Railroads and Vaults

My comments on Miracle of Sound yesterday got me thinking about something. I mentioned how much I liked Open Air by Miracle of Sound, and how I liked how it compared against 'When the World Ended'

What I mentally compared it against also, was Fallout.  I find it bitterly ironic that the Russian post apocalyptic story is more uplifting. What's more ironic is that Metro's uplifting is basically Fallout's 'normal.' 

Metro's core conceit is that the bombs went off, and things were made very, very bad. The surface is coated in toxic gas, humans and mutants swarm through dingy dark tunnels that are the only barely survivable areas. Humanity is reduced to licking moisture off of walls and eating rats and lichens. Filth and misery pile up everywhere and the tunnels are ghost haunted because people fear that the afterlife itself was blown asunder by the apocalyptic exchange of weapons.

Fallout's conceit is that cartoonishly evil governments fired rockets at each other motivated by greed and blew everything up.

In Fallout, in half of the games you're a dweller in a vault, a place meant for survivors to hide out and then come out and restore the world. The vaults are mostly clean, bright, and well maintained. They have food, shelter, pool tables, and other amenities, and when you step outside, its post-apocalyptic crapshack, with people living in ramshackle houses, even three hundred years after the bombs have dropped.

Fallout is shackled to its aesthetic.  Metro conversely has people who were alive when the bombs fell, and who remember the world before. The big differences come from Exodus though. In Exodus the protagonist of Metro discovers that its only Moscow (which was nuked directly) which has air you cannot breathe and a surface blasted clean of all life save for mutant abominations. 

The Metro people find a train, and they ride outside and find that they can breathe the air, find that animals, plants and the like are still growing, they find more humans who are trying to live in the post apocalypse. Coming out of the vaults of the Metro and discovering a damaged but LIVING world is a sea change in tone for the series. They thought that humanity was going to die in the cramped dark, swimming in human excrement, with even their ghosts trapped forever. But it turns out there's hope outside, a chance to start over anew.  The tone becomes one of optimism and looking forward because they're coming from a destroyed world to a merely broken one.

The russians in Metro, despite the bombs dropping about thirty years prior have already started building new buildings, reclaiming old ones, and generally know how to make a roof that keeps the rain out, unlike the folks in Fallout after three HUNDRED years. 

Fallout has you coming from your secure, safe, underground vault into a place that's irradiated, hopeless and destroyed.  You then have to fix whatever the problem of the game is, but the tone is one of loss, it pessimistically looks back. 

The irony for me is that irradiated, mutant infested craphole sums up both surfaces, but the Muscavites are overjoyed whereas the Vault dweller is terrified.  Kind of interesting to me for reasons of tone, but also of how looking forward as opposed to looking back can drastically change your outlook.

Spook's Review: Miracle of Sound, Level 10

As I've said before, its my blog and I like to babble about all kinds of random stuff.  My previous Spook's review was detailing Far Cry 5, and what I viewed as its positives and many sins.

This time, I'm switching to the musical side of things.

Miracle of Sound is Gavin Dunne. He's a musician who I've been listened to for well, ten years now. He's very productive. And while some people think that a musician who cranks out songs so rapidly might be untalented, I think he just likes being paid.  And that's always a good mark in an artist.

An artist who wants to get paid is an artist who wants to produce a product that people want.

Miracle of Sound's 'Level' albums are pretty much entirely based on Pop Culture or Video Game themes. As Dunne's matured as an artist however, he's moved from songs that track a bit too directly to their source material to ones that merely capture that feeling. I think this is a positive. 

As an example, way back on Level 1, he had a song which was called 'Commander Shepherd' and was based on well, Mass Effect and made express mentions of the various characters and aliens from that material. 

Conversely, songs from Level 10 like 'A Thousand Eyes' or 'Open Air' are obviously songs about Bloodbourne or the Metro series, if you know what those series are. Otherwise one is a haunting, creepy song and the other strangely uplifting.  That's to say that while Level 1 was video-game-music, this is music about video games. And that's a major positive.

One of Dunne's spectacular talents though is his ability to reward continuity. As video games and other media have multiple interations, he's found a way to link the various Metro, Assassin's Creed, Witcher and other pop inspired songs through the use of expertly layered leitmotifs and lyrics.

'Open Air' is one of my favorites from Level 10 because of how it harkens back to the 'Day the World Died.' One is a song about the fundemental despair of the Metro universe, and then the other feels like a relief, and a shining light of hope.

Mr. Dunne also excels at capturing the feeling of each world that inspires his music. This means that his songs tend to have a diverse tone and feel, that makes each of his albums, and Level 10 in particular, feel like you're listening to more than one artist.

Buy this man's music. 

The Retrospective Campaign: The Curse of Frank Herbert

Like many DMs out there, many nerds in general, I'm a fan of science fiction. 

Like some of the older nerds, I cut my science fiction teeth on stuff like Lensman, Dune and Slan. I don't remember much of Lensman (I need to pick it up and re-read it) I do recall that Lensman read like what I'd later identify as a 'light novel.' 

Slan is a discussion for another time, but then there's Dune.

Dune was a book that made a big impact on me, and had a bigger impact on my world design for good and ill.

Notably, Frank Herbert put a positively massive amount of backstory and details in the Appendix of Dune, because his primary story didn't waste time with explaining to you what things like CHOAM, the Bene Tleilax or such were. The story just dropped the terms like you knew what they were and kept running.  In terms of pacing, this is great. However, its contributed to the reputation the man has for the story being positively opaque on first viewing. He also had countless groups operating in intrigue against one another.

As a DM having countless groups at loggerheads all working independantly in a tapestry of plots and objectives can be helpful for staving off the 'they killed my bad guy too early' problem, but can also heavilly contribute to a sense among the players that they went to the swimming pool and found it almost shoulder to shoulder with other bathers.

One of my players developed a 'web of intrigue' to keep the various power players and their relationships and conflicts straight. 

As a DM its easy to get bemused as your players get mystified by not understanding the motivations of enemies, and how they can get so easilly confused by having multiple groups of baddies show up that seem to be working at cross purposes.

I think this is because for many groups, and many campaigns, the idea of the PCs vs 'the big bad' rings true.  The idea that all evil, all trouble, originates from one primary source is a common one in JRPGs and in many story-focused RPGs and CRPGs.

To try to ameliorate this I've tried to give the bad guy's certain schticks and tells (like a group having a specific group of humanoid servants they use or the like). 

I still wonder sometimes though if I have a complexity addiction when nearly every campaign's party has a web of intrigue, or a journal, or a diagram of enemies, allies and unknowns and their changing allegiances.

The Retrospective Campaign: Its Not As Bad As It Seems

Another major take away from the campaign I learned, or rather relearned is that well.. The players don’t see the flaws, just the product.

There was a part where my players were racing through the darkened corridors of an ancient starship, forced to fight through legions of evil weapon-ghosts while pursued by a being of pure hate and needing to contend against technological horrors before finally coming to grips against the dueteroantagonist and the worse-than-demon evil creature that was assisting her.

In my head I was picturing the dark corridors, a mixture of agoraphobically open and surrounded by the press of enemies and the necrotic flesh of the betrayed dreamers of ages past, or racing through narrow corridors fighting the corpse lit atrocities of past weapon wielders in tiny, dark chambers.

And it turned into well..

Me having to make maps using the Dark Omen set from Chrono Trigger, a few odd tokens here and there, and people making Ultima references when one of the opponents (A Pathfinder Gray Goo) was construed as them being attacked by THE FLOOR.

The battles were tough, but overcome. And when the bad guy was defeated through a mixture of weathering her nonsense and making appropriate conversation checks and I felt defeated. I was worried I hadn’t properly conveyed what I wanted to. My reach exceeded my grasp! My animation budget ran out and I had to use quick shots of Japanese kanji and have two of my characters stand on an elevator for two minutes without a frame change.

The players loved it though. Unironically. They loved the fight with the floor. They loved being chased up an elevator shaft by a Nightshade. They liked the pressure of a certain number of turns ‘til disaster.

They felt the final battle was climactic and awesome.

And the reason for this came from one of my players. They weren’t inside my head. They didn’t see what I failed to accomplish. They only saw what was actually there.

The important take away on this is that while you shouldn’t cut corners, the players will appreciate what you do give them. You want to give them the Michellin star treatment, but you’re not that good. Not everyone has the time, budget and like to give the Hollywood D&D experience. You need, as a DM, to learn to not only incite, but also trust in your players’ imaginations.

The Retrospective Campaign And Where Spook's Been

Well there’s been a lot going on  in my life in the last six months. Work, that thing that provides the money that I use to buy things to eat and such, has been a bear. Also, all of my work for SKM it seems is going for naught as the players have moved on to other stuff.

I still plan on finishing the rule set and trying again eventually. I put this much work into it, and I’d feel bad about trying to sell it since I don’t want to step on people’s proprietary toes.

However, as I want to have actual content for people to read.. So I’m going to unpack my experiences a bit in this and a few other posts..

Firstly, the background though and a full summary of the campaign.

The game started a few years ago, it was a Pathfinder game that started shortly after the Advanced Class Guide came out. We started with, what’s honestly, too many players. About eight of them.

I’ve previously detailed the total party composition back in the post ‘Campaigns I have Run’ back..well..last year. Yeesh, it’s been that long?

Anyway, the premise of the campaign was the heroes having to deal with two primary threats, defeating them, and in so doing progressing the story of my campaign setting a bit more.

As this is the first post I plan to make about this, I want to unpack the concept of how to plan a narrative campaign. I bring this up because well, a lot of people these days are focusing on a return to the sweet wonder that is the OSR and its purely emergent storytelling. Some players still want the narrative planning experience. And the trick to that is to figure out what your main themes are.

Themes, you see, are more important than events. You end up riding the plot train a bit too thoroughly if you decide to have your players re-enact your badly written fiction instead of letting them play and get engaged on their own.

Themes also assist you in determining how events play out, what will ‘happen next’ and so on.

A guiding set of themes I built this campaign around were ‘The Importance of Letting Things Go,’ ‘Death Is Not The End,’ ‘Change,’ ‘Things Passing Away’ and ‘There Is No Such Thing As Being Neutral Between Good and Evil.’ Almost all of the villains, in one way or another, were focused on trying to hold onto things they shouldn’t have, control, power, love, and so forth, and the misapprehension of a lesser good for a greater one, is one of the classics for making a villain who’s an utter jerkass but who you can still understand.

The beauty of building from themes (as opposed to from a map, or a plot) is that it lets you roll with the punches quite well, and you can adapt to a lot more possible events (player caused and emergent) while still knowing what you want to get across.  A course correction to make sure a given NPC stays alive, or dies, or has a big noble last stand, are generally jarring to a player, but if you’ve done your work on consistently theming, then when events seem to keep resulting in consistent occurrences based on those themes, it’ll actually reinforce the importance of player agency.

The theme will also help you when it comes to dungeon designs, objectives, and so forth. In a long campaign you’re going to have to make stuff on the fly. It’s just how it works.

To the Courts: On the witness stand

A major problem that DMs have with mystery and intrigue situations, is the question of liars.

Players tend to believe information NPCs tell them, even when its bad guys, because all of the information being provided by the NPCs, in a way, comes from the DM. As the DM is the one who provides the world for them, it’s understandable that they have trouble taking into account that a mouthpiece of the guy who basically is their eyes and ears, might be totally BSing them.

In my experience, I’ve noticed that players have a binary approach to the prospect of lying NPCs as a result. Some decide if a guy is trustworthy or not, some think that evil people always lie, and some just assume whatever information they hear is somehow correct. What a lot of players really have trouble with, is inconsistencies.

The Innkeeper’s daughter from our prior scenario, she might genuinely not know where the Accused was while she was being visited by the town guard who claimed to see him. She might lie and say the guard was at his post, not wanting him to get in trouble or reveal their relationship. She thinks she saw the accused sneaking around outside at 7am (it was actually someone else). She’s entirely certain that the accused isn’t guilty though because she saw him in a situation where he could’ve used the supposedly stolen item. She does however think he was under a charm spell.

 She might be entirely ignorant about some details, lie about one topic, be wrong about another, be entirely forthright with a third, and be honest but mislead on a fourth.

This is because information is a webwork. Especially in a court case scenario where you have to figure out the holes in people’s stories and prove them. The daughter’s statement that she saw the accused at 7am for example might be grabbed onto by the party as a lifeline (tying in with the timeline stuff I mentioned before) only to have it organically yanked out from under their feet by the king’s prosecutor. This might wrongly lead the party to believe the character is lying about everything though, and that’s again, where the problem comes up.

The DM really, really needs to try to make it clear that characters know what characters know, and their personalities, worries, and relationships effect how they convey and interpret information they see. It’s important to get a handle on this because this is where the real meat of a mystery, intrigue or court scenario is.

In your notes, it’s helpful to make entries about characters indicating what they do know, don’t know, and what they’ll say or lie about. This is because players may interrogate on topics besides what you planned for, and those topics, unexpectedly, may in fact give the players the edge they’re looking for.