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 - 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 - 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.

#RPGaDay2025 - 7 - Journey

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

Today's prompt is Journey. 

You might be relieved to hear that I'm not planning to link to Traveller again today. I did consider discussing Rim Expeditions or Deepnight Revelation, but I think that perhaps there are other prompts coming up where they would fit better...

Journey takes me right to Tolkien. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings both have journeys at the heart of their stories, but editions of the various Middle Earth related roleplaying games didn't put them front and centre of the game, and as a result were something less than they could have been. The One Ring makes travel, and the finding of refuges and places of sanctuary outside the wilds, really important and as a result, feels much more like the fiction it seeks to emulate.

Yes, earlier takes on Middle Earth had wonderful mapping and fantastic gazetteers (I'm especially thinking of Iron Crown Enterprises' work here) but somehow it was incidental. 

In The One Ring, travel will bring fatigue, encounters and threats. Outside of the points of light, Middle Earth is a dangerous place, and each members of the party will make rolls to progress safely. One character will take the role of the guide, leading the fellowship on its travels, and using the all important Travel skill. Others will be the Look-Outs, rolling Awareness to keep watch. Scouts will roll Explore to find trails and set up camps. Finally, the Hunters will find food in the wild using the Hunting skill. Not everyone will have to roll every part of the journey; who it is depends on the event that happens.

The path is planned on the hex maps and the distance you travel without an event is determined by the Guide's skill roll. 

Events will affect one of the roles, who will have to use their skill to try and avoid consequences. The Loremaster (GM) is given guidance on the types of event that could happen but it is tailored to the fellowship that is making the journey. Events will typically cause fatigue, but they can also bring dread (through shadow points) or restore hope. You can also be injured. Having pack animals will reduce fatigue along the way. 

It's a mechanistic approach but it works really well and uses a simple procedure to manage the process. 

When we played The Darkening of Mirkwood, journeys across the forest were very dangerous until we helped restore the Dwarven Road, and crossing the mountains even more so. We had one journey across what remains of Angmar where we ended up dumping lots of equipment as we were so fatigued. When we finally emerged into Eriador, we were incredibly relieved. The loss of fatigue really drives tension.

If you fancy a more generic version of this, Cubicle 7 took the mechanics that did for the first edition's D&D 5e line and turned them into a decent book called Uncharted Journeys, which I recommend.

In summary, I love the way that The One Ring has made each journey an important and memorable part of the game, using simple procedures that evoke the feel of the books that the game seeks to emulate.

7th August 2025

#RPGaDay2025 - 6 - Motive

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

Today's prompt is Motive. 

I could make this about Traveller again? Oh, go on then.

Traveller introduced many different things to the roleplaying game sphere, but Adventure 11: Murder on Arcturus Station did something that has seldom been adopted elsewhere. It presented a murder mystery on a lonely mining space station, along with a great selection of non-player characters. all with motives for murdering the victim. Released in 1983, there weren't that many investigative games out there yet, but this adventure dared to go beyond a simple chain of clues.

Instead, it tells you how to build your own murder mystery, allowing you to tailor the challenge to your players. You can have a simple mystery with three suspects, or perhaps all nine if you love complexity. Each suspect has their game statistics, reasons to be involved, known and hidden background, a clear Motive which can be discovered, and then the means. There are options given for how they could kill the victim (a somewhat obnoxious hard-nosed businessman) and also how they could be a suspect. Each has an alibi with reaction modifications depending on which lines of questioning are taken. There's also some final notes of elements that may be useful to the referee.

You can even set up a character as a murderer. This requires some work between the player and the referee before the game begins. There's some guidance on how to handle this (by encouraging the party to split and notes about information being passed around as a norm). The starter for the adventure gives all the characters a reason to dislike the victim (he refuses to pay them for their previous work), so there's some motive there already. 

Mongoose re-released this adventure with a prequel (the job that they don't get paid for) as Mysteries on Arcturus Station. The new prequel is a more traditional investigation, but the second adventure is pretty much the same as the original, except that it gives a way to have a player as the murderer without prior collaboration, which I think would work very well. However, they won't know their motive unless they solve the reason for the murder.

So there you are. A flexible adventure, bundled with Motives.

7 August 2025

#RPGaDay2025 - 5 - Ancient

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

Today's prompt is Ancient. 

Another Traveller reference, I'm afraid. 

Traveller's setting makes reference to 'the Ancients', an alien civilisation of great power and technology which wiped itself out some three hundred thousand years earlier. When I came across the game, it resonated with me because of the many Andre Norton books that I'd read prior to discovering roleplaying, particularly the Solar Queen series. In those, there is a similarly lost and mysterious civilisation called 'the Forerunners', which served a served a similar plot purpose. I've no doubt that this was an influence on the game.

That sense of mystery and wonder was also there in one of my favourite books, "Rendezvous with Rama", by Sir Arthur C. Clarke, which has a crew exploring an ancient alien vessel which was passing through the solar system. Alastair Reynolds also did this really well with his Revelation Space series, although opening the mystery box results in dire consequences for humanity.

Babylon 5 also had a similar theme with ancient civilisations with an ongoing war.

My heretical thought on the Ancients in Traveller is that they lose some of the reason that they fascinate once you know the story. Discovering the answer to the mystery makes it mundane. That's the paradox; we want to know, but when we find out, the magic goes away.

5 August 2025

#RPGaDay2025 - 4 - Message

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

Today's prompt is Message. I've answered this previously in the 2020 RPGaDay.

I'll do something different this time. My forever game, Traveller, had a message on the box set front cover which still resonates with me today.

This is Free Trader Beowulf,

calling anyone... 

Mayday, Mayday... we are under attack... main drive is gone...

turret number one not responding.. Mayday. .. losing cabin pressure

fast... calling anyone... please help...

This is Free Trader Beowulf...

Mayday...

It still sends a shiver down my spine when I read it, as the message sits there, pregnant with potential for adventure.

Much later, GURPS Traveller did a lovely thing with it's advertising campaign which went something like 

Hang in there Beowulf... Help is on the way...

That was a clever play on things at the time as Traveller was between publishers, and the GURPS edition reverted back to the classic / golden era before the Imperium is shattered by the second civil war as described in MegaTraveller.

That's my favourite gaming message.

Books in July 2025

July was a quiet month for reading for me. Lots going on with work and some time spent on writing projects that nearly made me miss my ' read every day' objective.

I read five books, for a total of 1,788 pages. That brings me to 70 books and 17,627 pages for the year. This month I read two non-fiction books, one roleplaying book and two novels.

The non-fiction books were The CIA Book Club by Charlie English and Liftoff by Eric Berger. The former was a fascinating tale of how the CIA funded and helped organise the sharing and sale of literature that was banned in the communist block. The story is focused on Poland, explaining how vital the sharing of literature and ideas was to Solidarity's success. 

Liftoff was a gripping tale of how SpaceX transitioned into becoming the leading provider of rocket launches. It was gripping, tense, and reminded me of why I respected Musk's drive (although I really dislike his management approach and values) and the achievements that were made. Unfortunately, that's all tainted by his foray into politics. However, this book captures the feel of a start-up business really well.

The roleplaying book was Tales of the Old West, which is the first historical take on a Western based roleplaying game. It uses Fria Ligan's Year Zero Engine and is really nicely written. I hope to run this at Furnace in October. Having run and played YZE games before, this looks like a great one.

I revisited the past this month with Mary Stewart's The Crystal Cave. This is her Romano-British Arthurian Merlin trilogy's first book. It has a special place in my heart as my Grandmother introduced me to it and I have read it multiple times. This was a return after more than a decade, and it was as wonderful as ever. I recommend this series if you fancy something Arthurian but a bit different. The series definitely influenced the way that I ran the Pendragon roleplaying game in the past.

Finally, I read Paul Vidich's The Poet's Game, a modern day spy story set mostly in Russia and the US. A former spy finds that he cannot escape his past as he's asked to help make contact with a former asset by the CIA. I found this a bit of a page turner, and look forward to the next book from the author.

I'm on holiday in August so the reading rate may accelerate again.

3 August 2025

#RPGaDay2025 - 3 - Tavern

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

Today's prompt is Tavern.

Tavern's don't immediately spring to mind when I think of gaming, but I do have to admit that my recent foray into Bree and The Prancing Pony during LongCon was a delight (but real ale lovers should also check out The Lamplighter Inn at Straddle, which had a much more relaxed feel). The gaming purpose that they've traditionally served was covered by Patrons for me. The venue didn't matter, and if I needed one quickly then there was always 101 Rendezvous to find somewhere to meet. 

The Tavern that I associate with gaming is the Gaming Tavern. This is an old-style Bulletin Board Forum that's mostly focused on roleplaying games but with space to discuss most things. It's lightly moderated (I'm part of that group now) and tends to be slower than the conversation in spaces like Bluesky and Mastodon. Mostly, I prefer it to the more social media as I can engage with it at my own pace and I never get that anxiety that I'm missing stuff when I get behind on my feed. Then again, I prefer blogs to YouTube videos so perhaps it's just a generation thing.

The saddest thing was when we had to close to new memberships because of the UK Online Safety Act. That requires age verification to be carried out but didn't put in place anything to do this pragmatically. If you're running a free service, then it's not easy to make that viable. We do still admit new folks, but generally that's because we've met them at conventions and have verified the individual's age. 

Anyway, that's my favourite Tavern.

#RPGaDay2025 - 2 - Prompt

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

Today's prompt is Prompt.

Well, first of all, you'll have to forgive me if not all my posts during RPGaDay2025 are prompt. Sometimes they need a little thought, sometimes real life will get in the way of them.

There's a thing in the OSR (and in that, I'd include early editions of Traveller) where a random table is suggested for encounters, events and more. I've only ever really used these for encounters (typically because they're there in a scenario, in D&D or early SF adventures like Mission on Mithril or Shadows) but I do like a good book of them because they're wonderful idea seeds for a GM. Reading through them gives prompts to your brain on how you could flavour or pitch an adventure.

Any of Sine Nomine's 'Without Number' books are great for this (and they have free versions), and there's other great material out there like Cubicle 7's Uncharted Journeys or Mythmere's Tome of Adventure Design. I have far too many of these books, and mostly they sit there, pregnant with potential for adventure. But when something emerges from them, it's wonderful.

These kind of books and lists are fantastic prompts for the mind. Anyone got any recommendations for others?

2 August 2025

#RPGaDay2025 - 1 - Patron

It's RPGaDay season again, so I'll give it a go. Here's a link to the blog post with the current year's prompts.

Today's prompt is Patron.

In many ways, this is an easy one to talk about, as the word 'Patron' in a roleplaying game context immediate takes me to my forever game, Traveller. I long loved the utility of the Classic Traveller supplement, 76 Patrons. This is a fantastic collection of short plot hooks with a variety of options for resolution that could easily fill in a full play session. I guess that they'd be referred to as adventure seeds or hooks these days. When I was running a sandbox style merchant campaign in the Spinward Marches (broadly influenced by Twilight's Peak and others), I'd regularly go to this book and JTAS (The Journal of the Traveller's Aid Society) for ideas to slide in around the main plot, and it was rare that they ever let me down as a source of ideas. 

Each Patron encounter was defined by a role for the Patron, the Required Skills & Equipment, and then had two short paragraphs giving Player's Information and Referee's Information. The latter was a selection of options on what was going on, numbered against the roll of a six-sided dice. There weren't always six options, but you always had an option to randomise.

You can still get 76 Patrons from Drivethru RPG.

Skipping forward, I was proud to coordinate the book 101 Patrons for BITS. This was initially designed to replace 101 Plots, but it grew legs. It has a lovely cover by Jesse DeGraff (RIP), and some fantastic guidance on using the 4Ps (Plots, People, Places and Props) when working out a scenario, followed by some lovely work on the 36 dramatic situations (by Andy Slack if I recall correctly). This is followed by 48 Patrons in the same format as 76 Patrons along with 27 situations (again in the same format but not necessarily directly linked to a patron), 6 elaborations and a huge number of 'starport chatter' and 'world seed' entries. It's a really useful book for a Referee, particularly if you're in a hurry. In fact, the whole 101 line takes this approach.

You can still get 101 Patrons on Drivethru RPG, but there's also a bundle with all the 101 books. 

I don't get any benefit if you do pick a copy up, but you'll definitely have a useful aid for running a science fiction game!

1 August 2025