KapCon XXX - Game 2
The last few years have been spent honing my presentation of Gumshoe in its various forms, so when I was staring at my big pile of familiar games and deciding what I should run in 2021, it felt like the easy and obvious choice. It also felt like a risky one, because I tend to think that these highly procedural games with a fairly complex ruleset are not the easiest sell to players. There's no real franchise to hook players in, for example. I wrote a blurb and got it up onto the website as early as possible so there was the maximum chance of finding the five players who are interested in this niche.
I actually blame Mike F for my love of Night's Black Agents. About 15 years ago he ran a really great game where we spent months investigating Vampires, figuring out their limitations, back-tracking their organisation, before ending in an 3 or 4 session orgy of retributive violence. I've been hoping to convicne a group to try Dracula Dossier since that was published, but somethow it's never quite worked out - quite possibly because I definitely feel like this is chasing a now impossibly idealised memory, so am always a bit hesitant in pitching it.
Game 2: Freeze | Thaw | Broil
In hindsight, I'm not sure it's wise to pick a game to run based on having designed a good character sheet for the game the year before. Writing was slow, even for me, and the play-test for the game was extremely rough. Here's where I went wrong - I started by thinking about what a Spy is and what a Vampire is, and what I thought some interesting themes were for the game.
For me the absolute core of the spy experience is the loss of any kind of really stable ontology; principally, you can't trust anyone, famously not even Control. Even if they have your best intentions in heart, the Greater Good (tm) can have them sending you to certain death. In the most perfect spy stories, you can't even trust yourself, because you are acting in amongst a tissue of lies. This is why Rogue Nation is the best of the Mission Impossible franchise - Ilsa Faust may be the only actual spy in the whole thing.
Vampires are, I think, about temptation. When I read Dracula, I don't really think of him as primarily a sadistic hunter, but as a seducer. The count is luring first Lucy Westenra and then Mina Harker into a dark and sinful world. I think a lot of recent iterations of the Vampire have treated them more like dark super heroes, which is a much easier thing to convey in a visual way. This interiorority has long linked Spies and Vampires in my mind.
I was also very interested in telling both of these narratives outside of their "natural" urban environment.
The game mission is this:
There is a Vampire masquerading as a judge in Kentucky, recruit them for your clandestine organisation.
The playtest group and the Round 2 KapCon groups both spent the bulk of their time surveilling the judge, trying to find a chink in his persona. Indeed, to some extent, the activities undertaken seemed aimed at actually just confirming he was a vampire. I guess when I said in the briefing to trust nobody... Neither run ended with a recruited judge. The third run instead focused on the minions provided in the organisation chart, and they managed to get all the pieces lined up and make the call.
There were two kind of big challenges I found when running a true Sandbox game in rural Kentucky compared to similar games in a megalopolis.
Challenge 1 is that when roleplaying, all big cities are kind of interchangeable at the level of detail in most roleplaying games. If you're in London, Paris, Mubai, Hong Kong, wherever, there's a certain well-understood potential for a criminal ecosystem, supply chains of various kinds of equipment, a class structure you can leverage from either end. Basically, in roleplaying, we're familiar with cities. Rural or small towns are inherently empty, there's just less of everything, and hence fewer avenues to investigate or leverage.
Challenge 2 is the closely related lack of density. Doing "traffic analysis" on a judge's apartment off the Champs-Élysées is meaningful because there are hundreds of cars and a certain minimum level of activity. Running "traffic analysis" of a judge's home in the dormatory areas of Bowling Green, KY, means you spotted the one car that drove past and it was or wasn't relevant. Finding a drug lab to smash and interrogate feels a lot easier south of the Thames than scouring thousands of square miles of scrubland in Warren County, KY. You get the idea.
One played in KapCon Run 1 got pretty fixated on just murdering the judge, on the basis that suborning them was just way too hard and too abstract, and that's a criticism that I think probably sums up my basic modus operandi as a scenario designer. I really yearn for complexity and for scenarios that challenge without being impossible.
I think next year I'm going to take a break from Gumshoe. It's a little too far away to predict what I will do, but chances are it'll be hopelessly old fashioned. I kind of want to play with the cool indie kids and their new-fangled mixed-narrative modes, but I basically still just really like Deadlands and TORG. Maybe someone will release a Pulp game system that I like up-and-down, or maybe I'll come to terms with the limitations of Adventure! or Spirit of the Century...
I actually blame Mike F for my love of Night's Black Agents. About 15 years ago he ran a really great game where we spent months investigating Vampires, figuring out their limitations, back-tracking their organisation, before ending in an 3 or 4 session orgy of retributive violence. I've been hoping to convicne a group to try Dracula Dossier since that was published, but somethow it's never quite worked out - quite possibly because I definitely feel like this is chasing a now impossibly idealised memory, so am always a bit hesitant in pitching it.
Game 2: Freeze | Thaw | Broil
In hindsight, I'm not sure it's wise to pick a game to run based on having designed a good character sheet for the game the year before. Writing was slow, even for me, and the play-test for the game was extremely rough. Here's where I went wrong - I started by thinking about what a Spy is and what a Vampire is, and what I thought some interesting themes were for the game.
For me the absolute core of the spy experience is the loss of any kind of really stable ontology; principally, you can't trust anyone, famously not even Control. Even if they have your best intentions in heart, the Greater Good (tm) can have them sending you to certain death. In the most perfect spy stories, you can't even trust yourself, because you are acting in amongst a tissue of lies. This is why Rogue Nation is the best of the Mission Impossible franchise - Ilsa Faust may be the only actual spy in the whole thing.
Vampires are, I think, about temptation. When I read Dracula, I don't really think of him as primarily a sadistic hunter, but as a seducer. The count is luring first Lucy Westenra and then Mina Harker into a dark and sinful world. I think a lot of recent iterations of the Vampire have treated them more like dark super heroes, which is a much easier thing to convey in a visual way. This interiorority has long linked Spies and Vampires in my mind.
I was also very interested in telling both of these narratives outside of their "natural" urban environment.
The game mission is this:
There is a Vampire masquerading as a judge in Kentucky, recruit them for your clandestine organisation.
The playtest group and the Round 2 KapCon groups both spent the bulk of their time surveilling the judge, trying to find a chink in his persona. Indeed, to some extent, the activities undertaken seemed aimed at actually just confirming he was a vampire. I guess when I said in the briefing to trust nobody... Neither run ended with a recruited judge. The third run instead focused on the minions provided in the organisation chart, and they managed to get all the pieces lined up and make the call.
There were two kind of big challenges I found when running a true Sandbox game in rural Kentucky compared to similar games in a megalopolis.
Challenge 1 is that when roleplaying, all big cities are kind of interchangeable at the level of detail in most roleplaying games. If you're in London, Paris, Mubai, Hong Kong, wherever, there's a certain well-understood potential for a criminal ecosystem, supply chains of various kinds of equipment, a class structure you can leverage from either end. Basically, in roleplaying, we're familiar with cities. Rural or small towns are inherently empty, there's just less of everything, and hence fewer avenues to investigate or leverage.
Challenge 2 is the closely related lack of density. Doing "traffic analysis" on a judge's apartment off the Champs-Élysées is meaningful because there are hundreds of cars and a certain minimum level of activity. Running "traffic analysis" of a judge's home in the dormatory areas of Bowling Green, KY, means you spotted the one car that drove past and it was or wasn't relevant. Finding a drug lab to smash and interrogate feels a lot easier south of the Thames than scouring thousands of square miles of scrubland in Warren County, KY. You get the idea.
One played in KapCon Run 1 got pretty fixated on just murdering the judge, on the basis that suborning them was just way too hard and too abstract, and that's a criticism that I think probably sums up my basic modus operandi as a scenario designer. I really yearn for complexity and for scenarios that challenge without being impossible.
I think next year I'm going to take a break from Gumshoe. It's a little too far away to predict what I will do, but chances are it'll be hopelessly old fashioned. I kind of want to play with the cool indie kids and their new-fangled mixed-narrative modes, but I basically still just really like Deadlands and TORG. Maybe someone will release a Pulp game system that I like up-and-down, or maybe I'll come to terms with the limitations of Adventure! or Spirit of the Century...