Twin Cities Theater Connection recently put a panel together of local artists working on summer productions of Shakespeare. You can hear the discussion on their “Summer of Shakespeare” podcast. So if you’ve always wanted to know what I sound like (and can’t afford to spring for the Call of Cthulhu audio book I did), this is your chance.
WORST. PLAN. EVAH.
Dwarves: Oh no! All the gold in our mountain has been cursed!
Dwarven God: That sounds sucky. Here’s a magical artifact to remove the curse.
Dwarf 1: Think we should use it?
Dwarf 2: Nope. Let’s lock all the dwarves afflicted by the curse into the lower vaults.
Dwarf 1: And then use it?
Dwarf 2: Nope. Let’s evacuate the mountain.
Dwarf 1: And then we’ll use it?
Dwarf 2: Nope. We’ll hide the magical artifact in the depths of the mountain.
Dwarf 1: And… then use it?
Dwarf 2: Nope. We’ll create clockwork bodies for ourselves and inscribe the secret of how to find the artifact on the gears and cogs.
Dwarf 1: And… wait, what?
Dwarf 2: Then we’ll go senile. And centuries from now the grandchildren of our disciples will “con” a small group of adventurers into retrieving and using the magical artifact.
Dwarf 1: What the hell are you talking about?
I guess this is what happens when you write adventure modules by committee. (I really wish I was exaggerating this, but I’m not. Although they technically didn’t plan to go senile, this is, in fact, the background used in the module.)
THE SIMPLE FIX
The artifact wasn’t ready-to-use out of the box. The Secret Masters of the dwarves collected the tears of the Hundred Widows who had lost their husbands to the corruption of the curse. The fist-sized teardrop of gold they forged from the cursed gold needed to bathe for a hundred years in the widows’ tears before it could cleanse the mountain itself.
Unfortunately, long before the teardrop was ready, the dwarves had been forced to abandon the fortress. Or perhaps the Secret Masters arranged for the evacuation, planning to return a century later. Whatever the case may be, things didn’t go according to plan: A hundred years passed and, deep in the bowels of the mountain, the Golden Teardrop was completed. But the dwarves were never able to return to the Golden Citadel, and so the teardrop lay forgotten…
A couple months ago I mentioned that I had created counter-intelligence guidelines for the Gather Information skill. Confanity had mentioned that he was intrigued by them, and I promised to get them posted sooner rather than later. For certain definitions of “sooner” and “later”, I suppose that this has now been accomplished.
Counter-Intelligence: A character can attempt to detect other characters gathering information about a particular subject in the area by making a Gather Information check. The DC of the counter-intelligence check is opposed by the original Gather Information check made in the attempt to gather the information.
Avoiding Suspicion: If a character is attempting to avoid suspicion, it becomes more difficult to detect them. Although the character suffers a -10 penalty on their Gather Information check for the purposes of collecting the information they seek, they gain a +10 bonus to their Gather Information check for the purposes of opposing the counter-intelligence check.
In addition, cautious characters can voluntarily increase the penalty on their original Gather Information check, granting an equal bonus for the purposes of opposing the counter-intelligence check. (For example a character could decide to be extra cautious and apply a -15 penalty to their Gather Information check. Their unmodified check result is 30, which is modified to 15 (30 – 15) for the purposes of determining what information they actually glean. But if another character attempts to detect their presence, they would have to make a DC 45 (30 + 15) counter-intelligence check to do so.)
Modifiers: Apply a -2 penalty to counter-intelligence checks for every week that has passed since the original Gather Information check.
USING THE GUIDELINES
For PCs, these guidelines aren’t only useful to find out if someone is asking questions about them. In fact, they’re generally more useful for identifying competing interests. Who else in town is trying to find out information about the Vault of the Dwarven Kings? Or investigating the Baker’s Street Gang?
Resolving these types of checks requires the GM to know two things:
(1) Who else is looking for that information?
(2) What should the DC of the check be?
The answer to the former question, of course, is situational. For the latter you could either set simple, static DCs as you would for any other Gather Information check, or you could actually resolve the opposed check.
FACTION
I generally find it useful to know what kind of information-gathering capacity factions have in my campaigns. For smaller factions (like an opposing group of adventurers or a small gang of bad guys), this is as simple as looking at the highest (or most appropriate) Gather Information skill modifier in the group.
For larger factions, I simply assign a Gather Information modifier to the group. (This number is essentially arbitrary, although I base it on the size, nature, and resources of the group in question.)
When trying to figure out how suspicious a particular group is (i.e., whether they’re performing counter-intelligence to make sure anyone is asking questions about them) or how pervasive their surveillance is (i.e., how often they’re making counter-intelligence checks), I’ve generally just relied on common sense to make a ruling whenever the question needs to be answered. But if you’re running a campaign where intelligence and counter-intelligence is likely to be fairly common (for example, a modern espionage campaign), then codifying those factors might be useful.
(For example, a Paranoid group might check 1/day; a Suspicious group every 1d6 days; a Cautious group once every 3d10 days; a Naive group might never check. In other words, if the PCs investigate a Suspicious group then there would be a counter-intelligence check made 1d6 days later.)
Last year my one-page dungeon The Halls of the Mad Mage, inspired by the twisted landscapes of M.C. Escher, won Best Geometry in the One Page Dungeon Contest. The deluxe version of the One Page Dungeon Codex 2009, which collects all of the winners, has now been released as a FREE e-book from Tabletop Adventures.
I believe the 2010 contest has also concluded (I didn’t enter this year).
THE HALLS OF THE MAD MAGE
If you like The Halls of the Mad Mage, while you’re at RPGNow for the Codex, you might also want to check out some of my other adventure supplements:
Most of the problems in Infamous are the result of its sandbox, but there are a couple of key problems with the main storyline as well, so let’s talk about those.
First, by its very nature, Infamous wants to give you meaningful choice: Do you want to be a supervillain or a superhero? But it runs into a problem because it also has a story to tell, goddamit.
The difficulty here is pretty easy to sum up: Content is expensive. If the game actually diverged every time it gave you a choice, the amount of content required would increase exponentially (and so would the production budget). So, instead, the game gives you the illusion of choice: No matter what you do, the ultimate result on a macro-level is the same and the next stop on the plot’s railroad remains unaltered.
Which is fine.
What you can do, though, is specifically color the events of the plot to suit the type of character the player is choosing to play. This is tricky, but it can be done. Infamous even takes a stab at it: Every so often the gameplay is shunted into a short semi-animated sequence that moves the plot forward. Some of these semi-animated sequences are swapped out depending on whether you’re a superhero or a supervillain.
The problem with Infamous is that the writers just don’t seem to have had their hearts behind the supervillain plot: No matter how villainous the character becomes, the game just can’t seem to shake the underlying themes of savior and redemption.
Fix #1: Develop a meaningful theme and arc for the supervillain side of the story. Most of the necessary pieces are tantalizingly within reach: They just need to be realized.
For example, here’s the end of the game:
Notice the complete disconnect between the end of the semi-animated sequence and the “evil epilogue”? How can you go from “when the time comes, I’ll be ready” to saying “only an idiot thinks I’m going to bother doing that”?
The fix here is simple: The narrative needs to explicitly embrace at every level the irony that Kessler’s efforts to indoctrinate Cole have had exactly the opposite result; that the unspeakable and almost incomprehensible sacrifices he made were all for naught.
More radically, it would be nice if not all of our choices were completely meaningless. (It would certainly improve the replay value of the game: After discovering how completely illusionary the choices in the game were, I didn’t bother going back to finish a replay.)
For example, you can watch the death of Trish in both the good version and the evil version. The different outcomes in this case depend on your morality rating within the game and suffers from the same incoherence as the end of the game: The fact that Trish, in her dying moments, chose to scorn you or to love you should have some sort of lasting impact on how Cole thinks of her. But it doesn’t.
In addition, the death of Trish is couched in a false decision: You can try to save her (evil choice) or you can try to save several innocent hostages (good choice). But, ultimately, the decision is meaningless: Trish is killed either way and the “decision”, like so many others in the game, is ultimately trivial and meaningless. (The game doesn’t even do a good job of giving a distinct framing to each choice.)
Supporting these variations in the death of Trish would be significant because this is a key moment in the game and its impact would be felt in many other places. But precisely because it’s a key moment in the game, a little extra depth here would go a long way towards enriching the entire experience. (And the differences, although pervasive, are cheap: A little extra time recording dialogue and a couple extra yes-no switches in the code.)
Similar changes at other moments in the game would be more isolated than the Trish divergence, and thus easier to implement.
(Tangentially: If you ever have the opportunity to write a video game, please avoid the temptation to include “you have succeeded at goal X in the gameplay, but now we’ll go to a cut-scene and reveal it was all a failure after all”. The discordant gut-punch is not effective. It is merely annoying. Particularly if you follow the example of Infamous and do it over and over and over again.)
