Lessons Learned – Ending One Campaign and Thinking about the Next

Fritz Schwimbeck

Could it be? A post that’s actually about gaming?

A couple months ago, we finished a campaign that I had been DMing since summer of 2019. It lasted about four and a half years. During most of that time we met either weekly or biweekly, though there were a few pauses here and there that took a month or two, mostly when I was scrambling to get the next adventure finished enough to actually play. I’ve had a few campaigns that lasted a decently long time – a couple that went over a year – but I think this was the longest. I’m gearing up to start another campaign with the same group after a half year pause, and I’m looking forward to it. It will be another 5e campaign, this time beginning in the Underdark.

To be honest, I don’t really like 5e. But it’s what this group wants to do, and I’m ok enough with it to run the game even though I’m not a huge fan of the ruleset. Last time around I managed to convert a few OSR adventures into 5e – Deep Carbon Observatory and Maze of the Blue Medusa specifically and I think I managed to make them work ok. My players loved those, anyway. I also ran a number of adventures I created from whole cloth, like Facility Designate 339-19.

The premise this time will be that the PCs have just escaped enslavement by the Illithids, and are lost in the Underdark with nothing but their loincloths. Perhaps one or two of them might have some sort of tool they were given for work – a pick, maybe a hammer or a rope. That’s it.

I wanted to take a little time to reflect on the last campaign and what I learned from it.


Commitment is Important

This might seem self-evident, but in order to have a campaign, you need people who are bought in and committed to showing up. It is *difficult* to get a group of adults together on anything remotely resembling a regular basis. This means that people actually have to make the game a priority. Not priority one, of course, but they have to be willing to forego other things in order to make the game. Everyone is going to have one-off instances where they can’t make it for some reason, and that’s totally fine, but in general, you need people who will show up. I have that with this group, as evidenced by the length of time it lasted and the very regular sessions, and I’m hugely grateful that I do; it’s the main reason I’m willing to compromise on the ruleset.


Plot and Player Agency

I did have a loose “plot” in my last campaign – a trap I think DMs like me who also love fiction fall into very easily - and ultimately, that plot wound up taking over and driving player choice in a way that felt unsatisfying to me. I think this was my single biggest mistake, though I have done similar things in the past without the same results and I really didn’t intend for the PCs to get locked into the “story” the way they did. A weird thing – it felt almost like my players *wanted* to be railroaded a little? Though if asked, I don’t think they would say that I railroaded them at all. Several times, I tried HARD to open things up and let them do whatever their characters wished, but they seemed to kind of stall out when I did so. It really felt as though they were relying on me to provide the impetus for their actions, and wouldn’t do much of anything until I offered the next “plot point” at which time they would glom on to that, even if there were other, very obvious, adventure hooks that had been presented beforehand. And I think this is part of why having a “story” in a campaign is so insidious in the way it begins to supplant both player and DM agency.

I never thought much about DMing before honestly - it was just something I did. Certainly I've heard much more from other DM's previous to this upcoming campaign than any other I have in the past, and I took what they had to say seriously, even though, it is, at the end of the day, just a silly game.  After pondering all of that, I think there are ways to structure play and campaign such that it encourages - almost forces -  the players to drive. I am not going to provide any overarching “plot” or “story” to drive action at all. There will be no apocalypse to avert and there will be no “big bad,” though the PCs might have rivals. For starters at least, the “story” will be one of simple survival - they have to figure out how to get food, water, and shelter, and initially even getting a piece of gear should feel like a big achievement, or at least that is the intention.

But they will be free to decide what to do - they can decide to stay in the Underdark or they can decide they want to try to leave (though if they opt for the latter, the campaign is liable to become the “story” of their journey to the surface world). The problem of survival doesn’t go away, but it may get easier. To begin, I will have a general map of the immediate Underdark area out to maybe 50 miles in every direction, and will create sites of interest on that map. I’ll create the first few encounter areas for the sites of interest but won’t fully flesh those out until they engage with one of them (otherwise the work will be endless). The world will be built out enough that they will immediately have several options among points of interest to engage with, and they get to decide how they want to engage with those points of interest – attack, speak with, sneak by, back off and go elsewhere, etc. Rinse and repeat this as they move through the bowels of the earth. The upshot should be that at each point along the way, it will be a player decision as to broadly what happens next, not a DM decision, while also keeping the amount of prep I have to do to something I can manage.


XP for Gold

In the past I’ve done a straight XP for overcoming encounters system, and that’s what I did last time as well. The “encounter” wasn’t always monsters and my players didn’t necessarily have to overcome the encounter through combat – they simply had to figure out a way to overcome whatever challenge was stopping them from achieving their goals. On a philosophical level, I like this. It has always struck me as kind of realistic – people grow from difficulties and challenges, after all.

I think this time around I’m going to either hybridize that with an XP-for-gold system, or use a pure XP for gold system. Noisms has a number of excellent posts that point out why this system is effective – here’s one that explores a number of other ideas as well and that I think is great reading for anyone considering running a D&D game.


Rolling Dice in the Open

I’m more and more a fan of this, and again noisms has written a couple of posts on why doing this is a good thing. I have gotten very used to and comfortable with the “DM screen” over the course of my “career” as a ref/ DM, and I still think some rolls should be secret – things where the player was not meant to know exactly what the outcome was, like hiding, for example ("Yep, you're pretty sure no one can see you!"), but I will roll anything where the results are immediately relevant in the open where players can see the result.


Combat

I had one guy who was brand new to RPGs and two relative newbies last time, but even so, I was really forgiving in terms of letting the group discuss strategy and ask questions during combat. This wound up having two effects – one of which was that combat felt bogged down (in a game where it’s already rather slow, especially at higher levels) and it also made the PCs more effective than they really should have been. To simulate the stress of combat more effectively I am considering implementing a couple of rules. First, the only person allowed to talk during a PC’s turn is that PC. Second, if you can’t tell me what your PC is doing in ten seconds, I am moving on and will come back to you after whoever is next in initiative order has had their turn. If you can’t tell me what your dude is doing in ten seconds, they aren’t doing anything, they are just goggling at the violence that has exploded around them.

I will not be tailoring encounters to the party’s “power level” – rather, the creatures they encounter will be much more a product of the environment / ecosystem, and if that means they stumble into something incredibly nasty, so be it.


Wandering Monsters

I was also really, really forgiving about wandering monsters last time. Again, I had some really new players, but at this point they know the game pretty well and all of them know going into this campaign that the gloves will be off. Wandering monster rolls are one of the rolls that will be made in the open. Also, similar to the point above about combat, if the characters are not in a secure location and they are conducting an hour long strategy session, I am rolling for wandering monsters. If they are discussing killing the monster in the next room and that monster has a means of hearing or detecting them and getting to them, they will probably be interrupted. I didn’t do this nearly enough.


Character Creation

I’m restricting certain classes, though some of them might be available if they are acquired diegetically (warlock, maybe). Wizards and clerics will be hampered initially by the lack of a holy symbol or spellbook, but everyone will be hampered by lack of gear to begin with. It will be up to them to find and or make the things they need. I’m considering races right now, and I’ll probably restrict those to human, dwarf, elf, gnome, halfling; I might also allow certain underdark races or variants like duergar or grimlock – I haven’t made a final decision. I’m also still vacillating on how I want characters to roll attributes. I am really attracted to the idea of 3d6 in order in a lot of ways. I feel like clever players instinctively use low attribute scores to help create a PC’s personality, and that ultimately this winds up being a more enjoyable experience for them even though many of them resist it. Last, I am seriously considering implementing a character “tree” or stable, ala Dark Sun, as this campaign is likely to be quite deadly.


Other Stuff

Aside from my own ailing mind, I will probably use 3rd edition’s Underdark and Patrick Stuart’s Veins of the Earth as my main sources for monsters, encounter areas, and general weirdness.

From where they start, they will be near a forgotten duergar tomb, a giant web hanging over a bottomless chasm, a beholder lair, a grimlock outpost/village (might use Skychasm or at least parts of it for that – if you are not familiar with it, go have a look, it is seriously good), and a boiling subterranean lake and series of hot springs heated by a magma chamber (kind of a tribute to White Plume Mountain). Some of these could make a decently defensible base of operations, if they want to do that.

I might well implement the alignment-changing resource shortage rules from Dark Sun as well.

Speaking of… I’ll leave on this note I guess: while thinking about all this and thinking about the Dark Sun campaign setting, I had this weird vertiginous moment where it felt like Dark Sun was a through-a-mirror-darkly kind of reflection of our own world. Anyway, it feels weirdly prescient and relevant now in a way that it didn't when it was first released and most D&D settings never do.  I may have to explore this further in future posts.

The Moon is a Sorcerer - Effects of Lunar Light or Lack Thereof

"At the end of the lunar cycle there are two or three nights of complete darkness, called the kamwonag’anga “the one seen by the practitioner.”  Only those with a ken extended through the knowledge and use of magical medicines can see the moon then; it is “there” but “invisible” to ordinary folk.  The moon is a “sorcerer” at this time, using its own remarkable powers to effect passage from the eastern horizon where its last sliver was observed to the western where the new moon will appear.  Fish and game may be seen in extraordinary numbers during these days of tenebrous nights, but as one man said, “the moon is a great sorcerer, he is bad, he closes the game and fish and prevents us people from catching them.”  What is more, lions and other dangerous beasts “wander about excessively” then.  Moonlight is auspicious and the personified moon “beneficent,” showing man his path through the woods.  For a few days, however, the moon is a “sorcerer” and denies man “his” light and the fish and game so tantalizingly, so tauntingly placed before him." - Perfect Lions, Perfect Leaders by Allen F. Roberts

 

The moon is a sorcerer ... when I first read the passage above, this phrase captured my imagination.  What does the moon do when he is a sorcerer?  What does he want?  Many cultures seem to have associations with moonlight and madness, but what about the lack of moonlight?  The time when the moon is invisible, when he is teleporting.  What is it like to be a practitioner of the art, one who is attuned to the moonlight and what it shows?  Roll a d8 or chose one of the effects below depending on the phase of the moon.

Full

1. The moon becomes a giant eye that stares incessantly at the party no matter where they go. Practitioners of sorcery are aware of this. Before announcing this effect, have all players who can use magic give you a taboo of some kind. Then reveal that the moon is watching them and they know they will be severely punished if they break these taboos or allow anyone they associate with to do so.  Follow through if needs be.
2. Invisible beings are sometimes caught in a moonbeam; they are easier for a mage to see.
3. One magic-using PC becomes maniacally obsessed with silver. They will go to great lengths to obtain silver that they see and take risks to acquire it – consider temporarily changing their alignment with regards to silver to Chaotic Evil (perhaps borrowing from Dark Sun’s water rules). They may steal from NPCs and even PCs if they think they can do it without being caught. If they have a silver weapon they will use this over all others; if they don’t have one, they will try to acquire one, etc.
4. The full moon descends to the planet and chases those who use magic.  If they are caught they are utterly destroyed.  The specifics of this (how big the moon is when it comes to the planet, how fast, if there is a way to defeat it and how, etc) are left to the ref.
5. The party becomes lost. Somehow they wind up in an area they cannot recall getting to – a place that is disconnected from the area they have explored. They recall walking along feeling slightly hypnotized, just putting one foot in front of another and following the person in front of them, not paying attention, lost in their own thoughts as they plod along, but suddenly all of them realize they are somewhere they have not been before, and they stop and look at each other – “I was following you.” “But I was following you!” In truth whoever was first in the marching order was following the moon.
6. The moon takes a piece of gear from all magic using characters in trade for its light. This piece of gear simply vanishes.
7. This moonlight, which is only visible to practitioners of sorcery, is attracted to particular people and “sticks” to them, so that they are illuminated with a soft glow for the duration of the night. They are easier to hit with missile weapons (+2 on rolls to hit) but shed light as the spell in a 30 foot radius. This is not dispel-able and is not affected by anti-magic etc. Roll some percentage for party members as well as those the party encounters to determine if the light is attracted to them in this way (or just determine it arbitrarily).
8. Sorcerers are able to see future events; one party member is selected and can ask the ref for the likely effects of a particular action once in the time from sunset to sunrise.

Gibbous

1. Under the strange light of the gibbous moon, the PCs look, sound, and act …. Different. Players swap charisma scores in some randomly determined way.
2. Sorcerers can see the strange marks which appear on a PCs skin when it is viewed under the moonlight. This could be a message of some kind, or it could be Aklo or written Theolal or a map or it could be nothing at all, just a strange patten caused by the PC resting their flesh against something. The marks may or may not be permanent.
3. The moonlight makes an object “come to life” – it becomes animate, conscious and able to speak, have opinions, etc. The animating force dissipates when the sun rises. This object is only animate to those with the power to see.
4. Sorcerers are more conscious of ambushes and the light makes them easier to see. The party is surprised half as much as is usual, and, if an enemy party has a magic user, the party surprises them half as much as usual.
5. A single time during the gaming session, a single PC sorcerer is able to detect ALL of the traps and tricks within sight range as they are revealed in the gibbous light (note the moonlight must shine upon these things in order to reveal them). If this ability is not used, it fades with the sunrise.
6. A ghost follows the party around for the night, visible to those with the power to use magic; it isn’t a “monster” as such, and can only impact the material world with much mental effort, and even then the effects are subtle. It might be able to whisper a word in a PC’s ear, or distract them at an inopportune moment. It has very limited poltergeist abilities – it cannot move anything heavier than a pound / half a kilogram. But it could potentially latch or unlatch a lock, or otherwise help or interfere with the PCs. The Ref can determine if this ghost is from someone the PCs encountered in the past – but it does not have to be.
7. Animals are inexplicably friendly towards the party, even those who might otherwise attack them or run from them.
8. If they concentrate, sorcerers are able to see through barriers such as walls if they are thin enough. “Thin enough” is whatever the ref says it is.

Half

1. The moon affects the value of coins. Roll a d4 – on a 1 or 2, they are worth only 50% as much as normal; on a 3 or 4, they are worth 150%. The value of the coins goes back to normal at sunrise, and the change is not obvious to the PCs; it only comes into play if they decide to buy something that evening.
2. At precisely midnight, time stops for everything and one except one random magic using PCs. This lasts for ten minutes, then time resumes its normal flow.
3. PCs feel hypnotized and possessed, as though an intrusive alien presence is influencing their actions. Players swap character sheets and play a different character until sunrise.
4. All written material becomes unintelligible to sorcerers under the light of the half moon.
5. Magic-using PCs become two dimensional for the night and are thus able to fit into the thinnest of cracks – they can thus slide under doors, into cave crevices, etc. However, they are incredibly ineffective combatants when two dimensional, since they have to adjust the angle of their attack in ways not at all familiar to them, and completely whiff three quarters of the time or more.
6. Spells fail a quarter of the time, and another quarter of the time they are twice as potent (in terms of effect, duration, etc).
7. There is an unusual and colorful indicator of the party’s route for the night. For example, butterflies that glow with moonlight follow the party wherever they go, or small black flowers sprout where they have stepped.
8. A mage can see the true nature of the world under the light of this moon. Such a reality is crippling, throwing the PC into an existential crisis. They are either paralyzed with the utter meaninglessness of it all (50%) or they suddenly see no sense in the survival instinct and will hurl themselves into danger no matter how foolhardy (50%).

Crescent

1. This light rubs against blades borne by obeah-men and practitioners and sharpens them until they will cut light.  Up to the ref if they implement this as a damage bonus or in a more narrative way.
2. Normally docile animals become aggressive towards mages, who are attacked by possums, or racoons, or deer, or domestic cats, etc.
3. The radiance of the moon makes one randomly chosen PC magic user recognized and adored by nearly all NPCs. They are famous and largely admired, though no one they speak with can tell them exactly why. A few NPCs might loathe the character and party, again for undiscernible reasons. In any event, they will be recognized, and an NPC might start conversing with them by saying, “oh my god, it’s YOU!” or “oh, it’s you.”
4. The light reveals vulnerabilities to the mage. The threat range of their critical hits is doubled.
5. The thin light of the crescent moon is surprisingly heavy – sorcerers are unable to stand, and may only crawl about on all fours until the sun rises.
6. Sorcerers are unable to heal while exposed to direct moonlight.
7. Invisible creatures are fully visible to mages. Visible creatures are invisible.
8. Any magic user who is under the effects of extreme stress (including combat) has a ten percent chance to begin randomly teleporting once per round (DM could use blink spell or something else as they prefer).

New

1. This moonlight is nonexistent and thus mages no longer need to use their muscles to hold up the light of the moon. They can use this muscle power for other purposes – refs could give a small bonus to overall STR for the night or allow a PC to complete some feat of str successfully once, even if it seems unlikely.
2. Sorcerers in the party are unable to see attackers. These are not invisible. It is just that the PCs cannot see them; they are hidden by the sorcerer moon.
3. A mage is able to see lies under the dark clouds of the new moon.  What these look like (and what they might be able to do) is up to the ref.
4. Dead sorcerers left under the empty night sky from dusk until dawn are resurrected at sunrise.
5. An important mage (PC or NPC) disappears and is nowhere to be found until a sliver of the moon is visible again.
6. The Gods are paying attention. Calls for divine intervention are twice as likely to be successful, and sometimes a god may be called even inadvertently by using their name.
7. From dusk until dawn, sorcerers are able to speak fluently with the dead.
8. Sorcerers can see secrets. Magic using PCs pick another player and state something general their character suspects of that player’s character. This turns out to be true in some way, though it may not be in an obvious or expected way. For example, Player A may say “Character A suspects that Character B is not who he seems to be.” It is then up to Player B to make that true through play; perhaps player B’s character is secretly in league with forces opposed to the party, or perhaps they are a permanently shapechanged animal in human form, or are, unwittingly, the prince or king of some obscure principality even though they are currently a pauper and vagabond.

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.

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.

The Best Game I’ve Never Played – Lacuna Part I 2nd Attempt

Sinister secret agents with shadowy employers and mysterious pasts. A bizarre landscape built from six- billion human minds. Arachnid-headed beings that guard a war-torn borderzone. And all the worst that Mankind has to offer, stalking the alleys and crumbling buildings of a place called Blue City.

Is it a dream? Is it a nightmare? Or is it just a game? And are you already playing?

It’s probably no secret I like weird stuff that delves into the subconscious. That’s why I think JAGS Wonderland is pretty phenomenal. I also really like noir atmosphere and style – at least in part what initially drew me to the Grand Commodore blog. Some years back I came across a game called Lacuna Part I 2nd Attempt and it is noir the way Slayer is metal and just bizarre. I fucking love it. I have never heard it discussed, and I have never played it, and kind of doubt I will have a chance to do so. But: if anyone out there is interested, let me know.

Lacuna has its start in a ‘zine called Daedalus, in the winter 2004 issue (I found a PDF copy – it was difficult, owing mostly to the MIT publication of the same name, but I was determined). It was written by a guy named Jared Sorensen. Here’s how the article starts:

“The first thing, the very first thing you have to understand about this entire blessed situation is that of the nature of the Mystery. Without this knowledge, you might as well be pissing into a bottomless bucket. Without this knowledge, nothing else is going to make any sense. The Mystery is the key.”

Sorensen means it. One of the things I love about this is how he uses a kind of adversarial ambiguity in telling you about the game (a bit more on this later). Take these lines:

“….there’s a great deal in this game that I simply do not wish to share with you.”

And:

“It is not necessary to understand the game in order to play it. There is an answer, but there’s a chance that it’s not the one you want.”

I fucking love shit like this. If David Lynch made a game, I think this would probably be pretty close. The gift of mystery is something I think is almost criminally underrated. People seem to like their narratives wrapped up with everything resolved and all questions answered, but I think the real magic is when there is room to wonder and theorize and think about something and not be certain.

Adventures are set in Blue City, for the most part, a kind of dream-city described as being “beautiful the way a sad girl can be beautiful – grey and lonely and lovely” – you can see the stylistic noir elements pretty clearly here I’m sure. I eat stuff like this up for breakfast. To elucidate the setting a bit further I’ll snip a bit from the game text here:

The term “Mnemonic Topography” was coined by the head of research at the Institute. Evidence pointed to several discrete levels of the subconscious. And much like the depths of the ocean hold startlingly different species of life, each mnemonic level carried its own unique “ecosystem.” On the “green” or topmost surface, short-term memory and emotions were the waves on the surface of the ocean. Easily seen, they were signifiers of currents and turbulence far below. Memories could be “skimmed” by a trained professional; much like a meteorologist can gauge weather patterns by studying cloud formations. Down below the surface, the “blue” level seemed to capture the majority of the research team’s interest. This unconscious realm of dreams and desires seemed to exist on the periphery of an entire world. One in which the dreams of one person were like dense fogbanks hiding a rocky coastline. The Map began to take shape. Deep within Blue City, places inaccessible to inexperienced travelers, were the levels classified as “deep blue.” When some subjects were brought back from parts of deep-blue with severe psychological problems, these areas were designated “black” and further exploration was prohibited except in specially monitored sessions. Black-level seemed to have some relation to nightmares and night terrors, an inhospitable environment with (psychically) crushing depths and hostile life forms. While charting out this dangerous area, a kind of trench was discovered…a fissure running along the “floor” of the mnemonic topography like a rift in the seabed resulting from seismic activity. This seemingly bottomless pit was called the Lacuna.

Basically, the players are Mystery Agents working for the Nasrudin Institute (government? maybe – maybe not, but I feel there is almost certainly a connection to this guy) attempting to investigate Blue City and the Lacuna, which is accessible in dreams. Blue City is inhabited by “personalities” and no one is really sure if these are people, or people’s dreams, or what exactly. So the players’ characters are asleep almost the entire time they are adventuring. This was written well before Inception, note. In some cases the characters might run into what’s called a “hostile personality”- a monster, which might be someone’s psychological demons – perhaps a real-life serial killer or school shooter, or maybe it is someone’s subconscious or unconscious desire to kill that is being enacted in a kind of grand drama in the collective unconsciousness. Who knows? We aren’t really sure what Blue City is.

The mechanics are really interesting; two in particular deserve special mention: Static and Heart Rate. Since the Agents are engaging in a kind of lucid dreaming, not actually engaging in physical activity, Heart Rate is how “health” is measured – if Heart Rate gets high enough, your agent can die in his dreams. But it’s vastly different than the “Hit Point” mechanic, as the exertions of the agents within Blue City will drive Heart Rate up as well, and you have different levels of Heart Rate – Resting, Target, and Max.

Another really clever mechanic called is called Static – this represents a number of things and is applied to the team as a whole. At its most basic, it’s the friction the mission encounters – if there are mistakes, egos get in the way etc, this can drive Static up. But it’s not always so mundane – other things can drive Static up as well, and it is used to represent the interference between Control (the folks back at the Institute who have organized the mission, represented by the Gamemaster) and the Agents (the players). Static can get so bad that Control becomes actively hostile to the agents. I think that at least some of Sorensen’s writing as well as the layout of the book is intended to give you a taste of Static – I mentioned the adversarial nature of some of the writing already. Something I have not talked about is the layout and art - spiders begin showing up with increasing frequency in the book – this starts subtly with perhaps just a long leg across a page, but as you progress through the different chapters (named after security clearances and also to some extent the parts of the mnemonic topography) there are more and more of them. I’m a bit of an arachnophobe (the giant spiders in Mirkwood in the Hobbit as a kid were woooooooo) so this may have been particularly effective for me, but I think it's nonetheless a little piece of genius.

Again, I love shit like this. The potential for the Gamemaster to be actually antagonistic towards the players reminds me a little of early editions of Paranoia (which I had a lot of fun with back in the day). It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but every once in a while as a DM, I get tired of being neutral and relish the opportunity to wade in a bit.  It's one thing to do it when you are role-playing a villain, but I always really liked the stuff in Paranoia about rolling dice and studiously not looking at them while telling the player what happens, etc.

Static can also trigger events – the gamemaster is encouraged to have a list of certain events relevant to the scenario they are running that happen when static hits certain levels (for example, one of the personalities the players know goes missing, or terrorists bomb part of the city, or it snows for the first time ever in Blue City, etc.)

There are also spidermen, and there is a Girl.

The spidermen wear vaguely eastern bloc uniforms and they are fuckin’ freaky. They have tiny guns that pulp people and sometimes they will try to capture an agent. No one knows why. They show up in response to Static but also: their appearance drives Static up.

We won’t talk about the Girl. It isn’t time yet.

I do not think Lacuna Part I is widely played. I have never heard anyone else mention it, and that is a shame. It is available for ten bucks at Memento Mori Theatricks.

20 System-Neutral Magical Drugs

Psst...c'mere kid...

Some drugs for your campaign! Hopefully these could be slotted in to any system that had magic or the unnatural in it. Substances with strange properties when ingested are rampant in fiction – Substance D, The Black Meat, Alzabo Juice, Semuta, Zu'ur, etc etc. Here are a few I cooked up for games. You can find many, many more over at the Center Cannot Hold in their Pharmacopoeia.

Go ahead and help yourself. The first one is free.

Disintegrator – This clear, tasteless liquid looks like water and is typically injected. It raises dex / str / con (or the equivalent in whatever system you use – all the physical traits, basically) to human maximum (18/00 or 18 etc) for about an hour and destroys some small part of the body forever (no save). It also gives the user a feeling of power – they are intellectually aware they cannot run through boulders and leap castle walls, but they damn sure feel like they can. Hence, it is extremely addictive. Also called Horrorface and Paddlehand for what long term users look like. D6 determines what bit is disintegrated. Fingers and toes go from the tip of the finger down.

1. finger joint
2. ear
3. nose
4. eye
5. toe joint
6. tongue

Blue Death – Usually taken intranasally, though it can be smoked, injected, or inserted into the rectum as well. The user “fits in” among low level undead – skeletons, zombies, ghouls, up through about the power level of ghasts will treat the user as if they were undead as well. In addition, the user experiences a sort of slow, tantric, melodic ringing in the ears. This is exceptionally comforting, imparting a languorous feeling of peace, but if the user is trying to concentrate on something else (anything that requires focused attention, like combat or translation of an inscription, etc) it is very distracting – there is a penalty to concentration, perception, and skill checks as DM rules. The user can also be turned as an undead of HD equal to their level. It comes in the form of chalky ultramarine chunks, and is typically crushed into a powder.

Blink –User begins randomly teleporting as per the “blink” spell. While the effect lasts, the user has a sense of exhilaration (something like a big drop on a rollercoaster or freefall) when the effect wears off, users are extremely disoriented (treat as confusion spell or similar). Moderately addictive.  This is a pale rose gas that is inhaled.

Bloop – This is a green liquid dancing with sparkles consumed orally. It produces a magical lighter-than-air gas in the user’s stomach, which allows them to gently float a foot or so off the ground and maneuver using the copious flatus also produced by the drug. It also causes hysterical fits of laughter, and potty jokes are much funnier than they would be otherwise. A bloop party is something to see, though not necessarily to smell, as the participants zip around a foot off the ground, farting and laughing.

Lifejacket - This drug typically looks like pale pink crystal, which is crushed and inhaled or cooked and injected. For the next week, the next time the user would die, they are instead spared with a single hit point. Also called Blood of Heroes and Widowmaker, it is extremely addictive due to the feeling of invincibility that results. Users often take it and then do something exciting but stupidly dangerous, like jumping from a cliff.

SDL – SDL stands for Sorcerous Dweomercrafty Liniment. This vaguely yellowish liquid is absorbed transdermally, or sometimes dropped into the eyes with a special glass dropper. For the next eight to ten hours the user trips balls, has true seeing as well as darkvision, and can speak with the thing on the d6 table below. However, you are otherwise incapacitated during that time – you can’t even really talk with fellow PCs – you are simply not making any sense to them. Relaying information gathered by speaking to whatever it is the PC can suddenly understand once the drug has worn off is extremely difficult, but possible. Not addictive, though it has a 10% chance each time it is taken to alter the user’s personality; this can be anything from simply making them slightly more open to new experiences to a spiritual awakening to a reversal of various core personality traits to insanity. If the thing rolled does not exist in present circumstances, the PC hallucinates it/them.

1. animals
2. plants
3. the dead
4. rocks and stones
5. the air
6. The Universal Consciousness Core

Battery – This amplifies the user’s bioelectricity to the point where they can use it as a weapon for d6 rounds, projecting it from their eyes. Treat these attacks as lightning bolts. The drug also imparts a feeling of frisson, a kind of anticipatory thrill. Additional doses create more powerful lightning bolts, but each extra dose has a cumulative 20% chance that the user will die of a heart attack or that his brain will be torn apart by the current. It is obvious when someone has used this drug, as blue-white bolts of St. Elmo’s Fire crawl across their body. The drug itself comes as small flakes of some dry, blue substance. It is smoked. Moderately addictive.

Glamer - Think of this as the ultimate tik-tok beauty filter; it beautifies the user to an amazing degree, but they are still recognizable as themselves. Often used by assassins and spies for the purpose of seduction. While the effect lasts (usually several hours) the user also experiences waves of well-being and self-confidence, but for an hour or so after it wears off, users feel absolutely worthless, and nothing can fix this except another dose of the drug. An inferiority complex may result if the substance is used long term. Moderately addictive. Also called Face or Mascara. To take it, a special poultice is made and applied to the skin, where the drug is absorbed transdermally.

Jelly – For the time the effect of the drug lasts, a user’s body takes on the properties of a liquid. They can ooze under locked doors (provided there is even the slightest space to flow through), be poured into different containers, etc. Typically this drug is in the form of an off-white powder that can be taken by inhaling or injecting it. The physical sensation of flowing is exceptionally pleasurable to most people, and thus this is mildly addictive. Woe betide the user who has a divided body when the effects wear off.

Elucidia – Users are able to read and speak any language and comprehend any artificial pattern with meaning (e.g. red/yellow/green traffic lights when they have never seen one before, or an Xbox controller when their universe doesn't have them, etc). The user feels mentally alert and perceptive and they are; however, users will also attempt to derive meaning from patterns that are meaningless or are totally mundane, and this can (pass a save or check of DM’s choice) lead to a form of paranoia. If this happens, the PC thinks everyone is out to get him and will flee from their own party members, fighting using deadly force if cornered.

Bounce – Refined from bloop, this turquoise powder is dissolved in alcohol and then taken orally. Users can jump up to 100’ in the air and are treated as if they are under the effect of a feather fall spell. The gas produced is highly flammable and the smallest spark can set off a firestorm or explode the user.

Paint – allows the user to change their appearance, per change self / disguise / etc. Also referred to as Mask. Moderately addictive inhaled purple powder, everything just seems a little more interesting while the effect lasts – the skies a little bluer, the grass a bit greener, people a little friendlier, etc. With continued use, the user's features become rubbery and stretched, droopy in a horrifying way.

Grin – This dark brown powder is indirectly smoked (it is placed on a sheet of something heated and the resulting smoke is inhaled). It produces a strong, euphoric rush and the user is healed of a large amount or all of the damage they have sustained. The euphoric effect lasts for no more than one hour, and comedown is a bitch – a deep depression often ensues. It is extremely addictive; addicts will cut or otherwise hurt themselves in order to gain the euphoric effects of the drug - it has no effect on the unwounded.

Ghost – This renders a user invisible and non-corporeal (i.e. they can walk through walls etc). In D&D terms, this might mean they can travel ethereally. There is also a refined version of Ghost termed Specter that allows astral travel. The user also experiences small waves of euphoria in the case of consuming either drug and so they are mildly addictive.  This is a white gas that is inhaled.

Remembrance – When the user takes this drug, he can absorb memories from the creature whose flesh he eats next. A little (or well, really, a lot) like Alzabo juice – ok, I’ll just face it, it’s exactly like Alazbo juice. There is a cumulative 5% chance per use that the user just cannot handle the memory absorption and goes insane, becoming catatonic or developing multiple personalities. This is a pink liquid filled with streaks of white light; it is ingested orally and tastes a bit like bubblegum.

Grunk – This black powder is rubbed against the skin, which it turns hard and knobby. Also called Scrut for the sound a fingernail makes scraping against the skin after it is taken. It improves the armor of the user considerably as well as being a mild stimulant. However, typically some of the skin stays hardened even after the drug wears off. Over time, this can get to a point where the user looks as though they have advanced epidermodysplasia verruciformis and will suffer all the debilitating effects of that disease. They will be in constant pain and have trouble moving or in some cases even dressing themselves.

Sorc - This strange drug is ingested by cutting a particular pattern into the skin with a specially consecrated dagger. It is also called Scar.  For the next half an hour the user develops an affinity with magic or psychic powers (Ref’s choice if both exist in the campaign world). Long term users are covered with scars. Each pattern must be cut into virgin skin – the larger the pattern, the more powerful the effect. In a D&D campaign, cutting a pattern into the forearm that is 2” in diameter might allow access to cantrips and 1st level spells for a few rounds, whereas cutting a pattern a foot in diameter across the chest or back might allow access to 8th or 9th level spells for 8 hours. Ref determines the damage the user takes while the pattern is being cut into them according to the system in play, but it should be commensurate with the size of the pattern.

Spell – as its name implies, there is no physical component for this drug. Instead it takes the form of a spell that can be cast, either on one’s self or on others. It is a potent stimulant, increasing dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin. For the next five to ten minutes, users are allowed bonuses on things like perception, search, and insight checks. These are from 5e, but should be converted to apply to whatever system you are using – for example in Delta Green these might apply to HUMINT or SIGINT (depending on the situation), Alertness, Search, etc. In OSR systems that may not rely on the dice at all, you may give the PC a hint if they are missing something. For example, if someone didn’t investigate the trapped chest thoroughly enough, “You begin to raise the lid, but hear a clicking noise like something being wound up.” Use your best judgement. If this is used on a PC more than once in a 24 hour period, they run the risk of going into intense paranoia. For some period of time, they will look at everything and one in the vicinity as an enemy of some kind and act appropriately; if a fight is hopeless, they will flee, if not, they will attack.

Prowl – an incredibly powerful stimulant, this blue powder can be inhaled, injected, or orally ingested. The user becomes totally aware of their own body and the periphery around it. This lets them move extremely quickly but with absolute silence – they won’t accidentally snap a twig etc. Attempts at stealth / move silently / sneak / etc are treated very favorably. They can also sneak attack / backstab as a thief / rogue of their level. If they are already a thief, this increases the damage they do to the next level.  An example using 5e rules: if they are 5th level fighter they would do an additional 3d6 damage while under the influence, but if they were a 5th level thief, they would do an extra 4d6 damage. They also get a bonus to initiative and are impossible to surprise. These effects last for an hour. The substance is very addictive – being more than peripherally aware of where every centimeter of your body exists is an exceptionally interesting and pleasant feeling and there are other uses for the drug – athletes and lovers use it as well. Comedown is described as though one were going blind or deaf over the course of fifteen or twenty minutes, eventually being completely blind or totally deaf. The drug turns the lips and the finger and toenails of a user a poisonous corpse-blue. On habitual users, this becomes permanent.

Block – This is made from leaves that have been dried and crushed. A tea is made from them which is usually a translucent shade of moss green. This is ingested orally. Someone who has done so is immune to the effects of charm, confusion, and fear, and cannot be stunned or poisoned for the next two hours. It also causes a narcotic drowsiness, which makes the user’s reaction times slower and makes them want to just lie down in a nice corner somewhere and dream for a while – in game, this can be a malus to initiative and sleep effects, as well as checks every so often to see if the PC is overcome with lethargy and just lies down for a while no matter what his comrades say or do.

...hmm.  Well.  Guess I better be going now, I see the city guard are headed our way. I'll see all of you later!