Call of Cathulhu Introduction

“Grandma, tell us a story,” came a chorus of high-pitched, mewling voices. Grandma looked over the kittens, each struggling for a prime spot in the basket on the library table. Winter in Vermont is cold, even inside, and none of the little ones wanted whisker or tail outside their warm bubble.

Grandma, a long-haired, graying calico, paced around the basket, looking over the stacks of books, fading forever into the darkness. “You’re not old enough, yet, for my stories.”

“We are, we are!” The kitten chorus echoed through the empty walls, bouncing around.

“You’re too young,” Grandma said again, primly sitting in front of the basket, licking a paw until they quieted down. “You will all be asleep before I start.”

“We won’t, we won’t!” They waited for her to finish smoothing her whiskers.

“You haven’t seen enough of the world out there,” she flicked her tail out the window. “In the darkness, beyond where we have you safely kept.”

“Tell us a story!” Grandma paced, leaping across to another table, where she turned again. She arched her back, stretching, before jumping back to the kittens.

“What do you know of the world? Any story is going to be meaningless to you.”

“We know about the humans,” said one of the kittens.

“And we know that there are things outside,” said another.

“Like other cats! And birds! And more humans,” said a third. “And… other things.”

“Do those other humans keep other cats,” asked the fourth. Here Grandma snorted, then sighed heavily.

“See? You are too young; the humans do not keep us. We keep them,” Grandma said, turning to the window again. “We keep them from the other things in your dreams. But, still. You are too young to understand. You won’t listen. A story would be wasted on you.”

“Tell us a story. We promise to listen!” The meows turned into a roar, until Grandma sighed and settled in front of the basket.

“It seems I’ll have no peace until I give you a story,” Grandma said. “So, listen now. Listen to how we keep them; how we watch them.”

---

Curl down, young kittens, and listen
A tale of wild cats gone missing.

They came to their clowder,
Under oak and spoke together.

First came Tumble, swift and fine,
Quick to act, and the first in line.

Next bright Bumble, sweet and gold,
Always brave and always bold.

Next came Rumble, stubborn and proud,
Un-catlike and very loud.

Next is, Mumble, first to speak,
Eyes blue as a spring creek.

Last is Jumble, who always dared,
Despite being small and scared…
---

A Call of Cathulhu adventure for 3-5 investicators.

New Basic Rules, A Quick Note

The new D&D Basic Rules are posted.

I expect I'll do a full read over the weekend and give you a lot more insight as I go. But, just after skimming the opening [which I'll re-read again], one thing stands out to me as kind of... awkward. Especially given the reason we moved AWAY from 3.5/3.0 to the 4E model was to fix the very problem.

Go read The Wonders of Magic section.

Though, the section on the Wonders of Magic makes me leery for our brave non-magical people. All of their examples are ways adventurers are screwed without their magical helpers. You need clerics or you will DIE. You need bards or you will be OVERWHELMED. Without wizards and druids everything is TEN TIMES WORSE. Even if everything is more balanced, someone may have wanted to say something about warriors and paladins being a protective shield in front of their more vulnerable members, just so it didn't seem like the warriors were just sort of there for other people to be awesome around.

GM Secrets: The Importance of Names

If you give any inconsequential NPC a name, he or she is suddenly the most important person in the session. If ever a PC asks an unimportant person's name, you are doomed. The adventure is now officially going off whatever carefully planned path you had set out. Accept that now Bob, Farmer guy with the Cows, is the central point of your plot. Your heroes are now cow wranglers for Bob. It is happening -- accept it, move on.

Making More Time In Your Games

People like table-top role playing games, but the general consensus is that a lot of the role playing has subtly turned more into combat roles than character roles. The main reason for this, I am going to posit, is pure economics. Resources, specifically.

The first resource is Time. The average time people have to game drops as they age and responsibilities kick in. The two times in your life when you have the most time to play games are at the bookends of it. For everyone else, there isn't time for a day-long delving into the lair of the dark lich. Combine this with the second resource/problem: Players, like any other actor in an economy, are rarely rational actors. These are the two biggest factors standing in the way of getting more RP in your RPG.

So, how do you get more out of your RPG?

GM Secrets: Party Balance | 100th Post!

Let's talk about party balance. Party balance in a table top RPG is vastly different than in fiction. In television, you have theoretical party balance, with the main hero overshadowing the rest of the party. No one really thinks the Ronin Warriors are a balanced party. In single player games, the hero can overshadow his friends. But, as you add players, particularly MMOs, the entire content system begins to revolve around the idea of a balanced party taking on level appropriate challenges (or, raw, overpowered cheese slicing through, uh, butter... look, this got away from me). D&D has been doing this for years, with crippling over specialization common in party dynamics.

What Sorts of Characters Do You Play?

So yesterday or the day before, I mentioned that my fiction tends to have an archetype of a scholar warrior. Which got me thinking to the kinds of characters I generally write and generally play. You all probably have someone at the table who says that they'll play any thing. That may be true. But, for most people, there's a kind of character that draws you. It might say something about your personality. So, what do you think?

GM Secrets: Challenges are More Than CRs

Most games have a reasonably good threat-to-excitement curve. During the early game, you are dealing with minor threats, then you save the world in the end. In fiction, challenging your heroes is important. Long running series (or table top adventures) often run into the problem where the new threat is only novel; not actually dangerous. You can take a breather episode or session to deal with a minor nuisance, build character or whatever. But, don't have threats vary as wildly as the stock market.

A Side of Fowl

In about 18 hours or so, if my estimate on the lag to auto post is right, you should be able to play the Guild Wars 2 Beta. So, while I expect to write about that over the weekend, today and yesterday, I was out of the area for work. So, today is a content light day. But that's OK! You can flip back and read about handling horror and my rule of three. Or click below the jump for some pictures of water fowl.

GM Secrets: The Rule of Three

Hello! If you're reading this, either I was able to access my Blogger account via my Nook, or I finally figured out Blogger's auto update tool. Either way, congratulations us! This is the third installment of my GM Secrets posts (I'm considering both parts of Conversing With NPCs one post.) Here, I'm going to explain to you my Rule of Three.

GM Secrets: Horror Is Hard

Scaring your players isn't easy. In early editions of Dungeon and Dragons, players understood the pseudo-adversarial role you play. You put that sphere of annihilation at the bottom of the pit trap, but it wasn't personal. Somewhere along with the way, players were exposed to the soft, downy warmth of challenge ratings, cooperative fiction and the disposable heroes of Call of Cthulhu. They lost that visceral fear that we feed on. We, of course, being GMs.

GM Secrets: Conversing With NPCs 2

The last post was getting too long, so I split off some of my random notes and put them here.

GM Secrets: Conversing With NPCs

The key to any good story, which is all a table top game really is is a shared story, is fun characters that we connect with.