My New Year Resolution includes doing stuff that normally scares me in different parts of my life. In the tabletop arena, that includes running zero-to-almost-zero prep games, something I never did. I have optimized prep principles so I never give myself more trouble than it’s worth, but I just feel the burning need to have a fair amount of prep and decided that my skills as a GM could be improved by doing these experiments where it’s just me and my lovely ass on the chair. Ran two sessions (so far) to that effect this month. One was expected, the other was unexpected. Here are my notes and thoughts:
Treasure Hunt in Bastion
Duet with CosmicOrrery. Her character was a worker for a shipping company in industrial Bastion. I think traditional sessions as discrete blocks of challenges, so my prep was sketching the sentence “weird witch needs a great merchant’s calligraphy, a thief’s hand and a maiden’s hair comb to do a spell”, with the added notes that she was easy to fool and a player could hand her whatever, although that would have consequences. This is a very simple structure: three separate objectives (not my problem how the player achieves it) with a predicted final sequence (delivering it) that varies in detail and result according to the objectives. A good enough framework to improvise.
Two minutes before the session I couldn’t help but sketch that there was a big theatre in Bastion where a famous actress would portray an innocent maiden, and that her father was a merchant who was jealous of her flirtations with a Peter Lorre stand-in. That would possibly be a good fallback challenge complex if Cosmic needed to go somewhere with all three objectives (how would the thief’s hand come from this? Not my problem).
After the set-up (and getting a nice thousand-shilling bill as guarantee), she immediately started thinking about how and where to get the two first items. So much for the two lines of prep I did, we are operating with one!
We figured out that she could start by visiting the company she works for and trying to get her boss to sign a receipt. She did some negotiation with a creepy co-worker so he would handle her a document, since she had none at her desk.
For the second one, she figured the galleys were her best bet to getting a thief’s hand. Indeed, there was a hanging thief there, still alive and struggling, but two of his pals were trying to get him out. A rather tense dialogue went down, as she tried to bribe the two thugs into cutting their friend’s hand off and giving it to her for the bill she had, in a rather difficult duel of wits: she dressed fairly well in class-conscious Bastion and had the bank note that seemed real, so attacking her would probably be a bad idea compared to other people, but she was a threat because she saw them committing a crime. Handling it through reaction rolls for offers and such was harder than expected, but I leaned into this and it went fairly well. The climax was a stand-off where she would handle the note and get the hand from one of the thugs while being fast enough to run away or not allowing him to pull a fast one. The roll went well, she ran away with the hand and never looked back.
She went to the theatre for the third one, and through disguising and performance got into the backstage before the play started. I figured that a famous actress would not leave her room unattended for thieves, and that actresses often receive flowers from admires, so I put there on the spot a gigantic flower monster watching the hair comb in the desk. Cosmic’s PC succeeded in grabbing it without being instantly killed but had to run away as the monster wrecked the theatre, and due to a good roll managed to disguise herself and run away instead of taking an Underworld route.
She delivered the three items. The witch successfully evoked the alien entity to wreak havoc. That wasn’t the worker’s problem, she had a restaurant to visit.
Chaotic Art
I was out doing errands when Halloween hit me up: “me and X are bored, would you run something in one hour?”. I had absolutely nothing, no idea what to do and wasn’t even sure if I could get home and do some notes in one hour. So of course, I said “yes”. Cosmic jumped in too, so three players. I asked them to use Streets of Marienburg as character generation, but without rolling stats or considering the mechanical bits. They simply chose a career, one extra skill and two abilities.
I decided that it should be a dungeon crawl. There’s something about Warhammer and Call of Cthulhu dungeon crawls (here regarding play ethos, not rulesets) that is different from D&D dungeon crawls. Even at level one, old D&D characters are tactical commando units performing a dungeoneering war operation, being highly capacitated for it due to the abstraction and class division. There’s a grounding to other games that makes their dungeon crawls no less entertaining but fundamentally different because one gets the impression the characters should not be there in many cases, being more proper to investigations and social intrigue that are interrupted by desperate skirmishes. It’s no wonder dungeon crawl scenarios for those games are not classic in design but with highly specific objectives to be achieved instead of cleaning the place.
Indeed, I never told them we would do a dungeon crawl. We got two women who got by among high society through wits, couch crashing and often sharing beds with nobles, and a rather unstable alcoholic mystic who wished to create his own cult. These people are not dungeoneers. So, they went down the dungeon. I grabbed a few tables (I have apps on my phone for that plus saved images just in case), rolled some results in lines and such, screenshotted so I wouldn’t forget and tied stuff on the way home. Drew ten nodes with vague spatial relationship, keyed four of them, two types of random encounters and started the game while filling the rest.
I plan on sharing the full dungeon here in the blog, so I won’t go in detail here, but the set-up is that an artist who used to mingle a bit in high society disappeared and took her stuff with her and was seen near the caves outside town. The mystic picked up the energy coming from there, and they all decided to investigate and see if she was there, because the three of them could likely take away the stuff from one weird woman. Unfortunately, the caves were so tainted with dark magic that they were perfectly designed like rooms despite being natural, like an artist studio, and monstrosities roamed there. A local noble was also lost around there, because he heard the rumors and hoped to have sex with the artist for whom he long sustained a crush, and it ended with him becoming a captive audience for the art. He was highly unpleasant, perverted and, well, a noble, so nobody gave a shit.
Among some highlights:
- They immediately touched a weird chaos statuette of a rat king, which ended up poisoning the mind of the mystic.
- They found the noble, chained to a bed and half-naked (he was expecting her to paint him in the nude), and decided to gag him to not listen to his whining and weird flirtations. They wanted to ransom him back into town if they couldn’t find the artist’s stuff.
- They found the naked portrait of the noble, which he insisted on carrying back.
- They had a very desperate struggle with giant bipedal rats carrying acid paint while another one tried to evoke… something in the cave. During this, the noble would not drop the painting and run (it was too heavy), so the mystic stabbed the painting to make the noble go berserk and run (and got his fingers bitten by the rabid noble as a response).
- They broke into the artist’s personal painting room and decided to stab her into shock (Halloween had to roll so she could not only do it, but not kill her by accident) so they could use her as hostage to leave the cave.
- They successfully escaped with the noble and ransomed him. They had the longest discussion about how to ransom him without attracting unwanted noble attention. The two women took their part of the money and skipped town, while the mystic started his cult.
Dungeon crawls with non-dungeoneering units are hilarious every time.
Notes About Improv
Improv was about setting a flow of challenges.
Challenge-oriented play is an easy framework to run. When improving, that means adjusting the presence of them so the player won’t get bored, and it’s interesting that if you come with them on the spot with random tables you truly don’t have any idea how they are meant to be solved, which is perfect since they are the player’s problem. The rose in the duet came from the need to include one more challenge so play wouldn’t be anticlimactic, and it spiraled very well.
The difficulty there is making the challenge seem natural instead of an asspull. It must not only be environmental and fictionally coherent, which is obvious, but also paced well, such as it doesn’t come as a result of pilling one problem after the other, but a necessary interruption for the player’s string of successes, something that doesn’t invalidate what the player did until that point. The rose monster was an improv necessity for ending play on a high note, leaning much more on trad play instincts despite using OSR challenges as an idea, and it was only possible because she succeeded easily by her wits with the other challenges so far.
Improvising a dungeon crawl was easier than I thought. First, because I already had the concept and types of enemies, so I could fill in the blanks. Second, because all I needed was being a couple rooms ahead of the party, so I could foreshadow it through corridors, sounds and smells to preserve their agency and tactical exploration (it helps that I had a vague concept of nearly every key). Most of the improv was filling sensorial details on the spot. The danger of improving a dungeon is taking away from them agency because of lack of foreshadowing, which is why I relied on corridors so heavily and fortunately had enough tables for ideas.
Reaction rolls, contrary to expectations, felt like a not-so-great tool for my kind of improv, because of the risk of it denying a potential challenge instead of setting an antagonistic or dangerous situation and instead being generous regarding possibilities of evading it through wits. The Three Little Brown Books suggest reaction rolls are only used in cases of the monster/NPC feeling rather overwhelmed and trying improv I could definitely see why that approach is functional.
I discovered I don’t really like improv in this manner. There’s just something that focused prep brings as a GM that leads to my further enjoyment. Which doesn’t mean any of those games weren’t enjoyable, we all had a blast, but they felt missing, always searching for me. Perhaps it’s GM brain; things always look direr for you than for the players regarding how the session is going.
I will keep doing improv sessions as a practice way and to keep gaming, which should be our focus as hobbyists, but so far it remains a craft experiment instead of anything I would gladly have as main repertoire.
Roll to Doubt 