Dungeon World - Session 4

This week we added a new player. He will be taking on the role of a stoic dwarven fighter and already has a rivalry with the halfling fighter and some trouble brewing with the bard. An interesting piece of trivia for our new player, he's a professional DM. I don't know how well he does because, well, I was too afraid to ask. I was a bit worried he would be snobby and critical of my skills, but he either kept it to himself or had a good time. I'm going to go with the second one if it is all the same to you.

Planning at The Sideways Stallion

The game began, as these things often do, with all of the PCs sitting around a table at The Sideways Stallion discussing where they would go now that they had finished their business in Sandover. The group argued for a little while before deciding that their destination would be Lambatar, a large city to the north. Their reasons for heading to Lambatar were twofold: a rumour of a beast terrorizing the countryside and an unlabled treasure map they had looted from the ruins might have something to do with lost vaults of treasure in the region. Very few adventurers can resist the lure of riches and fame and so the decision was made.

Preparation for their perilous journey (as Dungeon World puts it) took a few days and lead to the party putting the word out that they were hiring a quartermaster to look after their animals and traveling supplies. While there were a few interested parties, the group couldn't agree on who to hire and were just about to give up when none other than Jaim Sandover (Lord Sandover's youngest son) approached them in secret. Jaim wanted to join on as a way to escape his father and the dry future planned for him. After a brief argument the group decided to bring him on, a choice that I will surely exploit sometime in the near future. The next day the party sallied forth, heading north through hills, scrub and later into the rocky wasteland that surrounds Lambatar.

Bard Song: The Beast of Lambatar

I have this habit as a GM that whenever a player declares that they are singing a song, telling a bawdy joke or otherwise performing where I put them on the spot and ask them what song they are singing or what the joke is about. So, when the Bard declared he was singing while they traveled north, you can be sure that I asked what song he sang. His answer? The Beast of Lambatar. The song was a bawdy tale that reimagines the mythical beast that terrorizes the city as a kind of unstoppable Casanova.

Elf Facts

Another habit I have as a GM is answer player's questions about lore with questions. This came up for the first time in our Dungeon World campaign during this session when a player asked if elves had a better sense of smell than humans. My answer? You tell me, you're the elf!

I like to let players influence game lore as we go and this is a good example of one of the ways I do it. From this point on in our game elves will all have an excellent sense of smell instead of infravision.

Justice, Fire & Disagreement

Eventually the road to Lambatar hit a fork and the players, they took the road less traveled. Unfortunately, the road less traveled lead straight into the waiting ambush of the notorious highwayman The Scorpion.

The Scorpion opened with the classic line, "Your money or your lives." The party, however, was having none of that and made short work of his petty band of thugs. They evaded his nets, his poisoned arrows and even his six bandits. The Dwarf and Halfling fighters worked together to take down the majority of the thugs, but the Cleric stole the show when he clubbed a thug to death using his crystal orb/holy symbol.

When the dust cleared three bandits had broken and run for the hills only to be stopped with the Bard used his handy new Amulet of Rhissel to summon a wall of flame. Things then took a turn for the worse as the Dwarf and the Bard argued about what to do with the remaining bandits. The Bard wanted to give them Rhissel's justice and have them walk through fire to purge them of their crimes. The Dwarf thought that was violence and not justice and to prove his point he walked through the flames and feigned death. The Bard was unfazed and promplty pushed the bandits after him. One died, while the others suffered burns and were healed by bard song and then sent on their way with Rhissel's pardon. Something tells me this won't be the last time that the Dwarf and Bard butt heads.

The Maiden in the Cliff

A few uneventful days of travel later and the party was now working their way through the wasteland proper. Just when they were about to die of boredom they stumbled across a mysterious dwarven woman carved into a rocky cliff. The carving took up nearly the entire cliff and could be described as gigantic. This lead us to a quick round of...

Dwarf Facts

• Dwarves live beneath the rocky desert that makes up the Lambatar region.
• Dwarves have a patriarchal society.
• Female dwarves have beards, but only as maidens. Upon marriage they begin shaving and their husband wears a matrimonial beard clasp. (That's how they knew the carving was of a dwarven maiden.)
• Dwarves have many secret societies.
• Dwarves build funeral statues.
• Dwarves have darkvision.

Desecrating a Secret Dwarven Tomb

Further inspection of the cliff maiden resulted in discovery of a secret entrance, a place wear one could wade through the stone as if it were a kind of thick water. The group found that they could "swim" inside of the cliff and when they headed down they landed in a pitch black chamber. It was a good thing we established earlier that dwarves can see in the dark!

Inside the chamber were eight stone tablets with dwarven writing on them. The party tried to take them from the chamber, but found that as soon as they were exposed to sunlight that they started to turn to dust. They quickly returned them to the dark and the dwarf translated a heartbreaking tale of forbidden love and the death of an unlucky dwarf's wife-to-be. The Cleric and the Dwarf new from clues in the tale and the secret entrance that this place must have been constructed by a member of the semi-secret society of stonewhisperers. This, of course, lead the Cleric and the Dwarf to want to learn more about the place. The Cleric because he serves a god that collects and deals in secrets and the Dwarf because he was just plain curious.

Searching the chamber lead the Halfling to a secret door and the Bard to a trap. The trap was a nefarious one where ordinary stone would allow someone to pass part of the way through it (or all of the way), but once in the stone was unmoving leaving them sealed indefinitely. The Dwarf and Cleric argued about the secret to getting free from such a trap and the Cleric had the right answer, so it's a good thing he was the one the Bard listened to. Nearly drowning in stone was enough for the Bard and he retreated to the surface along with the Halfling to have an angsty conversation with Jaim Sandover while the Dwarf and Cleric continued to explore.

A few narrowly avoided stonemeld traps later and the duo have found their way to a stone room, filled with stone furniture containing one very dead dwarf. The dwarf rested in a stone chair with his head submerged in stone, an apparent act of suicide by stonemeld. The long dead dwarf didn't stay dead for long, though, and he was very angry at having both his lady love's memorial and his own rest disturbed. In a fit of poltergeistic rage he flung objects around the room and then possessed the cleric to use him as a channel for potent stone magic. Stony arms reached out from every stone surface and attempted to strangle both Cleric and Dwarf, luckily the Dwarf managed to evade the grasping hands long enough to keep both himself and the Cleric safe while the Cleric regained control and fired off a Turn Undead. The ghost returned to his corpse to cower in fear while our heroes hastily looted the small room, finding nothing of interest except for a small sphere. The sphere was carved with ancient dwarven runes and set off the Cleric's "secret detector".

The Cleric and Dwarf escaped the tomb only to stumble out into the light and find that the dwarven spirit had regained its senses and taken physical control of the stone maiden. She was swinging her chiseled arms out of the cliff face and trying to both smash everyone in sight and claw herself free from the cliff. The Cleric saved the day by casting the small carved stone into the light and watching it turn to dust. This seemed to appease the restless spirit and the party distanced themselves from the killer cliff as soon as possible. Nobody realized that the Cleric had enough time to use his orb to "scan" the stone sphere and send its secrets off to his patron.

Finishing Up

We went through the XP checklist and a couple characters leveled up. The Cleric asked me about the secrets of the sphere and I may allow him to get a compendium class out of it (Stonewhisperer). We'll see.

Alright, that's it. This little recap turned into a gigantic one. I hope I'm getting better at writing these session reports as I go, but I think next time I will aim for something shorter.

Categories: Dungeon World, Dwarf Facts, Elf Facts, fantasy, session report

Dwarven Name Generator

I've decided to make a few more simple name generators. First up: dwarves. I prefer my dwarves to have cheesy names rather than more lore-friendly names based on your makebelieve language of choice is. I seeded the generator with a lot of mining terms, precious metals and stones and similar things. For first names I gathered up a bunch of dwarf names from various sources, cut them up and added pieces that fit into the results. Enjoy.

Categories: dwarf, fantasy, generators, javascript, names

Dungeon World - Session 3

Our third session of Dungeon World is complete and it was our best yet. The party returned to Sandover Ruins and cleared out the rubble blocking their path deeper into the dungeon. I adapted Dyson's recent ziggurat dungeon to fit with the established game lore. This went over very easily as we had already determined that the ruins were part of a temple to an old, forgotten deity. I kept the traps, replaced any and all undead with lantern goblins and updated the stats for DW as needed.

Things started off with a bang, with the PCs discovering the remains of a would-be looter. They took the coins and sword off the bones, to my delight, and I got to mark two of them down for future Endure moves to fend off the poison whenever I decided it would kick in. It kicked in a few minutes later and like the good GM I am, I laughed maniacally as one of them got a 6- on their Endure. The traps didn't stop there, when the party next came upon a room full of statues they argued about entering for a while and were promptly attacked by the reanimated bones of the robber they had just looted. He was powered by the mysterious lantern goblin flames, but the group made short work of him in any case. Unluckily for them, the battle took them into the statue room and nobody said their morning prayers which meant they now had several alabaster figures coming at them from behind.

I decided to up the danger factor in the statue room and gave the statues high enough armor that the group would have a difficult time defeating them in a fair fight. It was a good thing the cleric is anything but a fair fighter, while the rest of the party kept the busts busy he puzzled out a way to deactivate them by forcing the symbol of the forgotten deity (a rising sun) to set. In other words, he covered the symbol up with some extra clothing he had in his bags. Of course, there was no easy way to keep that holy symbol covered as it was carved into a stone wall. Someone had to stand holding the fabric in front of the carvings. Normally this would not have been too much of a problem, but the halfling decided to go and trigger another one of Dyson's traps and unleash some knockout gas into the room. I was saddened that the character holding up clothing was unaffected by the gas; you can't win them all, I guess. My spirits soon recovered when that same halfling decided to loot a bunch of cursed gems and distribute them among the party.

Eventually the party made it out of the statue room and continued to explore. They made their way through a couple of rooms uneventfully before discovering the anointment chamber. It was here that the bard decided to anoint himself, everyone else was too fearful of traps at this point to touch the glowing liquid. This is important because the trap that was about to be set off could have been avoided if they had been a little braver. I know I am making it sound like the group went stomping through the dungeon setting off every single trap and, to a certain extent, that is true. I should probably mention that the Cleric did keep being made aware of danger thanks to some great Discern Realities rolls and a few hints from his deity, unfortunately he was having a very difficult time convincing the rest of the party to tread as carefully.

Anyways, next on the list was the magnum opus of the dungeon's traps: a mosaic that, when stepped upon by one that was unanointed, would summon a wall of flame, blind everyone and conjure an invisible stalker do what it does best. This created a dangerous little fight that took a sizable chunk of life off the fighter. I'll say this for Dyson, he certainly isn't lacking in ideas for cruel ways to whittle an adventuring party down to size. However, in this case the party carried on without losing any members. The characters searched the room thoroughly, but for some reason avoided opening the black stone sarcophagus in the middle of the chamber. I wonder why? In any case, they found the secret entrance Area 6 (secret tomb) and the Bard managed to sweet talk the apparition of Rhissel that appeared into giving them an amulet and a stack of gold. Things took an unusual turn here because the Bard decided that he might be interested converting to Rhissel's faith and, even more surprising, the Cleric encouraged this! Why, you ask? It turns out that the deity the Cleric worships is the last of the old gods and despite his deity's differences with Rhissel, it is in his god's interests to assist another old god return to power. I smelled campaign fodder in that explanation and you can be sure that I will be building upon it as we progress.

With the visitation of Rhissel's apparition gone, the party decided they had seen all there was to see and they returned to the surface. A visit with the Sandovers later and they had collected their reward for clearing out the remaining monsters and were well on their way to drunk at the local tavern. We ended the session and went through all of the end of game tasks, such as assigning XP and having tangential conversations.

Sadly, this session also marked the death of the planned Deck of Fate campaign. Since that campaign hinged on the PCs getting involved in a race to collect the pieces of Fate's deck while fending off various interests, it pretty much fell apart when the Wizard character ran off in the night along with the macguffin and the player in control of it. I could have salvaged the campaign, but the players happily latched onto the idea of forgotten gods awakening and I am just as happy to indulge them with a campaign built around that idea.

Categories: actual play, Dungeon World, fantasy, session report

Goblin Name Generator

A while ago, when I was feeling ambitious, I decided to try branching out of computer hardware and into a little programming. I got through a couple of beginner-level Python courses before getting sidetracked by other things. This weekend I got it into my head to try making a name/word generator that I could put on the web. Of course, getting Python on the web is beyond my meager skills so I ended up taking a crack at javascript.

The result of my javascript experimentation is this: a goblin name generator. I seeded it by going through Paizo's Goblins of Golarion and hacking the goblin names/tribes into pieces by syllable. This means that the names that pop out of this generator ought to be lore friendly for Pathfinder/Golarion games. Even if you don't play Pathfinder I think you will find the names are goblin-y enough for your needs.

Some things that I would have liked to include in this generator, but was unable to puzzle out: male/female toggle and batch generation of names.

Categories: fantasy, generators, goblins, golarion, javascript, names

The Deck of Fate: DW Session Report #2

We sat down for our second of Dungeon World a little while ago, but due to a very busy December I have just now gotten around to writing about it. For this session we were short both of our new players. One couldn't make it due to an exam, the other just never showed up. We didn't let being without both Wizard and Cleric get us down. The remaining players were happy to don their adventuring boots and leave the warm glow of The Sideways Stallion.

It was a role play heavy session, which is a nice contrast to the straight up dungeon crawl we had last week. Things started out with Bard trying to find some leather armor in the no-horse town of Sandover. After his brush with death in the ruins to the north he was determined to get a little protection. There is no armor shop in Sandover, so our hero had to make do with the local leatherworker. It was here that Bard learned he didn't have enough cold, hard coin to get some leather armor made for himself. He bartered away his pipeleaf for a heavy leather apron with a number of alterations to make it more armor-like.

The rest of the adventuring day was spent chatting up locals and putting on an impromptu performance in the town square. The Bard worked up a great tune and the Halfling got into the spirit of things with some tumbling, when he wasn't busy chatting up locals going about their business. Their performance caught the eye Jaim Sandover, youngest son of the area's ruling lord and the party earned themselves a dinner invitation to Sandover Manor.

That evening the party met the rest of the Sandover clan and, for reasons I can not explain, they all had cheesy southern accents. Dinner was short and sweet, with a little bit of role playing before we got into the meat of things: a request from Lord Sandover for the party to return to Sandover Ruins and delve deeper. It turns out that the local ruins have long been the lifeblood of Sandover, supplying the town artifacts and metals that are its primary trade. The recent monster infestation has changed that and Lord Sandover, being an example of a responsible feudal lord, was keen to get things back in order. This exchange between the players and Lord Sandover ended up being interesting to me (mechanically) as it marked the first time that the Bard used his various social Moves. It was a bit clumsy at first as we read over how things work, but it was not a bad experience at all.

Dinner closed with the party striking up a deal to clean out the ruins so long as some locals acted as guides and porters while they make their way through the ruins. We decided to end the session at the entrance of Sandover Ruins in hopes that we would have a full group again in the new year after holiday madness leaves.

As I said above, this was a nice counter to our first game of Dungeon World as it focused on a completely different side of the game. While the night could easily have become a wash out we were able to soldier on and have a good time and I think it is a testament to DW's good design that it doesn't require a full party of four to get things done. Speaking of design, the Halfling Fighter's player told me that he thought a Paladin was much more appropriate for the character he had in mind and that he was disappointed that it wasn't an option. I'm pleased to say that it is now (and so is my player). Thanks to Dungeon World being nice and open I was able to go onto Github, grab the Paladin Playbook and add some additional options to it. The whole process didn't take me longer than twenty minutes, but it does require a copy of Adobe InDesign. The good news is you can get a 30 day free trial to work your homebrewing magic if you don't have it at your disposal.

Our third session of Dungeon World is scheduled for next week and after a month without any role playing I'm  itching for a chance to roll some dice.

Categories: Deck of Fate, Dungeon World, Homebrew, Paladin, RPG, session report

The Deck of Fate: DW Session Report #1

Tarot card from the Rider-Waite tarot deck, also known as the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

After having been ravaged by lost players and conflicting schedules my regular group finally got together again last Wednesday. While we had been getting together regularly and playing all manner of board games and one shot RPGs it wasn't until last week that we were final in a position to start a persistent campaign again.

We picked Dungeon World as our engine to run this latest campaign and I must say that the first session went rather swimmingly, with the exception of a few minor hiccups which I will talk about a little bit later. For now let's talk about character creation.

This was our table's first time with Dungeon World and character creation went as smoothly as I have ever seen with an RPG. Each character class has its own character sheet and players go down the sheet checking off and circling the options they want. Had we not all been new to the game I think more of the players would have opted to write in unique bonds and descriptions to make their characters a little less by the playbook, but everyone seemed satisfied by what was available this time. I was initially worried that players would fight over the character classes and I only had so many sheets to go around, but that turned out to be a pointless anxiety as everyone settled into a persona without any fussing. Once the dust settled we ended up with a Fighter, Wizard, Bard and Cleric. There will also be a Ranger or Druid joining us later on in the campaign (played by my wife), but she was unable to stay through character creation due to some things that came up.

I wanted to start our very first game of DW off with a simple dungeon crawl. I find crawls are a great way to get a feel for new games and new players, which were both present for this session. I slapped together a quick adventure using one of Dyson's maps and a nasty little monster called a lantern goblin which I found on the Dungeon World blog. I did make a few minor changes to those lanter goblins, though. The first was to change them from having glowing eyes to flaming eyes and the second was to have that light/fire also light up torches and braziers found throughout the dungeon. I whipped up a new move to use with my fiery new friends called Revenge of the Lantern Goblin that was used once those torches lit up. It looked like this:

Revenge of the Lantern Goblin

1d4 damage, targets one except on 7-9.

10+ the torch launches a gout of flame at a nearby PC.

7-9 the torch launches a gout of that hits a monster and a PC.

            6- the torch launches a gout of flame and then sputters out.

All I needed to complete my dungeon was a reason for the player characters to visit there and thanks to some character bonds and cooperative players that was soon supplied. My players had decided that they their characters were mercenaries hired by the Wizard PC to help him collect a rare material component for use in a ritual. Who would have thought that rare material component was found in this dungeon I had prepared? What luck!

The party delved into the dungeon and soon discovered its unusual inhabitants. This is where one of the players threw me my first curveball: the Cleric managed a 10+ on Spout Lore on the goblins and decided to make them undead. I rolled with the punch and the party continued winding through the dungeon, fighting off goblins and extinguishing torches as fast as they were lit. This is actually where we bumped into our first hiccup. You see, one of my regular players has a somewhat... let's say offbeat sense of humour and he thought it would be funny to have his halfling fighter try and put out a torch with urine. One of the new players at the table was less than impressed by that turn of events, but we glossed past it and no harm was done. Clearly nothing that anyone can fault DW for, but a common problem when integrating new and old players.

When the party eventually reached the final section of the dungeon, an altar room with four braziers and an empty frame, I made my first mistake with the rules. The fighter ran into the room to attack the group of goblins guarding the altar and failed all of his Defy Danger attempts miserably. I hadn't realized that monster groups attack as a single unit and slew him outright. When I looked up the death rules to see what happened next I realized my mistake and had to do some retconning. That minor emergency out of the way, we played out the rest of the battle and the simple puzzle of the altar and the empty frame. The solution was, as you have probably guessed, to light all four braziers with goblin fire. This required some quick thinking from the party since Revenge of the Lantern Goblin made this a little more difficult than lighting torches would normally be.

The party's prize for solving the puzzle and slaying the goblins was a magical tarot card titled Trial by Fire, one of the cards that makes up the god of fate's personal tarot deck. Think of Fate's Deck as a deck of many things that was broken up and scattered because it was too powerful for mortal hands. I'm planning to build the campaign around the idea that these cards are resurfacing and all kinds of people want a piece of them, including the party's wizard and patron. I have had the idea to do a campaign like this bouncing around in my skull since this blog post got me thinking about the infamous deck in ways that I never had before.

Obtaining Trial by Fire marked the end of our first session and things should start moving along at a steady pace in the coming sessions now that we have our footing. I'm looking forward to wreaking chaos over the fantasy lands using the magic tarot cards and I don't think my players have a clue how seriously I'm planning on taking those impending doom sections on the Campaign Front once we get going.

Categories: actual play, Dungeon World, fantasy, session report

The Pale Forest (My 2012 RPG Geek 24 RPG)

The dust has settled and this year's 24 Hour RPG Competition at RPG Geek is now over. I threw my hat into the ring this time around with a game called The Pale Forest, but with 37 other great entries I didn't expect to win (and I didn't). That honour goes to the much more popular (and presumably handsome) RPG blogger Lowell Francis.

If you are unfamiliar with the special kind of "fun" that is the 24 hour RPG, let me explain it to you. A bunch of crazy game designers get together and decide that it would be a good idea to create a game with no prior work and no outside help in just 24 hours. There is no stopping the clock, once you start you have exactly 24 hours to finish the thing. It's a mad dash and a lot of fun provided you have a masochistic streak.

This was my first time entering a 24 hour RPG competition and I really didn't put as much of the 24 hours into it as I would have liked. I think my break down was 1-2 hours brainstorming, 3 hours designing and then throwing away my first idea, 3 hours on my second idea and 1 hour layout. Then probably another 1-2 hours of  hanging out in the official thread and otherwise procrastinating when I should have been working. All things said, I probably spent 10 of my 24 hours actually at my computer "working" on the game.

You can view/download The Pale Forest here.

My cover design skills aren't great, but this
one was terrible even by my standards.

Now that the contest is over I'm allowed to talk about my game a little. It's not actually against the rules to do so, but there's a kind of gentleman's agreement not to for fear of influencing voters. Here are some rapid-fire thoughts on The Pale Forest:

• I went with a kind of mad-libs style of character creation, mainly because I couldn't think of a way to marry character creation with game play. I'm not particularly happy with it.
• The big mechanical idea I wanted to play with was a built in time limit and a mechanical resources that run out. I accomplished this with a spindown die that represents health/gear/sanity and so on. It decreases with each scene and action and players gamble it to overcome obstacles. I think there is more that can be done with the idea, but I'd need more than 24 hours to truly make it work. I'm really interested in the feedback on this one.
• I was also interested in experimenting with gambling as a mechanic and I tried to tie that with the resources. I like the idea that players set their own risk/reward as it frees things for the GM and makes for an unpredictable game.
• When the aforementioned resource runs out something bad happens. I think the game is going to be rather CoC-esque in that there is rarely a happy ending.
• The game is very freeform with the only guidance being in random tables and a few paragraphs of exposition. With the mad-lib character creation someone should be able to get it up and playing in less than 10 minutes. I'm worried that there might not be enough guidance, but an experienced GM should be able to accomplish a lot with just the random tables and the way the gambling/resource mechanic works.

I don't think that I will be returning to this game to flesh it out and otherwise improve it. The reason? I don't really like it. I like the setting and I like the ideas that birthed the game, but I don't really like the result. I will continue to experiment with gambling mechanics with Rollplay Engine and I'm not convinced that a limited resource really works in an RPG without giving it more teeth and turning it into a competitive or very short game.

If you do end up reading or trying The Pale Forest please let me know how it goes. I am always curious about people's experiences and I haven't even had a chance to play the game myself.

Categories: 24 hour rpg, Age of Ravens, Game Design, RPG Geek, The Pale Forest

Grotesque

In case you haven't noticed, I'm rather enamoured with Technoir. I have rambled on about the game previously, so I won't bore you with another glowing review. Instead I'm going to tell you that I put together a transmission for the game and you can download it right now for free.

For those unfamiliar with Technoir and its transmissions, let's just say that they are a group of NPCs, Factions, Locations, Objects, Threats and Events that a GM links together to create an adventure. Transmissions are intended for use with Technoir, but aside from some NPC stats everything in the transmission could be used in another science fiction/cyberpunk game without issue.

As you may have surmised from the above image, the title of the transmission is Grotesque and it adds a mutant population and biotech industry to any cyberpunk city you want. I wrote the transmission so that you could plug it into any cities you have dreamed up or created using another transmission. It should work okay even if you don't have another city to plug it into, it just might be a little one dimensional.

Alright, that is all I am going to say about this. Take a gander at the transmission and maybe even give it a play. As always, I appreciate and welcome feedback.

You can download and view Grotesque here.

Categories: Adventure, cyberpunk, Technoir, transmission

Zombie Clocks vs. Attitude

Troll in the Corner is hosting this month's RPG Blog Carnival and, for once, I have something to contribute. This month's topic is horrible gaming sessions, and Ben makes it clear he means both game sessions that did horror right and sessions that went awry. Fittingly, I have experienced both extremes with the same game: Shotgun Diaries.

Success

My very first time playing Shotgun Diaries was a screaming success. I took on the role of the GM and two other players took on the roles of survivors in a zombie outbreak. It was also my first time meeting the  other players and I had recruited them from my local board and role playing games club specifically for a one shot game. None of us had played Shotgun Diaries before, but this was at the peak of the zombie fad in popular culture and we had all been keen on giving the game a shot.Once we had settled around my table, potato chips were placed in bowls and coke had been poured we were ready to start.

I decided to start the game off in a cabin at the tail end of a week spent fishing. I hadn't planned anything beyond that because, in my mind, zombie apocalypses are a bit like investigating eldritch horrors: they can only end badly. I knew that I could easily play off genre tropes for improvisation and that's exactly what I did.

The players encountered their first zombie at the hunting cabin and it turned out to be a tense affair. Both of the players played up the "what the fuck is going on" angle as they searched for weapons and tried to figure out how to kill the zombie. They showed considerable restraint by playing their characters straight, neither of them were genre savvy and that made for a stronger session. The adventure continued with gunshots attracting more zombies, the PCs scrambling for car keys and an eventual escape down the highway only to end up in a car accident. They stumbled on across several farms, encountering a mix of suspicious survivors and walking dead until they eventually stole a crop duster and flying it out of the zombie afflicted area. It  surprised me that they ended up with a "happy" ending, and perhaps they shouldn't have (I'll go into this a bit more in a second). Even with a good end to the adventure the session went well. It was played straight, which went a long way in reinforcing the mood of the game. I was also able to keep a good hopeless tension going, partly thanks to a great mechanic in Shotgun Diaries called the Zombie Clock. My night playing Shotgun Diaries with two strangers was the most successful night of horror gaming I have had yet.

I should go into a little more detail about two of SD's mechanics that played a big role in the game. The first was the player journals. The paragraph that briefly outlines the events of the session doesn't really capture that in game about five days had passed. Shotgun Diaries uses a journaling mechanic where each day the players can write something in their journals that becomes a "fact". It's through these facts that players can write things into the game or advance their characters. In the case of the above game one of the players wrote down that they had been an Air force pilot and this was what ultimately allowed them to escape via plane. I could have vetoed it and forced a bad ending, but what purpose would that have served? The other really important mechanic is the Zombie Clock. The Zombie Clock has the GM increasing a number every ten minutes and they can use it as currency to make bad things happen. When i ran the game I used zombie miniatures from the Zombies! board game. It really adds to the game by showing the players how the zombie hoard is piling up.

Now that you know about my most successful game it's time to talk about...

Failure

Several month after my successful game of Shotgun Diaries my regular group found itself short two members on game night. I suggested we give Shotgun Diaries a try, remembering how well an improvised game went last time, and pulled it up on my Kindle.  I had no idea I was in for one of the worst sessions in my gaming career.

This time around I had four players total and we went with a scenario involving people living in a trailer park. It started out well enough, with each of the players introducing their characters and some minor trailer park drama. The problems started when the zombies reared their decaying heads. The first problem was that these players, unlike the successful group, were unable to buy into the zombie premise. They knew exactly what to do to deal with zombies and things went more in the direction of Zombieland than Dawn of the Dead. This, by itself, would not have been a game killer. The game killer came in the abuse of the journaling mechanic of Shotgun Diaries. Players would write in that they had found weapons caches or other useful items. They would write in that there was a cure or that they had found a critical weakness of zombies. In other words, they gamed the system.

As you might imagine the combination of players not buying into the premise, metagaming and flat out abusing the rules as written made for a rather poor game. It turned into a slapstick affair with the catch phrase, "and suddenly... zombies." It was Dead Rising with four swaggering war correspondents intent on placing cones on zombie heads. I could have been more heavy-handed as a GM and vetoed things, but instead of salvaging the game it would have made me look like an asshole. There's a limit to what any GM can do if the players aren't cooperating.

When game was wrapped up and the dice were put away the players exclaimed that the game had been bad, but I knew better. I knew that the fault was not with the game; the problem was with all of us, and that brings me to the final heading...

Zombie Clocks vs. Attitude

What my experiences with the Shotgun Diaries illustrate is that successful horror gaming all comes down to attitude. It doesn't matter how many fancy mechanics or gimmicks the game system uses to build tension, reinforce the setting or make the game deadly. All of the players that sit down at the table need to approach the game with the right attitude. Horror gaming, more so than any other genre, requires this initial buy-in from players. So much of what makes horror horrific is the mood and the way characters react to the things that they encounter. It only takes one player goofing off to break that mood and spoil the game.

Attitude will trump mechanics every single time. There's no contest and it's the same across every game and genre. It's just that horror is more delicate than most genres. If you're not into it then you need to speak up and if you are the GM it's your job to make sure that everyone is on the same page before you play. Learn from my mistake.

Categories: Rambling, RPG Blog Carnival, session report, Shotgun Diaires, Zombies