Frankenstein Post
The title fits for two reasons. The first is that the blog is coming back to life after a few months absence. Secondly the new campaign we started last week's first adventure has strong references to the classic Mary Shelley book. The blog will focus more on the RPG elements of the weekly game and none on the mammoth amount of books I read. Goodreads now solely serves that purpose.
We finished up Pathfinder early. I was burned out and the Adventure Path started strong but did not end well. Once they got to the Jungle and the city it just seemed like there was little well written plot and mostly just combats of ever increasing difficulties. The Serpent Skull was not for us at least not after over two years of straight Pathfinder.
We were going to have scheduling issues so we picked a game that had little in need of weekly cohesion. We played Dungeon Crawl Classics for a couple of months and while fun just wasn't a good enough fit. I know most of the players liked it and don't know if they saw what I was seeing about the lack of understanding from them.
Now we have gone to a different kind of game and campaign. It is modern supernatural with horror elements. They are all FBI agents starting in a new division and mystery and conspiracy will arise from this. I hope. The first session had the players in my opinion a little to trusting of everything and accepting of the impossible. And when things got tough I do feel they missed something. But it is not a problem as there is nothing that can't be fixed and they can be trained.
The session started with a meeting in the J Edgar Hoover building with their new boss. He told them their first assignment is to lend aid to the Philadelphia Office and locate an 80 year old Russian nuclear physicist who facial recognition software detected. Seems simple enough but the scientist was thought to have dies in 2004 and so it begs the question why is a dead scientists on a watch list that includes facial recognition software. And being over 80 years old and never been to the US one might wonder why he would be on the watch list to begin with. It is fine the players didn't immediately think this. They are not used to playing in games where things get questioned like that. Also, in gaming even if the thought comes to you it could be a purposeful event the GM has included to be part of the mystery or it could be a GM that didn't realize it or think about that. How many things to you point out that are odd with the adventure before it looks like pointless nitpicking? It is a fine line in gaming.
The PCs travel to New York and went straight to the mall the scientist had been seen in. I gave them a few other investigation options though the mall was the best choice. If they would have gone elsewhere though the adventure would have shaped up much differently.
They find the scientist easy enough and he doesn't run just plays like he doesn't understand. The group eventually got through to him but the obvious clue there was he was reading the Philadelphia Tribune. They took him back to the FBI offices booked him and interrogated him. When the arrest was made there was the possibility that they would have run into the Monster as he was after the scientist at the mall. But they just arrested him and left so once again that dictated the next set of events. While they are questioning him his pager like device goes off. Except it is of course not a pager it is a detector. One Agent thought it was a bomb so they ran it down to a secure area but then the monster attacked. Like the monster is it was pretty much indestructible. They fought it and no one died but a character did get hospitalized. The next day one of the PCs gets a file folder documenting a conversation with a Russian about the Monster. The Monster is named Oleg and is part of the Russian Mafia. It is a great if a little long bit that really sets the tone for Oleg and how nasty and bad ass he is. The person who gave the interview is dead and whoever put together the folder includes an article of his death in it. Who gave the PCs this info is of course a mystery.
We ended it after that. The session went well though we might have too many quick to shot characters. The scientist told them a story on how prior to World War One Romania was taken over and ruled by Victor Frankenstein and I think the PCs accepted that as fact a little easy. I had more information on that included country name, maps, events, and history but pulled back from it as I was worried the PCs would accept it all so easily that they would want to travel there and that would take the campaign a direction I don't want it to go.
The whole idea of Frankenstein country comes from Dark Harvest: The Legacy of Frankenstein published by Cubicle 7. It is a great book with gaming in the country at the turn of the 20th century. The adventure about Oleg and the papers in the folder are all from Horror Recognition Guide from White Wolf. I really like that book and have wanted to use it ever since it was published. Many of the PCs I'm using I got inspiration from the book Masks by Gnomestew. It is a great resource for NPCs that a good friend got for me for Christmas. The game system we are using is Mini d6 but already the players are asking for some things that book does not cover so we will adapt some concepts from d6 Adventure. That was my original plan to start simple and then upgrade to more complex as needed.
General inspiration for the game has been drawn from almost every game line White Wolf has ever made (Promethean of course for this Accenture), Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green, Unknown Armies, Indiana Jones RPG, and plenty of others. This is the kind of campaign I've been prepping for a while. It is one of the reasons I have a vast RPG library to help find the perfect fits for what I need.
We finished up Pathfinder early. I was burned out and the Adventure Path started strong but did not end well. Once they got to the Jungle and the city it just seemed like there was little well written plot and mostly just combats of ever increasing difficulties. The Serpent Skull was not for us at least not after over two years of straight Pathfinder.
We were going to have scheduling issues so we picked a game that had little in need of weekly cohesion. We played Dungeon Crawl Classics for a couple of months and while fun just wasn't a good enough fit. I know most of the players liked it and don't know if they saw what I was seeing about the lack of understanding from them.
Now we have gone to a different kind of game and campaign. It is modern supernatural with horror elements. They are all FBI agents starting in a new division and mystery and conspiracy will arise from this. I hope. The first session had the players in my opinion a little to trusting of everything and accepting of the impossible. And when things got tough I do feel they missed something. But it is not a problem as there is nothing that can't be fixed and they can be trained.
The session started with a meeting in the J Edgar Hoover building with their new boss. He told them their first assignment is to lend aid to the Philadelphia Office and locate an 80 year old Russian nuclear physicist who facial recognition software detected. Seems simple enough but the scientist was thought to have dies in 2004 and so it begs the question why is a dead scientists on a watch list that includes facial recognition software. And being over 80 years old and never been to the US one might wonder why he would be on the watch list to begin with. It is fine the players didn't immediately think this. They are not used to playing in games where things get questioned like that. Also, in gaming even if the thought comes to you it could be a purposeful event the GM has included to be part of the mystery or it could be a GM that didn't realize it or think about that. How many things to you point out that are odd with the adventure before it looks like pointless nitpicking? It is a fine line in gaming.
The PCs travel to New York and went straight to the mall the scientist had been seen in. I gave them a few other investigation options though the mall was the best choice. If they would have gone elsewhere though the adventure would have shaped up much differently.
They find the scientist easy enough and he doesn't run just plays like he doesn't understand. The group eventually got through to him but the obvious clue there was he was reading the Philadelphia Tribune. They took him back to the FBI offices booked him and interrogated him. When the arrest was made there was the possibility that they would have run into the Monster as he was after the scientist at the mall. But they just arrested him and left so once again that dictated the next set of events. While they are questioning him his pager like device goes off. Except it is of course not a pager it is a detector. One Agent thought it was a bomb so they ran it down to a secure area but then the monster attacked. Like the monster is it was pretty much indestructible. They fought it and no one died but a character did get hospitalized. The next day one of the PCs gets a file folder documenting a conversation with a Russian about the Monster. The Monster is named Oleg and is part of the Russian Mafia. It is a great if a little long bit that really sets the tone for Oleg and how nasty and bad ass he is. The person who gave the interview is dead and whoever put together the folder includes an article of his death in it. Who gave the PCs this info is of course a mystery.
We ended it after that. The session went well though we might have too many quick to shot characters. The scientist told them a story on how prior to World War One Romania was taken over and ruled by Victor Frankenstein and I think the PCs accepted that as fact a little easy. I had more information on that included country name, maps, events, and history but pulled back from it as I was worried the PCs would accept it all so easily that they would want to travel there and that would take the campaign a direction I don't want it to go.
The whole idea of Frankenstein country comes from Dark Harvest: The Legacy of Frankenstein published by Cubicle 7. It is a great book with gaming in the country at the turn of the 20th century. The adventure about Oleg and the papers in the folder are all from Horror Recognition Guide from White Wolf. I really like that book and have wanted to use it ever since it was published. Many of the PCs I'm using I got inspiration from the book Masks by Gnomestew. It is a great resource for NPCs that a good friend got for me for Christmas. The game system we are using is Mini d6 but already the players are asking for some things that book does not cover so we will adapt some concepts from d6 Adventure. That was my original plan to start simple and then upgrade to more complex as needed.
General inspiration for the game has been drawn from almost every game line White Wolf has ever made (Promethean of course for this Accenture), Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green, Unknown Armies, Indiana Jones RPG, and plenty of others. This is the kind of campaign I've been prepping for a while. It is one of the reasons I have a vast RPG library to help find the perfect fits for what I need.