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.
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:
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.
- 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Been having a fantastic time, thanks again for everything (now including this wonderful writeup!) Only thing I would add is Agent Dyer's laudable willingness to try the City's surreal dreamproducts. Smokes, chips...maybe there's a vending machine somewhere in the Horizont House.
ReplyDelete100%! That bit has been so much fun, I'm so glad there's someone with the fortitude to try these things - it has kept me on my toes!
DeleteYa it's been fun so far, thanks for running the game and for the writeup :). And yes Dyer is definitely up for a weird vending machine.
DeleteHmmm....OK, I have an *idea*....*Something* will be arranged!
DeleteSo glad you've been enjoying it, it's been great to have you along for the ride!