Victorian horror game -- 1st session report

Last night saw the first session of my new mini-campaign, a vaguely H. P. Lovecraft inspired investigative affair set in London in the year 1890.

The PCs are all members of a secret club calling itself "The Society of the Squared Circle", based in private rooms at London's Oriental Club. They have found themselves involved in a murder case, coming to the support of a young doctor who, at first glance, doesn't have a leg to stand on -- he was witnessed killing a woman with his bare hands and then collapsing unconscious by her side until being apprehended by the police. However, all is, of course, not as it seems. The group have begun to uncover some unusual aspects of the case, and have lots more digging planned for the next session.

This was several firsts for me: first time running a campaign set in the real world, first time running a game in a modern(ish) setting with electricity and guns and so on, first time running a proper investigative adventure.

So far I have very much enjoyed the setting -- it's been a real breath of fresh air after running a relatively typical D&D campaign for the last 18 months!

A few points of interest which stood out to me as referee so far:

• I love the Victorian period! (I knew this already.)
• I also like the Victorian period on practical RPG grounds. It is close enough to living memory, and has enough modern technology to be not too unfamiliar to players, while not having advanced so far that problematic things like widespread mass communication, the internet, and so on make designing an investigative scenario tricky.
• One aspect of playing in a historical real world setting which was unusual for me was the balance between making things up and looking things up. I'm used to running completely home-brewed fantasy campaigns, where I, as DM, am free to just make up anything on the spur of the moment and have it become "campaign canon". Not so in a historical setting. We are lucky enough to have a player who is pretty knowledgeable about history, and the Victorian era / the British Empire specifically. This helped a lot when questions came up (and many did!) about "did they have X at that time?", "was Y common knowledge then?", etc. Thanks Steve! Actually this is something I really enjoyed -- that the game felt a bit more collaborative than usual, with players being able to contribute as much to the atmosphere and background as I was.
• I found it a lot of fun designing and running an investigative adventure. This was something I was very unsure about -- whether I'd be able to come up with an interesting scenario, and create a gradual trail of clues for the players to follow. After one session, it's gone really well so far, I feel. Rather than the usual D&D methodology of drawing a map and detailing what's where, I wrote three lists: a list of locales (and marked them on a city map), a list of people (and their relation to the case / each other), a timeline of events. This seemed to work pretty well, and I didn't have to do too much note flipping. I'd be interested to hear how anyone else deals with writing this kind of adventure...

Oh one final fun thing I'd like to share about the campaign: as we're a group of very mixed nationalities (English, German, German/Russian, Dutch, Italian, Belgian), I suggested that it'd be fun for everyone to play a character of their own nationality. This has worked out very well, adding the players' knowledge of their own countries' history to the pool of background flavour. Thus we have a Dutch electrical inventor, a German doctor / polar explorer, a German industrialist, a Russian noblewoman and occult dabbler, a Belgian diplomat, an Italian mobster (named Michael Corleone!) and an English arabist.

Album + Book + Artist = D&D Campaign

Jon Anderson's Olias of Sunhillow

+ Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea

+ Patrick Woodroffe

Thoughts on campaign structure

A few things have been mulling around in my mind lately about how to structure a good campaign (good meaning: 'the kind of campaign I want to run'), and what sorts of limitations can be put on the game to achieve that.

My current Age of Chaos campaign was designed from the beginning with certain in- and out-of game limits which were attempts to define how it should work. Here are some of these principles:

1. A fixed group of characters is not required. This was the original impetus for the campaign, in fact. To be able to run a game with players who aren't all able to commit to coming to every session.
2. Each session should be its own self-contained adventure. This kind of follows from the first principle - if the group of characters can be different every session, then the normal idea of a campaign as a continuous story doesn't necessarily work out.
3. It's a sandbox - the players are the ones who drive the action, through their choices of where to go and what to do. The DM does not have some over-arching plot in mind which the PCs are implicitly expected to follow.
4. No moral imperative - connected with point 3 - the campaign won't take the form of saving the world or suchlike. It's more about exploration.
   

It's interesting, looking back, how the campaign has developed. The first point has become pretty moot, as the group of players actually is more or less the same every session - there's a core at least, and the occasional drop-in from another friend. This has also nullified the second point - the story can continue directly from where the last session left off. I guess I came up with those guiding principles from perhaps a more idealistic perspective (the idea, which really appeals to me, of having a large rotating pool of players), rather than a practical point of view (that actually we have a pretty static core of 4 players in our RPG group).

So far point 3 has gone well. I've not deliberately introduced any pre-planned story arcs (although hints of plots and subterfuges have come up during play, which is only natural), and the players have chosen their course of exploration. I do get the feeling they're a little shy of choosing their own path, which is perhaps due to a difference in experience, as they mostly grew up on D&D 3.5 or later, whereas I grew up on Basic/Expert D&D. I think the emphasis in those two eras of the game was pretty different. Since reading ars ludi's thoughts on his West Marches campaign I'm very much taken with the idea of the players deciding between games where they want to go next, giving the DM some time to prepare something which they might encounter there. This unfortunately also requires knowing how many people are going to come to each session - it's all very well planning a daring raid on a Goblin city, but when only two players come to the game it suddenly doesn't seem such a good idea.

Point 4 is a tricky one for me. The campaign currently seems to be veering in exactly the opposite direction - a band of witch-hunters out on a crusade against Chaos. It's not really what I had in mind, and I can't quite put my finger on what it is I don't like about it.

All in all it's very interesting to see that really what I'd prefer to run is a series of more modular games, where each session has a pre-defined emphasis ("we're going to explore the ruins of the old mill", "we're going to try to steal the Duke's diary from his library", "we're going to follow that treasure map we found", etc). A sort of modular sandbox. I want the players to be totally free in their course of actions, but I guess I want to know up-front what they intend, so I can prepare something engaging, and I want each session to be an adventure - with enticement, danger and reward (or pain)!

Ah I guess I'm just suffering from having had three slow-paced town based sessions in a row! Still, things are looking up - strange things await the PCs in those cellars...

One conclusion I can draw for now though is that I'd definitely like more players, to enable this kind of tag-team adventuring...