#RPGaDAY2015, Day 28: Favorite Game You No Longer Play

Today’s topic is one I’ve been waiting for when I looked over the list of writing prompts. Subject? Favorite game you no longer play.

Let me tell you about The Armitage Files.

30843_originalThe Armitage Files is a campaign for Trail of Cthulhu, a game about H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos where investigators go out, save the world, and go insane. I love this game campaign, even though I don’t like Lovecraft’s stories. As a geek in my twenties, I thought I should love the Mythos — it’s something that just seems to speak to gamers — but it never took. I’ve always thought the writings were dull and ponderous as the narrator constantly explains how he will tell you all about this horrific thing that’s just on the next page, like an overwritten The Monster At The End Of This Book. There’s just something about Lovecraft that doesn’t resonate with me. So no, I’m mistaken: I don’t dislike Lovecraft. The feeling I have is indifference.

Which is why it surprised me when I discovered The Armitage Files and found it utterly amazing.

The campaign is set around the Miskatonic University faculty: Professor Armitage receives two letters that appear to be from himself, in a future after the stars have aligned and the mind-destroying creatures from beyond space and time are let loose to destroy the world. The letters discuss his group’s investigations and how they might have been misled, which culminate in their failure and the unleashing of the horrors. So they come up with a plan: assuming these are actual letters from a future Armitage and his investigations, the Armitage group gathers another batch of investigators to follow up the leads written about in the letters. Perhaps this new group of investigators will make connections that they missed. Perhaps by making different choices, they’ll pull together what the real threat is. Perhaps they’ll stop the coming apocalypse.

The letters (the files of the title) are anywhere from three to five pages, most coming with some sort of extra thing: a burnt photograph, flower petals, bloodstains. In the writings — which become more disturbing as the campaign proceeds onward — there are maybe three, four obvious adventure seeds to follow up. But the letters (and more do arrive) aren’t content to let the investigators go after everything — more arrive, some during investigative cases, prompting the players to decide what is important to follow. Can we investigate the circus before it leaves town? Should we find out why Armitage was interested in the amateaur astronomer club, who are meeting out of town this weeked? A new letter shows up but we haven’t found the travelling salesman mentioned in the last letter! What do we do?

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The letters are in sepia and white in the book, but Pelgrane Press has a full color PDF download on their website. ((Under “Forms and Handouts”.)) You can actually hand out the letters as they arrive.

The campaign is driven by the players’ choices. It’s imperative that the players let the GM know what tack they will follow to prep for next time. “There’s an army base mentioned here,” they say. “Let’s investigate that.” And then the next time the players meet, the GM can have something ready. If they don’t go to the Kingsport Yacht Club, they don’t.

And every person mentioned, every place mentioned is in the book, but the details are up to you, the GM, to fill in. The astronomy club in your game might be a cabal of cultists performing sex magic under the stars. In my game, they were just innocent hobbyists, being killed off by a witch. The Kingsport Yacht Club inner circle might be fellow investigators, stalwart and true; they might be fish-things; they might be cannibals. Whatever they are, your game of The Armitage Files and my game will be vastly different.

And this possible future — or is it some unknown alien force toying with the Armitage Group? — starts catching up to the investigators. Our game broke up due to timing and scheduling after a letter arrived, describing the rather gruesome death of one of the players’ investigators. The actual file has a scribbled out section and you’re supposed to point to a player and say “and that’s where your investigator’s name is written,” but thanks to the power of Photoshop, you can easily replace that scribble with the actual character’s name. It was pretty neat, dumping the files on the players, just chatting while they’re skimming over the document, and seeing one of them suddenly come across his character’s demise. “Oh no,” he said, eyes widening. “Oh no!”

Not completing The Armitage Files is going to be my one big gaming regret. It’s such a fantastic campaign concept. Restarting might be a bit difficult because some of us might be going over story beats from earlier, even though everything might be different. Which, I suppose, is exactly how the campaign in The Armitage Files is supposed to function.

Buy The Armitage Files now. ((It’s under “GUMSHOE Print Products” and “GUMSHOE PDFs” at the site.)) It’s the best campaign ever written.

 

Required reading: Rick Neal’s The Armitage Files actual play reports. Spoilers, but not really because of the nature of the campaign. Start at the bottom of page 3 and work backwards:

#RPGaDAY, Last Year: Day 28 – Scariest Game Played

Ah, for Scariest game I’ve played, there’s not many to choose from — I usually run the games. Last year, when coming up with an answer to this topic, I went with the Don’t Rest Your Head game that my friend Brian ran. When preparing to run it, he asked each of us for a recurring nightmare we had. We told him, because we trust each other. We knew that the nightmares were going to manifest somehow in the game, so it would be interesting to see how they would come about in that dream world. Brian went away and came back next week to run the first of two DRYH sessions.

That first session was incredibly tense. He didn’t incorporate our nightmares in the game. All that game, we were wondering When? When is this going to happen? What is it going to be like? and it kept getting delayed and stretched out and… Suspense.

That whole session was crazy spooky.

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Anything to follow-up on that topic, Thomas?

Most of the games I run also aren’t horror games, but there have been a few. We did a Chill one-shot in Venice which had some horribleness happening that creeped out the players, with a Headless Horsemen-like creature that could only be seen by the person it was going to kill (yes, concept stolen from Doctor Who, sure). The Lacuna game I mentioned in an earlier post. My friendly guy-next-door character in the Shadowrun/CthulhuTech mashup game where he kept his “wife” locked up in a room in the basement whenever he went out of the house. ((I actually played in a game!)) Oh, and The Armitage Files, but I’ll talk about that in just a little bit.

Horror is like comedy in a game. You can’t force it. It just happens.

Unless you’re playing Dread (which has that Jenga tower in the middle, threatening to kill your character off) or you share secrets, like we did in Don’t Rest Your Head.

#RPGaDAY2015, Day 27: Favorite Idea for Merging Two Games Into One

I’ve only heard of one other group coming up with this idea, and that was John Wick for his gaming group, so I know it’s a good idea we stumbled across. John’s version took the concept a step further than our group’s idea of using lenses, as in “we view the campaign through a different lens”.

This was actually Bo’s campaign ((Yeah, that Bo — the one who later went on to produce Tabletop.)) he was running while we were out from the gaming scene with a newborn. I think he started the game off with the d20 system, then switched over to a generic RPG system he homebrewed. ((The intent was to develop it and bring it to market, but that will never happen.)) Like I tend to do, Bo ran the game like television seasons: a major storyline through a series of episodes, then a break and retooling for the next season. We joined up in season three and he wanted to test his system in different settings with different approaches, so he came up with the idea of just playing the same campaign as viewed through different lenses. When the game started, it was somewhat based in fantasy d20 basicness. We shifted the lens, and had our next adventure in a steampunk-like world. Then we shifted again and the world was — and has always been — 1930s pulp action. Then we shifted again and we’d have a Cold War feel. All the elements changed to adapt the setting and theme: Xochipulti’s magic staff became the Hellfire Pistol, Morgan’s pirate ship became a zeppelin, and Mandi’s steampowered babbage machine became a neon-fire cyberdeck. Once the lens shifted, we went on to the next adventure. ((The antagonist of the piece originally began as a god-like force that possessed a character’s beloved. By the time we got to my lens, I cribbed from the Watchmen comic and used Dr. Manhattan’s origin for her.))

It was quite clever.

Then, a few years later (and maybe an hour and a half drive away to the north), John Wick came up with The Flux. The Flux was similar to our Lensing, but it took thinks a step further. Instead of just recasting the world under a new light, The Flux actually changed the world in-game. The game world comes to an end, resets, and recasts the same people in different positions. Everybody in this new world knew that this world was the only reality that existed — and had existed — since the dawn of time: decades, centuries of history sprung into being, even though the world was only hours, minutes old. So: we were playing World of Darkness. Now we are playing Pendragon. But — crazy thing here kids — sometimes, your Arthurian Knights have flashes to their time as Changelings in Minneapolis. They’re new characters, but not. It’s a way to explain why you’ve got a similar band of five people hanging out with each other.

Also, quite clever.

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