[Mortal Coil] A Better Playtest Session

[Brennan Taylor]

I have made a habit of posting a lot of horror stories here, so I thought it would be nice to post an actual play breakdown that worked well. The game is Mortal Coil, a set of rules for diceless supernatural role-play, that is currently under development. The group was a playtest group, consisting of the players detailed in a this post, minus Players B and C and including my wife, Krista. Although I am not 100% satisfied with how things came out (I pretty much never am, these days, when I GM--not quite sure why), the players seemed quite happy with the results, and were at least interested in the outcome.

The setup was thus: the characters were average, rural folks in 1950s Pennsylvania. The fictional mining town of Germantown was the main setting, with all of the characters at least acquainted with one another, and some working quite closely together on a regular basis. The characters were as follows:

Maeve Buck, a young woman (early 20s) who has returned from college to help on her father's farm. Her father, Jack, suffered a paralyzing stroke, and lost the use of the left half of his body. Her father is a temperamental tyrant, although considerably less potent since the illness. Maeve's mother left when she was very young, and Jack has always claimed she ran off. Maeve blames him for this, and he blames Maeve, some nice tension there. The true story is that Maeve's mother is a dryad, and Jack had trapped her with an iron spike in her tree, which Maeve removed allowing her mother to return to the plant. Maeve has some nature-related powers.

Carl, a farmhand, and the only one to remain after Jack had his stroke. Carl is a former navy man, dishonorably discharged after serving some time for killing another sailor in a drunken brawl. Carl is hiding from his past, and has powers that augment his strength. He also has a bane which causes these powers to activate against his will when he grows angry (hence the manslaughter).

Greta, a nurse in the town's hospital who fears she is going crazy. She has premonitions that come true, and can speak to dead bodies and have them answer. She is tending to Jack, and comes up to the farm often.

Owen, the town sheriff. This characters was the only one without any supernatural powers. He had some pretty good temporal powers, though.

A brief synopsis of the events of play: we started out with some mysterious events up on the farm. A girl's body appeared at the edge of the field, and it turned out to be a teenage girl who had disappeared nearly ten years before. She was freshly dead but hadn't aged a day. Maeve discovered a rusty old iron spike in a shoebox of her mother's old things. Maeve saw her mother in the yard, went out to talk to her, and her mother warned her not to go back where the girl had been found. Maeve's father had somehow crawled out behind the barn during all of this, and Maeve found him weeping beneath a forked tree with the iron spike in his hand.

Things heated up after this, with Greta speaking to the dead girl while Carl was in the room, thus reassuring Greta that she wasn't nuts. Carl was, needless to say, freaked out. Owen, a very down-to-earth guy, investigates the girl's death, but is unwilling to believe it is the girl who disappeared ten years ago. A family of hillbillies, the Wolfers, somehow figure into all this, and drop ominous hints that they protect some sort of gateway and that something has recently come through it. A group of standing stones, the "Indian Stones" as they are known locally, are also significant.

This all comes to a head when a pale man appears and attacks Greta. After a big fight, with gunfire and hand-to-hand combat, this extremely strong and agile person is killed. The group discovers that Jack is gone from his bedroom, and track him out to the Indian Stones, where he begins to walk normally. Following, they find themselves in a strange fairy-tale land, with talking animals, dwarfs, and other oddness. The find and confront Jack here, where he has transformed into a giant or ogre of some kind. He is with Maeve's mother, Elma, and the group manages to convince Elma to come back with them.

All in all, the players seemed to really enjoy the game, especially when everything started to come together and hit the fan. I was only partially content with the way play went, but I think a lot of that has to do with my own insecurities more than anything else. It was quite useful from a playtest standpoint, and there are several changes to the rules I want to implement due to this play.

First off, my issues. I think I let things meander for far too long at the beginning of the plot. I should have dug in more, jumped to important scenes more quickly, because I felt it dragged a bit there. I don't know if the players would agree, but I was constrained by some of my old GM habits, where I give the players lots of choices and move slowly even when there aren't any real choices to be made. I need to cut to the good scenes in my GMing, something I plan to work on in future.

Secondly, the system I have in place regarding character Passions isn't grabby enough. The passions are too abstract and I need to relate them more closely to the character's motivations, a connection I don't think is clear enough at this point. I also used pre-gen characters, and I don't think I should do this in future. At the very least, the players should be involved in the selection of Passions so that they can hook into the character and really get into the interplay of these attributes. Everybody was new to the system so there was some time spent getting the kinks out for this. Once the first attack took place, everyone seemed to get far more into the game.

All in all, though, a much more satisfying experience than the typical one I post here, although more typical of my play. The problems I had with this I seem to be having with everything I run.