The Best Game I’ve Ever Played – Lacuna Part I 2nd Attempt

Previous posts:

Actual Play!  Sessions 1 & 2

The Best Game I've Never Played

OK, the title is a bit tongue in cheek, but honestly, I had a great time with this game. I’m certain that is in no small part due to the excellent group that came together. Was it the best game I’ve ever played? That’s so hard to rank, but it was a great experience, up there in the top ten certainly.


Lacuna is such an interesting game to me, in part because of how little is actually there. The characters, the setting, even the rules are all reflective of the title in that there are missing pieces. In his We Are Building a Religion post, Maxcan ended by saying this:

“This game is not for those who seek only linear things, who take pride in their ignorance, who desire the mundane or populous at the exclusion of all else, who do not consider what they want nor why, who neither understand nor have any interest in understanding. This game is ill-defined by design."

This captures the spirit of the missing pieces in Lacuna, I think. Those missing pieces are there to create questions and to allow one to ponder the answers. There’s never anything definitive, only possibilities. Even the characters are a lacuna – we don’t even know their real names, much less anything like a background. So one obvious lacuna to explore is this one: who are they? What is their background? How did they become mystery agents?

The inattention to the rules could be sloppy writing on the part of Lacuna’s author, but I doubt it – I think the takeaway here is that the rules don’t matter past their ability to create interesting play and tension. Same with the setting – the lack of detail here even with Read Once and Destroy (hereafter referred to as ROAD), which only gives you a few points of info to work with, is all ambiguous or missing on purpose. The entire setup is designed to foster creativity and creative play. Any one of the lacunae in Lacuna honestly creates an axis around which an entire campaign could be run. The genius of the game is that it doesn’t even pose these as questions – rather, it gives you just enough information for you to start asking the questions yourself. Here are just a few:

 

1. What is The Conflict?

We didn’t even get a chance to touch on this in our game. Blue City is at war with some ill-defined “enemy” who is never named, and the conflict itself is never named, it’s never “The war in the east” or “World War 18.5” or anything, just “The Conflict.” There is apparently a part of Blue City that is like a border-zone, across which the Conflict is occurring in some Black (as in security clearance Black and perhaps quite literally an area of blackness) place. We never see it. One of the NAQ (Never to be answered questions) on the kickstarter for ROAD and Company Handbook 3.0 is this: Is the area of the so-called “Conflict” our material world? There is so much to explore here, and I don’t think I had time to even mention it more than once, and then very obliquely in a newspaper article.


2. Who and What is the resistance?

It is implied that some of the damage in Blue City is a result of the Conflict, but other things are the result of terrorists, or some sort of resistance that is opposed to the Conflict. In Podzemní (Polish for “underground” I think) neighborhood, the tram station is underground. In the ROAD entry, you have two entries from Mythography describing the same thing:

The arched ceiling of Podzemní is painted sky blue with wispy clouds stretching out in either direction. The artist included a whimsical touch: a single yellow balloon that drifts off into space. The symbol for this tram station—a yellow balloon—can be seen throughout Blue City as a stylistic touch. Perhaps it represents freedom or the search for a better life? It’s certainly a cheerful sight in an otherwise drab and gray place. — Mythography Ω

The arched ceiling of Podzemní is painted sky blue with wispy clouds stretching out in either direction. A vandal included a subversive element: a single yellow balloon that drifts off into space. This symbol—a yellow balloon—can be seen throughout Blue City on subversive literature and graffiti as a symbol of opposition to the Conflict. — Mythography Ω

This is perhaps one of the clearest illustrations of the kind of duality and ambiguity that is present throughout the game. Both of these things, or neither, could be true. This is something I teased a little in my game, but we never truly got into it. Perhaps in a future instance!


3. What happened to Agent Miner? What is going on with the Company?

There appear to be opposing viewpoints / forces even within the Company, and at least one agent, named Miner, has gone MIA in Blue City. There are implications that some agents spend months in deep cover in Blue City. What are they hunting? It might be a rogue element to the company. But if this is the case, what happened and why is there a rogue element? Did that element find out something about the company that forced the schism? Or something about Blue City? There are heavy implications that Miner met The Girl – is he still alive? Is he leading the aforementioned resistance?

At one point I found some very early play reports (back when the game had only been presented in a ‘zine I think) and one of the guys who ran it observed that when you look at the Mentors presented in the material and kind of map out the organization, you see clearly how it has been compromised.

“It's criminally easy to see this right there in the Lacuna Part 1 rules. Take the list of mentors and draw a little hierarchy-diagram of authority. Then write the current status for each one next to it (missing, dead, nervous breakdown, etc). You will see the direct path along which the Agency has been penetrated, and exactly how that's resulted in disarray. You couldn't have a better le Carre social-setting and source of adversity for the hapless on-the-ground agents if you lifted it right from his novels.”

Again, in my game, we did not focus on this, but the questions beg for answers and this is yet another aspect of the material that you could spin an entire campaign around. I also want to observe that any of these questions can be easily connected to the other questions. It’s really a quite beautiful and elegant set up!

4. For that matter, who is the Girl?

There are some implications that you have met her before the game even begins. She might be your mother. She might be THE mother. She might be a figment of the collective unconscious. Agents could dive into this angle if they wanted to as well.  I didn't get into this question in my game except in the most cursory way.  I considered having Margaret be the Girl early on but rejected the idea.  You should know when She shows up.

5. Who are the Agents?

This is the one that was the most intriguing to me because it is such a huge gap. Without getting into the extensive backstories that so many RPG players give their characters, most RPGs encourage the player to know who their character is. This is my dude, he is a dwarven fighter named Krago of the Mountains. He is FUCKING strong (str 18/54) and pretty tough (con 16), but clumsy (Dex 6) and not too bright (Int 7). He likes dwarf stuff: gold and gems and metal and earth and fire. Etc.

It bears repeating – in Lacuna you don’t even know your own character’s NAME. This is the question I wound up focusing on, and there were some answers, but there is no sense at all in which the answers I gave are canonical.



With all that said, I would have loved to explore all of these questions to some extent. I would have loved to run a full-blown campaign for Lacuna, and to let some of what I did explore develop much more slowly and fully. But I also realize that getting five people together on anything even remotely resembling a regular basis is difficult. I thought I was incredibly lucky to get people to play at all! This time around, Arkwright’s player, Screwhead, ran into some unfortunate and uncontrollable events that caused them to not be able to join us, which was too bad. They gave me an idea to make Arkwright’s disappearance or death hook into the “decoy team” thread that had been going throughout sessions 1 & 2, which I thought was brilliant, but I just couldn’t find a great way to work it in, so I elected to have Control do an executive ejection because of malfunctioning equipment. I’m sorry, Screwhead!

SO. We left our Agents off last time with Tiller and Dyer having ridden through a pulsing black and red vortex / tunnel they found in the floor of an octagon for dog-creatures to fight each other. They landed in some sort of apartment that seemed almost like a sound stage – the books on the bookshelves weren’t real, the fridge, cabinets, and cupboards in the kitchen were all empty, etc.

Meanwhile Shepherd and Arkwright had escaped the dog track on foot, and after an explosion leveled part of it and they were contacted by Control to congratulate them for a successful detonation, they hustled away from people in uniform, and went to the Horizontal House, where Margaret thought her nephew was being held. They forced the apartment number out of Oleg – 4C. Entering the apartment building, they passed a sleeping doorman on their way to the elevator. The doorman had the radio on and as the Agents passed, they heard a special bulletin announcing that four people were wanted in connection with the Kennel Run Bombing, and recognized that the physical features being described belonged to the team.

They got in the elevator and pushed a combination of buttons to take them to 4C, and when the elevator door opened, the front door of the apartment slid away with it. The sound surprised Tiller and Dyer, who were already in unit 4C, and the team was reunited. Shepherd filled the team in on the discoveries regarding Margaret and Oleg and Klammen and the weird filmmaking that seemed to drain memories and produce this bizarre substance called Memorandum A. Tiller and Dyer had found a door that opened on a staircase going down (deeper and deeper) and looking like something out of a Soviet-era bunker except everything was done in black. They could see a “cheerful glow” emanating from the bottom of the steps and after pressuring Oleg, were told that it was a vending machine.

Because I HAD to.

The team headed down the stairs and to the vending machine, replete with a glowing cartoon picture of Clarence Boscow (the Personality who ran the kiosk they visited in Session I) on it. The vending machine looked normal enough in the snacks-behind plexiglass department, with a little cubby where products were dispensed, but it had a weird keyboard covered with buttons all labeled with C words, and in addition to a slot that could take bills or baseball cards, and another for coins or cucumber slices, there was a small hole, slightly smaller in diameter than a dime. Dyer immediately fingered the hole.

Nothing bad happened, though I was tempted.

The team asked their charges willing and unwilling for funds for the vending machine and Margaret happened to have some baseball cards. She selected one of a player named Infant Red and they were rewarded with four credits. Dyer mashed buttons in an attempt to get a package of snacks with what appeared to be a singing jellybean on it (I *think* that’s what I described, it was off the cuff and all I really remember is that the mascot had a speech bubble with a musical note in it). Somewhere in here, Margaret or Oleg, I forget who, told them the hole that had been so eagerly fingered was for yet another payment method – cigarettes. Dyer inserted one and it was accepted, the team was back up to four credits.

But they were NOT biting on the keyboard, or trying to make sense of it, so when Tiller, moved by suspicion, began investigating the sides of the vending machine, he saw that it looked to be almost embedded in the wall, but that there were hinges on it. I had designed the vending machine to be a door opened by depressing the same words that were on the White Rose Club business card Margaret gave them last session, but the party was not having any of it. Instead, they worked together to heave and pull and put their feet on the wall for leverage and tug and they managed to wrest the vending machine OFF the hinges and pull it out of the entrance it had been blocking. It reminded me a little of the “Paper?” “Paper.” “Fuck it.” exchange from Big Trouble in Little China (which I cannot find on YT). They managed to also get the back of the machine open, and Dyer took advantage of this opportunity to load up on surreal snacks. Somewhere in the midst of all the grunting and heaving, Agent Arkwright vanished. Tiller, paranoid, indicated that he thought she had been snatched away. “That’s what they DO!” he said. What had happened was that back at Control, the team doctor had been seeing some worrying indications from the equipment used for the dive, and made an executive decision that she was going to eject Arkwright before anything really bad happened. Thus, Arkwright spent the majority of this session sitting on the Slab back at HQ and cursing fate.

I had wanted very much to be able to describe the various weird shit from the machine, so I worked up a 5d12 table that gave me type of snack (i.e. chips, jellybeans), texture, smell, and two tastes. I have to give my wife some credit here with helping me on the table. I would never have come up with “buttercream-cancer taste” or thought of durian fruit on my own.

 

The agents continued to head down the now exposed stairs behind the vending machine until they heard the strains of a piano echoing out of an open doorway at the bottom of the stairs. Everyone is having a shared dream and that means dream things are possible and dream logic applies. When the agents heard the strains of a piano being played from a room at the bottom of a staircase that looked like it was straight out of a Soviet-era nuclear bunker, and one of them (Max in this case) said, “I will waltz in,” I thought, that’s fucking perfect. So the agents paired up and waltzed in.

They entered a ballroom, a sort of hazy, difficult to tell how large it is area with their target, Bartok Friedkin, sitting center and playing a grand piano. When Bartok saw the agents, he looked up from his playing briefly and smiled. Everyone danced for a bit, with Shepherd and Margaret paired, and Tiller and Dyer paired, while Oleg did some sort of avant-garde interpretive bullshit by his lonesome (all I could come up with on the fly, please don’t fault me). Dyer made her way towards the piano, wanting to do a little swoop in to check things out, and as she approached, Bartok smiled again, and struck a sour note on the piano, which caused machine guns to deploy from the inside (where the sound board and hammers and strings normally are) and start shooting as Bartok literally hammered with his fists on the keyboard, producing bursts of automatic fire.

Dyer stayed alive by whipping a handful of candy at Bartok, who flinched and dodged to one side. That meant he couldn’t hammer on the keys to trigger the gun pointed at her. This in turn gave Shepherd, who had been spinning in a circle holding hands with Margaret, enough time to turn the centrifugal force into full-on flight, as he was flung by Margaret and soared nearly thirty feet across the room like a cannonball into Bartok, knocking him over in a flurry of sheet music and tipping the piano bench backwards, dumping him on the floor and disabling him.

A knife skittered across the ballroom floor after falling from the now open piano bench. Oleg wasted no time in grabbing it and menacing Tiller with it. Tiller responded with a smart double drop kick to the head, putting Oleg down for the count.

There was a strange blurring sensation and doubling of the agents’ vision for a moment, during which Bartok appeared to divide like a cell into two beings. One of them wore a white suit and snakeskin boots. He had a blonde pompadour, eyes like literal dead cathode ray televisions, and a mouth like a crocodile without the scales. The other had a two foot pink mohawk, a spiked leather jacket, and instead of eyes he had a horizontal slit that went the full width of his face and glowed with the insectoid orange of arc sodium lights. The “Hostile Personality” had finally been exposed!

I cannot recall all of the action that followed, but I do remember:

Tiller blew one of Oleg's knees off, resulting in arterial spray across the floor. He went down himself somehow, I don’t recall how (probably from the drop kick). As the HPs attacked, he cast around for some way to go deeper and found it – a shadow under the piano that made no sense. He dragged himself to the shadow inch by inch, fingernails squealing across the tile of the floor, and, finding he could put his hand through the floor where the shadow was, heaved himself into it after indicating that he thought Shepherd and Dyer had the situation well in hand.

Shepherd and Dyer fought with the HP (HPs?).  Shepherd almost had a heart attack, having pushed his heart rate past the limit. He lost a point of Force. And then, out of nowhere, Dyer asked me if he had any 1000-year-old ginseng. In what turned out to be one of those beautiful serendipitous moments, earlier on in the day when I was making the snack table, I had put ginger down as one of the tastes. My wife in her infinite wisdom told me to change it to ginseng. The coincidence was too much for me.  It looks like maybe the collective unconscious is real. YES, Dyer had ginseng, in the form of one of the snacks, absolutely. YES absolutely, he could give it to Shepherd. YES, it would protect Shepherd’s heart the next time he blew a dice roll and almost had a heart attack. And indeed it did, which resulted in Shepherd being able to pin a Lacuna device to one of the HP entities, while Dyer took care of the other.

Victory!

At this point, Control tuned back in, though static was heavy, talking directly into the agent’s minds, basically screaming at them to

///// EJECT AGENT! EJECT NOW! Y0U AR3 IN DA…. I REPEA….3J…EJECT N0W! ….1N DAN ///////

Neither of them trusted Control much at this point. And I think they both felt like they might owe Margaret at least a casual glance around for her nephew, who never turned up. So they ignored the order.

Perfect.

This pushed Static to the point where I could release the Spidermen.

Shepherd and Dyer heard footsteps, and saw the gleam of eyes, far too many eyes for the faces in the darkness of the stairwell. They heard voices talking in what might be Russian.

Dyer and Shepherd hastily coached Margaret, who was bawling, to build a mind palace of her nephew, whilst the agents would build a mind palace of her, and in this way they could all escape together.

They knew it was bullshit I think, and that it wouldn’t work, but they were out of time. (A quick note here, if I were running a campaign, I would make Margaret a recurring Personality, and when she saw Shepherd again she would say “I KNEW you would come back for me!”) As two of the Spidermen entered the ballroom, holding weird, almost laughable tiny little guns (that PULP things) and ordering the agents to Stop and Come with Us, Shepherd and Dyer ejected.


We cut to Tiller.

He is standing in a room much like the one above, but instead of black, the whole thing is done in shades of burgundy red. There is a door in front of him, pillowed with tufted red velvet except for a gleaming golden plaque in the middle.

He decided to enter.

At this point, I gave him a choice: Do you want to tell me what happens now? Do you want me to tell you? Or shall we leave the whole thing a mystery?

In the same way that the game felt like a gift to me, I want to pass it on. So I will not reveal what the choice was or what happened. This is a gift to you – something for you to wonder about if you weren’t there. Hopefully something that inspires you to imagine your own ending.

But, what I will reveal is this. When Shepherd and Dyer sat up groggily on the Slab, rubbing their eyes and looking about, they could tell that there was a lot of befuddlement on the part of the Control team, and they could hear Arkwright saying “What happened to him? What happened to him?” Tiller was nowhere to be found.

The awards ceremony was low-key, but all the important people at the Company showed up to see Arkwright, Shepherd, and Dyer honored.

Tiller’s name was not mentioned…at least in any official capacity.



Play Lacuna.

You can find all the material I used to run this game on google drive here.

The New Innocence and Writing Without Fear

 

“The problem of the hero going to meet the father is to open his soul beyond terror to such a degree that he will be ripe to understand how the sickening and insane tragedies of this vast and ruthless cosmos are completely validated in the majesty of Being.” – Joseph Campbell

There is a band called Praxis – they are honestly a supergroup – Buckethead, Brain, Bootsy Collins, Bernie Worrell are the main players, along with Bill Laswell and a number of other musicians. All of these guys are really amazing musicians – Bootsy and Buckethead in particular are once-in-a-generation Mozart-level geniuses at their individual crafts of bass and guitar respectively. They do mainly instrumental work and in this work influences from jazz and classical and funk to death metal can be heard.

All their stuff is pretty good, but there’s a couple of tunes that are real standouts. One of these is a piece called “The Interworld and the New Innocence.” I first heard it close to thirty years ago and it still makes the hair on my arms stand up; an analysis of it is really not totally necessary here, but it is an unearthly combination of longing and undeniable drive that I find incredibly beautiful.

Perhaps in part because the song is so good, but I think also for other reasons, the phrase “The New Innocence” stuck in my head the first time I heard it and would not leave. I wondered about it. What did it mean? Why did it resonate so strongly with me?

When I began to write again, my path to the art was beset by fear; I often feel isolated and like the people around me do not understand me, and I often feel as though I cannot make myself understood; in social situations, especially, the words simply don’t come fast enough. Many of the most compelling experiences of my life involve situations and behaviors that have negative social currency or behavior I am not especially proud of – addiction, homelessness, involuntary institutional commitment – dishonesty, violence, dysfunction, sorrow – in short, though I feel I have lived a full and interesting life, it involves experiences that societies at large and people in general want very little truck with. It's made me extremely self-conscious and in many ways I often find myself frightened to be authentic with the people I am surrounded by socially, save for a select few who I treasure. It is very easy for me to carry this fear over into my writing.

Why is that? I think there are several reasons. One very obvious one is that our writing is judged and we are judged by it almost right away, as soon as we enter the school system. Is this paper deserving of an A? Perhaps not. Perhaps it is a failure and we get the dreaded scarlet F. I think this teaches us to judge ourselves as well and this is, in large part, where it begins. Or at least probably where it began for me. I came to think of writing as a way to win approval or disapproval. Columbine hadn’t happened yet, or I probably would have wound up in even more trouble, but some of my poetry, stories, and artwork in high school landed me in sessions with the school principal or counselor, who expressed “concern” over my “disturbing” artistic efforts, though of course most of my peers thought it was awesome shit.

The thing about writing with fear is that it introduces the kind of self-censorship that encourages an author to hide things. Inevitably, those things are all the universal ones – that is, all the important true and human ones.

I remember hearing a quote from Cormac McCarthy, something to the effect that drinking is an occupational hazard of writing. Note that McCarthy was known as a teetotaler. This made sense to me almost immediately when I heard it. In my younger days, I relied on alcohol to lower my inhibition to the point where I felt I could write without fear.  I took a very long break from writing.  At some point I realized what a shit carnival I was making of my life and these days I do not drink, but I’ve had to relearn how to approach the page without feeling self-conscious and frightened of judgement, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I am trying to push through those feelings and get to the heart of human experience in spite of them. Why? Not because it is therapeutic; it isn’t. At least not for me. Writing in this way makes me feel horribly vulnerable and exposed and open to ridicule. As if my whole ass is being presented purely for the purpose of people pointing out what a weird shape it is and what the ugliest bits are. So why do it?

For me, I think it is because it is the only way I have to get at those human things in my writing.

So these days, when I find I am thinking about writing something and feel like “people will think you are weird,” or “you’ll be rejected because of this,” or “people will associate you with this thing which is fucked up,” I know that's the thing I have to write.

I have come to think of this approach to writing as “The New Innocence,” which is really just a pretentious way to say that I am trying to write without fear of rejection or ridicule. There is an incredible and paradoxical power in innocence, I find. One of my old martial arts teachers had this saying that the only thing more dangerous than a black belt was a white belt. The Zen mind really is the beginner’s mind, open to all things without judgement. White belts might do something incredible simply because they don’t know NOT to do it or that they cannot do it. Again, thinking back to very early training, at one point my instructor had me practice sidekicks for a bit while he worked with some other students. I went ahead and did what I was told, and at one point I threw a kick that made the whole leg of the gi stiffen and there was a loud “pop!” and my instructor looked around and finally turned to me and asked incredulously “was that you?” I nodded and he said something like “I could tell from the sound that what you did just then was perfect execution. What you did just then, you want to do every time.” Of course, once I was told that, I couldn’t make it happen again for the life of me!

What is the power of innocence? The power of innocence is absolute authenticity. The real things in us that cannot be denied or argued with. It is the eternal, the expression of our humanity. When we are authentic, we own ourselves as human beings with all the beauty and ugliness inherent to our condition. It is so fascinating to me that the core of us is at once so soft and harder than diamond!

Society at large doesn’t really have a place for that kind of authenticity. And that’s ok. I’m not sure we are capable of the kind of total authenticity I am talking about with more than a few people at a time – it’s exhausting! At least for me. But one place we can be that way (if we allow ourselves) is on the page, and when we are, I think it can transform what otherwise might be a completely mundane experience or topic into something more than the sum of its parts, into something eternal and universal that I think other human beings cannot help but recognize.

I’m not certain how to end this little essay, but I want to talk about what I think is possibly the greatest lesson my mother ever taught me, because I think there is a connection here somewhere. That lesson is simply this:

When you love someone else, genuinely love them, you are never diminished by the experience. It my not be reciprocated. It may be painful. It may make you feel small and weak. But you are never truly rendered small or weak thereby. It is only ever an experience which ennobles one’s soul.

I said earlier that the experience of writing without fear makes me feel vulnerable, like my body is on display to be lampooned and ridiculed, but that’s not exactly right. It’s much, much closer to the feeling of saying “I love you” for the first time to someone you are not certain will say it back. Someone who might instead say "Yeah, you're fun to fuck," or "You make me laugh," or the worst, "I like you too."  I think in its own way, trying to write without fear is like saying “I love you” to the whole world.

Actual Play! - Lacuna Part I 2nd Attempt

OK, so first off, Lacuna turns out to be every bit as fucking awesome as I thought it might be. Play Lacuna!


When I posted last about Lacuna, I invited people to let me know if they were interested in playing and to my utter surprise I got a quorum who seemed like they were ready to play - I was so, so pleased. We agreed to three sessions – essentially a slightly extended one-shot. Initial scheduling was fairly painless (of course, it didn’t stay this way, it never does – I’m convinced more RPG games wind up as corpses at the hands of the scheduling demon than all other C.O.D.s combined – but I think we managed to work it out). While I was prepping I wound up stopping by the memento mori theatricks website and saw that since I’d last really looked at it, there were a couple of updates to Lacuna in the form of Company Handbook 3.0 and Read Once and Destroy. Company Handbook 3.0 is a rules and character creation update, and just as with Lacuna Second Attempt, there are contradictions from the last source, things that are unexplained or confusing, and things missing. I am near positive that this is at least somewhat intentional. I may say more about why when we finish.

Read Once and Destroy is a sourcebook on the different districts of Blue City. It adds a few additional lines to the sketches drawn in 2nd Attempt but it’s about the furthest thing from a high def picture of the environment as you can get. Again, in my opinion this is all intentional. Still, it was helpful.

Kickoff was set for 6/13/23.

The morning of 6/13, at least near me, was perfect for the game - cool and overcast with light rain throughout the day.  This turned out to be the the day Cormac McCarthy died.  Weird, considering he's been an influence on at least three of those involved (I think probably all of us to some extent).  And just because I've always wanted an excuse to link it and now I have one, see Screwhead's brilliant Shattering Lead article for at least one of these influences.

I think the old man's ghost might have flown over us while we played. In his honor I am going to try to do this whole post without using a semicolon.

I want to gush a little about the group I wound up with.  I got so incredibly lucky with this group, it's an amazing group of people and players.  I told each player that I would enjoy seeing a picture of their agent if they wished to post one and all of them wound up giving us something, which I include below.

In no particular order:

• Max from Weird & Wonderful Worlds is playing Agent Dyer

• Screwhead from Was it Likely is playing Agent Arkwright

• Ènziramire from A Most Majestic Fly Whisk is playing Agent Shepherd

• Dave/Her Christmas Knight from Grand Commodore and Fierce Firelight is playing Agent Tiller

LOOK at that list! Most of the folks who stop by this corner of the internet with any regularity are probably familiar, but go read their stuff if you haven't already. These folks are among the most intelligent and creative human beings I have ever had the good fortune to stumble upon. If these guys were entries in the old monster manuals, the frequency would be unique, the number appearing 1, and the intelligence would be fucking supra-genius. Me? I am a slow old man who just learned how to pronounce chitin properly after 40 some odd years of saying it wrong in my brain (and probably out loud on more than one occasion).

It was kinda fucking scary to run a game for these guys!

But luckily, these folks are socially just as brilliant as they are intellectually and they took it easy on me, plus Lacuna is the kind of game that is REALLY HARD to fuck up. Honestly, though it leads with a noir punch, this game is a Rorschach blot that can be whatever the group decides they want – anything from a Superhero game with guys flying around and shit to something out of the Matrix or something with PKD-style twists that make you question what’s “real” and what might not be. The group is creating a fiction together (as is the case with all RPGs) only here, it is also explicit that the agents are in a dream within that fiction. So they can at least try to do anything they want, though they are supposed to keep a low profile as much as possible. I stuck with a noir-ish theme to start with – a woman in trouble, a little rain, long shadows, and the players were perfectly happy to go along with me, though there was plenty of comic relief.

There were also some lovely dreamlike moments. Among the highlights from Session 1:

Agent Dyer encounters her doppelganger and flatters the hell out of her. She also pays someone in cucumber slices.

Agent Shepherd tries to get through a crowd – he wades in and tries to push and shove his way through, but it seems like he can’t get through them no matter what he does. This was actually a great moment, I thought, in that it was so reflective of dream experiences. After he jacked up his heart rate significantly, I let him through using his umbrella to stab at people in his way.

Agent Arkwright arrives in a hotel room with a dead woman on the bed and someone knocking at the door. She stuffs the body in a closet, answers the door to find an obsequious cop, and manages to bribe him with baseball cards.

Out of nowhere, Agent Tiller has a 2-3 minute monolog about descending into the deep ala Greek heroes and the creation of “psychic eunuchs” (his words not mine) in pinning Hostile Personalities. Holy fuck. Wish I had it recorded!

I actually kicked the game off early with character creation, treating that as the Mystery Agent Exam and setting up a Discord server with some channels for company announcements and whatnot to try to put people in the right frame of mind.  This is actually an important part of the game, IMO, most especially in terms of who each agent's mentor was.  But time was limited, and I thought I could work this part in beforehand, so the players arrived with their Agents created.  Just as with the rulebooks, there is not much to this, and again I think this is probably intentional - more on this when we finish, possibly.  

SO: Session One. The agents are on their first dive. I spent a bit of time setting this up and introducing them to their Control team. Their mission is to pin an HP named Bartok Freidkin.  Control gave them briefing materials.  If I were doing this face to face, I would have prepped a manila folder for each player.  Every agent got the below "wanted poster" as well as two other pieces of material, pdfs showing (if not really explaining) the "transverse liminality effect" the HP has on the environment, and a transcript between the HP and an anonymous interviewer.

One of the agents (I will not say who) got an extra piece of briefing material.

I'll throw up a google docs link with all the stuff I prepped for this after we finish if there's any interest.  Hell, I'll probably do it even if there isn't any interest.

The agents get on the Slab and “wake up” in various places in the Hotel in Café Station Plaza. Arkwright is in a hotel room with a dead woman, who looks at first glance to be a suicide. She's dressed in what I think of as "East German Spy Chic."  They agents manage to find each other and do some additional investigation on the dead girl.  They find some strange details.  However, outside of the blood spatter patterns being wrong for a suicide (it looks to them as if someone sat on this woman’s chest and pinned her arms with their weight, then shot her in the forehead) this is inconclusive and so they decide to move on and search for their target. They extricated themselves from the hotel, spoke briefly with the recurring Personality Clarence Boscow, and, on instruction from Control, bought some things from him.  This is where Dyer, in what I thought was an inspired bit of play, offered to pay in cucumber slices. They picked up some umbrellas (for the light rain falling), Saguaro cigarettes (coppery undertaste, otherwise like a cross between a clove and a Marlboro red) and some chips – the chips featured something that could be a melon or could be a sea urchin on the bag and tasted bizarre – described as too organic, kind of gamey. Somewhere in here Control (accidentally?) referred to them as “decoy team” instead of “alpha team.” Arkwright slipped away and tried to get more info about this, but Control was kind of…sarcastic and unforthcoming about it.

They figured out a bit about public transport and using the tram they went to Jupiter district in search of the Red Café (a place mentioned in their briefing). That café has a low constancy index (which is to say, it’s rarely “there”) so I rolled a 6 sider and told myself on a 1 it would be there. It turned out it wasn’t present on this dive, so the group got back on the tram and headed to Kennel Run, to the dog track. This was another element that came up in the briefing – the Hostile Personality they were supposed to tag mentioned liking gambling and the dog races. As they did so, they saw what looked to them like another team of Mystery Agents standing there as they pulled away.

They scanned the crowd and talked to a clerk who told Shepherd that their quarry might be in the actual Kennels, where it was implied there were illegal dogfights. Tiller found an entrance into the bowels of the track as well as a newspaper that featured a picture of woman who looked uncannily like the dead girl in the hotel (with a guy who was described as "looking like her handler") as well as a tribute / obituary to a writer, a not-Cormac McCarthy. They learned the woman was some sort of film star (kinetoscopes here). We ended session one with them gathered around the newspaper and staircase into the kennels, a staircase covered in colored shadows, blue near the entrance and fading to an impenetrable navy further in.  The agents contact Control, who approves temporary Deep Blue clearance and they prepare to descend.

Session Two kicked off with Takashi Miike wandering out of the shadows in the staircase down to the kennels and giving the Agents a slow once over. Neither spoke, and he wandered off into the crowd. I really wanted to have a chance to have him say “You could spend ALL your money down there,” but it was simply not to be.

The agents descended and found a couple of goons guarding a door. They were pretty easily dealt with, and the party took their weapons and proceeded more heavily armed. I considered having the goons make more trouble, but with only three sessions, decided against it, preferring to keep things moving along.

Inside, the agents found a kind of nightclub / mutant dogfighting gladiatorial pit. Scanning the crowd, they saw the woman from the newspaper photo sitting at a table with two men. Shepherd and Arkwright headed over to investigate while Dyer and Tiller checked out the arena.

What was fighting in the arena weren’t exactly dogs, though they had doglike qualities. But that wasn’t what interested the agents. Tiller, in particular, was obsessed with “going deeper." They spied a trap door in the arena, barely visible through cruor and gore that spattered the killing floor. Tiller grabbed a man circling the crowd and taking bets and said he wanted to replace one of the dogs. The man, totally unphased, said it wouldn’t be the first time and so it was arranged that Tiller would fight in the arena, with Dyer as his “trainer.”

Meanwhile, everyone at the table with the film star did their best Greedo and Han Solo impressions, with multiple guns drawn under the table. Ultimately the Agents got the better of the two men who were hovering around the film star, and extracted enough info to understand she was in trouble and needed rescuing. She slipped them a business card for the White Rose Gentlemen’s club, with some writing on the back indicating a place called Horizont, and then four words – Control, Conspire, Command, Confuse. While they gathered info from the group at the table, they watched Tiller blast away and kill two very Freudian dog-beasts before the trapdoor opened and he and Dyer dove into a pulsating red-and-black vortex where they slid along like people doing Olympic luge and were ultimately deposited into a strange apartment. Queue another brilliant fucking monolog from Tiller, about his mentor, his need to go deeper and the chrysalis he believes will begin to unfold in his mind and transformation he will undergo if he gets deep enough. They decide to check out the apartment and find that everything is fake. Fake flowers, ok not so surprising, but fake books on the bookcase? Just cardboard meant to look like a book cover with no actual pages? No utensils in the kitchen drawers, in fact nothing in any of the drawers or cabinets? Fuckin’ weird place, feels like a movie set. They poked around some more and opened a closet door into what looked like the hallway in an old Soviet bunker or something, thick and dusty concrete walls, floor, and ceiling leading off into the blackness (black instead of deep blue this time…)

I paused them here, and they didn’t get much of an opportunity to do much else during this session, and that is something I regret. I like to have players not go for very long without having a chance to DO something, and I made Tiller and Dyer wait a bit – too long for my liking, but hopefully they were still interested in what was happening with the other two agents and the information being gathered by them while they waited.

While Dyer and Tiller discoed with the dogs, Shepherd and Arkwright managed to get a decent amount of info out of the actress (named Margaret) and her director/handler (Oleg). It’s confusing stuff, though. Stuff about filming Mystery Agents and taking their memories and special cameras that make a substance / drug called Memorandum A rather than film. Oleg is a filmmaker, and Bartok is a hitman, both of them working for some shadowy figure named Klammen.  Margaret’s sister, Jennifer used to do this but stopped cooperating, finding the work abhorrent – she’s the dead girl from the hotel. For some reason, they must have one of these two sisters present when the "film" is made in order to extract Memorandum A.  They have kidnapped Jennifer's son / Margaret’s nephew, and are holding him somewhere and this is the only reason Margaret is cooperating. Shepherd and Arkwright see their counterparts disappear down the trap door, and decide it might be time to move themselves. Taking Oleg and Margaret with them, they started to leave the track, on their way to Horizont district, where Margaret is convinced her nephew is being held. As they got out of the bowels of the dog track and made their way to the exit, the world explodes.

OK, not the whole world, but that’s what it felt like to them; someone had planted a bomb at the racetrack and it went off and killed a LOT of people. The agents got lucky – they escaped relatively unscathed. Arkwright immediately puts her gun on Oleg before he can take off. Shepherd looked around for a means to contact Control, a phone. He found one and it was ringing. He picked it up, and on the other end he heard Control congratulate him and the team on a successful detonation. Concerned and confused, he pressed Control for more info but the line went as dead as some of the nearby bodies. Looking around at the decimation, dead bodies, people with terrible wounds, and seeing the gathering of folks in uniform, Shepherd and Arkwright hustled off to the tram with Oleg and Margaret in tow, and moved to Horizont station, where they exited in front of the Horizontal House, an apartment building with a very strange and complex elevator system - a kind of grid, where passengers have to push two different buttons to get the elevator to take them where they want to go. With Oleg forced to tell them that his apartment is 4C, our agents readied themselves to step inside.

And that’s where we ended session 2, with Tiller and Dyer in some freaky apartment about to descend further, and Shepherd and Arkwright just outside the Horizont House preparing to make entry.

No spidermen sighted so far.

Session three (which will be the final one) should be really interesting! The agents may get some answers about all this shit; there are several levels prepared for them. I have plans. But as with all RPGs, and especially with Lacuna, there’s a distinct possibility that my plans will be meaningless. I will post a write up and release the material I put together for the game when we finish (likely a couple of weeks from now). I actually would not mind running a campaign of this at all but I figured I was lucky to get three sessions.  If I had my way, I would probably have started things off without an actual Hostile Personality target.  Blue City is such a weird, weird place, and even with Read Once and Destroy there are so many massive gaps in what is actually there, which can change from one dive to another or even as the agents exit and enter a building if you want it to. If I had months and months to run this thing, I think it might be fun to have them do a couple of sessions of Green-level intel collection for the Mythography department just wandering around Blue City.

I said earlier that the game is like a Rorschach blot but I really cannot overstate how forgiving this game is to run. You have a couple of very simple mechanics that I have found to be quite effective so far (Heart Rate is really interesting) and basically total freedom to do whatever you want to with the material.  I think this group has enjoyed themselves thus far - I know I have.

I'll say it one more time - go play Lacuna.  It is fucking awesome.