A Home for Horror: Locale and Situation in Eldritch Tales

[b_bankhead]

HP Lovecraft set his fiction in an evironment increasing familiarity,body of lore, imagery and organization created a multlayered tapestrie that was a whole greater than the sum of the stories. Once the revealer has been selected, the next great task of those in the game is to ay the groundwork for the locale in which the action will take place.

When things form outside make contact with our world, there is a certain topology of human response to it. First there are those in immediate contact with it and directly affected by it.  Surrounding them there is a kind of penumbra of indirect effects that manifest themselves in bodies of rumor, legend, poorly understood observations.  Beyond this is the local world as a whole, that is changed only minimally by the present situation, (but has the potential to be,disturbe a LOT).

In Eldritch Tales these three areas correspond to Situation, Rumors, and Hard Facts.
The Revealer and the players have different levels of power in creating the three parts of the locale.
Because Hard Facts will be created in a round robin fashion among all the players and the Revealer, this will numerically give the players as a group more say as to the setting than the revealer.

Hard Facts are things that just about any mundane member of a locale will know about it.

Hard Facts:
Deal only with mundane facts
Are definitely true
Must not contradict previous facts
Good Hard Facts are concrete and specific
Hard facts can involve statements about themes,imagery,
motifs and aesthetic aspects of play


Rumors are the body of mysterious legend, myth, lore and lies surrounding the
eldritch element of the setting.  They are what the  outside world sees and knows
of it. They are created round robin fashion, again giving the players the greatest
power.

Rumors
Rumors may deal with eldritch events
Rumors are not necessarily True
Rumors may contradict each other
The truth or falseness of a rumor is revealed in play

Good rumors are ambiguous,suggestive and incomplete

A sample Locale:

Project R.L.Y.E.H. Locale

The setting is aboard a Space Station that is secretly building earth's first interstellar craft R.L.Y.E.H

"Rlyeh" stands for Relativistic Light-Year Extension into Hyperspace

The feeling of the game should be Victorian,
or industrial-cusp, even though we're in the future

Orbits edge of solar system

The station is called the Crystal Palace

Regular contact with aliens

First Contact station

Earth contact limited to one shuttle and satellite feed

The commander of the station has recently passed away


The mission of the station is to prepare for a possible interstellar  journey, and is completely self sufficient.


Project R.L.Y.E.H. Rumor
last shuttle from earth is late
people keep disappearing on level 23
an alien worshiping cult meets in a access duct
rare ancient earth documents describe some aliens

Some of the spacers (miners) in the belt claim there are "gremlins" causing trouble in the mines.

The station computer has a locked file for which nobody on the station has the password.

So many have gone crazy that half the medlab has been converted to an asylum



Weaving the Horror, the Revealer and the Situation

Once the locale and it's rumors have been established, it is necessary to create the librabry of potential situations underlying the reality and the rumors.

Up until now most of the power has been held by the players.  Now it's the Revealer's time to shine.  The situations are created, in secret by the Revealer. By examining the hard facts and rumors the Revealer will have many clues as to the kinds of situations that will intruige the players.

Situations

Situations are the result of some major eldritch event or influence a with the locale and the people in it.

Situations are created by the Revealer
Situations may not contradict hard facts
Situations may deal with mundane or eldritch truths
Situations are not necessarily true until they are revealed in play
Situations are only revealed to the players in play
Situations may contradict each other until revealed in play
Situations may or may not be tied to particular rumors

Anatomy of a situation

A situation consists of the following elements
Name,Stakes, conseqences, Revelations,Scale

How many revelations to a situation? This is an important issue in that it determines the pacing of play. a very breif, small situation might only have 3-4 revelations.  A really long 'epic' game might have a dozen. The number of revelations is important also because typically the more revelations the more sessions and the scale of a situation can only increase once per session.
Note that situations are neve engraved in stone, Elements of a situation or even whole situations may be invalidated by what happens in play. The Revealer should be ruthless about disgarding outmoded situations..

Sample situation for 'Project R.L.Y.E.H

'Spanish Prisoner'
Stakes: Aliens are manipulationg humans to steal the RLYEH spacecraft
Consequences: Loss of the spaceship and crew
Revelations
The medlab psychotics are the psychics who control the RLYEH drive.
The Captain's daught offers evidence that his death wasn't accidental
Crazy psychics were drive crazy by visions of the loss of the ship
Security officer dies after leaving more evidence of why captain died
A cult of alien worshipping humans are going to help them steal the spaceship
Scale: Personal

Revelations are general patterns of information, and should be considered non specific as to how they will enter the game.
If the character is the ship's medical officer it might be found in an autopsy theater. If the character is a gladhanding security officer it might come after a lot of rounds of drinks with maintainence crew who heard strange chanting in an unmapped access duct....
All situations start at personal scale but can grow up to the scale of the entire setting, at one level per session.

Design Issues to be answered.

Multiple character's/ same situation. -tracking character 'teaming' on the same situation
One character/Multiple situions-tracking a character's potential involvement in several situations
Mechanisms for adding to Hard Fact, and Rumors in play
When /how can Revealer create new situations?

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

I just got a very, very strong whiff of The Whispering Vault from that post. Are you familiar with this game? Apologies if you'd made that clear in the past.

Best,
Ron

[Darcy Burgess]

I'm a little unclear on a couple of concepts, although in general I think this is a really useful idea -- I have my suspicions that even outside of the context of ET's ruleset, this thread would be helpful in designing just about any mystery-based plotline.

Please clarify the relationship between Situations, Rumors and Hard Facts:

Are Hard Facts and Rumors attributes of a Situation?  Can they ever be independent of one another?  If so/not, in what groupings?

also, under "situation", you make reference to "scale".  You reference the two ends of the scale spectrum ("personal" and "entire setting").  

What are the intervening steps?
How does being in a given step influence play?

Finally, an example of play would be of great help in wrapping my head around these, um...Eldritch...Tales.  :)

[MatrixGamer]

It looks like your Revealer/Game Master needs to play a solo game to come up with the hidden back story. You might try using a simple Matrix Game.

The revealer knows the setting and characters. They have an idea of what is going on. Start the solo pre game a month/year/day before the actual RPG is to start. You can do as many turns in this pre game as you like. Each turn imagine yourself in the shoes of each faction in the game. Make a statement/argument about what they would like to see happen next in the game. This argument does not have to be what they character/characters did - but can be what the other side did - or that rain falls, or the birdge washes out, etc. Once you've made the statements the decide how strong they are (hoe likely to happen).

Can't fail - roll 6 1's in a row to fail
Really strong - roll 2-6 to succeed
Pretty strong - roll 3-6 to succeed
Okay - roll 4-6 to succeed
Pretty weak - roll 5-6 to succeed
Really weak - roll 6 to succeed.
Impossible - roll 6 6's in a row to succeed

Roll one d6 per argument, it either happens or it doesn't.

If arguments logically compete, then do a dice rolling competition. Roll for each argument till only one remains. If they both roll out then neither happened.

In this way you can have coherent actions happening behind the players backs that are easy to generate. You can even have a small game group to help you. They play the back game while you run the RPG. I do games like this on my yahoo group (MatrixGame2) all the time. We are starting a Cthulhu game right now.

This mechanism is fun to do so it eases some of the strain on the revealer. Meanwhile the players don't know that the old bridge is out! I wonder if they'll find out the hard way?

Chris Engle
Hamster Press

[b_bankhead]

Hiya,

I just got a very, very strong whiff of The Whispering Vault from that post. Are you familiar with this game? Apologies if you'd made that clear in the past.

Best,
Ron

   Well I have and have read Whispering Vault a lot.  Like ET, it seems to reject the CoC type of 'mystery' and to build an overt narrative into the game's structure,  but I have not been conciously influenced by it as a design template. As I will later show, the other parts of the system show other influences.....

[b_bankhead]

Please clarify the relationship between Situations, Rumors and Hard Facts:

Are Hard Facts and Rumors attributes of a Situation?  Can they ever be independent of one another?  If so/not, in what groupings?

also, under "situation", you make reference to "scale".  You reference the two ends of the scale spectrum ("personal" and "entire setting").  

What are the intervening steps?
How does being in a given step influence play?

Finally, an example of play would be of great help in wrapping my head around these, um...Eldritch...Tales.  :)

1. Hard Facts and Rumors MAY be attributes of a Situation ,but not necessarily. Hard Facts, Rumors and Situation are definitely attributes of the setting however.

2. I should have explained scale better. I veiw the Setting as having a size. Project Rlyeh is about the size of a small town, one of my setting occurs in a single building, another has the entire USA as a setting.
The precise role of scale in the game will become apparent later.

3. Well putting together a playtest group would certainly help getting examples of play! Although a 'script' of a game might be helpful.

[Darcy Burgess]

could you please provide an example (perhaps within the context of your rlyeh example) of a rumour or a hard fact (or better yet, both!) that is not an attribute of the situation?

I'm suspicious that these would actually still be subsets of a situation, but just not the situation at hand, and perhaps a situation of little meaning.

When I say "example of play", I mean "imagined/envisioned example of play" -- how you see gameplay proceeding.