The Horror
I think a lot about lynchpin players, the ones who are going to carry a game when the others are only marginally interested. Hopefully, the other players become more engaged as time goes on, but if not it’s not the end of the campaign. In my D&D campaign, Jeremy was the lynchpin. He showed up to EVERY game, he talked to me about the game for hours, and he agonized over his character. In this game, it would be my brother.
To keep the momentum going, I write “story hours” (as they call it on ENWorld) detailing what happened in the game. This serves several purposes: it keeps my writing skills fresh, it gives me something to post to my blog every day, it helps clarify and crystallize the events of the past game, and it ultimately makes for what I hope is an entertaining read. Deep down, I’m still trying to make up for that comment about my horror writing.
When I write a story hour, I fill in dialogue, add in details, and while I generally stay true to what happened, the story hour is a chance for me to go back and “fix” things. Story hours are a very important means of providing continuity between sessions as well as filling in players who miss a game. What’s interesting is how the D&D story hour became the new gaming reality for my players. On more than one occasion they quoted what I wrote as if they gamed it that way, or even misremembered the session completely as I wrote it.
So what kind of campaign should we play? To keep my brother interested, I had to somehow bring the confluence of zombies and weapons together, one aimed at the other in no particular order. It’s not pure horror, but I figure military horror is something I can handle. I mean…how hard could it be?
The first step is figuring out what kind of game we want to play. I need to be able to embrace the hack-and-slash tendencies of Joe L and Matt, the bravado of Jeremy, the military squad-tactics of Bill, the CSI investigation of George, and of course plain old horror for my brother. I also wrote a series of D20 Modern .PDFs tackling zombies (Blood & Brains), ghosts (Blood & Spooks), slashers (Blood & Blades), modern mercenaries (Combat Missions), Werewolves (The Complete Guide to Werewolves) and aliens (Alien Invasion). Our last game was D&D 3.5 and everyone was familiar with the D20 system (or the Palladium system, close enough) so I decided D20 Modern was the way to go.
The other question was what setting would we play? I’ve got a full-time job that sucks up a lot of my time, so having published material was critical. The more published material, the better. Looking at my oeuvre, the campaign had to be flexible enough to allow zombies, ghosts, slashers, mercenaries and aliens. It took me about five seconds to find what I needed: Delta Green.
If you’re not familiar with Delta Green, it is essentially an 90s-era version of the Call of Cthulhu game, recasting modern conspiracies of aliens and other weirdness through a Cthulhu-inspired lens. The players are federal agents, organized by a secretive cell structure, who work together during off hours to combat Mythos threats. Delta Green solves a lot of problems of the traditional Cthulhu game, which involves a butler, a physicist, an archaeologist and a martial artist walking into a bar…
A little research revealed a disturbing fact: there isn’t much published material for Delta Green. In fact, it seemed I had discovered Delta Green after its golden days had passed. There was more somewhat material for modern Call of Cthulhu, which is adaptable to Delta Green but necessarily made for Delta Green gun-toting agents. And there’s a lot of material on the net. But at the time of the launch of the campaign, there wasn’t much*.
* I’m happy to report this has since changed.
So I had my game and my setting. There were a few rules I wanted use from my own published works. I’d like to state up front that none of my friends, my gaming friends of twenty years, have ever actually read anything I’ve ever written. Ever. They don’t know about it, don’t use it, and when I give them books I’ve written as gifts I get that same expression that little kids give when they get clothes for Christmas. I felt it was high time my friends got to see my amazing talents in action, and if that meant fitting in every stupid book I ever wrote, so be it. This game wouldn’t just have zombies, it would have zombies AND werewolves AND aliens damn it!
First up, the sanity system. I wrote a consolidated sanity system for Blood & Blades that took great ideas from Gareth Hanrahan’s OGL Horror and the Unearthed Arcana sanity system (which was in turn taken from Call of Cthulhu). It was the ultimate sanity mechanic and I was looking forward to using it, slowly eroding our heroes’ sanity as they faced unspeakable horrors, facing down hopeless odds to help humanity survive one more day, even if it was merely holding off the inevitable death march to the apocalypse…
“I hate sanity mechanics,” muttered George. “That’s just one more stat to keep track of.”
“Sanity?” asked Jeremy. “We’re not playing that Call of Cthulhu crap are we?”
Not only were we going to play Call of Cthulhu, but we were going to wiggle into the squirmy, wormy heart of Delta Green by playing every scenario I could get my greedy little mitts on. Hell yeah we were going to play Call of Cthulhu! But I found myself on the defensive, because Call of Cthulhu (even in another game system) has a reputation of sorts.
That reputation is, unfortunately, of a game that preys on the players. Cthulhu is often played as a one-shot in which survival isn’t expected and actually an exciting and interesting death is encouraged. Of all my players, only my brother was even slightly interested in that sort of game. That’s not how Cthulhu is played these days, from what I hear, but the reputation precedes it. It’s not helped by quite a few grognards who are proud of the “everybody dies” style of gaming gleefully reinforcing the reputation that if you can’t handle your character dying, you’re a pussy.
Since I deal with realities of trying to get a gaming group together, I was determined to move forward. We were going to play a game that involved sanity somehow, but it wouldn’t be just another “stat to keep track of.” And I was going to play Call of Cthulhu without letting the players know that’s what we were playing. I told myself that every campaign is ultimately a unique creation of the GM’s, and aren’t we all creating our own unique storytelling experiences through the collaborative nature of role-BLAH BLAH BLAH? In my head, it was a very convincing argument, so I laid it out just as eloquently to Jeremy.
I lied.
“Nope,” I said.
Lesson Learned: Sometimes, horror is about the unknown, even if it means you don’t know what game you’re playing.
References
- About Me: http://michael.tresca.net
- Blood & Brains: The Zombie Hunter's Guide: http://rpgnet.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=18157&it=1&filters=0_0_10093
- Blood & Spooks: The Ghost Hunter's Guide: http://rpgnet.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=18603&it=1&filters=0_0_10093
- Blood & Blades: The Profiler's Guide to Slashers: http://rpgnet.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=19481&it=1&filters=0_0_10093
- Delta Green: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1887797238/michaeltrescaA
- Spycraft: Combat Missions: http://rpgnet.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=51227&filters=0_0_10093
- The Complete Guide to Werewolves: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0976314231/michaeltrescaA
- Alien Invasion: http://rpgnet.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=15941&it=1&filters=0_0_10093
- Call of Cthulhu d20: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0786926392/michaeltrescaA
