So, I started the Providence campaign this last week. The hook is “Silent Hill meets Gangs of New York”, as investigators from a strange organization deal with the supernatural dangers in a fantasy city that is an amalgamation of the last decade of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. It’s a mixture of many cities, leaning closer to the 1910s mostly, although the first scenario leans later due to circumstances. It’s not a horror game by any stretch, it’s an adventure game with dark motifs.
All characters are investigators/agents/thugs for The Circus, under the sword of Damocles known as debt. Once they earn their freedom, they can comfortably sleep knowing that there’s someone from the organization forever watching their street. I believe that roleplaying campaigns get a lot of mileage out of being cheeky and, well, playful, which includes stealing cool shit and putting it into the setting without thinking twice. So, The Circus is obviously named after the John le Carré literary universe’s term for the British secret service. The agents’ Handler is obviously named N, both due to M from the James Bond universe and the possible reference to Nyarlathotep. So it goes.
The first session was a direct operation, and the dungeon used is here. A few differences:
- There was a trail of blood that led to Alec, which was included for pacing purposes and as a campaign opener and that I removed for public release.
- The noted message in the Office was about the kitchen instead of the Warlock. After playing it seemed like a good change.
Our agents were:
- Corbett Treadway, a former child laborer who can taunt people with psychic abilities.
- Bastogne, a bully hunter who sees in the dark.
- Sam, capable of hiding in pure shadow.
In game terms, the two first were Enforcers (the Circus’ term for agents skilled at violence) and Sam was a Ghost (specialist in subterfuge and crafts). Character generation was pretty simple, with four options of “skill packages” with in-world justifications and two special abilities. Coincidentally, all the agents had the Ghost Step ability to move silently. I also included a prompt question after each skill package and ability so they could form the background and deepen the characters without being overwhelming. They could propose abilities if they wanted.
They were deployed by their Handler to recover the briefcase, find out what happened, recover Alec and, if possible, remove any threats. Some details of how it went:
- Random encounter rolls were really generous. They explored carefully without many repercussions until the halfway point. They consistently got information and then went around the difficult places, only to find another difficult place, building an architecture of the medical unit.
- They found Agatha and Christian, the two agents planning on defecting, first. They got the information and tried to make them give up their weapons, which went poorly.
- When they got trapped with Alec inside the Storeroom, they asked about the sigil on the door and whether it would still work if they removed the door from its place. I said it would, but that sigils are made to be static and while it wouldn’t lose its function, it would weaken by moving around and that the Warlock could burst through. They formulated a plan to tie Alec to one of them with rope and use the door as a large shield to move around and escape the Warlock. Some twenty to thirty minutes were discussing how to do that and where to go, as well as formation, with everyone throwing their most insane ideas and discussing finer details. They thought about using it to push the Warlock into the ether room and set an inferno but were quickly dissuaded by the notion they would be screwed as well.
- They escaped into the Kitchen in a rush, shot some creatures there and escaped back into the Examination Room, locking the door besides them, and only met with more creatures there. Cue more shooting until they left.
- They had a discussion whether they would use the briefcase to take the defecting agents from the bathroom to the alley, and let them live their lives on the run, or going back to headquarters and opening the portal to the bathroom there so the agents could be arrested for planned treason. The players wouldn’t suffer repercussions for helping the agents escape (for all the Circus knew, they were MIA and that’s it), but there were benefits with the higher-ups by selling them out (all agents are under severe debt, remember). They decided against it, by the end, and released the two agents into “freedom”. They also recovered the knife in this manner and the rolls favored them.
The session went from the slow two hours and some minutes build-up of recognizing the space, analyzing traps and how to circumvent them, gathering clues and discussing information to a ten-minute rush of action and rolls.
My notes:
- Running a game to three people I’ve never ran to before after years of only running to the same two groups was quite a nerve-wrecker. Some performance issues tied to description could be tied to that.
- The other performance issues were tied to the pacing of a campaign opener in an open table. One operation = one session means that, when the decision is between gameplay and giving time to players to make decisions by only giving the salient information and playing around with perspective, it’s always better to give only the information they can directly use in decisions and avoid any description beyond that. This led to some efficiency, but it was a skill issue on my part.
- I increasingly prefer more detailed keys for my own use and this is the turning point for me. More text to remember or consult is what I need.
- Providence is a difficult campaign to properly get across. Getting the challenges and decisions across is easy enough, but the serious adventure tone can be harder, as it can’t use the techniques of investigative horror roleplaying without coming across as a false note. Most of the GMing challenges for it will be finding scenarios and phrase choices that convey the uncanny disorientation of familiar historical and modern touchstones.
- The dungeon was more functional than expected. I was not sure how its objective-oriented play and its nature for play (instead of being a dungeon one can come back to, it’s closer to an incursion into a singular space) would work for my GMing style. It was pretty close to being a Demesne, but the adding of Mannequins interferes with that.
We are trying to keep the sections in under 2.5 hours, which makes writing scenarios a bit difficult to keep the rotational operation aspect plus being an open table, but it’s a rewarding challenge. I’m excited for the next session.
Roll to Doubt 