The Inquisitor’s Library: Portmortem

[bryant]

“And lo, a horror of great darkness fell upon him.”

So that worked out pretty well. I wanted to run a grim, darkly complected game with veins of humor in the Warhammer 40K universe. Good match of setting and mood there. I got pretty much what I wanted. It took a bit of adjusting and shuffling and learning and talking to nail the mythos, but by the time we hit our stride it was awesome.

The goal was to do a tight series of self-contained missions. I knew this was going to be a short term game, but I didn’t want to run a whole story arc in three months, so I tried to treat it as a series of modules so that the end wouldn’t feel like we’d stopped in the middle. Also, I wanted to be able to pick it up again and run another one or two session bit sometime.

This sort of failed for two reasons. First, I couldn’t resist picking up some of the pieces of the first mission and turning them into an ongoing story. The spiders wanted to come back, and thus they did. The players should count themselves fortunate that I didn’t dump the Baron’s ghost on them, but frankly, he’s out there.

Layering in ongoing story elements also meant that I didn’t have to scrape to engage six players in the details of each mission. If the acolytes were heading to a feudal planet, say, I could drop in scenes growing out of the previous mission to give our tech priest some spotlight rather than carefully inserting a techie bit directly related to the matter at hand.

And the secret third reason is that I just couldn’t help it; it’s my best technique for giving a game texture. C’est la vie.

Six players is a lot, though. I should have run for five or four. On the other hand, if I ask myself who I’d leave out? Well, none of them. Er, none of you. Whichever. I enjoyed running for everyone and everyone liked playing. No good answers there.

Anyhow, the upshot is that I think I cut it to a fairly abrupt close. I thought about regearing for a story arc; I know where certain things are going. Perseus has a hopefully disturbing bit of news about the extent to which the five that is four has infested the Inquisitor’s Library and the denizens therein, for example. Also, to the best of my knowledge, the acolytes left Acreage without turning over some drugs to a certain person.

But I think it’d take another few months to play to a conclusion point. You don’t want to build the corruption too quickly. So cutting it now is the right move.

Also, I emphasize that the game was in my eyes a success. The system is a cranky old antique from the 80s that nonetheless works. Tweaking everyone’s weapon to be superior quality and reminding people of the aiming rules fixes combat ineptitude; treating failed rolls as successes with consequences takes care of the rest. And the combat is simple enough so that we could memorize how it works. I may have been getting a rule about Toughness wrong for the entire run, but if I did, I just made things more deadly.

The first mission hit an appropriate level of scariness. The second mission wasn’t meant to be scary, it was meant to be grueling. I think we got that nailed as well — the final combat sequence, when I just kept throwing waves of a few thugs at the PCs one at a time, with some PCs falling over into drugged hallucinations — that was meant to be grim and long and painful and I think it worked well without keeping our combat monsters from being scary. Hopefully it worked for the players as well.

All in all? Success. I am nothing but happy with the players, cause they gave me awesome stuff to work with. Discussion, feedback, and comments are welcome.

Originally published at Imaginary Vestibule.

Comments

[jeffwik.livejournal.com]

1) This game was indeed a lot of fun and a success.

2) I feel like I demanded a disproportionate amount of spotlight time, which I wasn't trying to do, it just happened (see also Orlando Trash).

3) The last session was the violentest session of anything I've played in a long time. I mean, sure, I've played sessions of like D&D (or, again, Orlando Trash) where there was more actual violence, but it had a visceral quality usually absent.

4) It was definitely my intent to a) give the package of drugs we got from the one guy to the other guy, b) destroy all of the other drugs, c) kill eleven of the twelve drug-making guys, and d) bring the twelfth drug-making guy back to the library with us, bound hand and foot so he couldn't make drugs. Things were chaotic at the end so we might not have done all those things, but that was my goal.

5) I really didn't care for the system; my character didn't feel to me like he was good at the handful of things I wanted him to be good at -- lying, looking, and stabbing -- and even though I was spending xp, I wasn't feeling much improvement.

[bryant]

#3 -- YAY. I think I know how I got that effect. I'll be trying to get it again.

#4 -- Done, then.

#2 -- Not to worry. I knew you were going to get a fair bit of spotlight; I thought hard about how to turn that into a group-building experience. This is part of why I railroaded you into the leader role.

#5 -- I also didn't give you a lot of opportunities to exercise those skills. Next time out I'd go ahead and retrofit Gumshoe as the investigation engine, and keep Dark Heresy as the core and combat engine.

[jeffwik.livejournal.com]

The setting, and what you wanted to do with it, seem to me like an excellent fit for Unknown Armies.

[bryant]

... but that's the same system. Roll percentiles, and you probably have a fairly low skill, since most UA PCs do start pretty low. Advancement is likewise slow.

[jeffwik.livejournal.com]

But UA has your passions and obsession and the chance to flip-flop, which I think goes a long way.

Plus the damage system is more forgiving for people with little Woolsey-style knives instead of chainguns and force swords; the little knife is still a suboptimal weapon but it's not as bad as it is in Dark Heresy.

[bryant]

Mmm, true enough.

[jeffwik.livejournal.com]

I guess what I'm saying is I can envision Woolsey as a UA character really easily. OTOH, I have a lot of UA familiarity.

[bryant]

Somewhere on my list of things to understand before I die: why do we engage the way we do with game systems? What are the knobs to twiddle? What questions can I ask to help me figure out what kind of system a person will like?

I mean, I get DH combat but I don't get WoD combat. There's no good reason for this. Or rather, there is, but I haven't figured it out.

Fuck, I need a psychology major who wants a really wacky PhD topic. I'm utterly serious about that, if anyone knows one.

[bryant]

Expounding on #3, and what I did, because I want to write it down while I'm thinking about it...

The waves was a big part of this. I wanted you guys to feel like it was just gonna keep coming and coming and coming.

Running two hallways was important. Split but close action was intended to make it feel like there was important shit going on that you couldn't do anything about quickly. The coma/hallucinations also helped.

Players willing to get into the spirit of it was big.

[jeffwik.livejournal.com]

That makes sense. It definitely worked.

[bluegargantua]

It was a fun game. All hail totally random parties!

heh
Tom

[peaseblossom.livejournal.com]

I had a good time! Although I feel like I had only just started to learn the rules and get into my character. Also, for next time, I think it would have been nice if all of us had had non-mission hooks; I felt like all our down time was about Woolsey.

[bryant]

Yeah, absolutely on both counts. See my notes on too many people in particular on the last bit. :(