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

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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.