that buy in just from one player was fantastic. It meant he could pull the others in as people who weren’t really known or accountable. He was tied into the mystery, as was the aunt of the gravedigger.

It’s a tricky thing to do right. I love bringing players in to help, but that’s only one way of helping try to lay out the threads seamlessly. Personally I’d love to hear what other people have done with their plot threads to keep players following the breadcrumbs.

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