Gaslight Musings on a New Campaign

I'd done some soliciting recently for a Call of Cthulhu game. A little less than two weeks ago we kicked off our first session. I believe it went pretty well, especially considering some brand new faces at the virtual gaming table.

I'll confess to having mixed feelings about gaming on the internet. There is something really nice about having people around a physical table, the sound of rolling dice, the shared meals. That said I would have a difficult time pulling that off at this stage of my life. And there are some definite advantages to gaming online. The pool of players is greatly expanded - at our most recent game we had players from the American South and Southwest with my brother and I here in Massachusetts. It's allowed me to stay in touch with players who have moved away, whether they continue gaming with me or not.

The past few months have been abysmal as far as keeping to a regular schedule on this blog. Life happens. My wife is working again which is absolutely fantastic for us it does make home-life a bit more chaotic with everyone darting out in the morning and scrambling to get stuff done after work. Add to that Girl Scouts, activities at the local Boys & Girls Club, a wife correcting papers and getting ready for parent teacher conferences, and my life as a software engineer doing one of those periodic shifts into "crunch mode".

I've been doing some fun stuff as well. I've been reading through some Call of Cthulhu materials and have obtained a lot of Chaosium's Gaslight-era products. Though I'd been familiar with it for years (well decades) it is only in the past few years that I've really gotten some serious time in Call of Cthulhu games and I can definitely say it is one of my favorite games. The rules system that powers the game doesn't seem all that impressive when you read it but, at least for me, it plays absolutely fantastically. I'm certain it's not the most realistic engine, it lacks a lot of things that modern games have, but it just seems to work.

I've also been embedding myself in the era. I've listened to some Sherlock Holmes audiobooks and gotten some used (and cheap!) copies of annotated books for works like Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I've also been able to do some Jules Verne reading, engaging in one of my periodic wishes that I spoke fluent French and didn't have to rely on translators. I've also purchased my first fountain pen - I wanted to experience what it felt like to write with a nib point. I was frankly surprised to discover I really enjoyed the experience - when funds permit there's some fancy ones out there I'm anxious to try.

Though there are only some thirty years separating the Cthulhu by Gaslight decade of the 1890s from the default era of the 1920s there is definitely a very noticeable difference in the way those too eras feel. I get the feeling of being in the transitional period from an older world to our modern world. It is perhaps a stretch to call the 1920s "modern" but in my experience in the twenties one gets the feeling of being at the dawn of our modern world. Sure there's no internet, no cellular phones, no television. But you get the birth of all that, a fast-paced world with fast cars, fancy radios, telephones being relatively common in urban areas, etc. In the 1890s you are just beginning to get there but those sorts of elements have not yet entered the popular culture.

I'm hoping this campaign gets some legs to it - the Dungeon Crawl Classics game I'd kicked off in the spring and summer was great fun but really couldn't get to a needed quorum. I'd love to try it again at some point. And if you feel like joining in, give a holler and we'll see if we can find you a spot at our electronic table.


That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.

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Settling Fantasy America

Today is Thanksgiving here in the United States. Our Canadian neighbors celebrated it a month ago. Here in the United States the general story is the Pilgrims who settled at Plymouth and the Wampanoag tribe had a feast of thanksgiving.

Being the history geek that I am I've done some reading on what the European settlement of America was like. As a gamer, I'd often thought of doing a game along those lines and did run a brief one about a fantasy version of a Viking settlement in a fantasy analogue of Manhattan.

My own research has revealed an awful lot of myths about the European settlement of the Americas. The biggest one in my opinion is that the Americas were an untamed wilderness. The Native American method of using the land was definitely different from the European one but they most definitely made large changes to the land - one of the better known things they did was perform controlled forest burnings.

Where does such an idea originate? Here I'm not particularly authoritative. If I were to guess, I can think of two reasons. The first is it just makes one feel better to have settled in an untamed wilderness rather than squat in land that had been originally cultivated by others. The other reason I believe is how  decimated the native population was after exposure to European disease. Cracked had one of the best descriptions in their article 6 Ridiculous Lies You Believe About the Founding of America:

There's a pretty important detail our movies and textbooks left out of the handoff from Native Americans to white European settlers: It begins in the immediate aftermath of a full-blown apocalypse. In the decades between Columbus' discovery of America and the Mayflower landing at Plymouth Rock, the most devastating plague in human history raced up the East Coast of America. Just two years before the pilgrims started the tape recorder on New England's written history, the plague wiped out about 96 percent of the Indians in Massachusetts. 

In the years before the plague turned America into The Stand, a sailor named Giovanni da Verrazzano sailed up the East Coast and described it as "densely populated" and so "smoky with Indian bonfires" that you could smell them burning hundreds of miles out at sea. Using your history books to understand what America was like in the 100 years after Columbus landed there is like trying to understand what modern day Manhattan is like based on the post-apocalyptic scenes from I Am Legend.

This is something to keep in mind when considering a fantasy game based on the Americas. Suppose you give the fantasy analogue or version of the Native Americans use of real magic - if they have the ability to cure diseases there's a pretty decent chance they'd have been able to keep the settlers/invaders out - or at the very least, make such a settlement a very expensive undertaking. After all, these are the same people who made the Vikings decide perhaps they'd rather go elsewhere.

I seem to recall a few ideas floating on the internet about using elves as a fantasy analogue for Native Americans. What I would prefer to do instead is make the natives of a New World to be of the same races that can be found in the Old World. I believe it makes such people more real - there's a tendency to oversimplify the original Americans - either as magical people who lived in perfect harmony or as savages who lacked the technical know-how to fight off the Europeans. In reality they were people, just like the European settlers were people. Some honest, some deceitful. Some friendly, some standoffish. I believe the "elves=native nature lovers" shorthand greatly oversimplifies an entire group of civilizations. This falls into advice I've mentioned before from James Raggi of Lamentations of the Flame Princess fame - only use non-humans in a fantasy game if there is a very compelling reason to do so. In my Vikings in Fantasy North America game I did actually use dwarfs - dwarfs like those of Norse myth, living within mountains. They were very, very different form the natives, based off of the Lenape Indians and the Viking settlers had a much easier time dealing with the Lenape than the dwarfs.

There's a number of works I've read that I believe give a good foundation of life in North America before or shortly after European settlement. Some of these include:

• Charles C. Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. An excellent view of the empires and other civilizations present in the Americas. The Incan Empire seems like it'd make for an awesome inspiration for a fantasy civilization - an empire centered around a mountain range, far longer than wide, presenting lots of unexplored places just a few days travel.
• Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War. Perhaps most interesting is the examination of the decades following the famous "first" Thanksgiving (it's far from the first, but it is the one everyone thinks of). With the outbreak of King Phillip's War we see the son of Massasoit, who helped the Pilgrims survive, led Native Americans into war against the settlers of New England.
• James Horn's A Land as God Made It. An examination of the Jamestown settlement. You quickly see how there is no way the English would have survived without help. And as in Mayflower, you'll see leaders who want to use the settlers for their own benefit against nearby rivals. One interesting fact that came out in my reading of this book - the native's small arms, their bows and arrows, were typically superior to the muskets of the settlers. 

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RPG Review: Call of Cthulhu 3rd Edition

I've already done a review of Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu game. But given I've been a bit AWOL in my blog of late and part of the reason has been prep for a Cthulhu game it seemed reasonable to do a review of one of the older versions of the game.

For me, this was my first exposure to Call of Cthulhu. I received it as a Christmas gift from my parents back when I was in high school in the mid- to late-80s. (Now that I think of it I also once received a complete Edgar Allan Poe collection from my wife - I get some creepy gifts.) This was not my Chaosium RPG now that I think on it - I know I had Ringworld and had also played Elfquest by this point. (Elfquest is another property I'll need to discuss at some point - as I recall it was rather big back in the 80s.)

I really don't know how it was my parents came across this version of Call of Cthulhu - it is my understanding that the 3rd edition was the Games Workshop version and was a UK-based release (though I am pretty certain they bought it from a local Waldenbooks so perhaps it was released in the US as well).

One thing which amazes me is how little the game has changed across editions. I could make a character with this version of the game, published over 25 years ago, and bring him easily into the most recent version of the game. I've also used scenarios from this book for 6th edition Cthulhu games.

Be that as it may, let's take a look at the game on its own merits. It is a hardcover book, a bit longer than a normal US RPG book, with black & white pages with color plates inserted. The book is divided into "sub-books" - basically it's as if the contents of a boxed set were bound up into a hardcover book (though it took me as a new player a little bit of time to figure that out). The "books" contained within are:

• Investigator's Book: Under 30 pages long, contains rules for creating characters, action and skill resolution, sanity rules.
• Keeper's Book: About 50 pages long, rules for the Cthulhu mythos, magic, and introduction on how to run the game. Includes three sample scenarios including the classic "The Haunted House" which has probably begun more Cthulhu campaigns than any other scenario.
• Sourcebook for the 1920s: The 3rd edition generally assumes a 192s setting and these 30-ish pages include information on life in the 1920s. 
• Cthulhu Companion: As I recall, this is pretty much the 2nd edition Cthulhu Companion, with information on the Mythos in Mesoamerica, new scenarios, sourcebook additions, etc. For some reason one thing which really stuck with me was a list of prions in the 1920s, with one sounding like it would fit perfectly in the film The Dark Knight Rises.

As far as rules go, not a whole lot has changed between this and the 6th edition. Books are rated on how well they impart new spells, something later dropped form the game, but aside from that the game has changed more in the form of tweaks and clarifications. It still has characteristics rather similar to games like D&D, ranging from 3-18 in most cases. The characteristics don't make a huge difference, though the Education and Intelligence stats do play a large roll in your number of starting skills. The game still uses a simple percentile skill system with no real difficulty system added to it - though every game I've been in has used various modifiers to indicate difficulties when needed. Though I've needed to use that rarely - generally I assume if you need to roll the task by its nature is already difficult. 

One thing I think later versions of the game do a little bit better is impart the feel of Lovecradtian horror up front. I think that's mainly due to their inclusion of Lovecraft's tale The Call of Cthulhu. Truth be told I was unfamiliar with Lovecraft when I first got the game. I'd just heard a lot about the game from Dragon magazine and other gamers and was curious. Don't misunderstand me - the game does a good job with its atmosphere, I just think later versions do it better. It becomes very clear from looking at the stats of creatures of the Mythos and the sanity rules of the game that this is not a game where you kill the monsters and take their stuff. You're more likely to blow your own brains out in an attempt to avoid becoming an insane slave of some Mythos creature.

As with all versions of the game I feel one of the best things it has going for it is the inclusion of several scenarios. There are some in this book that to the best of my knowledge have not been reprinted in later versions of the game - though I do lack a copy of the 4th edition. Some of the scenarios are quite unusual. There is one featuring a ghoul whose main objective is getting lots of books for his library. Two other scenarios take place in unusual locations - The Mystery of Loch Feinn taking place in Scotland (and would make for a good Gaslight scenario as well) and one of my favorites, The Secret of Castronegro, taking place in New Mexico. This scenario also fits in well with the Mesoamerican Mythos information found in the Cthulhu Companion book.

Like most Chasosium games, Call of Cthulhu 3rd Edition has a ton of information within it. You could run a very enjoyable campaign with just this book (a fact true of later versions as well). For modern gamers, the rules have changed very little. However, some of the articles and scenarios which seem to have not found their way to later incarnations of the game remain very usable and worthwhile. While there is no digital reprint of this version of the game available you can get a lot of the unique information from the 2nd edition Cthulhu Companion. The 2nd edition rules had been available from RPGNow but looking now it appears they are no longer there.

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Children's Heroines

I'm the father of two daughters, one aged seven and the other aged ten. They've both enjoyed a fair amount of traditional fantasy and science fiction tales - Chronicles of Narnia, Star Wars, etc. However both of them have also indulged in a fair amount of what I'd considered to be "girl-centric" literature and videos.

As a caveat, I'm far from being an expert on women's issues and am not a wiz in the social sciences. With that caveat in mind, I have nevertheless tried, together with my wife, to make certain the girls have good female role models. I want them to be able to enjoy stories where a girl or woman protagonist is the hero - where she is not waiting for her prince to rescue her, nor just a "dude with boobs", nor some ultra-sexed object.

Another desire is the stories actually be entertaining. Preferably without sparkly vampires.

Both girls started off with Dora the Explorer. I can still recite the theme song to Dora with ease. I suspect when I am old and have forgotten my name. "I'm the map, I'm the map, I'm the map, I'm the map, I'm the map!" The television show had Dora going on all sorts of minor adventures but the kids really enjoyed the longer Dora movies where she would have adventures in fairytale land and deal with the Pirate Piggies. I'd view these as primarily "cute" with a goal of providing some education to the viewer/

I think though their interest grew more when they discovered the Barbie Fairytopia movies. Now as a caveat - these are clearly designed to sell Barbie dolls. For those of you who lack knowledge of Fairytopia the initial story is that of Elina, a fairy without wings. She gets teased by the other fairies for her lack of wings. Elina becomes involved in saving Fairytopia from the villainous Laverna, sister of the kind ruler of Fairytopia, the Enchantress. As Laverna kidnaps the guardians of Fairytopia she comes closer and closer to her desire to rule - and she tempts Elina with her greatest wish, having wings. However Elina rejects this temptation and saves Fairytopia - and (spoiler alert) gets rewarded with wings.

It is a simple enough story but one my daughters both greatly enjoyed. It had some nice fantasy tropes such as the magical land, fairies, magic, etc. Sequels deal with other parts of Fairytopia such as the undersea kingdom of Mermaidia. And Elina is not one who uses violence to solve her problems (not to say that a "male" story must have violence either). She often doubts her own abilities but nevertheless does not give up.

Lately my younger daughter has discovered the American Girl series. While a lot of people think of just the dolls with American Girls, there is a strong effort at historical accuracy with the books that are associated with the dolls. They are not fantasy but rather grounded in history - just as a number of RPG-ers I know also double as history buffs. There's got to be a number of people who are experts on the 1920s due to participation in Call of Cthulhu games.  Right now my daughter Jasmine is all about Caroline, the protagonist of a series of books centered around Sackets Harbor along the shores of Lake Ontario in New York during the War of 1812. In the first book Caroline witnesses her father, a shipwright, being taken by the British just after war is declared - and before the protagonists had gotten word of the declaration of war. The books do not alter the historical role of women - Caroline does not strap on a sabre and engage in the life of a privateer. But it does show the great accomplishments women were capable of despite the limitations sexism put upon them. Caroline's mother takes over operation of the family shipyard's without hesitation and during the First Battle of Sackets Harbor stands ready with a pistol should the British manage a landing. Caroline herself finds herself assisting the guncrews as they try to adapt their too-small cannonballs to their cannons - during this she forgets to be afraid despite being vulnerable to British bombardment. But after the event is over the realization of what she has been through hits her.

These novels really reach my daughter as she recently got to meet the author of the books, Kathleen Ernst, at a book-signing and tea party at the nearby (for us) U.S.S. Constitution Museum - any author of a work with nautical action in it in the War of 1812 would find the museum an excellent resource.


To be honest, I never thought I'd find myself being a connoisseur of works targeted for girls. But I'm really hoping to get one of them to join the gaming group at a certain point - I really need new blood. And if you can't recruit them then best to create them. Also, in all seriousness, I want them to be able to imagine their own fantastic worlds where they are not the princess in need of rescue but rather their own strong characters in their own rights.

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Recruiting for a Cthulhu Game

In the summer time my gaming group had played some Dungeon Crawl Classics. The game was great fun but my attempts at using it to add new people to the group didn't pan out - with real life issues we actually seem to have lost a member.

With the group being rather small I'm attempting to switch its gears toward something which handles smaller groups better. I've mentioned previously one of my more successful campaigns has been with Call of Cthulhu and being an investigative game where firepower is of less importance that seems a natural match for where we are presently.

That said I'd still love the opportunity to add a few people to the virtual table (we play remotely using various communication tools). If you'd like to join us give me a shout - you can find links to my email on this blog and you can also reach me via Google+ or the comments.

Let me tell you a little about this campaign and the group in general. As far as the campaign goes it is set in the early 1920s, centering around New York City though we've also had adventures set in New England, South Carolina, and the American southwest. The characters are private investigators or those associated with them. These investigators have focused on the weird. That said, they have also dealt primarily with the periphery of the mythos - cultists. evil scientists and sorcerers, and lesser servitors. In Trail of Cthulhu terms we'd be on the pulp side of things (instead of purist), though I would categorize it as realistic pulp. Violence can solve problems but you'd best have a plan - three people taking on a dozen armed cultists will end badly and even three on three in a fair fight can be dangerous. Ambushes are your friends.

We've been using the 6th edition of Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu game. We meet every other Monday starting around 7:15 PM Eastern US time and play for 2-3 hours. As far as communications goes we've been using Fantasy Grounds II as our virtual tabletop and skype to communicate. Given the highly investigative nature of the game I have been contemplating switching the rules over to Trail of Cthulhu but wouldn't do that without chatting with the group. (For those unfamiliar with it, Trail of Cthulhu is very focused on the investigative nature of play).

As far as group dynamics go... To begin with, we are not an especially intense group. We're all in our thirties or forties and have families (indeed family issues is a big reason for losing people - when it comes to a choice between family or game, family of course must come first.) We all either live in Massachusetts or have lived there at one point (as the game started face-to-face). We're all involved in various techie industries in way or another. Politically we're all probably left of center. Religiously we're pretty tolerant - we've had Pagans, Atheists, and Catholics at the same table. We all seem to like science fiction and superheroes - not an odd interest for gamers I know... You don't have to match any of what I've described but it does seem fair to give a glimpse of who you'd be at the virtual table with.

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First Thoughts on NBC's "Revolution"

Including audiobooks and comic books, I read a lot more than I watch television and movies so I don't catch a lot of new shows. I was a fan of "Jericho" a few years back, a show about a small Kansas town trying to endure in the aftermath of a nuclear exchange and the collapse of the United States government.  When I first heard of "Revolution" I thought of "Jericho" and decided to check it out.

The premise of "Revolution" is that 15 years ago some event removed power from the entire globe. We're not talking all power plants failed or an EMP fried lots of devices, nothing electronic works. To be honest, this is something I have a hard time buying into - sometimes willing suspension of disbelief is hard. As someone who majored in Computer Science and Engineering I had to take a lot of Electrical Engineering classes and this selective suspension of the laws of physics is awfully hard to swallow. After all if you really suspended electricity you'd die pretty quickly as your nervous system and brain would lose their ability to transmit messages. I know S.M. Stirling did a series with this as a premise, starting with Dies the Fire, though I've not read that series.

For the time being I swallowing my disbelief to see how things develop. The series takes place around Chicago with the main threat being the Monroe Militia which rules over everything. There is a magic gadget that one of the protagonists possesses that apparently can make electricity work again, suggesting there may indeed be something "magical" about the suppression of electricity.

The society that has emerged is one that people familiar with the post-apocalyptic genre will recognize pretty readily - one that has been forced to go back to a medieval level of technology. Firearms still work but the Monroe Militia has banned civilian possession of them. Flashbacks have been showing what transpired in the aftermath of the event that suppressed electricity.

For the time being I'm watching the show. In my opinion it illustrates the challenges in sustaining interest in a setting - it is an interesting setting, but interesting settings are, in my opinion, not that difficult to create. The difficulty is, I believe, in keeping that setting going. This is true whether you are making a book, movie, television series, or RPG campaign. In this case there is obviously a mystery as to why electricity no longer works and the possibility of brining it back. But this seems to be see something that needs to be addressed vs. kept in the background. It's a balancing act - you don't want to reveal or resolve everything at one but at the same time you can't keep your audience - or gaming group - hanging forever. Ideally a revelation or resolution should not close off dramatic opportunities so much as opening up new ones.

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Life After the Zombie Apocalypse

Lurch (in my front yard...)

My last blog post dealt with the decidedly uncheerful post-apocalyptic novel The Road. It's a difficult book to read. I couldn't imagine ever wanting to play an RPG in such a setting. Heck after posting that marked the longest gap between posts I've had on this blog so it must have drained my will to post...

Aside from a few brief Aftermath and Gamma World games I've not done much gaming in the post-apocalyptic genre. Probably a bit too depressing for my tastes. I like intact societies, not remnants of civilization sulking in ruined cities. With that in mind, one "sub-genre" I have given some thought to gaming in is the "Zombie Apocalypse" genre. The basic premise is pretty simple. The dead rise in the form of zombies. Usually they bite people and the people bitten become zombies. I'm far from an expert in the genre but you can find examples it pretty easily - The Walking Dead comic book and television series comes to mind most easily.

Quite a few RPGs have delved into the zombie apocalypse genre as well. The most famous of these is probably Eden Studios' All Flesh Must Be Eaten RPG (AFMBE). AFMBE doesn't presuppose any specific form of zombie apocalypse, rather it has rules for designing your own zombies. Lots of AFMBE supplements are pistaches of other genres with zombies added in - D&D with zombies, Lord of the Rings with zombies, Star Wars with zombies, etc.

Beyond AFMBE I have a few other zombie-centric RPGs. There is Hunters Books' Outbreak Undead. I've only recently acquired it so I've yet to form a full opinion of it. It seems dedicated to being a type of survival simulation, with rules about establishing and keeping a home base. This strikes me as something which would be useful in a long-term game.

One of the more unusual zombie apocalypses I've seen is New Dark Age's Unhallowed Metropolis. It supposes that in 1905 the dead begin to rise. Now it is some two hundred years later and society has barely survived the apocalypse. The game is set in a largely isolated London in a "Neo-Victorian" society, kind of a cross between a zombie apocalypse and steampunk.


Unhallowed Metropolis in my mind addresses one of the big problems with the genre, that being the "and then what?" factor. AFMBE is often regarded as ideal for one-shot adventures and mini-campaigns. To me that seems an understandable assumption - it seems likely that a zombie apocalypse game would be very easy to start and be a blast for the first few adventures. But then comes the challenge of sustaining it. If your only challenge is zombies then the game is likely to lose steam fast. AFMBE has a supplement, One of the Living, which is dedicated in its entirety to examining the long-term impact of a zombie apocalypse. Unhallowed Metropolis takes it even further, with society having, at least in pockets, managed to rebuild. The Walking Dead comic book is still reasonably close in time to the outbreak of zombies - I believe it is under two years sine the outbreak. However even there the story has progressed to the point that the zombies, while still a huge threat, are not the only threat and are perhaps less dangerous than other survivors.

If you're looking to run a long term Zombie apocalypse game I suspect you don't need to have an answer to "and then what?" from the start but you need to be willing to answer it and not preserve a status quo.

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