XX Horror: Women, HPL, and Trail of Cthulhu

[Erik Weissengruber]

I am starting a campaign of Trail of Cthulhu using the Armitage Files scenario pack.

The agenda is clear: the main PCs are going to be played by female players. There is room for others but we have the focus.

There we also be a troupe style of play. The main Investigators are like the Maguses of Ars Magica, there will be a few Associate Investigators (to be played by men) and numerous Grogs.

I was amazed that anyone in the hobby would go for it. Now I am having to turn prospective players away.

A few notes will have to go here.

[Ron Edwards]

Any thoughts on why?

"Just a gimmick" is a fine answer, if that's what it is. I'm asking as the author of Sex & Sorcery, meaning, I understand there might be more substance to the answer.

Best, Ron

[Erik Weissengruber]

Primarily, its aesthetic. Or creative impulse-y.

If I want to direct Glengarry Glen Ross by Mamet, I am going to get one kind of creative experience. I.e., a group of men yelling at each other, pretending to be the nastiest bunch of men possible.

If I am doing Top Girls by Caryl Churchill, it is going to be a very different experience. That play is not all smiles and sunshine and sisterhood. But working on that fictional material is going to be very different from the Mamet one.

I want to work with one kind of group because I am bored with the other. Now, there is some ethical twinge about having facilitated lots of the first type of the experience and none of the latter. So I want to even the balance sheet.

Also, I have been wondering about what horror means to women. Do the kind of biomorphic horrors that give me the chills resonate with women? Is there a way of exploring fear and daring and madness with women in a way that does not just reinforce real-world fears and threats.

I totally crapped out on a previous run of the Esoterrorists by trying to pull out the personal fears of the players. That kind of mindgaming gives me the creeps to think about now, and it resulted in some flat play. The challenge is to create frightening situations without abusing the players.

Also, some of the players have been upfront about how their personal histories make dealing with in-game insanity problematic. But they still want to do it. So I have to find a way for them to engage with the themes of madness and lack of control without being a manipulative mind-gaming prick about it.

So, the "I will not abandon you" aphroism is on my mind.

I have had to adapt my approach because of the flood of interest. I am unhappy with more than 4 players at the table for a psychological game. So I hit upon the expedient of having whichever of the main my female players was available for a particular session to be helped out by supporting characters played by either men or women. The arc of the campaign would be like a sprawling dramatic T.V. series, with a whole community of protagonists and opponents but with a tight focus on one subset of that community in each particular episode.

So a 3-tier system of Clued-In & Mythos-Savvy Investigators, Assistants, and Extras is evolving. Again, I have never done anything like this before and I am amazed that anyone is interested in doing it this way.

[Marv]

Erik, I didn't follow all that you said in your second post in this thread, but your first post spoke to me quite a bit.

I'm a male gamer but have often run campaigns with many females as player characters -- my wife, sister, daughter, and friends of the above. Never an all-girl group, but typically around 50%.

I have noticed that women and men seem to go about gaming in very different ways. The girls seem to gravitate more to CHARMED while the guys play DRESDEN FILES, if that makes any sense.

I haven't tried much Cthulhu gaming with my group, so it would be interesting to learn how different players responded to the genre that includes running away rather than kicking butt.

Keep us up to date on how the campaign progresses. It's an interesting topic.

[Jay Dugger]

What news on troupe play in Trail of Cthulhu?

[Erik Weissengruber]

Troupe play:

Argh. The group has bloated. So the "can't say no cuz we're all gamers" impulse took over the "focused play rather than baggy shapless hanging out" impulse I started with.

That said -- I am very pleased with the small sessions.

Spotlight Scenes and Big Group with Scene Cuts:

Last night we didn't even investigate a crime linked to the mythos. The characters were all in different places and up to different things. One character did the Clarice-meets-Hannibal thing and interviewed an creepy sorceror in jail as a result of a previous investigation by the crew. That took about 1/2 an hour. She is drawn, fatally, to Kingsport and a family of patrician New Englanders who persecuted her witchly ancestors. Another character had an interaction with a doctor friend who was doing charity work in depression-era Arkham and had been conducting abortions as well. Said doctor had been shopped to the police by another PC whose player gave the PC a strong Catholic background. This one-on-one scene lasted about 20 minutes.

Once those personal inquiries were taken care of, those characters had independent action threads while 4 other players began their own scenes. Much cross cutting occurred over the next 2 hours. The PC who betrayed the doctor, a shady antiquites dealer raced into the hills near Dunwitch to see what happened to the body of a mobster. Another PC -- a cop -- was heading to the same area to chase down some gangsters. This was co-incidental to the PCs but engineered by the players in director stance.

Note: there are real mysteries to solve AND a vast occult conspiracy unfolding. That is a heavy enough cognitive load for the players to manage. I have been explicit with my "screw the in-character/out-of character knowledge" attitude. There have been some real gross-out surreal mystery moments despite this baring of the devices of story-making. A very simple description of a 15 million year-old fossil strata discovered up in some Homo Sap. remains from 50 thousand years ago, and featuring the impression of a wrist watch really creeped out the crew.

The crew in the hills had their sanities compromised but not blasted as they faced down some bloated, pustulent undead minions. Meanwhile one of the PCs was kidnapped while trying to approach a maddened Miskatonic professor on the verge of trying to burn the archeology wing down. Her storyline hooked up with that of the Catholic priest investigating his suspicions about the aforementioned professor. All the while the PC whose doctor friend was in jail was pursuing private personal questions about past disturbing events and the strange medical threat that the jailed doctor saw hanging over the very woman who had turned her in.

Biomorphic horrors:
When one of the PCs decided to make the NPC abortionist an ally, I knew that birth and other body issures were going to be on the table. I like the way different players chose their character's reaction to the doctor and her work. When the doctor confided that some of the fetuses she aborted were "wrong" and that some pregant women have disappeared, the issues around birth were tied into the supernatural horrors around the characters.


Intentional Bleed vs. Manipulative Mind GamingI have tried a "mash-up" like the session prep in Freemarket. Only, what I do is choose from a list of personal fears that the players have confided in me. I asked about experiences of isolation, betrayal, abuse of authority, loss of bodily control.

THE FEAR FROM ONE PLAYER IS ALWAYS USED IN ANOTHER PLAYER's MASHUP.

So, one of my players talked about a parent who kept an illness hidden. That experience was brougt over to another player, who had the opportunity to warn another PC about a medical threat. That second player did not share the information.

Personal horrors are in the fictional world but are not being waved back at the players who contributed them.

All the characters have drives that point them in the direction of dangers and horrors that the players have contributed to my idea pile.


Charmed vs. Dresden:
This is horror and not supernatural fantasy. We are running the the "Purist" mode: your Sanity never comes back. And your character is never more effective than when running into danger, so the system pushes you to dramatic self-destruction. Everyone who signed up for the game knew that was what they were getting. I lost some early participants because they said they weren't into grim and nasty.

The mechanics of ToC require you to find Sources of Stability and ideological Pillars of Sanity. Those are beautiful shiny targets for my GM malice. My mash-up technique involves taking Player X's Source of Stability and placing it in Player Y's way. I try to arrange scenes where Y's Drive is at odds with the needs or even safety of this Source of Stability. (This is taking PC>NPC>PC triangles from Apocalypse World). That is what happened with the abortionist NPC, a Source of Stability from one PC thrown in the way of another. I had no idea what this second player would do and was surprised when she helped put that doctor in jail.

I foreground the need to maintain relationships as part of maintaining character effectiveness.


On Marketing to the Genders

To throw around gross generaizations: if it is proposed that female gamers are, as a population, more interested in exploring character relationships than the other gender is, then a game where engaging with fictional relationships means engaging with the system might lead to more rewarding play by members of that population than one that does not.

However, (to get out of generalizations) the player who made the bold choice  of having her character make an ethical judgment that went aginst the player's own personal beliefs ALSO sent her character into the hills to pump full of lead the zombified remnants of a rival criminal.

There is no reason why you can't kick ass and talk to people too.

[Jay Dugger]

Troupe play:

Argh. The group has bloated. So the 'can't say no cuz we're all gamers' impulse took over the 'focused play rather than baggy shapless hanging out' impulse I started with.

That said -- I am very pleased with the small sessions.

Ha! a familiar sentiment well expressed. What number of players do you
have, and do you still use troupe-style play with them? I can't tell
from your post.

Spotlight Scenes and Big Group with Scene Cuts:

Said doctor had been shopped to the police by another PC whose player gave the PC a strong Catholic background. This one-on-one scene lasted about 20 minutes.

Does this mean each player got a spotlight scene, or was it each character?

Once those personal inquiries were taken care of, those characters had
independent action threads while 4 other players began their own
scenes. Much cross cutting occurred over the next 2 hours. ... This was co-incidental to the PCs but engineered by the players in director stance.

How did you pace the cross-cutting? When did you decide when to change
from player to player?

Note: there are real mysteries to solve AND a vast occult conspiracy unfolding. That is a heavy enough cognitive load for the players to manage. I have been explicit with my "screw the in-character/out-of character knowledge" attitude.

The usual warning about separating player knowledge from character knowledge seems to apply here, but the play description suggests you've not had any problems. If not, why not, and how do you suggest other people reproduce the result? It seems to me you've combined a social contract with skilled players and then distracted them with mystery and conspiracy. What do you really do?

Intentional Bleed vs. Manipulative Mind GamingI have tried a "mash-up" like the session prep in Freemarket. Only, what I do is choose from a list of personal fears that the players have confided in me. I asked about experiences of isolation, betrayal, abuse of authority, loss of bodily control.

THE FEAR FROM ONE PLAYER IS ALWAYS USED IN ANOTHER PLAYER's MASHUP.

So, one of my players talked about a parent who kept an illness hidden. That experience was brougt over to another player, who had the opportunity to warn another PC about a medical threat. That second player did not share the information.

Personal horrors are in the fictional world but are not being waved back at the players who contributed them.

All the characters have drives that point them in the direction of
dangers and horrors that the players have contributed to my idea
pile.

I don't know what "mash-up" means here. I've not read Freemarket. Otherwise this redirection of player fear seems like a good way to make play more evocative. Did you have any players refuse to confide when you asked about personal fears? If so, how did you handle that? Did you lose players to this approach, as you did with the not
"into grim and nasty?"

Charmed vs. Dresden:
This is horror and not supernatural fantasy. We are running the the "Purist" mode: your Sanity never comes back. And your character is never more effective than when running into danger, so the system pushes you to dramatic self-destruction. Everyone who signed up for the game knew that was what they were getting. I lost some early
participants because they said they weren't into grim and nasty.

Did the drop-outs have prior experience with Trail of Cthulhu or Call of
Cthulhu?

The mechanics of ToC require you to find Sources of Stability and ideological Pillars of Sanity. Those are beautiful shiny targets for my GM malice. My mash-up technique involves taking Player X's Source of Stability and placing it in Player Y's way. I try to arrange scenes where Y's Drive is at odds with the needs or even safety of this Source of Stability. (This is taking PC>NPC>PC triangles from Apocalypse World). That is what happened with the abortionist NPC, a Source of Stability from one PC thrown in the way of another. I had no idea what this second player would do and was surprised when she helped put that doctor in jail.

I foreground the need to maintain relationships as part of maintaining character effectiveness.

How do you integrate the mash-ups with the mystery solving and with discovering the conspiracy? In your place as GM, I would try to align PCs on different sides of the mysteries and conspiracies such that the intra-player conflict furthered that story, sacrificing prepared plot points for player created drama. What do you do? In particular, how do you keep the story from fragmenting into parallel unconnected threads? Does the PC>NPC>PC triangle prove sufficient by itself? If it fails, how and how do you recover?

[Erik Weissengruber]

See post #10 for the correctly formatted and phrased response. This one remains in place only because a couple of posts responded to it, and because I don't like deleting posts. - RE

Quote
Said doctor had been shopped to the police by another PC whose player gave the PC a strong Catholic background. This one-on-one scene lasted about 20 minutes.


Does this mean each player got a spotlight scene, or was it each character?

No. I ran it from 7:00 to about 7:20. Took a break and brought in another player. That ran from about 7:20 to 8:00. Then the mob took to the table to run from 8:00 to about 10:30

I LOATHE kibitzing. When there are too many players at the table, and attention is focused on one player, I get a lot of side chatter and people carrying out in-character banter. "We're just role playing" they say and I assume it is a practice that has been built up by being in many-player games and trying to maintain a sense of participation when waiting for one's turn to roll the dice. And we have a too big group. So I just broke out a few key one-on-one interactions and let the consequences flow. Some games like Inspecters and 3:16 have nice little mini-scenes where we break out of the flow of the action and then get back to group play. But it is really hard to keep everyone focused on one speaker in a big group like mine.


Quote

How did you pace the cross-cutting? When did you decide when to change
from player to player?

I used an old trick from Ron's Sorcerer: find out what the scene is about and set up everything until just before the dice need to roll.

Quot

The usual warning [1] about separating player knowledge from character knowledge seems to apply here, but the play description suggests you've not had any problems. If not, why not [2], and [3] how do you suggest other people reproduce the result? It seems to me you've combined a social contract with skilled players and then distracted them with mystery and conspiracy [4].

[1] The documents in the scenario pack are bizarre notes from the future about future events. However, the crimes that the characters need to solve are taking place NOW (1933). The events in 1933 are related to what is discussed in the documents but the events in the document do not give direct knowledge about the crimes. So, a document being faxed back from 1935 mentions a method of decapitation that leaves the blood static inside both the severed head and the body, until such point as either is moved and the blood flows as chemistry would predict. That future victim is unnamed. I have an NPC the PCs like die in the same way. I have an explanation for this that relates to the whole vast conspiracy but is not important for the crime at hand. The PCs have to do the standard cop stuff of identifying the victim, the time of death, the means, the perpetrators, the motive. When that 1933 crime is solved, the adventure is over.

[2] So at my table there is a player who was given a copy of the weird handout at the previous session. They take it home and read it and get their imaginations buzzing. Then, at the current session, I introduce a fictional circumstance in which the document is given them. They do some in-character acting and feign surprise or whatever. They might use some PC ability like "Anthropology" to get some extra clues about the document. I usually present them with some challenge or pull at odds with what the crime at hand is. Frex, I killed a beloved NPC bag lady just before the crime at hand was uncovered: the theft of an important book from the Orne Library at Miskatonic U back in 1908. The PCs had to deal with the call of Cthulhu drawing them toward some arcane mystery and their human relationship to someone they cared about. The player who had been given the document to mull over had to tie together her thoughts about the document and its significance with the courses of action pursued by other players' PCs.

[3] The rulebooks have advice about how to run more linear investigations than the kind we get into, but they do provide insight into how you can be firm on details of the crime – and I do not pull baits and switches or rewrite the crime just to keep the players on edge – while allowing players the choice about how they will investigate it. With ToC the players have to balance solving the crimes with their own personal Sanity and Stability and the ideological and personal commitments to which those character traits are linked. The scenario pack, written by Ken Hite and featuring a chapter on improvisation by Will Hindemarch, gives simple guidelines for an improvisational approach to the investigative game. Put simply: the issue is never "will the players find the clues" but "what will they do once all the clues are given" and "what price are they willing to pay – and have others pay – for the crime to be solved." Believe me, I sometimes find myself gritting my teeth when the players grab onto one clue and insert it into a chain of deductions that leads AWAY from the easy solution of the mystery. But I let them run with it. Then I will use scenes that are not related to the currency – the number of clues is limited and cost resources to explore – to offer them redirection. That is usually if they have not solved the crime by the end of the session. So solved crime means they walk into the next session with their resources low. If I know that Col. Mustard did it in the Kitchen with a Knife, but the players believe that some minor NPC must have used the Knife to do it, I will let them spend the session looking for that minor NPC. They found the clue of the Knife and there is no doubt it was the murder weapon. If the PC with Forensics got in the room and looked around, they were certain to find the clue: that is how the game works. What they did with it was up to them. By the end of the session I might have one of the PCs close friends (a source of Stability) mention parting with Mustard at the door to the kitchen on the night of the murder. That wasn't in my list of clues. And the source of Stability might have been interacting with the PC for some other reason. But I do want to let players know there are other avenues to explore if they are at a dead end. They will have to use investigative abilities to PROVE that Mustard did it, or make some tough choices along the way, but redirecting them after they have exhausted an avenue of inquiry is fair play.

[4] I am just following the game and scenario pack's well-defined procedures. The social contract was just about setting up a female-focused game. The rest is all part of the System that the game lays out (there are some implications of the mechanics that I had to work out on my own, but the written rules come close to expressing all of the latent possibilities of the System). I know what the course of events will be in terms of the grand apocalyptic nightmare. I am working with a thematic determinism: there will be some horrible catastrophe. There is nothing that I think the players MUST do or be tricked into doing to make our sessions interesting. The future doom is Setting and it is with/against this Setting and its thematic tensions that the players are acting as they solve individual crimes. And as this is a horror game solving the crime doesn't mean that the police come and tidy everything up. Each character comes face to face with personal fears and nightmares and implications related to each crime. So even if I give one character the document in advance and let players who have not had the opportunity to put their characters in touch with the document, this practice does not make solving the crimes easy, or threaten a metaplot (because there isn't any), or make the outcome of each session predictable. If you are running a game with a time-travel angle you can do it even if you land, as I do, on a determinist treatment of time within that fiction.



I don't know what "mash-up" means here. I've not read Freemarket. Otherwise this redirection of player fear seems like a good way to make play more evocative. Did you have any players refuse to confide when you asked about personal fears? If so, how did you handle that? Did you lose players to this approach, as you did with the not "into grim and nasty?"

Freemarket contains a scenario prep procedure that avoids railroading. Moreover, it prevents the GM (or "Superuser") from over-preparing or fixing details in place. The players begin the session by updating characters and making a few changes to what memories from last session are still pertinent to the characters. Then the Superuser takes a character from Player X's memories, a location from Player Y's memories, an event from Player Z's memories, and comes up with a situation with which to confront Player W. And so on. As the Superuser does not know which memories will still be on a character's sheet in the upcoming session, the Superuser cannot plan in advance what situation Player W will meet in that upcoming session. It depends on the choices made by X, Y, and Z.

Think of it as a session of improvisation: I and the players make a few key, principled decisions and run with them.




Did the drop-outs have prior experience with Trail of Cthulhu or Call of
Cthulhu?

Nah. It was just an agenda thing. He thought that he would have some fun with horror and then his mood changed and that was that.



How do you integrate the mash-ups with the mystery solving and with discovering the conspiracy? [5] ... how do you keep the story from fragmenting into parallel unconnected threads? [6]. Does the PC>NPC>PC triangle prove sufficient by itself? If it fails, how and how do you recover? [7]
[5] The mash-up is employed for several purposes. It provides a session-specific selection of the variety of the kinds of horror Color that we set up before the campaign. It also provides potential Premise-relevant social interactions for the characters. These interactions can be occasions for offering players an alternative track of investigations but are there for character action: in a universe inimical to human feelings and inhabited by powers inimical to humanity itself, how do you make life meaningful? (I don't get too angsty or philosophical about this, its just Existentialism 101).  The crime must be solved. The weird documents must be dealt with. And a number of NPCs have access to those strange transmissions from the future, so they will be out and about doing what they want to do (I had one deranged academic attempt to burn down the Archeology Department of the Miskatonic – about time too!).  And the crime must be solved. But the Story arises from characters interacting with Premise to create a Theme. I write out the crime and the relevant clues in relationship to the mash-up. I don't use it in the way it is used in Freemarket. But the crime is the crime. The actions the characters take to make their lives meaningful in the face of the weird messages from the future do not shake my firm definition of what the crime was.

[6] The story is the choices of the characters in relationship to the crime at hand and the document from the future. A story about a group of friends retreating from each other in the face of a horrible event is a story. But the players are all trying to find their response to the Premise. The one who thinks that strong, firm, and violent action is needed will try to recruit others to go along. So I have 2 investigators looking through old books in town while 3 run into the hills to look for Zombies. That would make a good movie to watch. For a while anyway. But the characters' ability pools do not refresh until the crime is solved and all characters know the solution. The characters, not the players. So regardless of the out of character knowledge, the players must find a way to tell each other about the crime. That's interaction. The cop who looks at the would-be revolutionary and delivers the news that as a result of hanging out with radicals, the revolutionary's best friend was drawn into a sinister alien conspiracy is not just delivering information: he is getting all up in the face of another player's PC. That's drama. The rules of the game dictate "no refresh on pools until crime is solved" and that rule turns the players back towards each other even if they have been diverging in paths of exploration.

[7] A PC>NPC<PC triangle is just a means for confronting players with the reality of the Setting. "In this world, some people want X, what does your character do when NPC #3 asks you for it, Player A?" I will ask this of Player A. Then, later in the session, I will say "Player B, NPC #3 couldn't get x from Player A's character and now wants you to punish Player A's character, so will you?" None of this has to do with the crime or the clues related to it. Perhaps Player B will ask NPC #3 to do some leg work related to the crime. Or will use Interrogation against this NPC to get a clue. Or will strike some kind of deal with the NPC where Player A's character will be punished and then the NPC will go out and try to find a clue. Or Player B will really get into character, make an impassioned in-character speech, and that will be that. The crime HAPPENED and no PC>NPC< triangle can change that reality. It can fizzle and be dull, so I will move on. But no clue will be lost because of it, and the background reality of the past crime will not be changed because of it.

ToC is like a good cop show: the interpersonal drama is occasioned by the crime and affected by it, but the players work to solve the crime because their characters are, ultimately and with some guidance from the character creation rules, made to solve crimes (although through various motives).

[Ron Edwards]

This thread has become a fine partner to and descendant from [Pocket Universe] Old serial killer procedural and new fantasy-adventure, and the links in there.

Best, Ron

[Erik Weissengruber]

Yeah, thanks. I didn't provide any enriching links.

The Forge site had some discussions about mysteries and gaming that have been in the back of my mind ever since I did some play testing for Gumshoe.

The Sanity and Stability mechanics provide more story-potential than the bare Gumshoe material. 

[Erik Weissengruber]

[Edited to improve format and fix typos]

Spotlight Scenes

Said doctor had been shopped to the police by another PC whose player gave the PC a strong Catholic background. This one-on-one scene lasted about 20 minutes.

Does this mean each player got a spotlight scene, or was it each character?

No. I ran it from 7:00 to about 7:20. Took a break and brought in another player. That ran from about 7:20 to 8:00. Then the mob took to the table to run from 8:00 to about 10:30

I LOATHE kibitzing. When there are too many players at the table, and attention is focused on one player, there is a lot of side chatter and people carrying out in-character banter. "We're just role playing" they say. I assume it is a practice that has been built up by being in many-player games and trying to maintain a sense of participation when waiting for one's turn to roll the dice. And we have just such a too big group. I just broke out a few key one-on-one interactions and let the consequences flow. Some games like Inspecters and 3:16 have nice little mini-scenes where we break out of the flow of the action but then get back to group play. But it is really hard to keep everyone focused on one speaker in a big group like mine.


Weaving (the Sorcerer technique)

How did you pace the cross-cutting? When did you decide when to change
from player to player?

I used an old trick from Ron's Sorcerer: find out what the scene is about and set up everything until just before the dice need to roll.


Player Knowledge vs. Player Use of That Knowledge

The usual warning [1] about separating player knowledge from character knowledge seems to apply here, but the play description suggests you've not had any problems. If not, why not [2], and [3] how do you suggest other people reproduce the result? It seems to me you've combined a social contract with skilled players and then distracted them with mystery and conspiracy [4].

[1] The documents in the scenario pack are bizarre notes from the future about future events. However, the crimes that the characters need to solve are taking place NOW (1933). The events in 1933 are related to what is discussed in the documents but the events in the document do not give direct knowledge about the crimes. So, a document faxed back from 1935 mentions a method of decapitation that leaves the blood static inside both the severed head and the body, until such point as either is moved and the blood flows as chemistry would predict. That future victim is unnamed. I have an NPC the PCs like die in the same way. I have an explanation for this that relates to the whole vast conspiracy but is not important for the crime at hand. The PCs have to do the standard cop stuff of identifying the victim, the time of death, the means, the perpetrators, the motive. When that 1933 crime is solved, the adventure is over.

[2] So at my table there is a player who was given a copy of the weird handout at the previous session. They took it home and read it and got their imaginations buzzing. Then, at the current session, I set up a fictional circumstance in which the document is given them. They do some in-character acting and feign surprise or whatever. They might use some PC ability like "Anthropology" to get some extra clues about the document. I usually present them with some challenge or pull at odds with what the crime at hand is. Frex, I killed a beloved NPC bag lady just before the crime at hand was uncovered: the theft of an important book from the Orne Library at Miskatonic U back in 1908. The PCs had to deal with the call of Cthulhu drawing them toward some arcane mystery and away from their human relationship to someone they cared about. The player who had been given the document to mull over had to tie together her thoughts about the document and its significance with the courses of action pursued by other players' PCs.

[3] The rulebooks have advice about how to run more linear investigations than the kind we get into, but they do provide insight into how you can be firm on details of the crime – and I do not pull baits and switches or rewrite the crime just to keep the players on edge – while allowing players the choice about how they will investigate it. With ToC the players have to balance solving the crimes against their own personal Sanity and Stability and the ideological and personal commitments to which those character traits are linked. The scenario pack, written by Ken Hite and featuring a chapter on improvisation by Will Hindemarch, gives simple guidelines for an improvisational approach to the investigative game. Put simply: the issue is never "will the players find the clues they need" but "what will they do once all the clues are given" and "what price are they willing to pay – and have others pay – for the crime to be solved."

Believe me, I sometimes find myself gritting my teeth when the players grab onto one clue and insert it into a chain of deductions that leads AWAY from the easy solution of the mystery. But I let them run with it. Then I will use scenes that are not related to the currency – the number of clues is limited and they cost finite resources to explore – to offer them a chance to shift direction. In that case I am giving them an Opening to do something.

That is usually done if the players have not solved the crime by the end of the session. A solved crime means they walk into the next session with their resources low. If I know that Col. Mustard did it in the Kitchen with a Knife, but the players believe that some minor NPC must have used the Knife to do it, I will let them spend the session looking for that minor NPC. They found the clue of the Knife and there is no doubt it was the murder weapon. If the PC with Forensics got in the room and looked around, they were certain to find the clue: that is how the game works. What they did with it was up to them. By the end of the session I might have one of the PC's close friends (a source of Stability) mention parting with Mustard at the door to the kitchen on the night of the murder. That wasn't in my list of clues. And the source of Stability might have been interacting with the PC for some other reason. But I do want to let players know there are other avenues to explore if they are at a dead end. They will have to use investigative abilities to PROVE that Mustard did it, or make some tough choices along the way, but redirecting them after they have exhausted an avenue of inquiry is fair play.

[4] I am just following the game and scenario pack's well-defined procedures. The social contract was just about setting up a female-focused game. The rest is all part of the System that the game lays out (there are some implications of the mechanics that I had to work out on my own, but the written rules come close to expressing all of the latent possibilities of the System). I know what the course of events will be in terms of the grand apocalyptic nightmare. I am working with a thematic determinism: there will be some horrible catastrophe. There is nothing that I think the players MUST do or be tricked into doing to make our sessions interesting. The future doom is Setting and it is with/against this Setting and its thematic tensions that the players are acting as they solve individual crimes. And as this is a horror game solving the crime doesn't mean that the police come and tidy everything up. Each character comes face to face with personal fears and nightmares and implications related to each crime. So even if I give one character the document in advance and let players pass around the document if their characters have not touched it, these practices do not make solving the crimes easy, or threaten a metaplot (because there isn't any), or make the outcome of each session predictable. If you are running a game with a time-travel angle you can do it even if you settle, as I have done for this game, on a determinist treatment of time within the fiction.

Chasing red herrings means that characters get to explore the world and I get to throw Premise and Color material at them. The time isn't "wasted" but there is the clock of diminishing resources to inspire co-operation.

The human tendency to OVER interpret is my friend in this game. Rather than trying to parse the material for a few minimally plausible interpretations, each player spins a web of possibilities and the group becomes awash in potential courses of action.

I don't know what "mash-up" means here. I've not read Freemarket. Otherwise this redirection of player fear seems like a good way to make play more evocative. Did you have any players refuse to confide when you asked about personal fears? If so, how did you handle that? Did you lose players to this approach, as you did with the not "into grim and nasty?"

Freemarket contains a scenario prep procedure that avoids railroading. Moreover, it prevents the GM (or "Superuser") from over-preparing or fixing details in place ahead of the actual session. The players begin each session by updating characters and making a few changes to what memories from last session are still pertinent to the characters. Then the Superuser takes a character from Player X's memories, a location from Player Y's memories, an event from Player Z's memories, and comes up with a situation with which to confront Player W. And so on. As the Superuser does not know which memories will still be on a character's sheet in the upcoming session, the Superuser cannot plan in advance what situation Player W will meet in that upcoming session. It depends on the choices made by X, Y, and Z.

Think of it as a session of improvisation: I and the players make a few key, principled decisions and run with them.

Did the drop-outs have prior experience with Trail of Cthulhu or Call of Cthulhu?

Nah. It was just an agenda thing. He thought that he would have some fun with horror and then his mood changed and that was that.

How do you integrate the mash-ups with the mystery solving and with discovering the conspiracy? [5] ... how do you keep the story from fragmenting into parallel unconnected threads? [6]. Does the PC>NPC>PC triangle prove sufficient by itself? If it fails, how and how do you recover? [7]

[5] The mash-up is employed for several purposes. It provides a session-specific selection of the variety of the kinds of horror Color that we set up before the campaign. It also provides potential Premise-relevant social interactions for the characters. These interactions can be occasions for offering players an alternative track of investigations but are there for character action: in a universe inimical to human feelings and inhabited by powers inimical to humanity itself, how do you make life meaningful? (I don't get too angsty or philosophical about this, its just Existentialism 101). 

The crime must be solved. The weird documents must be dealt with. And a number of NPCs have access to those strange transmissions from the future, so they will be out and about doing what they want to do (I had one deranged academic attempt to burn down the Archeology Department of the Miskatonic – about time too!).  But still the crime must be solved. The Story arises from characters interacting with Premise to create a Theme. I write out the crime and the relevant clues in relationship to the mash-up. I don't use it in the way it is used in Freemarket. But the crime is the crime. The actions the characters take to make their lives meaningful in the face of the weird messages from the future do not shake my firm definition of what the crime was.

[6] The story is the choices of the characters in relationship to the crime at hand and the document from the future. A story about a group of friends retreating from each other in the face of a horrible event is a story. But the players are all trying to find their response to the Premise. The one who thinks that strong, firm, and violent action is needed will try to recruit others to go along. So I have 2 investigators looking through old books in town while 3 run into the hills to look for Zombies. That would make a good movie to watch. For a while anyway. But the characters' ability pools do not refresh until the crime is solved and all characters know the solution. The characters, not the players. So regardless of the out of character knowledge, the players must find a way to tell each other about the crime. That's interaction. The cop who looks at the would-be revolutionary and delivers the news that as a result of hanging out with radicals, the revolutionary's best friend was drawn into a sinister alien conspiracy is not just delivering information: he is getting all up in the face of another player's PC. That's drama. The rules of the game dictate "no refresh on pools until crime is solved" and that rule turns the players back towards each other even if they have been diverging in paths of exploration.

[7] A PC>NPC<PC triangle is just a means for confronting players with the reality of the Setting. "In this world, some people want X, what does your character do when NPC #3 asks you for it, Player A?" I will ask this of Player A. Then, later in the session, I will say "Player B, NPC #3 couldn't get x from Player A's character and now wants you to punish Player A's character, so will you?" None of this has to do with the crime or the clues related to it. Perhaps Player B will ask NPC #3 to do some leg work related to the crime. Or will use Interrogation against this NPC to get a clue. Or will strike some kind of deal with the NPC where Player A's character will be punished and then the NPC will go out and try to find a clue. Or Player B will really get into character, make an impassioned in-character speech, and that will be that. The crime HAPPENED and no PC>NPC< triangle can change that reality. The scenes arising out of that triangle can fizzle and be dull, so I just move on after the player is done acting. But no clue will be lost because of it, and the background reality of the past crime will not be changed because of it.

ToC is like a good cop show: the interpersonal drama is occasioned by the crime and affected by it, but the players work to solve the crime because their characters are, ultimately and with some guidance from the character creation rules, made to solve crimes (although through various motives).

[Erik Weissengruber]

The previous post missed a key revision:

"The players walk into the next session without refreshed pools."

[Erik Weissengruber]

"An UNsolved crime means they walk into the next session with their resources low."

[Erik Weissengruber]

We are at document 9 of the 10 documents in the scenario pack.

Fave moment: a player had a chance to use a tome to bring a premature child to robust health. I don't know if it was the running low on sanity or indifference to the child's fate, or a sense of futility at sacrificing for a future generation that made the player decline the opportunity. But it was a wonderful moment of grim. And she did not stay so unemotional when the sickly tyke was kidnapped by a ghoul.

Second fave moment: a player goes against his character's drive and takes a hit to stability when he blurts out something entrusted to him in the confessional.

When characters' Stability and Sanity are low, their decisions become really weighty.

[Ron Edwards]

I am amazed, Erik. I wish there were some way to document all of this in detail.