Eternal Lies - From the Keeper's perspective (Spoilers)

  

I posted a write up on my reflections on Pelgrane Press' excellent Trail of Cthulhu campaign Eternal Lies back in June. Rich, our Keeper for the campaign, shared his thoughts & reflections more recently in our discussion group and he's kindly agreed that I can share them here.

Clearly, there are spoilers below. 

#RPGaDay2025 - 17 - Renew

It's RPGaDay season again. Here's a link to the blog post with the current year's prompts.

Today's prompt is Renew. 

Energy seems to beget energy. Since I rediscovered - renewed - my passion for Traveller, all of a sudden I find myself full of energy for roleplaying projects more generally. I've probably been more engaged on gaming this year than I have for quite some time.

I've two projects that have been niggling me for quite some time, and now they're coming together nicely. 

The first relates to material that I produced for BITS in the past; while some of this has been available in PDF, several of the books that I'm most proud of have never made it past the original editions that we were selling at conventions and through a couple of retailers and publishers (Leisure Games and Steve Jackson Games mainly). I've been working with Andy to get these back in print as PDF and POD, and they should be out before the end of the year. After that, I'll be helping to get some of the others converted to POD as well. However, this isn't quite as simple as it sounds as we will publish under the TAS programme. 

We need to do conversions into Mongoose Traveller 2, amend the legal parts and trade dress and then format them for print, which is reasonably complex as most of the books were originally created at A4 rather than A5 in Microsoft Word. Some where done in Quark, adds a further complication as the version of Quark that BITS has doesn't play nice with InDesign or Affinity. Fortunately, Affinity can manipulate PDFs very well if you have the fonts. That needs to be done manually, as the PDF from Quark strips the font names and replaces them with something like 'CIDFont+F1'. The covers are another challenge, but mostly less so. I can open a PDF and get to the elements on those so I am confident that they can be recreated easily (except for title dress, which is a shaped and extruded font that even Andy can't remember how he did it).

So it is very much a project to renew.

The second project relates to a Traveller adventure that I wrote about two decades ago for the first Furnace. That has been run multiple times by me and others (it's probably the most tested scenario we ever wrote, with perhaps runs in three figures by me and others at conventions). Completing it has been on my round-to-it list for a long time, but kids, life etc. have always got in the way. I'm exploring a route to bring this one to print via TAS in collaboration with another Traveller publisher that I really respect. Hopefully, that will see the light of day earlier this year or at the start of next year. Have just converted two other scenarios to Mongoose Traveller 2e, I'm pretty confident that I can do that part quickly.

So this year has definitely been one where I renewed my energy for Traveller and gaming in general. I'm even running a Traveller campaign for the first time in a long time!

17 August 2025

#RPGaDay2025 - 16 - Overcome

It's RPGaDay season again. Here's a link to the blog post with the current year's prompts.

Today's prompt is Overcome. 

You may have noticed that yesterday, I managed to give Deceive number 16. I'd love to claim that was deliberate but it was totally an accident. Anyway, that's fixed and hopefully it won't break any of the permalinks.

I think that longer form campaigns give you a better opportunity to feel like you've overcome something. Sure, one-shots are brilliant and, as a player, you can pull off amazing things with stories to tell, but there's something about the extended game that makes it mean more.

Some examples.

At Longcon 2016, I was fortunate enough to play a truncated version of The Dracula Dossier over a weekend. Although the game was short compared to how the campaign could play out, it had the space for highs and lows, for terror and success. At the end, when we killed Dracula, it really felt like we'd struggled to overcome a true threat and succeeded.

I also played in Dr Mitch's Darkening of Mirkwood campaign, which ran over an extended period, and was a chain of defeats and successes where we managed to lift the Shadow from Mirkwood, leaving it in a better place for the events of The Lord of the Rings. However, it included one of the most terrifying slow motion events of my gaming life, the death march out of Angmar. We'd found ourselves in the Witch King's former kingdom and ended up fleeing, with children we'd rescued, back towards safe havens in Eriador. We had a number of poor rolls - lots of Eyes of Sauron - and found ourselves pursued and accumulating fatigue to the point that we were shedding equipment just to keep moving. We only just managed to get out alive, and it felt like we'd overcome the worst that could have been thrown at us.

I ran Curse of Strahd over multiple sessions and wrote it up here. The player's had a huge challenge to overcome, bring hope to Barovia and getting themselves to the point where they felt that they could overcome Strahd. What amuses me to this day is the fact that they felt it necessary to have a WhatsApp back channel without me where they plotted how they could overcome their Vampiric enemy. I'd initially felt it was a joke, but soon realised that it was very real. I think that they definitely had a feeling of overcoming despite great odds against them at the end.

Finally, at Longcon 2025, I ran both parts of the Stormbringer epic campaign Stealer of Souls & Black Sword. The end point of the campaign saw one of the characters seeking vengeance and facing off with Elric over the death of her father, his soul stolen by the demon sword Stormbringer. Somehow a path was found that didn't end up with what would have been an otherwise inevitable death. The gave a real feeling of success, and the character definitely overcame her likely fate.

I do think that the longer form game lends itself to a stronger feeling of having overcome something significant.

16th August 2025

#RPGaDay2025 - 15 - Deceive

It's RPGaDay season again. Here's a link to the blog post with the current year's prompts.

Today's prompt is Deceive. 

This is an interesting one. I'm a huge fan of character vs character conflict, especially in one-shot convention games, as it makes the players really devious and interactive. However, I have shifted in how I do this. Mostly, the motivations and agendas were hidden, which meant that what happened often came as a surprise. The players would be trying to covertly deceive each other and gain the upper hand. I've written scenarios with a single player having a covert mission that puts them at odds with the rest of the group, and they've mostly gone down well at the table.

I have a Dune hack of Conspiracy of Shadows that plays out the events at the start of the first book, with one of the characters randomly assigned the role of traitor (which is kind of fun, as Paul Atreides can have that role). This was run using the 'blood opera' mode for the game, which is built around relationship maps and backstabbing. 

These days, I'd feel obliged to call out that there were hidden agendas and potential character-vs-character action, because I've become aware that it can cause upset and reduce enjoyment when people stumble into this kind of thing and don't like it. It's not everyone's cup of tea. 

I don't believe that you should ever have player-vs-player (PVP) in a roleplaying game; as a GM you need to be really clear that this is all about character-vs-character. Roleplaying is far more personal in its nature that a video game, and the danger is when people start to take things personally. My experience is that you tend to get a better atmosphere and more enjoyment at a table when the GM has called that out at the start.

I'm also a big fan for making the scheming open at the table; not everyone loves that, but it can make for a more fun story when things are played out so the player is aware, but the character doesn't know that they are being deceived or plotted against. The character may get stabbed in the back, but the player can see it coming.

Some games do deception overtly; Alien is a good example of this. Each character has a hidden agenda, which will change as the scenario develops. That change is usually a complete surprise, and is a tool for the GM to drive interaction. However, the setting is built around paranoia and distrust, and it's open from the start of the game that anyone could have an agenda like Ash or Burke, something at odds to the survival of the group.

In conclusion, I like games were there is an opportunity to deceive, but I prefer it to be open and the table to be aware that it could be happening. I also think the GM needs to be clear at the start that it is character-vs-character, not player-vs-player.

15 August 2025

#RPGaDay2025 - 13 - Darkness

It's RPGaDay season again. Here's a link to the blog post with the current year's prompts.

Today's prompt is Darkness. 

Hello Darkness, my old friend...

I think that I get the most out of roleplaying games when the struggle to succeed is palpable and you're not sure if you're actually winning. The games I remember most as a player are those when all the way through, I wasn't certain that we could or would succeed. Eternal Lies, the Darkening of Mirkwood, Tales of the Lone Lands, the Dracula Dossier, the multitude of Esoterrorists campaigns I've played in, all of these had little victories along the way, and some setbacks. In all of these cases, I was never certain what was going on and - so many times - the opposition looked almost certain to succeed. And yet somehow, despite the darkness, we prevailed. Those victories all built towards victory, but right to the end of everyone of those campaigns, I had no confidence that we could win.

And sometimes the win was bittersweet. In the Dracula Dossier, my character had to kill another party member who had become a vampire to fight Dracula. In Eternal Lies, we won, but my character was lost, and the other character was permanently scarred by the events. But all the way through - from Mexico City at least - we'd thought that death was likely. 

The darkness makes the victory all the sweeter.

Looking at it from a GM's perspective, it can be a fine line to walk. I try to be a fan of the characters, but that doesn't mean that I won't push them or stretch them. There were a couple of moments in Curse of Strahd which came very close to being a TPK (Total Party Kill). Ironically, the encounters weren't aimed to be like that, but the tactics that the players chose made them do that. Throughout the campaign I struggled to judge whether I was making it feel dangerous enough for them. I knew that once they'd reached mid-levels, that even Strahd himself wasn't likely to be a major threat if they worked together, but the players didn't see it that way. I tried to make them see the darkness in the setting from their interactions, from the way that the townsfolk were cowed and had adjusted to their terrifying and horrific oppression by a feudal lord who would literally eat you alive if you opposed him. I tried to make the moments of success and sanctuary meaningful, light against the darkness.

Failure and adversity against the darkness make the victory all the sweeter.

13 August 2025

Edit - I was doing catch up mode with this and seem to have written a variant post to that in Overcome (which I actually wrote first). However, I think that the theme here is subtly different. The darkness is what you are overcoming, what the struggle is about, rather than the struggle itself. It is the threat, the oblivion, and the price of failure you need to overcome. You don't need darkness to overcome something (for example, a heist based scenario, or a trading based campaign both probably won't have much darkness) but I think that it makes the stakes so much higher.

RPGaDay2025 - 12 - Path

It's RPGaDay season again. Here's a link to the blog post with the current year's prompts.

Today's prompt is Path. 

There's an element in game design that really turns me off, partly because I've increasingly lost interest in complicated mechanics and minutiae, something that my younger self would have lapped up.

Hang on, you say, but don't you love Traveller?

That's definitely a "Yes, but..." response. Traveller hides its complexity in procedural subsystems, which are mostly pretty logical. The character generation has pretty much everything you need for any character across two pages for each type, in clear step-based tables. Starship design is a menu-based system (you don't have to use formulae for power points and more these days) and there's a variety of spreadsheets out there that make it really easy to do. The task system itself is simple and elegant (although I prefer the more precise way that it was done in MegaTraveller and the DGP Task system for Classic Traveller). There's a clear and simple path through each of these processes.

So what do I mean?

I don't like the legacy of D&D3e with the whole process of feats and paths to create the optimum character. This continues through to the current design. I really don't want to read through lots of lists of things that are usually presented in text blocks with the mechanical impacts hidden away. I tend to skim them or phase out when reading because I find them tedious. Same with bestiaries and spell lists.

I loved the simplicity that Cypher presents itself, both in character generation and the game engine itself.

I am an adjective noun who verbs.

And then you hit pages of details - the paths that characters will develop on - behind all that which just lost my interest. It took me a while to realise that as a GM I could just skim this and hand it over to the players. I ended up doing the same with my D&D5e campaign. The players took this on.

I get lost in the trees and can't see the path through the forest as a result.

And yet I know this kind of detail and options give some people a lot of delight. Several of my friends love to go through this in detail and build their perfect, optimised character. To them, this approach gives a clear path to the character that they want.

Perhaps it's a legacy of my earliest games being Chaosium's BRP-based games and Traveller? They didn't have the same kind of progression. BRP was based on skills through experience and training and Traveller, well, once you generated a character, that was pretty much it for development originally. Their core engines were simple.

And yet, I really enjoyed running D&D5e and I've actively considered using Numenéra for running the Ultraviolet Grasslands.

12 August 2025

#RPGaDay2025 - 9 - Inspire

It's RPGaDay season again. Here's a link to the blog post with the current year's prompts.

Today's prompt is Inspire. 

When I pick up a roleplaying game and read it, I need it to inspire me if I want to run or play it. When I'm reading a book, I get what I can best describe as the 'GM tingles'. This is usually triggered by something within the game or the scenarios that excites me, meaning I want to explore that situation or idea.

At the moment, I'm reading In Nomine with a view to running it at Furnace. This has been mainly driven by a fantastic experience around the time that the game was originally released when my friend Ric ran a short campaign focused around the Northern Ireland peace process. It allowed us to explore the motivations of angels and devils against a very real backdrop that meant a lot to the GM as he has a heritage from Northern Ireland. I've always wanted to explore this further.

Had I not got this past inspiration, I'd have probably given up on the idea, as I found the first part of the book pretty tedious. The core rules are pretty verbose (but simple), the kind of thing that turns me off. However, I've just hit the part about the motivations of angels and archangels and all of a sudden I'm excited and inspired. There are tensions between them that are begging to be explored. 

I mentioned in yesterday's post about things that I wanted to explore in some Traveller adventures, and it works in similar ways in published materials too. What are the gaps and tensions that call out to be explored?

Similarly, a splat-book with details for everything doesn't inspire me. Give me gaps and conflicts to explore. If you try to sell me your game on page count, I'm probably not your target audience.

What inspires you when you and makes you want to play or run a game?

9 August 2025

The Dying Earth Revivification Folio Cribsheet

At Furnace last year, I ran Pelgrane Press' Dying Earth roleplaying game, using The Dying Earth Revivification Folio, which is the completely compatible but updated set of rules based on the Skulduggery RPG which was spun out of the original Dying Earth Roleplaying Game that was Pelgrane's launch product. 

As usual, I handled learning a new system by creating a cribsheet for quick reference at the table. Here's a link to it on Google Docs. Feel free to comment with any corrections or improvements.

I would observe that the game captures the feel of Jack Vance's novels really well, but it does mean that the players need to be willing to embrace the whims of fate, much like the protagonists in the novel. Hopefully, that fate will avoid Chun the Unavoidable. However, he is, as the name says, unavoidable. Just don't have a dismal failure...

9 August 2025

#RPGaDay2025 - 8 - Explore

It's RPGaDay season again. Here's a link to the blog post with the current year's prompts.

Today's prompt is Explore. 

Recently, my forever game Traveller has started to produce some great campaign supplements for exploration, at a completely different scale to what it's done before. Deepnight Revelation is an epic, multi-decade exploration campaign into the unknown to understand an interstellar phenomenon. It's probably the closest Traveller has got to Star Trek in feel since it came out. Rim Expeditions does something similar, but different, allowing you to play Solomani Explorers pushing out towards the rim of the galaxy (or at least our spiral arm). 

What was really different for both of these was that they looked at exploration at a high level, whereas previously Traveller had focused at the macro-level, zoomed in on a planet, or an artefact, or a ship. The way that it was previously done in Shadows or Mission on Mithril was great for getting to the immediacy of a game, but there was not necessarily a long term driver. Perhaps the mini-campaign sets like Tarsus and Arrival Vengeance got closer to this (and the latter is definitely a voyage of discovery across the shattered Imperium), but it wasn't so deliberate. The new approach is a definitely aimed at a multi-year voyage of discover, boldly going into the unknown (or partly known).

However, I've written pretty extensive reviews of Deepnight Revelation and Rim Expeditions, so I don't propose to go back to them. The links will take you to them.  It's worth adding that I've since read the extra six volumes beyond the core box set for Deepnight Revelation and I would consider them essential if I ran the campaign.

There's another aspect to explore when it comes to roleplaying games. Inherently, roleplaying games give you the chance to be someone else and explore their worldview and how someone very different to yourself would react. Yes, it will always be a stretch to really push away from your own world-view, but it's fun to try. Many of the scenarios that I've written have been triggered by the thoughts of 'wouldn't it be interesting to explore that'?

Delta 3 is Down* was written having read the GURPS Traveller Zhodani Aliens Volume, which made me wonder what a Zhodani crew would make of the Imperials if they were forced to interact with them. 

Cold Dark Grave* was partly about exploring a close family business and how the interactions would play out if they found themselves doing something potentially illegal but with the potential to save them from bankruptcy. How far would they go?

Wolves at the Door** was all about playing teenagers and exploring how they would react if their world was threatened by raiders. Could they be Spielberg style heroes? 

The joy of roleplaying games is that they let you try something different, to explore the character you have created and also the situation that you are in. We can do things we couldn't in real life and explore the consequences. I think that's what has kept me roleplaying for forty years; the chance to explore something different from the mundane.

8 August 2025

* Both of these are currently being reworked into Mongoose Traveller second editions with BITS.

** There's also another plan to bring this out with another Traveller publisher.