A Game of Shops, final part

Greetings, dear guest!

My exams are over since yesterday, so Steamagination will once again have regular updates. Today it’s time to finish Game of Shops.

 

Addicting addition

The last thing worth writing about in a Game of Shops is a major subplot that started as a joke and turned out to be really, really serious, probably more serious than anything else in the campaign. When a halfing scoundrel, Tomek Bugajło (Bugaylo) allied with the PCs they not only gave him promised shelter, but also tried the black lotus he was selling! At first they were very wary about using this drug, but soon they began to indulge in it.

And it was quite a surprise for me. Drugging themselves is something that positive characters certainly shouldn’t do and while nineteenth century knew less about addictions than our times the lotus is not just any drug, it’s the opium of Urda – and Urda probably already had its Opium wars. I must honestly admit that I haven’t read much about opium usage while I was running A Game of Shops but now I know that while it was used as a medicine in the nineteenth century selling it to people who didn’t really need it was a crime in victorian England. Even before I knew that it was clear to me that such an addiction must have some consequences, but I didn’t want to simply disallow using the lotus. It would be treating my players like children, something too similar to “sledgehammering” described in Drugs are bad at TvTropes.

There’s nothing wrong (period-wise) with a character smoking a pipe. Opium, however, is a more serious matter.

At first I’ve decided to demonstrate how inconvenient it is to smoke lotus. It looked like an innocent joke – every time somebody smoked lotus he rolled expression and his thoughts materialized with intensity based on the result of this roll. TN 15 gave a single picture while rolling 25 or more created something real and lasting.

The one who smoke the most was Zdzisław Nowicki (Zdhyswav Nowitsky), an ogre athlete always dreaming of battles with worthy opponents so his lotus dreams were various powerful boxers – trolls, ogres and so on. Sometimes a single test was enough to defeat them and make them vanish, but with good rolls they were so durable that Our Ladies and Gentlemen had to fight them for several rounds. Lots of things in their estate got demolished, but strangely they found it amusing rather than distracting and continued to smoke.

Amoral and shocking, isn’t it? But now as I think about this addiction it seems to me that the whole story became better because they didn’t stop. You know – drugs are such a danger because they are tempting. The PCs liked the “trips” they owed to the lotus so they indulged themselves with one drug-stuffed cigar after another and that allowed me to consider them real addicts and serve them a real nightmare trip. Courtesy of a sandbox-liking Game Master.

Black lotus is a fantasy drug[1], so getting addicted to it has very peculiar effect. It is strongly associated with writers who can’t tell the difference between their creations and the real world, so I’ve decided that the PCs who smoked lotus regularly – Zdzisław and Kevin, a sniper from Avalon – were losing their grip on reality. Zdzisław was haunted by a hallucinatory Szkudrycki (you know, the policeman who arrested him before) while Kevin, who at the moment of the first hallucination was spying in an inn like a Hooded Stranger from a fantasy setting met a group of three typical D&D heroes: a halfing thief, a dwarven warrior and an elfen mage. They asked him to give them a quest and later to protect them from a mysterious undead Warlock.

Both Kevin and Zdzisław were attacked by their hallucinations, but only Zdzisław resisted. It was a fun to hear him talking to Szkudrycki: I wasn’t guilty! You can’t arrest me! Wait, why am I talking to you? You don’t exist! Kevin, however, gave in. not only did he cooperate with his newfound friends, he also took later the side of the Warlock and began to believe the words of this wraith more than those of his existing companions.

Others tried to persuade him to turn back from this path leading nowhere, but when he decided to listen to their advices it was too late. When the campaign came to an end, a devil attacked Vidlice. The rest of Our Ladies and Gentlemen were fighting with him while Kevin hid himself with an artifact the devil was after, but then the Warlock approached him and persuaded our poor addict to enter his astral realm. A realm of ice and undeath, in fact created only to be an eternal prison for naïve Kevin. There was probably no higher-staked discussion in the entire history of my Wolsung sessions.

However, it wasn’t a va banque confrontation, so Kevin had a chance of escaping – Daphne Fatestring, a True Artist from a session long ago had a dream of his prison and drew a painting which was a gate to this remote astral realm. His friends managed to get him out of there, but the lesson was well-learned: now every time somebody mentions black lotus at the table the rest tells him to stop at once. I don’t want to boast myself but I think that it was such a good lesson because I’ve designed it not as a lesson, but simply as a logical consequence of PCs’ actions. I haven’t told even once something like “don’t do this” or “lotus is dangerous”, I’ve just allowed the players to do as they please and then I made them face the consequences.

 

But enough of my stories of myself! Next time we’ll look at Operation Wotan, the first Wolsung supplement released in Poland. And next week I’ll post here a three-part mini-campaign about a great expedition to the North Pole with lots of mysteries, villains and, of course, tentacles. For what good are arctic regions without a little bit of At the Mountains of Madness?

---

[1] I saw it in Baldur’s Gate II and in stories about Conan, so it may in fact be the most generic fantasy drug ever.

 

New to Wolsung: two opposite entrances

What I’d like to share with you today is my experience with introducting Wolsung to new players. I’m planning to write it down as a two- or three-part series, beginning today with two ways to smoothly teach new players the rules of this game. As stated in the title, those two ways are completely opposite to each other, but they both have worked at my table.

 

Option one: long creation

The first option is rather mainstream and I’ve already had time to test it well. It’s very simple: don’t fill the whole character sheet at once, instead fill it gradually over the course of first three sessions.

It’s nice to see a character gradually coming to life.

On the first session distribute only attributes, skills and archetypes. Players should choose race and profession of their characters, but these choices won’t influence the rules – not yet. They get no tokens and they get only five cards for the entire session:  Five, Ten, Dame, King and an Ace. The color of these card doesn’t matter yet – they can be used with any aspect of an Archetype, ex. a club can be used as “suspects” by an investigator even thought “suspects” are normally associated with spears. The Game Master gets no cards and no tokens. It’s up to the Game Master if the Extraordinary Ladies and Gentlemen start with an Achievement and thus if they have 2d10 dice pool.

Those limitations serve many purposes. First and foremost they ensure that players won’t be overwhelmed with the whole ruleset of Wolsung. My introductory sessions using these rules always run much smoother than those with full mechanics. Second, more specific aim is to ensure that players won’t have to use the cards too often. When they use them only when they really need them they’ll have a better chance to learn to use them in an interesting way. And, last but not least, not introducing cards and tokens at the same time ensures that players will understand the difference between them – after all, they both add to the roll and it’s important to know when to use and how to describe each of them.

On the second session introduce professional and racial abilities, gadgets and feats. Give them to players in typical amounts, including 20 XP that every character should get at its creation. However, don’t introduce tokens and limit the use of any token-relying abilities to once per session.

 I think that using gadgets, feats and magic is easier than using a full suit of cards, so this order of character creation seems the best for me. It also has a huge advantage when it comes to spellcasting characters. They aren’t able to renew their powers using tokens, so from the very start they have to focus on more lively and interesting option of renewing them using the rules of their sort of magic (using one’s primary element for Wild Talents and so on). Let’s hope that this habit will stay with them once they get a bunch of tokens.

On the third session full rules apply – give the players regular number of cards and tokens and finally have them yourself.

If your players learn really fast, you may give them half this amount (three cards and three tokens) during the second session. On the other side if they need more time to understand Wolsung, you can give them half the amount on the third session and wait until the fourth with the full amount.

This way of teaching Wolsung is really well-tested, I have taught something like a dozen players using it and now they all use the rules very easily and creatively. my second idea lacks these virtues but it can be really fun to some players.

 

Option two: Lots of cards!

In this version a player chooses only his Archetype for the first session. His character has no stats, but he gets three cards and draws another three each time only one is left in his hand, discarding the worst of the four. He can play this cards as any other player, with one exception: if he uses card value as a result of his roll, other players can increase this result with their card bonuses.

Because such a player has no stats, he can’t be a target of an attack during a confrontation and his failures only have consequences to the story, not the mechanics.

That’s why I consequently write “player” instead of “players” – this option is best suited for adding a new player to an already formed group. This is the way I’ve used this rule in my sessions (only once so far, but with good results). A character created this way is not only very simple to run but also invincible, so he gets a period of protection that allows him to get involved in the plot more smoothly. Getting new cards when he still has one left allows to hoard an all-powerful deck towards the end of the session. I think there should be such a possibility because Wolsung is, after all, a tactical game and players should be taught to rely on their own wits, not only sheer luck from the first session.

The obvious drawback is that the player has to use many, many cards on the first session – but since he doesn’t have to do anything else, it shouldn’t be a really serious problem. I think that a player who begins with such minimal rules will use cards more interestingly during later sessions.

What to do with such a character after the first session? I suggest creating him using long creation rules, but simplified: the character gets three tokens on his second session (along with attributes and skills) and on the third one he is ready with full suite of both stats and cards.

Using these rules to create an entire team is a very interesting option both for new players and for experienced ones wanting a fast-paced, fun game, but it requires to tweak other rules of Wolsung in quite a serious way. If somebody is interested in this home-brew version of Wolsung I’ll gladly write about it.  

 

In next installment of this series I’ll write about introducing the world of Wolsung to the players and helping them find their place in this Victorian society. However, first I’ll finish A Game of Shops an review Operation Wotan. I know that this week has less new posts than the last one and I’m sorry about it but I can’t write more for you because of my exams.

I’ll be glad for your opinions on these ideas!

 

A Game of Shops, part three

The whole campaign got complicated like a map of The Tube. Mind the gap!

A friend of mine told me a few weeks ago that George R. R. Martin wrote A Game of Thrones as a book that could not be made into a movie (do TV series count?). Then she began to talk about the plot, but she didn’t explained the events – instead she focused on how does Martin tell this story. And it convinced me that A Game of Shops is a really good title for my campaign.

Because honestly, I can’t simply write the events down. There were too many subplots, too many small events, too many things that began as an improvised element then developed into a two-session intrigue… I can, however, write abouth the way in which the campaign developed and give a few examples of such development. Such an approach should be more interesting than a simple chronicle of everything that happened.

 

Power has its consequences

As I’ve written in the last part of the series, my main idea for creating NPCs was to make them versatile in reactions to both the PCs and other non-playing characters. Similarly, my first rule for running the campaign was to allow my Ladies and Gentlemen to do virtually anything, but always with interesting consequences.

It means that I haven’t prepared everything that could happen, instead I’ve listened to what my players want to do and then I’ve then either allowed them to do so or created a complication. Let’s see how it works…

During the first session players stumbled upon Tomek Bugajło (read as Bugaylo) – a halfing scoundrel seeking to expand Scylla’s influence in Vidlice. One of my Gentlemen (Lady wasn’t playing with us yet) offered him a deal: he’ll help Tomek in the future if the halfing tells him something about Widnacki. I haven’t planned that Tomek knows anything, but having the PCs in halfing’s debt sounded like a good story hook. And so I’ve decided that the halfing knows that Widnacki doesn’t exists but doesn’t know whose plot is this. The deal was concluded.

Later Tomek tried to sell some lotus and was spotted by the police, so he sought refuge in players’ house – and they hid him. There simply had to be consequences, so I’ve sent a policeman on them. Inventing policemen is very easy because nineteenth-century literature is teeming with them: Javert from Les Miserables, Porfiry from Crime and Punishment etc. My adamant vigilante – Damian Szkudrycki – soon became a major NPC and a constant nuisance for the players. He finally arrested them when they were returning from the Free City of Ujście (not under Slavian jurisdiction) and to break free they had to escape from a prison in Gniazdo – the capital of Slavia – and then flee from the police and the press through the streets of the capital, finally arriving at the royal castle and proving their innocence in front of the king. In a va banque discussion with overpowered Szkudrycki. I’d die to replay this session as a LARP on the streets of Warsaw!

This shows another method of GMing really useful in Wolsung, one I’ve learned from a Polish blogger DeathlyHallow: you can run this game as a sandbox, but keep your eyes wide-awake! As soon as an opportunity for cinematic, fast-paced, pulp action arises, use it! Make up a scene and don’t care too much with probability – you’ve got a chance to run a game that your players will remember for a long time.

To sum up: it works well in Wolsung to allow the players to change the arrangement of the setting because their characters are to be powerful and because your players don’t know precisely what is this arrangement so they don’t feel that you’re distorting the setting. When doing such a thing, however, you have to plan some interesting (not necessarily mean) consequences – that will make your game run really smooth and generate a lot of action. I know that it’s not my idea and many GMs talk about this approach for decades, but in Wolsung it works especially well.

 

Our old friend

Vidlice after the fire burnt down.

I promised to write something about Witold Duwacki – and he clearly deserves a mention. He was the main attraction of the first session and it used up all of his roles I’ve written about last time. Our Gentlemen met him in the villa of a respected noblewoman and employed him as an engineer, additionally using his knowledge about Vidlice to learn a lot about the city. However by employing him they provided him with all the chemicals he needed to recreate his “mr Hyde formula”, so he soon ingested it and used his newfound brutality to set fire to one of Brulnicki’s factories. The PCs rescued a lot workmen from this facility, argued with Brulnicki who ordered to evacuate machines in the first place and finally caught Witold. It gave them fame, enmity of Brulnicki (remember – he was the one who wanted them to succeed, so their relation became complex) and an interesting information about him: Witold told them how it really was with his exemption from Brulnicki’s factory.

 

Pros and cons

Running a campaign in this way is really interesting and doesn’t take much time between sessions, which was then a really important thing to me. The main drawback is that when most of the plot is improvised, it usually isn’t as awesome as a carefully prepared scenario. It wasn’t a problem during the first few sessions because they were running on these precious few notes I’ve had prepared. However, later same scenes were a little bit disappointing.

Despite this problem the whole campaign was a really great experience both for me and for my players. I won’t return to such a model of play for some time because now I want to run a few really well-prepared sessions, but I’ve learned a lot in Vidlice and I’ll surely use these experiences in the future.

 

As there is no point in writing the whole campaign down, there’ll be only one more part of A Game of Shops. There I’ll describe the most important and most ridiculous addition to the plot: an addiction to black lotus that some Gentlemen developed! But this report won’t be my next post. First I’m going to post a one-shot adventure about trolling – not strictly in the modern meaning of this word, but… you’ll see. It should appear here on Friday evening or Saturday morning (European time).