I got back from Gen Con yesterday. All in all, I had a really great time, picked up a bunch of cool stuff, and then came home to find a stack of Kickstarter games on my front porch. (Which I’m referring to as Gen Con Twelfth Night now that it’s happened three times in a row.)

But I did run into something of a bad streak of luck this year when it came to actually playing games. Although there were a couple of really great games, for the most part I was mired in complete duds. In a few cases, this was the result of a bad scenario, but for the most part I was suffering from some truly atrocious GMing.

This caused me to reflect on the fact that GMing is one of those crafts where you very rarely get to see another practitioner’s work. There are, of course, some groups where players will cycle through the GM’s chair, but this seems to largely be the exception rather than the rule. As a result, I suspect that many (possibly most) GMs exist in a bubble, and this isolation limits their ability to recognize (and correct) their shortcomings.

I’ve written a great deal of advice for GMs here on the Alexandrian, and most of it is positive in nature. I like to tell you about the nifty stuff that you could be doing or adding to your games. But now I’m going to spend a little time taking the opposite approach: I’m going to talk about the stuff that you should NOT be doing.

The examples I’ll be using here are primarily drawn from some of the bad experiences I had at Gencon. But since I’m not looking to specifically call anybody out, I’ll be anonymizing the details.

GM DON’T #1: MORPHING REALITY

Player: Shit! Okay, we run out the other door!

GM: There is no other door. The only way out is the way you came in.

Player: What the hell happened to the other door?!

There’s nothing more frustrating for a player (nor more guaranteed to shatter their engagement with the game) than watching the reality of the game world shift like a mirage in front of their metaphorical eyes.

In some cases, of course, this morphing of reality is the result of poor communication: The GM forgot to mention the ogre that is now pounding in their skull when they unwittingly tried to run past it. Or when the GM said that the doors were at the “end of the hallway” he meant they were facing each other across the width of the hall while the players assumed he meant they were standing side-by-side looking down the length of the hall.

Far more problematic, however, is when it becomes clear that the GM’s own mental picture of the game world is inherently unstable. For example, there was a science fiction scenario where a ship’s compartment was filled with vacuum… or not. It oscillated randomly over several rounds of combat. (And if you’re thinking that this would be distressing for anyone in that compartment, you would be correct. Maybe you’re the character who carefully took the time to make the preparations to enter a vacuum only to be upstaged by someone else rushing into the compartment because the vacuum has vanished. Or maybe you’re the character suddenly exposed to the vacuum because you entered the compartment after being assured that everything was fine now until the GM suddenly remembered that the vacuum was supposed to be there. Either way, everything else about the game will quickly become blotted out by your palpable frustration.)

I think it can be argued that maintaining the integrity of the game world is, in fact, the GM’s most fundamental task. Everything else flows from that singular, unifying vision. And without that integrity meaningful choice (the defining characteristic of the roleplaying game) becomes impossible.

Perhaps the most common form of morphing reality is geographic: Distances that double or quadruple in size. Ogres who can somehow simultaneously be standing right next to two characters who are nowhere near each other. Hallways that appear and disappear from the floorplan. But it’s a problem which can be found in any aspect of the game world: NPCs who change their appearance. Organizations that flip-flop between panopticon omniscience and bumbling cluelessness. Spells that vary in efficacy depending on the GM’s mood.

On that last note, it’s also important to note that, in addition to descriptive consistency, the GM should also strive to achieve mechanical consistency. As Ben Robbins’ elegantly states in “Same Description, Same Rule”:

The game world is imaginary. It does not exist except in the minds of the participants. Each person has their own mind and their own imagination, which makes it all the more important to make sure there is a consensus, that you are all operating in the _same_ fictitious world and in agreement about how things work. Consistency makes that easier, inconsistency makes it harder.

To use an example from M&M, the players encounter one machine gun that uses a normal attack roll, and then later they encounter another machine gun that uses an Area attack instead (automatic hit, Reflex save to reduce damage). Conceptually the two machine guns are identical — one is bigger but otherwise the same.

A player sees the second machine gun before it fires and says “a ha, I will dodge to increase my Defense, which will make me harder to hit!” Logical but completely incorrect, because that player doesn’t know that the second machine gun uses a rule mechanic that has nothing to do with Defense.

(…)

There’s a simple fix for this:

The same description should never be modeled with two different rules. If you want to use a different rule, there should be a different description.

IMPROVING YOUR VISION

RPGs are the theater of the mind. They’re improvisational radio drama. Achieving consistency means holding complex pictures of the game world in your mind while simultaneously juggling all of the other things the GM needs to be doing at the gaming table.

That’s not easy.

The degree of complexity in that mental image that can be successfully managed will vary a lot between GMs. (This is also a skill, of course, and you’ll generally find that you’ll improve at it over time.) So the first thing a GM needs to do is know their limits. And once they know those limits, they can find ways to push beyond them.

For example, I know that I, personally, can’t handle fights with simultaneous action resolution if there are more than 8-12 characters involved. Beyond that limit, I can’t keep all of the disparate actions in my head at the same time and figure out how things would play out. So when that situation began cropping up frequently in my OD&D open table campaign, I responded by creating a mechanical structure that split the round into multiple resolution phases so that I was handling smaller groups of characters at any given moment.

If you struggle with keeping the geography of a locale consistent, sketch out a quick map. (This doesn’t have to be a hyper-accurate blueprint: It just needs to cement the idea that the kitchen is here and the bedroom is over there.) Jot down notes on your NPCs to keep their appearance and characterization consistent. Keep a campaign journal so that you can track continuity between sessions.

IMPROVING YOUR CONVERSATION

Once you’ve got things straight in your own mind, you can work on improving communication with your players. Start by making a mental (or physical) note of moments when your players become confused by your descriptions. Review those moments: How could you have phrased things differently – or what details could you have added – in order to make things clearer? Over time you’ll figure out which phrases (like “at the end of the hallway”) are too vague and how you can make them more precise.

(Note that precision does not necessarily equate to greater length.)

Creating clarity might also mean using visual references: Drawing diagrams, handing out photographic references for major NPCs, hanging a map of the city on the wall, and the like.

TRIAGE AT THE GAME TABLE

While you’re working on all of that, keep in mind that no matter how skilled you become mistakes and misunderstandings will still happen. So give some thought about how you’ll handle that confusion when it happens.

First, be alert for signs that a misunderstanding has occurred. Usually a dead giveaway is if the players are proposing actions which don’t make sense to you. I’ve talked about this at length before and proposed a general principle:

If you don’t understand what the players are trying to achieve with a given action, find out before adjudicating the action.

Second, give the benefit of the doubt to your players. Your vision of the game world is not precise and the situation of the game world is dynamic (even if your mechanics are breaking it down into sequential turns).

For example, there’s an ogre fighting in the middle of a room and one of the players declares that he’s going to run past the ogre. Clearly in their vision of the situation there’s enough room for them to safely do that. Maybe in your vision of the room things aren’t so clear-cut. But if you just have the ogre take a step to the left as he swings his club at Athena, then you could easily imagine Horatio rushing past him. So let it happen.

Third, find ways to compromise between your vision and what they want to accomplish.

Maybe it really is impossible for Horatio to just run past the ogre: It’s a small room or maybe the ogre is specifically trying to prevent people from getting past it. Instead of just declaring it impossible, however, look at what the player is trying to accomplish (get past the ogre) and then offer them a way to do that which is consistent with your vision of the room: Maybe they can make a Tumble check to get past it. Or maybe Athena could deliberately bait it out of the way.

This process of compromise isn’t just a specific application of the “Yes, but…” principle of GM rulings (although it is), it also smooths the players’ correction of their mental picture. These mental pictures, after all, are built up from an aggregate of detail. By offering options for accomplishing their goals, you’re encouraging them to focus on the additional details you’re adding (the room is smaller than you thought) instead of on the rejection of their previous vision. (It’s a subtle distinction, but in my experience it’s significant.)

Finally, when the wheels come completely off the bus don’t be afraid of allowing minor retcons to resolve the discordance.

If I’m following the advice above, I find this most often occurs when the consequence for the misunderstanding doesn’t immediately manifest itself. For example, “If I’d known the ogres were close enough to get here before my next turn, I never would have stopped to pick up the idol!”

Even with the passing of some short span of time, it’s usually still not too difficult to just back things up a step, correct the action taken under a misapprehension, and then move forward. But as chains of cause-and-effect become more complicated you do have to balance the potential discordance of the retcon against the discordance of the player’s disconnection from the game world. (Also bear in mind that there is a difference between “the character didn’t know” and “the player didn’t understand”: If the player thought the ogres were several hundred feet away when they were actually only a few dozen feet away, that’s one thing. But if Horatio didn’t realize that the ogres could traverse several hundred feet in a single round because of the cheetah totems they’re wearing, that’s a completely different thing.)

Once again, it can be useful to consider the compromise of a negotiated retcon: When Horatio grabbed the idol he was granted a brief vision, so you’re not going to allow a retcon that wipes that moment out completely. But maybe you’ll allow Horatio to avoid getting cut off by the ogres if he drops the idol and makes a run for it with a successful Athletics check.

Go to Part 2

THE GM DON’T LIST
#2: Rolling to Failure
#3: Resolution Dithering
#4: Thou Shalt Not Hack
#5: Not Knowing the Rules
#6: Choose Your Own Adventure
#7: Preempting Investigation
#8: Mysteries With No Clues
#9: Fudging
#10: Idea Rolls
#11: Description-on-Demand
#12: Mail Carrier Scenario Hooks
#13 Boxed Text Pitfalls
#14: Fearing the Silence
#15: The Railroader’s Fallacy
#16: Not Writing Down Initiative
#17: Too Many Players
#18: Too Precious Encounters
#19: Ignoring Character Backstories
#20: Always Say Yes

“The players have ruined my adventure!”

I see a lot of GMs say this. It generally means that their players have done something that they didn’t expect. And now what are you supposed to do?!

Well, unless it’s a convention game (or some similar situation where there is a strictly limited amount of time available), my answer is invariably going to be, “Let’s see what happens.” (While doing a little happy dance in the back of my brain, because this is what makes RPGs so cool.)

In practical terms, it’s very easy for my players to do something which I hadn’t anticipated. But it’s generally very difficult for them to do something that I have absolutely nothing prepared for. I just don’t prep my scenarios that way. It’s more typical for them to do something unexpected and now the guy that I thought was going to be their patron is, in fact, their arch-enemy. But I still had the guy prepped, right?

So when the PCs have done something radically unexpected, most of the time I just keep doing what I was doing before: Selecting the tools built into the scenario and actively playing them.

In some cases, the PCs will end up tumbling into a section of the scenario that was prepped for a completely different type of interaction. (Common variations include “I didn’t think I’d need a stat block for that character” in relatively complex systems where stat blocks are time-consuming or “this will involve several dozen pieces moving in directions I didn’t anticipate”.) If this happens, I’ll generally call for a 5 or 10 minute break so that I can juggle the pieces into place smoothly.

For example: In my regular D&D campaign a long while ago, there was a situation where some allies of the PCs were going to get involved in a street war. But based on what the PCs were planning to do, it was pretty clear that they weren’t going to be directly involved in the street war. So I prepped that as a sequence of events that the PCs would hear about afterwards. Then the PCs shifted direction and ended up unintentionally right in the middle of the street war: So I took a 10 minute break to prep the additional stat blocks I needed.

In extremely rare cases, the PCs will manage to perform a complete scenario exit. When that happens, I will generally bring the current session to a close and spend the time necessary to prep the new scenario. (Generally you want to ad lib along the new path for a certain distance until the new frame is both clear and the PCs have clearly committed to it. If you imagine that the campaign is currently in Houston and the PCs decide to go to Dallas, you can probably get a fair distance down the freeway or all the way to the city limits of Dallas as you wind things down for the night. This is partly because it will help focus your prep for the new scenario. And it’s also because the players will sometimes abruptly reverse course and drive back to Houston.)

One example in my D&D campaign occurred when a PC landed on top of a randomly generated NPC after a failed teleport attempt. They became almost immediate friends and it turned out that the randomly generated NPC was on his way to a dungeon that he’d discovered. The PCs decided to tag along… to the dungeon that I had literally just created 5 seconds earlier. We were close to quitting time for the night in any case, so I wrapped things up and prepped the dungeon.

(The PCs then promptly decided not to go to the dungeon after all at the beginning of the next session and I had to scrap the entire dungeon. Which is the most prep I’ve had to scrap in the last 7 years of GMing.)

A more recent example occurred when I was running Eternal Lies: The PCs decided to aggressively pursue a two word reference in a letter that I hadn’t anticipated them glomming onto. In that case, we had enough time left in the current session that they booked their flights and, quite literally, got to the city limits before we broke for the night and I prepped a whole new scenario for them.

One of the tricks to running Numenera is to avoid falling back on your D&D-bred reflexes and having the game world default to a fantasy feeling. Although superficially similar to D&D fantasy due to its renaissance trappings, that’s not what the world of Numenera is: It’s a mélange of science fantasy on the far side of a billion years and eight mega-civilizations.

Keeping that in mind is the inspiration behind this techno-weird tavern. Whether you use it as a respite between adventures, a pit stop on a long and dusty road, or as an introductory mini-scenario to orient your players to the nature of Numenera, you’ll hopefully find it suffused with the unique flavor of the Ninth World.

(You could also take the various bar games and activities and split them up into multiple taverns, each with its own particular focus.)

GETTING A TABLE

The place is crowded, but it shouldn’t be too difficult to cadge a table near the center of the modular, multi-chambered, multi-tiered tavern (particularly if they slip a shin or two to the hostess).

Directly above their table is a gravity glide: Get a good push off and you’ll glide through an antigravity zone from one balcony to another. (Screw it up and you’ll end up drifting helplessly until someone lassos you.)

SAVANNAH MENU

A large, sunken table with a dome of shimmering energy atop it. The interior of the table appears to be a diorama depicting a miniature savannah dotted with small copses of trees, but on closer inspection you can see herds of animals moving across the grasslands.

A large, harpoon-like contraption is attached to the lip of the table and can be moved around its circumference on a rail. (You can sight through the energy fields built into the harpoon and use it to shoot one of the miniature creatures moving through the diorama.)

Menu-Tender: “It’s two shins per shot!” (That means if you can make the first shot, you’ll get a discount on your meal. If it takes two shots, you’re breaking even. Three or more and you’re paying a premium for your lousy aim.)

Making the Shot: Herds of gallen (long-bodied, herbivorous animals), shiul (massive, four-horned creatures), and ul’un (catfish-like creatures that levitate above the grasses and glide across the savannah).

It’s a Speed task (difficulty 4) to make the shot. On a success, the harpoon drags the creature up through the surface of the table (where it emerges full-size and ready to be cooked).

CHROMERIDING

A sleek, bullet-like shape about six feet long levitates a foot or so off the floor of the pit at the center of one of the tavern modules. A saddle-like depression notches into its top.

As potential riders approach the chromerider, their shins tingle. (This is due to an energy field. See below.)

Rider Rating: A dial can be set from 1 to 5. (The task difficulty of the ride is equal to the dial setting + 1.)

Chromeriding: This works like a Chase (Numenera, pg. 100). The rider must succeed on a number of Speed tasks equal to the task difficulty they selected. If the rider ever has more failures than successes, they’re thrown off the chromerider. (Riders who are thrown off land in a cushioning energy field that lines the bottom of the pit.)

Description of the Ride: Each round it becomes more and more difficult to remain on the chromerider.

• Round 1: The chromerider bucks like a bronco.
• Round 2: The chromerider spins around the horizontal axis.
• Round 3: The chromerider spins around the vertical axis.
• Round 4: The chromerider tries to scrape the rider off on the metal poles surrounding the riding pit.
• Round 5: The chromerider splits into four pieces and tries to fly off in different directions. The rider must succeed on a Might task to hold the pieces together. Alternatively, a Speed task can be made at +1 difficulty to stay on just one of the smaller pieces.
• Round 6: The ceiling dilates open and the chromerider rockets straight up into the sky. (On future rounds, repeat the previous rounds… but now they’re 50 feet up in the air.)

JEMARA

Jemara is a form of choral karaoke. On a stage at one end of the tavern, there’s a free-standing arch made from sort of coral-like material, silver-and-red in color.

Stepping Through the Arch of Jemara: As one steps through the arch, a temporal schism occurs and they’re split into multiple duplicates of themselves all sharing a confusing, mirrored single consciousness.

This is an open success Intellect task: The level of success determines how many duplicates successfully emerge.

Performance: Ask the player what song they’re performing. The lyrics appear on their retina, super-imposed simultaneously across their many fields of vision. The Arch of Jemara pulses with light and projects music.

The singer(s) can make another open success Intellect task, using the Helping rules (Numenera, pg. 101) to gain a +1 bonus to their die roll for each temporal duplicate. The GM should use the result to determine the reaction of the crowd.

After the performance is done, the temporal schism ends and the duplicates vanish (although they may still flicker in and out of existence in an aura around the performer for a few minutes longer).

WARP DARTS

The warp dart board hangs in the middle of a long aisle. The trick is that the aisle is filled with gravity inversion fields, which means that the darts don’t travel in straight lines. (And the highest value targets are on the back side and edges of the board.)

Competition: If the PCs challenge each other, resolve the warp dart competition as a PC vs. PC Speed task (see Numenera, pg. 98). Highest result wins. (Let the victor describe their winning throw.)

A Challenger Appears: A level 6 NPC shows up, challenges the winner of the previous game, and offers a bet of 5 shins on the outcome.

PINANJU

A matte-black, fully-articulated mannequin stands in the center of a geodesic dome formed from silver filaments.

When activated, Pinanju is a martial arts simulator: The players must duplicate the movements of the mannequin while the dome generates holographic opponents. The game can be played cooperatively (using the Helping rules) or competitively (seeing who fails a combat check first).

Opponent Selection:

• Street Urchins (Difficulty 2)
• Glaives of the Beyond (Difficulty 3)
• Margr Beast Warriors (Difficulty 4 – Numenera, pg. 244)
• Angulan Knights (Difficulty 5 – Numenera, pg. 224)
• Gaian Witch-Ninjas (Difficulty 6)

(In the context of Pinanju, the actual stats of these opponents aren’t important. But you might like to show the PCs a picture of what they’re facing off against.)

A game of Pinanju is resolved in four rounds:

Basic Combat: Might or Speed task (using the difficulty of the selected opponent).

Covering Fire: During this round, the player must avoid the attacks of “bonus enemies” who pop up around the perimeter of the Pinanju ring by succeeding on a Speed task. On a failure, their next combat check is made at +1 difficulty. (These avoidance moves have to be improvised around the set routine presented by the Pinanju automaton.)

Basic Combat 2: Another Might or Speed task.

Swarm: In the final round, four opponents appear simultaneously. They effectively act as a swarm, requiring the player to make their Might or Speed task at +1 difficulty.

TOROID TOSS

Players receive a toroidal ring that slithers to the touch but not to the eye. They have to toss the toroid over a prize-winning peg at the far end of a strangely slanted court. However, the tossing lane is filled with dimensional fields – as the toroid passes through them, it reappears in seemingly random locations (often changing direction or the like).

Initial Cost: Requires 2 Intellect to plot out a potentially successful path through the dimensional fields. (If this initial cost is not paid, any throw is essentially random and has only a 1 in 20 chance of paying out.)

Final Toss: Speed task (difficulty 6). On success, receive a random oddity.

Something I discussed in The Art of Pacing is how scenes are framed and filled. The basic idea is that any scene in an RPG has an agenda (the question the scene is trying to answer) and the content of the scene is about trying to resolve that agenda. Most of your scenes will be about conflict: Two or more characters want mutually exclusive things and the scene is about which character gets what they want.

One problem GMs can run into once they understand this framework are non-combat scenes that end up being short and unsatisfying: The PCs have an objective. They briefly interact with the environment or an NPC. And then the scene is over and done.

First: In order for an objective to be interesting, there needs to be an obstacle preventing you from accomplishing it.

For example, let’s say that you have an objective of going to the corner store and buying a Coke. In general, that’s not going to result in an interesting scene because there’s no meaningful obstacle. But if there’s a team of ninjas hunting you through the neighborhood, it gets interesting. If you can’t leave your sister alone because you’re afraid she might commit suicide while you’re gone, it gets interesting.

For your combat scenes, the combat mechanics are generally taking care of providing interesting obstacles. But we could imagine a combat scene which was fairly boring: Imagine a single attack roll that resulted in all of the PCs’ opponents getting wiped out. (That’s not to say you should never have combat scenes like that, of course, any more than you should always have ninjas guarding the corner store.)

For your non-combat scenes, you need to figure out what the obstacle is. And you’ll get even better scenes if there are multiple obstacles, multiple objectives, or both. (In many cases you can simply set up the objectives of the scene so that they conflict with each other and, presto, you’ve got both.)

Technoir introduces a useful concept called “vectors”: You often can’t just jump directly to making an “I solve the problem” die roll. Instead, you have to make some preparatory rolls in order to establish a vector to the thing you actually want to effect.

For example: You want to shoot Victor inside his club. But you can’t just drive up outside the club and shoot him. First you’ll have to find some way to get inside (sneaking or fast-talking your way past the bouncers), then track him down, and then take your shot.

For example: You want to convince Michael to sell you the datachip. But first you’re going to have to get him to admit that he has it. Then you’ve got to convince him that there’s another way to save his sister. And then you’ve got to convince him that you’re offering him something worth the risk.

As with anything else you prep, you don’t want to fall into the trap of predetermining how the PCs are going to overcome the obstacles. Instead, just set the obstacles: Michael doesn’t want to admit he has the datachip. Michael needs it to save his sister. Let the players worry about how they’re going to overcome those obstacles.

Back to the Art of Pacing

Go to Eternal Lies: The Alexandrian Remix

End of the road.

The final count for the Alexandrian Remix of Eternal Lies is:

• 300+ props
• 150+ diorama elements
• 450+ pages
• 130,000+ words

In many ways, this is a campaign that grew out of control. I was wildly over-ambitious in my approach and the result was a lot of stress when it came time to close the deal down the stretch. But the final result was an incredibly intense experience. I doubt that I will ever attempt to run another campaign quite like this one, but I’m glad to have had the experience. And I’m happy to share the experience with you.

THE ORIGINAL PITCH

SETTING: Mormo was invoked in 1924. Cthulhu briefly awoke in 1925. The federal government raided Innsmouth in 1927. Yog-Sothoth nearly broke through the barriers in Dunwich in 1928. This game is about the decade after that. When things got worse.

If you’re familiar with the Cthulhu Mythos, then you’ve got a pretty good idea what’s going on. If you’re not then I recommend checking out these stories:

• “The Call of Cthulhu”
• “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”
• “The Dunwich Horror”
• At the Mountains of Madness

(The last of these is a short novel, but the other three make for quick reading.)

CHARACTERS: You are investigators. As the campaign begins you may or may not be previously aware of the Mythos, but you ARE renowned for your investigating and/or problem-solving abilities. That might just be a quiet reputation among the sort of people who really count; it might be a local renown like that enjoyed by the Great Detective; or it might be the national renown of an Eliot Ness.

On a meta level, it’s important to remember the “investigate” part of your name. When faced with the horrific unknown your response isn’t to run away and pray to your broken gods; it’s to solve the mystery. Your Drive will help you with that.

MY PLAY-THRU

I’m not going to attempt a comprehensive overview of everything that happened in my play-thru of the campaign, but I have had several requests from people who have been interested in how it played out.

The total playing time was 95 hours, split over 22 sessions.

NEW YORK: The PCs made a point of conducting a very thorough investigation in New York before leaving town. They discovered leads that pointed in the direction of Los Angeles, but they decided it still made sense to check out Doug Henslowe in Savannah first.

SAVANNAH: The investigation in Savannah proceeded basically in the way that you would expect. As they were getting ready to leave town, the thugs from Bangkok drove out onto the tarmac and started firing guns at them. They rushed up the passenger stairs, returning gunfire over their shoulders, as the plane began taxiing down the runway.

LOS ANGELES: Here’s where things took a sharp left turn. The PCs poked around Los Angeles long enough to figure out that George Ayers had mounted an expedition to Ethiopia in 1924. They also learned that the old cult was tangled up with hardened gangsters. After learning that some of the gangsters were living at Trammel’s mansion, they decided the mansion was too tough a nut to crack and they left without investigating it. (This meant that the only clue they had was the one taking them to Ethiopia.)

ETHIOPIA: Ethiopia is, in the original campaign, a dead-end in terms of investigating the cult. (You learn a lot of useful information, but because the cult hasn’t been active there for a decade there are no additional leads pointing at new cult activity.) This is why, in the remix, the Emporium of Bangkok Antiquities is active in the region (so that clues will point back in the direction of Bangkok). The PCs got tangled with the Emporium around the Obelisk of Axum and then backtracked to the Danakil Desert.

One of the really great things that happened in our play-thru was the roleplaying around the question of violence: The group started out mostly as innocents with a couple of World War I veterans who had no interest in revisiting the horrors of their past. As they left Dallol, however, they were pursued by Afar fanatics as they sought Ayers. At the instigation of one of the World War I vets, they reluctantly agreed to ambush their pursuers. Once violence broke out, however, Robert (the character who had pushed for the ambush) failed his Stability check, prompting a violent rejection of the murders they had just committed. This caused severe tensions as the rest of the group, who had felt pressured into the conflict, were suddenly whiplashed by Robert’s change of heart.

Fortunately, in the Dream-Scourged Halls where George Ayers awaited them, the group had a time of respite in which tempers could cool.

Over the course of the rest of the campaign, this initial conflict would slowly develop and resolve in response to the horrible things they witnessed (and the horrible things they needed to prevent) until, quite naturally, the group found itself armed with machine guns and explosives. Watching them slowly harden in the face of the burdens they were forced to bear was a really fascinating (and powerful) bit of roleplaying.

SEVERN VALLEY: At this point, the Emporium of Bangkok Antiquities was the only real face they had for the cult. And their animosity for the Emporium was heightened after they discovered that one of their allies in Eritrea had been killed by them. As a result, they pursued the Emporium to the Severn Valley in England (which they had learned was the site of their next expedition).

Midway through the Severn Valley, however, the campaign was put on a lengthy hiatus for several months. The over-ambitious nature of what I had been attempting had caught up with me and combined with several scheduling delays that had pushed the campaign into conflict with several other major projects. During the hiatus, however, I was able to prepare material at a slightly more relaxed pace. What forced the campaign out of hiatus, however, was that one of the original players was leaving town: Rather than leave the campaign unfinished, we decided to bring it back for a series of marathon sessions in June. (This eventually culminated in a run where we played 8 out of 10 days.)

The Severn Valley wrapped up with several of the PCs badly traumatized for the first time: One of the PCs had raised the ire of the Faceless Sentinels on the Isle Beyond Severnford. Most of the group fled with her back to London in order to escape the Sentinels, but the two World War I vets remained behind to check out the Church on High Street in Temphill… and what they found under the Church left them badly shaken.

At this point, however, Alice — a cop from Chicago — had yet to see a single supernatural thing. Mostly by chance she had chosen a path which seemed to always leave her with the part of the group that was experiencing mundanity. At times, the others had tried to impress upon her what they had witnessed, but she (at least partly in active denial) considered them to simply be hallucinating from the horrible stresses they had all been placed under.

BANGKOK: The PCs left England and pursued the Emporium to Bangkok. This was an interesting location because there’s a kind of baseline assumption here that the cultists are probably aware that someone is messing with their business. But for our play-thru this wasn’t the case: The cultists knew that somebody had been talking to Douglas Henslowe. A largely different subset of PCs had interacted with the Emporium in Axum under a convincing cover story that placed them nowhere near Savannah. And… that was it. They were midway through the campaign at this point, and they’d largely glided over the cult’s radar.

As a result, in Bangkok the PCs were successful in tracking Savitree to Ko Kruk Island before anybody really knew that they were in town. Rather than getting thrown into pits and hunted across the island, therefore, they ended up playing cat-and-mouse with Savitree in the ruins of her family’s mansion. This sequence was massively successful: Alice, who still hadn’t seen anything incontrovertibly supernatural, got sliced with a nectar-tipped spear. Which meant that her first real confrontation with the Mythos was having a Mouth grow on her arm.

When we wrapped up that session, the PCs were getting ready to loot Savitree’s library and then leave town, pursuing leads for Malta. This would have had the interesting consequence of carrying them even further into the campaign without knowing about the existence of Major Mouths or realizing what the true source of Nectar was. I was kind of fascinated by what that trajectory through the campaign would have looked like, but by the time we reconvened the following night they had decided to reverse course and check out the Phikhat Hwan death-fights after all. (This ended with them shooting Xuc Pramoj through the head just before blowing up the Major Mouth.)

MALTA: Much like Trammel’s mansion, the PCs did not like the look of the heavily fortified warehouse in Malta. As a result, this section of the campaign was largely about stalking Montgomery Donovan. This was also the site of their first major firefight: After blowing up the Major Mouth in Bangkok, they concluded that they needed more explosives and more guns. So they’d smuggled huge quantities of dynamite and several machine guns into Valletta (and put them to good use shortly thereafter).

Before the PCs had arrived in Malta, I had murdered a Source of Stability for one of the PCs: Her beloved horse Butterscotch. (The players never forgave me.) The PC was able to rescue both Monte and Alexi from the hospital, however, and they became, collectively, a new Source of Stability for her.

The other thing of note in Malta is that Sir Godfrey Welles never actually showed up. Because of how the PCs tackled the locale, he was never able to spot them until they were already blowing up the warehouse and fleeing town.

RETURN TO LOS ANGELES: They were now fairly certain that there was a Major Mouth beneath Trammel’s mansion in Los Angeles. And they were resolved to destroy it.

They were able to use Donovan’s blackmail material (recovered from Malta) to coerce several LAPD cops to flip on Trammel and lead a raid on the mansion with them. This went very well. (For the PCs, any way. Two of the cops were killed when Walker blew up their car with a grenade.) The sequence became particularly memorable, however, because the mouth on Alice’s arm (which had been causing problems for weeks) finally went hyperactive during the raid: There’s a linen closet in the mansion that contains a minor mouth. Alice opened it while she was completely alone: The long, prehensile tongue on her own arm initiated a disgusting, groping French kiss with the similarly grotesque tongue of the mouth inside the closet. Things went downhill from there. The other PCs managed to get into a car and drive away from the mansion before finally being forced to amputate her arm. Moments after the frantic, horrible, bloody field amputation was completed, the mansion exploded behind them.

MEXICO CITY: Mission completed. Time to get out of the country. Mexico City largely played out by-the book: Effective and disturbing, with a lot of really nice small roleplaying moments. But in pretty much the sequence you would expect based on reading over the material.

YUCATAN: Similarly, the Yucatan largely proceeded as one might expect. They ended up hiring two of the available guides (which provided ample opportunities for interesting interactions), while one of the dilettantes earned the inexplicable enmity of the third guide (who was also the cultist trying to kill them). Also memorable was the sequence just after they arrived at Chichen Xoxul: They would attempt to set up camp at a location, discover that it was horrible, and move to a different site to set up camp… which they would discover was horrible for some completely different reason.

THIBET: Upon arriving in Thibet, the PCs decided to attempt a risky landing without a runway in order to cut down on their travel time to Mt. Kailash. They ascended the mountain without great incident, but had a great deal of difficulty descending into the ravine. (They initially planned to descend one at a time for safety’s sake, but the first investigator only got down about halfway before being forced back by the terrifying things in the ravine.) In the end, they coordinated a massive explosion with a simultaneous summoning of Gol-Goroth to deal with the Liar. Wini, who had sacrificed her own sanity to master the mind-rending arts of sorcery the campaign demanded of the group, took one of the bricks from Chichen Xoxul, carved an Elder Sign into it, and left it lodged in the white snows of Mt. Kailash.

THE END: I’ve already discussed how their progression through the rest of the finale went. In the final scene, Robert — much to the horror of the other PCs — volunteered to accompany Jobs to the planet seen in The Gazer’s Perspective.

THOUGHTS FOR THE FUTURE

This will almost certainly not be the last time I run this campaign: Partly to recoup the time I’ve already sunk into prepping it. Partly because there’s a high demand from the other players I’ve developed relationships with through my open table. Partly because it’s a really great campaign. But mostly because I’m really curious to see what happens next time.

When I return to Eternal Lies, however, there are a few things I’ll be changing or adding to the campaign. It’ll be awhile before I make any of this a reality, but in the meantime you might think about doing these for your own campaign:

• I would strongly recommend adapting the Sources of Stability rules from Night’s Black Agents. They’re much more appropriate for the type of globe-hopping campaign you see in Eternal Lies. (It’s very difficult to connive for the PCs to get back home to their Sources of Stability between locations. This was particularly exacerbated in our play-thru because we embraced the global nature of the campaign and the PCs came from all across the globe. It might be a little bit easier if everyone came from the same hometown.) I’ve been playing with the idea of creating a hybrid system (in which characters would still have multiple NPC Sources of Stability, possibly scattered across the world for easier access and rich epistolary opportunities, while still including Symbols and Safeties), but I haven’t really hammered out the details.
• I’m planning to prep hotels for each of the locations. Probably aiming for three: A low, middle, and high class location. (I only figured out that this would be useful at the point where the campaign was already winding down.)
• I want to go back and add explosive charge guidelines for destroying each Major Mouth. My primary goal here is to establish the idea of thinking about explosives in terms of abstract “charges” that also need to be dealt with logistically, so that by the time you get to Thibet the PCs will (a) have a general sense of how much explosive power they need and (b) an established relationship with the mechanics involved in lugging them around the landscape. (Might be interesting to supplement the “lugging them around” guidelines with stealth guidelines for metropolitan areas.)
• Finally, I’m probably going to revise Savitree’s notes on the Mt. Kailash expedition so that the Emporium of Bangkok Antiquities don’t actually make it up onto the peak. (They get chased off by pilgrims, which would force them to acquire their magnetic scanning equipment to take whatever remote readings they could.) My primary motivation here is to preserve the image of the PCs being the first ones to ever reach the top of Mt. Kailash. (I only consciously realized this was a meaningful concern when my players got up there, got excited about the idea of being the first people to ever be up there, and then remembered that the Emporium had beaten them to the punch. Which was a funny moment, but I think it’s more powerful to leave that achievement for the PCs. This remains true even if the players don’t immediately think of it, because then you can drop that image on them during the Triumph Atop Mt. Kailash sequence after the Liar has been destroyed.)

I also have a personal goal of making better use of the Eternal Lies Soundtrack Suite by preparing a more robust selection of playlists and probably adding more specific cuing prompts to my prep notes.

But that’s for another day.

If you’ve run the campaign (particularly if you’re running it with these remix notes), I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments! And don’t forget to join us over on Yog-Sothoth and the G+ community for Eternal Lies GMs.

FIN.