SESSION 18B: MISSED OPPORTUNITIES

March 22nd, 2008
The 7th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

Their carriage came to a clattering, jolting halt on Brandywine Street before the abandoned lot.

Tee led the way into the ruined shed, taking a few moments to verify the hidden signs she had left. “They haven’t been disturbed,” she said. “No one’s come this way.”

At the bottom of the ladder she found the doors of the antechamber still locked. She slid the key into the lock, turned it, and then stepped back – clearing the way for Agnarr and Tor.

The doors swung wide to reveal utter putrescence: The pinkish flesh of the lair seemed to be dying, literally rotting away from the walls. Pus and blood dripped from gaping, ulcerous wounds.

“Oh no…” Tee murmured, already suspecting that they were too late.

They headed down the main hall. Agnarr took the time to sprint down the side passage leading to the sewer entrance. It had been smashed open from the outside. He knelt down: The pulpy, dying flesh had clearly been trampled by many feet, but he wasn’t sure how many had passed this way… or whether they were still in the complex.

The rest of the group proceeded down the main hall. When they reached the room where the idol had rested, Tee’s worst fears were confirmed: The door had been smashed open with a battering ram which lay nearby. The idol had been ripped out of the floor. It was gone.

“Dammit,” Tee cursed, tears welling in her eyes. “I should have just taken it. Why didn’t I just take it?” (more…)

Go to Part 1

NODE 1: THE BLACK CATS

BACKGROUND

The Black Cats aerobatics troupe was first organized in 1924 with 13 members, headed by Bon MacDougall.

MEMBERSHIP: The roster is in constant flux with members coming and going.

Original members: Bon MacDougall, Al Johnson, Gladys Roy, Fronty Nichols, Heard McClelland, Chief White Eagle, Jack Frye, Paul Richter, Art Goebel, Spider Matlock, Gladys Ingle, Frank Lockhart, Reginald Denny, Babe Stapp, Bill Lind, and Sam Greenwald

HOME BASE: Burdett Airport – Los Angeles, CA

UNIFORM: Black sweater with a 13 Black Cats patch on the front and names on the back.

• Each name has 13 letters; if it doesn’t, nickname is added.
• White claw insignias; one for each time they’ve fell. (Under Black Cat rulings, after the eighth claw they can no longer fly with the troupe, because cats only have nine lives. Reginald Denny received two when joining the troupe because he’d been felled twice during the Great War; his joining may have also been a publicity stunt arranged by his studio.)
• The logo of the black cat was created by Bon MacDougall “in regard to the ancient Egyptian religion and it honored the sacred cat of Bubastes”. He flew with it before the formation of the group; adding the 13 for the group.

TRIVIA:

• Appeared in Howard Hughes’ Hells Angels and other 1920s films.
• Used no parachutes until 1927 (when it became law).
• Disbanded in 1929. (Members of the troupe went on to found TWA.)

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:

• http://www.twaspirit.com/blackcats.html
• http://www.sedonalegendhelenfrye.com/1928.html

LOCAL TOURING TROUPE: Consists of Gladys Roy (who is from Minnesota) and a handful of other 13 Black Cat members who are barnstorming as an independent tour across the Midwest.

AEROBATICS SHOW

START: If the timing makes it possible, the show has already started as the PCs approach.

• They see a low-flying plane pass overhead. Someone is dangling helplessly from it!

AEROBATICS SHOW: Play Aerobatic Show – Video (skip to 00:15).

Aerobatics Show – Photo 1 (Race Car): Gladys Roy appears in a race car keeping pace with a plane.

Aerobatics Show – Photo 2 (Climbing Aboard): Gladys stands up in the car, grabs the passing plane, and climbs aboard.

Aerobatics Show – Photo 3 (Wing Leap): Gladys jumps to another plane.

Aerobatics Show – Video: As she does so, a third plane comes up… this one having lost its wheel. Gladys collects a wheel from the second plane, transfers to the third, and replaces the wheel.

Aerobatics Show – Photo 4 (Dog): After changing the wheel, she climbs up onto the wing, and does a handstand. As she comes down, she’s confronted by an angry dog. The dog threatens her, she backs away…

Aerobatics Show – Photo 5 (Tennis): … and leaps onto another plane! This one is outfitted with a tennis set, which she proceeds to play with another barnstormer.

The show continues like this for some time, with various stunt performers on both land and ground doing a variety of amazing feats. The planes themselves also do a variety of stunts and formation flying.

OTHER POSSIBLE STUNTS

• Flying through a building or crashing into a building, tree, object, etc.
• Blowing up planes in the air; passengers and pilot eject.
• Spinning airplanes (sometimes engulfed in fire) toward the ground, but not crashing.
• Loops while barnstormers stand on the tip of each wing.
• Flying lower and picking up hats with wing tips.
• Hanging from rope ladders or dangling upside down by ropes; swinging under the plane on wires.
• Parachute performances.
• Flying inverted for extended periods.
• Riding a bicycle dangling from a rope and then parachuting down to the ground.
• Landing upside down.
• Saloon brawls on wing tops.
• Staging a fight on the wing with one man getting knocked off with a punch.

CURTISS FIELD – FALCON HEIGHTS

• Bill Kidder founded the airfield in April 1919; Minnesota’s first full-service airport.
• Licensed by the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company for selling and servicing Curtiss airplanes.
• Snelling & Larpenteur Avenue (dirt-lane roads at the time) would be lined with cars on weekends to watch the planes. Just east of the Minnesota State Fairgrounds.
• Offers short plane rides for $15.
• Additional Resources: http://www.airfields-freeman.com/MN/Airfields_MN_Minneapolis.htm

GLADYS ROY

APPEARANCE:

• Prop: Photo of Gladys Roy

ROLEPLAYING NOTES

• Cool, confident, ironic and witty.
• Smokes.
• Quirks an eyebrow when amused.

BACKGROUND

• 23 years old.
• Started parachute jumping in 1921. Holds the world’s low record for parachute jump. (Has also jumped from 17,000 feet.)
• A barnstormer who’s performed across Minnesota, also in Hollywood and across the nation.
• Famous for dancing the Charleston and playing tennis on the upper wing of an airplane in flight.
• Western Vaudeville Manager’s Association is her booking agent.
• She was injured filming The Fighting Ranger in Hollywood earlier this year when she was thrown from a horse

CLUES

• She invited Alicia Corey to the party at James J. Hill House.
• She knows Rachel bought her whiskey from people associated with Kid Cann. (She recognized the Juicy Fruit flavoring as Minnesota 13.)
• She bought the liquor for the party (Minnesota 13) from a bootlegger named Oleg Andersson. She met with him a gin-joint called Pete’s on Hennepin Ave. just north of the river. (See Node 2: Minnesota 13.)
• She wasn’t drinking at the party last night because she had the aerobatics show this morning.
• Following Gladys: Gladys can be followed to Node 3: Fatima’s Shrine (she goes there after the aerobatics show).

LEVERAGED CLUES (anything proving her membership in the Sisterhood of Fatima)

• Can basically fill in all the background on Tanit and Ra.
• She knows that kids are being kidnapped by the Tanit cultists. (Alicia Corey told her.)
• She knows that the whiskey was tainted with Tanit parasites (although she didn’t know that when she brought it).

NOTES

• Gladys’ Bag: Searching through her stuff will turn up a Hamsa charm similar to the one Alicia Corey had at Hill House. (Can be used as leveraged clue.)

GLADYS ROY: Athletics 10, Driving 4, Firearms 3, Fleeing 6, Scuffling 8, Weapons 8, Health 10
Alertness Modifier: +2 (professional paranoia)
Stealth Modifier: 0
Weapons: Fists (-2), Switchblade (-1), .41 deringer (+0, 2 shots)

OTHER MEMBERS OF THE BLACK CATS

Have no real connection to events, but…

• Know that Gladys Roy was talking about going to Rachel’s party last night and having a grand old time.
• Alicia Corey went with Gladys and didn’t show up for work this morning. (Caused a headache with the box office.)

13 BLACK CATS FLYER

These flyers can be found at Hill House and also Node 5: Fatima’s Shrine. There’s also likely to be some found here at the show itself (brought by people who received them elsewhere, etc.).

Go to Node 2: Minnesota 13

Let’s say that you have a scenario featuring a pack of werewolves that have taken up residence in a ruined castle a few miles away from a small village. What scenario hook could you use to get the PCs involved in this scenario?

Perhaps:

• The villagers could ask them for help, or perhaps a local burgher could offer to pay them to root out the werewolves. (This is an example of patronage; an NPC is requesting that something specific be done.)
• The PCs could hear rumors in the local tavern about the spate of recent werewolf attacks, or perhaps they see bounty notices posted by the local sheriff. (This is an example of an offer; the GM is simply offering information and it’s up to the PCs to determine what they want to do with that information, if anything.)
• As the PCs ride past the ruined castle, a couple of the werewolves come racing out to attack them. Or perhaps they hear screams of terror emanating from a farmhouse. (This is a confrontation; the scenario is directly encountered by the PCs.)

In each case, the PCs generally come away with a basic understanding of the situation and an understanding of what action they’re expected to take: There are werewolves in the ruined castle and they need to get rid of them. (With some of the hooks they might only know that there are werewolves in the area and need to do some investigation to identify the ruined castle as their den, but that still constitutes a general understanding of the situation. It’s also possible, of course, for the PCs to choose a course of action that doesn’t involve getting rid of the werewolves: But when you design a scenario with slavering werewolves who are killing innocent people, it’s fairly clear what the expected decision will be.)

This, however, is not a necessary characteristic of a scenario hook. In each case, you can twist the scenario hook by misleading the PCs regarding either the situation or the expected course of action or both.

For example, you might mislead them regarding the nature of the threat: The villagers, discovering dismembered limbs and unfamiliar with lycanthropic activity, think that the attacks signal a return of the tribe of cannibalistic ogres who plagued the region a generation ago. That’s what they tell the PCs, who will be unpleasantly surprised — and perhaps wish they had stocked up on silver weapons! — when they head out to the ruined castle and discover the truth.

You might also mislead the players regarding the motives of the various NPCs involved. For example, it turns out that the werewolves in the ruined castle have actually come to the area to END the attacks by hunting down their former packmate who is now suffering from silvered rabies.

Or when the werewolves come rushing out of the castle towards the PCs, it’s because they’ve just escaped from the hidden torture dungeons of the local baron, who is transforming innocent villagers into werewolves to build a powerful, supernatural army. Reversing good guys and bad guys like this is an extreme example of the principle.

When NPCs are involved in delivering the misleading scenario hooks, it can be useful to distinguish between whether the NPCs are deceiving the PCs or if it is, in fact, the NPCs being deceived (or mistaken) about the situation: If the villagers know that the werewolves are just peaceful nature-lovers and they want the PCs to eliminate them so that they can claim the werewolf clan’s ancestral property in the valley, that’s a very different story from the villagers honestly believing that the werewolves are guilty of horrible crimes.

The possibilities are basically endless, and can obviously vary greatly depending on the actual details of the scenario in question.

The reason to use these misleading scenario hooks is because you’re creating a reversal: The players enter the scenario thinking that it’s one thing, and when they discover the truth the entire scenario changes into something new. In practice, delivering a strong reversal like this can turn even an otherwise pedestrian scenario into a truly memorable one.

MULTIPLE MISLEADING HOOKS

Having multiple hooks for the same scenario is a good idea, for the same reason that the Three Clue Rule is a good idea in general. Ideally, you want each of these scenario hooks to be distinct: Coming from different sources. Including different (although probably overlapping) information about what’s going on. Being driven by different motives.

(It’s less interesting for three different villagers to all follow the same basic script in asking the PCs to help them fight the werewolves. It’s more interesting if they see werewolf tracks in the forest and then a villager asks them for help and then they spot a poster offering to pay a bounty for werewolf pelts.)

When some or all of these scenario hooks are misleading — particularly if they are misleading in interesting and different ways — it not only becomes much easier to vary the hooks, it immediately creates a sense of mystery that will tantalize the players and encourage them to engage with the scenario in order to figure out what the heck is going on.

THE BAIT HOOK

The other form of a misleading scenario hook is one that is only “misleading” from a metagame perspective: This “bait hook” can be completely legitimate from the perspective of the game world, but the reason the GM includes it is in order to put the PCs in a position where they can be confronted by the true scenario.

For example, they might be hired to guard a package of diamonds that’s being delivered to a bank vault. But the only reason that job exists (and it might even go off without a hitch) is to put the PCs in the bank when the bank robbers show up.

On rare occasions, bait hooks like this can also be diegetic when an NPC gives the PCs a false job offer in order to maneuver them into a location or situation for an ulterior purpose. This plot conceit is quite common in pulp fiction, for example, when detectives are hired to keep a person or location under observation so that they can be framed for a crime.

I’ve found a lead on the key. Meet me in the alley off Yarrow Street.

This session of In the Shadow of the Spire marks the beginning of Act II of the campaign.

As we’ll see (and be discussing) in the future, Act II is primarily structured around two major threads. Before the first session began, I knew that there would be two triggering events – one for each thread – that would kick off Act II.

The letter the PCs receive at the beginning of this session is one of those triggers: During the period of amnesia which began the campaign, I knew that the PCs had hired someone named Shim to help them find a magical artifact. Despite the PCs no longer being aware of it, the investigation had continued apace and had now yielded results.

The letter acts as an external event: Since the PCs were not interacting with Shim (nor were engaged in any activities which might bring them into Shim’s sphere of influence), I had full control of when Act II would begin and, more importantly, I could build all of the investigations that would sprout from Shim’s contact without needing to really think about how the events of Act I might turn out. The material was, effectively, located behind a firewall.

(This should not be taken to mean that the events of Act I were somehow irrelevant to the events of Act II. In this very session, the PCs are going to make some truly momentous choices that will completely alter how they intersect with the major events of Act II: The situation that’s triggered by Shim’s letter exists behind a firewall; but once the firewall is breached, the PCs and everything surrounding the PCs will begin to interact with it.)

A firewall like this is not necessarily impregnable. We saw an example of this earlier in the campaign when the PCs independently interacted with the Hammersong Vaults and then spontaneously concluded (correctly!) that they may have stored other items of value there during their amnesia. (And we could imagine a similar hypothetical scenario in which the PCs needed the services of someone like Shim, identified Shim as an option, and chose to contact him. Which would have led to a possibly far more interesting – and confusing! – conversation.)

PULLING THE TRIGGER

With a trigger like this in place, how do we know when to put it into play?

You could simply schedule the event: As soon as you know that the trigger is going to happen, you figure out when it should happen and literally place it on the calendar. (A campaign status document is great for this.) This is what I had done with the Hammersong Vaults, for example.

Alternatively, you could mechanically check to see when the trigger occurs. For example, you might make a 1 in 8 random check each day to see if that’s the day Shim finishes his investigation. Or you could set up a progress clock coupled to a mechanical structure for determining when the clock gets ticked.

For a more dramatist bent, you can simply decide when to pull the trigger to best narrative effect. This is largely what I did for the beginning of Act II, with my primary concern being effective macro-pacing: I knew I wanted to space out the two Act II triggers a little bit. I also knew I wanted some crossover with ongoing Act I material so that there was a sense of continuity instead of a sharp discontinuity.

Since Act I wasn’t linear in design, this was not necessarily a straightforward process: There was a bunch of Act I scenarios the PCs never engaged with (and which, as a result, I mostly never prepped) and there were a bunch of other scenarios in Act I that hadn’t been part of the original plan, so I needed to make a judgment call about whether or not certain scenarios had been permanently “written off” and, therefore, how close to the end of Act I we really were.

In practice I also sort of combined methods (which is another valid option): When it was clear that Act I was closing out, I scheduled the trigger for the near future on a specific date. This meant that I wasn’t 100% in control of exactly when or how it might interact with the ongoing activities of the PCs.

Thus begins Act II.

It’s a doozy. Twelve years later, we’re still in the middle of Act II. I’ll almost certainly discuss the reasons for that in a future post.