FIVE YEAR PLAN
Next month marks the beginning of Year Five of Ocean City Interface, one of my f2f campaigns. Its PCs come from a near future setting, Ocean City. We call this the “Alpha” world. However, strange forces have also dragged them into other worlds, which we call Portals. Players move through the multiverse of these portals, dealing with stories within them as well as a larger connecting story. 

I want to talk about this because of the upcoming anniversary, but also because I’ve seen threads recently on Gauntlet Slack about handling multigenre games. Maybe my experience will help others run this concept. As a side note, our campaign plays bi-weekly and with the usual losses to holidays, illness, and scheduling, we’re probably at about session 80+ of the campaign. That schedule has some impact on play (as I’ll come to later)

MULTIVERSITY
I talked about this campaign in an earlier Age of Ravens post, but let me give the basic concept. Players begin with an Alpha character. We use Action Cards, a card-driven system which borrows a great deal from Fate. Each character has a unique resolution deck, tuned to their strengths and personality. The deck evolves over play by marking things up, Legacy style. PCs also have a character sheet which covers their skills (allowing redraws), aspects, damage tracks, and abilities (powers and stunts). When the game moves from one portal to another we swap out the character sheet completely and the deck partially. About half of a player’s deck remains the same throughout. 

We started the campaign with six players. Five chose the portals. We began with a fantasy mercenary portal we called Sellsword Company. I built this on a mini-campaign I’d run before, a world where artifacts have intelligence and drive events. We’d originally done a Microscope session to create the setting (which ended up a little like Wield). I deliberately cut corners here as I expected the player who’d chosen this setting would drop eventually. 

The conceit was that we began playing Sellsword Company straight, and only at the end did we introduce the idea of the Alpha world. Then the characters popped out of the portal back into their lives in Ocean City. They believed they’d been in a strange highly detailed, VR game they hadn’t signed up for. In trying to figure out what had happened the PCs met one another. 

We then played out that investigation for several sessions before they slipped into another portal. This established the gameplay loop. Sessions of meta investigation followed by a trip into a portal for several sessions and then back again. Once Sellsword dropped out of the rotation (after that player dropped) we had four portals (in this order):

• Neo Shinobi Vendetta: Cyber-ninja clans battle in a strange megalopolis. 
• Masks of the Empire: In an effort to reclaim it, Imperial Agents enter a land mysteriously closed off for 80 years. 
• Sky Racers Unlimited: In a dieselpunk world sky fortresses compete in a cross-continental race over a fallen North America.
• Assassins of the Golden Age: A secret conspiracy of mages strikes from the shadows to maintain balance between science and sorcery.

Linked Thematic: There should be a recurring motif, theme, or set of images across the different portals (science gone wrong, the perils of power, hidden secrets come back to haunt, revenge, etc) which also serves as a connection.

As I mentioned above, the players have created their own continuity of character between portals. For my part I’ve leaned into a few things. Each portal has some version of artificial intelligence (mad science doppelgangers, nano-kami, unsleeping automatons, magical clockwork cities). Each portal also has the “return of the repressed” (lost lands opened up, recovery from brainwashing, memories of a forgotten war). There’s also significance in numbers—key elements come in sevens, with two of those lost. 

Bottom line: Motifs help the players organize and understand the worlds. Be obvious about these patterns. They give the characters something to actively look for. 

BOTTOM BOTTOM LINES
A few additional observations.

• Plan where you need to. Do light prep on your sessions, but be prepared to invest time getting the mechanical side right. Pull back from occasionally to think about the “metastory,” but don’t plan it out. Have ideas, but let that evolve in play. Focus on mapping the trail rather than laying down the track. 
• Don’t rush it. You might have great ideas for the next portal and want to get there. If you’re a person who flits from idea to idea, you may trip yourself up. Realize that nothing’s going to be simple or quick. You’re moving through multiple worlds and stories; give each of them the attention they deserve. 
• Bi-weekly sucks. That’s the nature of our f2f scheduling. As the campaign’s rolled on, there’s been more information to track. Bumping a single session means we don’t play for a month. I’ve had to be ready to do “re-orientation” sessions when we return from a break or shift to a portal we haven’t been to for a year. 
• If you have a world they return to again and again, you need to give it more attention. It’s likely to be the world the PCs have the most contact with. Eventually you’ll be able to connect portal events to Alpha events and vice versa. But early on you want it to be compelling on its own. It probably needs more depth of character than anything else (NPCs, daily lives, etc). 
• Here’s the one thing I hadn’t realized when I started: you really need to engineer for success points in the meta-story. If there’s a connected reason why they’re moving between worlds (a conspiracy, a foe) show them pieces of that early on. Let them battle elements of that enemy. In the case of my game, multiple factions, each drawn from a portal, struggle for control in the Alpha world. The PCs have fought them there and stopped several schemes. I’ve also had information and details they’ve uncovered in a portal give them clues to events and weaknesses in the Alpha world.

​For the full backlog of Age of Ravens posts on Blogger see here. ​​  ​​

by Jason Cordova ​
​
One of my major design goals for The Between was for the game to feel highly cinematic while being played. Early on in the design process, I knew I wanted some kind of cross-cutting between the scene our player characters were experiencing and a scene taking place somewhere else in London. Those back and forth cuts between scenes are a hallmark of my GMing style, and I have also been known to narrate scenes for the players that are entirely outside the purview of their characters (such as villainous monoluges), and so I knew I wanted that style of play baked right into the rules of The Between. 

I eventually landed on a concept I call the Overscene. In its original form, the Overscene was a scene that the main scene the players were involved in occasionally cut to in order to show a different side of the story, in a different part of the city, and was strictly out-of-character knowledge. It was narrated entirely by the D.I. (the GM) and had the additional goal of giving the players a better understanding of the greater mystery. However, after giving it a lot of thought, I decided this approach was too heavy-handed and abandoned it (although there are some echoes of this version in the D.I. procedure called The Enemy, which will be discussed in a future post). 

But I had a hard time shaking the idea; I was still in love with the beautiful, cinematic nature of the Overscene. And so I began to think about my GM toolbox; I began to consider all the little tricks I use in my games to create a certain type of experience and what lessons could be learned from them. My Paint the Scene technique is probably my favorite (you can read about it here) and was most influential here. In Paint the Scene, the most important outcome is that the players get to work with themes and motifs to describe how their characters experience something in the setting. Additionally, it is entirely irrelevant if the details that come from Paint the Scene have any direct bearing on the story being told—more often than not, they don’t. The narrative goal of Paint the Scene is to add richness and texture to the setting that feels both real and coherent. But the real insight for purposes of the development of the Overscene was this: players frequently re-incorporate elements from Paint the Scene into the main narration, often unconsciously. 

So how does the Overscene work now? 

The present iteration of the Overscene has three goals: to create a cinematic feel at the table, to encourage the players to use theme and motif in their narration, and to pace out the Night phase of the game. The Overscene begins with a short description of a scene taking place somewhere in the city on the same the night the player characters are engaged in their hunt. That description is followed by 4 prompts, each of which has one player (or all the players, in the case of a Paint the Scene prompt) narrating a bit of the scene. After the first prompt is satisfied, we cut to the main scene involving the player characters. After each of the player characters has had a chance to do something in the main scene (trigger a move, have a short bit of conversation, investigate a small part of the scene, etc.) we jump back to the Overscene and do the second prompt. After the second prompt is satisfied, we dive back into the main scene as before. You continue this, back and forth, with the Night phase ending immediately after the characters have taken their actions in the main scene following the fourth prompt. 

During all this, if the players manage to incorporate a thematic or sensory detail from the Overscene into the main scene—or vice versa—they get to mark XP at the end of the Night phase (indeed, this is the only way of getting XP during the Night phase). 

Below is a link to the different Overscenes I have been playtesting, which should give you a better sense of how this works. When the game is published, these will be presented as a deck of cards (with about 50 different Overscenes available). 

Outcomes from playtesting

I have so far run around 35 playtest sessions of the alpha rules. The Overscene is rock solid. There is a bit of mastery involved—it’s an unusual concept in ttrpgs—but after doing it a couple times, the players really get into it (and look forward to it). As for specific outcomes, these are the things I am most happy about:

• The Overscene is an excellent way of pacing out the Night phase. I’m going to talk more about the interplay between the languid Day phase and the visceral Night phase in a future post, but for now just know that the Night phase is meant to be tight and intense. Putting a hard line on where it ends leads to very efficient, focused play. 
• Even though players only get XP credit for re-incorporating one thematic or sensory detail, they continue to do it throughout the Night phase, with some players hitting it 4 or 5 times. 
• Players often make subtle allusions to the Overscene during the main scene without even realizing they are doing it. In this way, the Overscene functions on an unconscious level, in much the same way Paint the Scene does. This is a VERY powerful effect of the Overscene. 
• The Overscene continues to satisfy my overarching design goal of managing cognitive load, which I have discussed before, and which I believe is one of this game’s triumphs from a design standpoint. 

All in all, I’m quite happy with the Overscene. It’s one of the few parts of the game that is leaving alpha more or less untouched. I expect as more people get familiar with The Between and its very particular style of play, people are going to want to steal the Overscene for their own designs. 

by Fraser Simons, Keeper of the Neon Veil

​Date Played
12/13/2018

System
Fire Ships At Midnight

Facilitator
Haley G

Players
Fraser S, Sarah J

Session Recap
Fire Ships At Midnight is a storygame that has 3 players take on the roles of The Duke of Medina Sidonia, Cardinal Ribera, and Captain Salazar. It captures a moment of history I was not even remotely aware of: the legendary disaster of the Spanish Armada as they attempted to invade the English in 1588.

We don't play to affect the outcome of the disaster, though. We play to find out which of the three characters can save their reputations, each vying for their own course of action using the mechanics of the game. You wager dice in an attempt to outbid the others. But your failures and successes are linked, ultimately. And when you play to drive the fiction toward your ideal outcome, you also find yourself slipping into your character; "fighting" with the people you realize you're in bed with, as you are the only people who will be judged...and rewarded.

In the first scene, I found myself advocating for a course of action that was actually the second scene's most positive outcome for my character, the Captain. The plan I quickly thought up when attempting to embody my character was my character's primary goal—how perfect is that?!

As we continued, I found that this was similar for everyone. The desired outcomes also goalpost what your character would do and want, making it so easy to roleplay their possible mode of thinking, maneuvering to the end game.

Even when you start out advocating for the lives of your men and the safest, sanest, course of action, you think. You end up on the precipice, deciding if you want to be crowned in glory (all the while knowing you're all responsible for a horrendous outcome for the lives of those you are, perhaps, most responsible for as the Captain) or be disgraced.

That's when you are really playing to find out; when you're realizing your immense, titanic privilege in a situation with lives in the balance; when you're choosing the best outcome for yourself.

And remember: that is what the game says it's about. It warned you the whole time.

Highlight
To foreshadow my character's own decision, midway through play the Duke offered to help me when we returned. Promises writhed in ostentatious firelight splaying across his gilded quarters. On a player level, I lost and missed my favored outcome, as did the Cardinal, who lost so direly they were out of the game. But while the Cardinal held fast despite this loss, I gave one of my losing dice to the Duke, bending to his will.

In the end, we were crowned as heroes and the Cardinal fell to dysentery in the hull of the ship. He prayed and prayed and cursed us as he died. His grandson, the bishop, looked so much like the Cardinal as we held our final conference. Talking of executing deserters or disbanding the fleet, trusting the captains to sail for Spain and king and country. All the while the words of the bishop, like the shadows on the wall when we spoke last to the Cardinal, fell on deaf ears. In the end, even if you're god fearing, you want the king on your side; not god.

Moment of Insight
No matter what outcome you vie for it is all false valor and bluster. If it happens to align for the best outcome for the army and best sailors belonging to Spain, well, that is particularly lucky for them.

Fireships at Midnight is available in Codex - Flame, which you can pick up for FREE right here. 

​Star Wars Saturday

Impulse Drive (Session 2 of 3)
Rich Rogers runs for Bethany H., David Miessler-Kubanek, Greg G., Jason Mills, and Sabine V
The crew of the Nerf Herder grows to their full complement, gets into a nasty fight with a Trandoshan Bounty Hunter, had a few costume changes, and flies off to Eriadu.

TGI Thursday

City of Mist (Session 2 of 4)
Lowell Francis runs for Agatha, David Miessler-Kubanek, JM, and Steven Watkins
The crew pursue several avenues of investigation leading to parallel battles with a pissed-off Koschei the Deathless and Baba Yaga's Walking Airstream Trailer.

Gauntlet Quarterly

Hearts of Wulin: Book Three (Session 8)
Lowell Francis runs for David Morrison, Patrick Knowles, Rich Rogers, and Sherri
The final volume of our trilogy begins with our heroes in the wilds, but an assassination attempt draws them together to protect those they love.

Hearts of Wulin: Book Three (Session 9)
Lowell Francis runs for David Morrison, Patrick Knowles, Rich Rogers, and Sherri
Pursuit of the assassins leads the heroes into the secret temple of the Frost Queen where secrets and villainy are revealed.

Duet December

I Haven't Seen You Since...
Noella H runs for Steven desJardins

The Adam of Your Labors
Noella H facilitates for Stentor Danielson
In the wake of her cat's death, tenured professor Olive attempts to bring him back, but instead animates a plant who begins to take on qualities of Spot.

Ampersand Month

Sorcerers & Sellswords
Paul Edson runs for Lu Quade, Rob, and Steven desJardins

Rockerboys & Vending Machines
Paul Edson runs for Jim Crocker, Michael G. Barford, and Tim

Gauntlet Hangouts

Symbaroum: The Copper Crown (Session 7 of 8)
Darren Brockes runs for Chris Thompson and Fraser Simons
Variol and Obadan make a pact with an ancient being and escape the darkness with few treasures in tow.

Bat Hack: Championship Series (Session 1 of 4)
Rich Rogers runs for Greg G., Keith Stetson, and Walter
It's the first game of the Championship series of Bat Hack!

Conjure Hagalaz: Escort Quest
Blake Ryan runs for Alejandro and Diana Moon

Monsterhearts 2: Ballhir - Cold Snap (Session 3 of 3)
Donogh runs for Asher S., Jesse Ross, Mark Causey, and Walter
A party to celebrate their victory preventing the bypass, and to see the Fannon's out of town, breaks up when people go to the lake, Muir Iasc is hungry and close to waking up...

Psi*Run
Ryan M. runs for Brian B., Lauren, and Michael G. Barford
Our heroes evade fluid metal Mr. Rogers beneath NeoDetroit with the powers of memories, feelings, and psychic blades.

Crossroads Carnival: On Broken Dreams (Session 2 of 5)
Jason Cordova runs for Bethany H., Bryan, David Morrison, and Patrick Knowles

InSpectres: A Night in the Park
Shane Liebling runs for Ben Swinden and Sarah J.

Lady Blackbird: From Hand To Haven
Shane Liebling runs for Bethany H., Jim Crocker, Michael G. Barford, and Pat P.

City of Mist: Second Story Heroes (Session 2 of 4)
Lowell Francis runs for Darold Ross, Fraser Simons, and Gene A.
Their case literally explodes, leading our cohorts to dig deeper into a mysterious gallery owner, a series of bombings, the Greek Mafia, and a vulture-like consigliere.

InSpectres: Santa Teresa Nights (Session 2 of 3)
Shane Liebling runs for Brian B., Jen Overstreet, and Rich Rogers
Down a man the crew pick up a go-getter intern and investigate strange happenings in a eucalyptus grove...

The Sword, The Crown, and The Unspeakable Power: Wreathe Your Hands With Blood (Session 2 of 4)
Agatha runs for Jason Cordova, Lowell Francis, Ludovico Alves, and Matthew Doughty
The Crown brings their mailed fist, the Beloved searches for sacrifices, the Hex calls up dark powers, and the Lyre falls victim to those called up powers. Content warning: casual violence and Cordova-level grotesqueries.

Masks: Caught in the Spiderweb (Session 1 of 4)
Leandro Pondoc runs for Jim Crocker, Sabine V, Stentor Danielson, and Tim
In the neighborhood of Shoreline, one of many in Prospect City, a routine night patrol for our heroes gets broken up by gang warfare, shotgun-toting would-be carjackers and awkward conversations about relationships.

The Quiet Year
Leandro Pondoc runs for Ludovico Alves and Sabine V
In one quiet year, a community deals with a lack of food, weaponry, and oh yeah TVs buried underneath the dirt, strange hunting spirits, a sudden proliferation of cults (!), and bears made of orchids and roses.

Monsterhearts 2: Kingsport 1943 (Session 1 of 4)
Catherine Ramen runs for Bethany H., Jesse A., Joe Zantek, and Seraphina Malizia
Join us for homeroom creation and then the opening chapter of our tale of the World War II homefront: Selina the Fae gets into a fight with a popular but bereaved girl; Lawrence the Sasquatch shows kindness; Edward the Ghoul gets caught by MPs; and Astrid the Unicorn is romanced with Edward and takes in the fugitive Noah Marsh.

Check out all the great videos on The Gauntlet YouTube channel and be sure check out the playlists to catch up on all your favorite games. If you'd like to play in games like these, check out the calendar of events and the Gauntlet Hangouts Google+ Communitywhere new games are announced! To support The Gauntlet, please visit the Gauntlet Patreon at https://patreon.com/gauntlet. All are welcome to play Gauntlet Hangouts games, and Patreon supporters have extra options like priority RSVP for Gauntlet Hangouts games and joining the Gauntlet Slack team where special events are announced like Gauntlet Games Now. Enjoy, and everyone have a great weekend!

​Mysteries have filled my recent months: Bubblegumshoe, City of Mist, Trail of Cthulhu. I dig mystery games; ironic, given how terrible I am at solving them. The end of a Midsomer Murders episode will still surprise me, even after the killer’s eliminated most of the red herrings. Perhaps that’s why I like running rpg mysteries: I already know an answer. 

I’ve done several of these for The Gauntlet: Kuro, Dresden Files Accelerated, Tales from the Loop, Mutant City Blues, etc. It’s also one of the few GMing areas I’m consistently asked about (alongside “Don’t you know Fate sucks?"-style inquiries). Recently, Eduardo L. hit me up with a couple of queries. I thought I’d offer and expand on my original answers to him. 

"When you're developing your mystery - are you mapping out the scenes and clues like you might do with a traditional Gumshoe game? In other words, how do you design the clues in your scenarios and individual scenes?"

I held off on an answer because I knew I’d be preparing a fresh mystery for this week’s Bubblegumshoe. So, like most GMs (I assume), I start off with a basic concept. Usually that’s a crime or a major scene. For my Dresden Files game I started with "Someone steals a Chinese Hell." For Kuro I had “Someone’s hacking people’s subdermal nano-tattoos to summon demons." For this week’s Bubblegumshoe, I started with "Someone steals a crop of highly valuable ginseng."

The next thing I think about is the entry point. Who is calling them in, what’s the connection? That’s my lead for figuring out the cast of characters. That gives me a general idea of the kinds of people and circles the PC might interact with, but at that point it’s nebulous.

by Lowell Francis

​Campaign/Session Title
Hearts of Wulin: Book Three: Session 1

Content Advisory
Harm to arachnids

Date Played
12/2/2018

System
Hearts of Wulin

GM
Lowell Francis

Players
Patrick Knowles, Sherri Stewart, Rich Rogers, and David Morrison

Session Recap
For Gauntlet Quarterly I've been running campaigns across three month spans. I've tried a couple of approaches. For Hearts of Wulin, we have a single campaign split into three "books". Each month tells a complete story, though characters and themes return throughout.

In the first two books we established the world and eventually dug into the mystery of the Orphans of Yun. The Yun, a wulin clan, had been mysteriously destroyed. At the end of Book One, we learned that this destruction had come from jealousy, as the Yun had developed a deadly new art and had begun to use it against their rivals. At the end of Book Two we learned that those who had destroyed the Yun still sought their secrets. More importantly, it turned out that two of the PCs, Jade Saber Lan and Nightsky Ming, had been adopted and raised by enemies of the Yun. Both broke away from their heritage at the end of the arc.

This session involved re-framing these two returning characters. Both opted to keep their PCs as they were, but reworked their bonds and entanglements. The character Zheng Wen had appeared a couple of times earlier in the series, and he now returned as a regular for the final arc. Finally we established a new PC, Passing Cloud, a recently discovered survivor from the Yun Clan.

The session began with Zheng bringing news to Nightsky of her beloved, Sedate Rao, and his impending marriage. In the year since the events of Book Two, Nightsky had trained and hidden herself in a ruined temple. She said that Sedate Rao's marriage meant nothing to her, despite his bride being a villainess. But Zheng felt she lied.

At the same time Shardsabre Lan went to see Passing Cloud. Lan had once been called Jade Sabre Lan, but at the end of Book Two, he'd broken his ornate weapon to demonstrate his independence. In the year between books, he'd forged a new blade and taken this new name. His friend Passing Sky, though suspicious of Lan due to the machinations of Sky's hidden twin brother, greeted Lan warmly. Lan, drawn to Passing Cloud but unable to speak of it, asked the student-warrior to accompany him to a potential lost Yun Shrine. Cloud agreed and left short note behind for his caretaker, Auntie Silver.

In the temple, as Zheng and Nightsky drank tea, a low warning wail cut through the air. Nightsky had bound ghosts which now alerted her to an impending attack. The pair doused the lights and turned the ambush back on their attackers. Zheng handily cut through the mob of henchpersons while Nightsky faced Dancing Spider. In the melee Dancing Spider revealed that there were two additional targets: Lan and also Nine Blossoms, Zheng's beloved from the Liquid Metal Delegates. Nightsky killed Dancing Spider by driving her blade through the villainess' hands and poisoning her with her own spider venom.

At the same time, Lan and Cloud returned from their fruitless exploration. On a hillside path, they found themselves ambushed by a gang of thugs and the assassin Dancing Scorpion. Cloud demanded to know if Lan was part of this attack, an accusation which stung him deeply. Lan disarmed Dancing Scorpion, knocking aside her living weapons and sending her tumbling down the hill. She took off. Cloud managed to dispatch the henchmen, though not without effort.

After some further travels all four heroes met up. Zheng and Nightsky discovered that Nine Blossoms, the other target, had left the city secretly, heading out to a temple in the hinterlands. The four gathered themselves together and set off to rescue her.

Highlight
Shardsabre Lan's expression when he realized the assassin fought with thrown living scorpions.

Moment of Insight
This trilogy approach has been fairly successful. But breaking the longer campaign up into back-to-back chunks, we have continuity while allowing new players to come in and help set the story going forward. It's something I want to examine closely once we're done with the whole campaign.

Actual Play