Hey everyone,

I've been thinking a lot about the big secrets in games like Engel and Blue Planet, the ones meant to be kept from the players until they can ultimately be revealed through actual play. And I'm sure there are other games with such embedded secrets. I'm interested in seeing posts from folks who've played through the revelation of one of these kinds of secrets, both from the GM and/or the player perspective. What was it like? How many sessions of play did it take before the secret was revealed? What were the specific circumstances of the revelation? What impact did the revelation have on the continuing game? Was the revelation itself satisfying, or unsatisfying, mind-blowing, or not? Did it end the game? Organically? Or through disintegration of player interest? Did the game continue? With greater player interest, or not?

Thanks,

Paul

Paul Czege wrote: I'm interested in seeing posts from folks who've played through the revelation of one of these kinds of secrets, both from the GM and/or the player perspective.

Hello,

If I'm not mistaken, Paul is specifically asking about games in which the actual text of the published game contains the secret. It's either in the core book in the GM's section or published later in a GM-supplement, or revealed bit by bit through a series of published adventure scenarios.

Isn't SLA Industries supposed to be based on some hoo-wa secret of this sort? I own the game but confess to an extreme need to do something else every time I try to read it.

Best,
Ron

Well, I really don't want to become known around here as "the Dragonlance guy", but in the D&D history threads last week I did talk about playing the entire Dragonlance saga. There were quite a few big "revelations" that the players were meant to discover along the way.(Obviously these weren't built into the game rules, but they were intrinsic parts of the game setting.)

Not one of them produced a satisfying roleplaying moment. Either (and it seems to me these outcomes are likely in any game with built-in secrets) the players had already learned it from reading the modules or books (players: "we try to look surprised"), or they had long since guessed (players: "oh, we didn't already know that?"), or it didn't strike them as being particularly remarkable (players: "zzzzz"). (Oh, there's a fourth very possible outcome in less railroaded games: the secret that just never comes up in play.) You can chalk all of these down to the quality of the Dragonlance secrets and my skill in those days at a DM, but I think these kind of problems are likely any time you have secrets built into a published setting.

Nowadays when I think of a good surprise to spring on the players, I generally use it immediately. The impact will almost never be heightened by waiting.

Rob

I haven't found most in-game secrets to be very dramatic when they get revealed. I've done it a few times, but always tied the secret to something else to keep player interest. Otherwise, the reaction is pretty mild, since the players themselves haven't learned much.

The only time I've seen someone do it well was with my Pax Draconis system. One character named Myron is discussed as an evil and psychotic type behind a revolution, but characters aren't supposed to know much about him. In the game, the characters were pursuing various criminal activities and government corruption and managed to intercept a transmission that contained Myron's name. Now, the players didn't learn anything about the character or setting, but by tying this infamous character to their current plot, they suddenly perked up and got a sense of the depth to which this plot might extend. (Mark Eddy was a part of this group, so maybe he can share his feelings).

Even then, the excitement had more to do with the GM's plot than the one written in the book.

Many moons ago, I was in a group that played a lot of Dark Consipracy. Over a few campaigns, the Dark Secret of the game was introduced each time (being about the cause of the supernatural wierdness). And I think we did the full range of reactions (Shock, Horror, Gasp, Cool, What now?). Each time it kinda felt either passe ("Oh, yeah", says some guy, "didn't you know it all started when...".) or forced (Powerful NPC turns up, and tells us, and us alone). Whilst this was going on amidst a lot of dysfunctional play, I beilve the most methods would lead to the same outcomes, for the following reasons:

1) There is no natural way to discover the secret. It needs either someone who knows, or GM fiat and a power mystical character. If you don't have one of the more obscure mystaical skills, then discovery is pretty much impossible. Which leads to:

2) The secret is not empowering. Knowing it adds very little to the game. There's a very narrow avenue that would allow the PC's to 'make the world better', but, frankly, that's more improbable than discovering the secret. A game could be based around it, but that would be a radically different game.


The games I played where it happend just ignored it, more or less - in that the game didn't do anything different.

The game that I ran based around an intent to work with the secret fell apart (Partly due to inexperinced GMing on my part. Mostly in fact. But partly because it just wasn't the game the players wanted).

I also ran a Conspiracy X game [0] much later. It was revealing one of the (medium ?) secrets about one of the alien groups. It worked ok - because it gave rise to events that made the playes go "This isn't what we know to be true" - thus thematically linking to the secrets side of the game. Unfortunatly [1], the players decided that stomping on any evidence was more important than investigating - so it became a PC talking point - and nothing more. Which was where I left it.

[0] I do play games without conspiracy in their name. I do! I do! really.

[1] For the POV of this thread.

Personally, I think of this as the "Watchmen" effect. If you've read the comic. you get to the end and think, "That's his super-brilliant plan? He's mister brilliant (Ozymandias?) and that's all he comes up with? That stinks!"

I think this happens every time you deal with a game with a Big Secret --- at least, it does to me. Take Unknown Armies. Street Level is cool. Actually in the Underworld is cool (whatever they call it). But Avatar? That's the best they can come up with? That's the big cool secret? It stinks, IMO.

My sense is that if your campaign is going to be built on a Big Secret, you'd better feel it out slowly with the players, and make sure that when they find the Answer, they'll say, "Wow, cool!" Not, "Gee, that's kind of a letdown."

The only game which I can confess to having actually sprung the "secret" on players was Feng Shui. Everyone played a modern day type character, whom I entangled in a mess of gang violence and police actions ala John Woo, and just started upping the ante from there.

About 3 sessions in they discover the Netherworld, and get caught up in major drama there. Its not until about 10 or so sessions in that they are introduced to the concept that reality and history is controlled by control of the Feng Shui points on earth, and then the madness really started. It was the best campaign I had, lasting about 2 years.

Major strengths to it were that I played with mostly non-gamer types who I introduced into the hobby, and also that I had the only rulebook. Feng Shui's rules are easy enough to pick up, although we did drift significantly from the initiative/shots/damage rules into something simpler.

What was it like? How many sessions of play did it take before the secret was revealed? What were the specific circumstances of the revelation? What impact did the revelation have on the continuing game? Was the revelation itself satisfying, or unsatisfying, mind-blowing, or not? Did it end the game? Organically? Or through disintegration of player interest? Did the game continue? With greater player interest, or not?

Hey all,

To a lesser extent, any play that focuses on exploration could be said to reveal secrets about the world. For example, Call of Cthulhu is all about normal people discovering that horror stories are real. In my experience the revelation is incredibly contrived, with part of the group saying things like, "Oh my goodness! Zombies? I would never have guessed," and the rest just waiting for the faux-hysterics to stop before shooting and/or running. The in-game situation is about right, with people in shock, going into fight/flight mode, etc, but the players obviously have no interest, having experienced nothing out of the ordinary.

On the other hand, keeping secret knowledge in the background only has led to some great times, because even when the players suspect, they never know for certain.

A third possibility exists, which is player-cooperation. In a hunters World of Darkness LARP, I played a particularly memorable hunter who just never seemed to notice any of the strange stuff going on around him. His story was that he is kinfolk (decended from werewolves) with limited supernatural powers, but saw his foxhole buddies killed by a werewolf and now hunts 9-foot-tall, hairy vampires. As the player, I chose for the character what he saw and what he rationallized. When the run simply got out of hand, I made the decision that he simply put the pieces together enough to go on a rampage, which was very climactic and fun.

Later,
Grant

7th Sea was all about the big secrets "what actually happens to Port mages who open their eyes while Porting". "what's going to happen with the Montaigne invasion of Castile", "When is the pseudo Napoleon guy going to take over Montaigne", "What really is the 7th Sea"....blah blah blah. About 50 more like that.

Me and everyone I know personally who were into 7th Sea (and when it first came out I was WAY into it) lost interest somewhere around supplement 250 (ok I exaggerate...a little) and quit playing long before the secrets were revealed. I imagine some of them are out by now, but I find myself completely not careing whatever lame answer they finally revealed.

Secrets can be fun, but they should only last till the next supplement (or two at most) not be diddled out in dribs and drabs over the course of 2-3 years of neverending product.

I've been running Seventh Sea off and on pretty much since it came out and our game revolves around two of the minor game secrets. You may want to look away now, yadda yadda.

One of the princes of Eisen (Stefan Heilgrund) intends to make a deal with a supernatural entity (the Schattenman) to help his rise to power. There is a lost dracheneisen mine somewhere under Frieberg.

That particular campaign has run for about fourty sessions and should be done in about half-a-dozen to a dozen more. The Heilgrund secret was hinted at in around the third or fourth session and was revealed fully in about the twelfth. The dracheneisen mine secret was revealed about half a dozen sessions after that. Play since then has been driven by repercussions and effects from that.

Play has deviated somewhat from the metaplot-as-written implications and effects of the secrets.

A lot of the secrets in Seventh Sea - as Valamar mentioned - are kind of lame. I think that's because the secrets go the world rather than the characters. The secrets I used in the game I run impact directly on NPCs with whom the players have had contact. Also the players actions are settling the outcome of the secrets. Ultimately, what happens to the mine, what happens to Heilgrund, is going to emerge from the players actions.

With a lot of in-game secrets I suspect they get revealed TA-DA and then there's not much for the players to do afterwards.

With a lot of in-game secrets I suspect they get revealed TA-DA and then there's not much for the players to do afterwards.

The game that is rife with secrets of the sort you refer to is Deadlands.

I'm not going to go into my own experiences, as they echo the most negative stories listed here. I learned the secrets as a GM long before any IC revelations, so I kinda was in the "oh dear zombies" camp. (In fact, nearly everyone I was playing with was in this camp.)

So my data is not good. But I suggest if you're really interested in this topic, subscribe to the Deadland mailing list, and ask your question. I think that Deadlands would serve as an excellent example, in that it has lots of in-game secrets of various sorts, and it's played by a fairly large number of people, so you could get a lot of opinions.

Info on joining the list: http://www.peginc.com/Chat.htm
Info on Deadlands in general: http://www.peginc.com/WeirdWest/Index.htm

Hi Paul,

Here are the three types of Canonical Secret that I've observed.

1) The Curtain. Once The Secret is revealed, there's no reason to play anymore; the players' collective "Gasp! We're all androids ..." is pretty much the last item on the menu of play.

2) The Panama Canal. Upon the revelation, there's only one thing to do: "What, we're all androids too? Argh! We've been killing our own kind! Damn the masters, hitherto our bosses, now our mortal enemies! Join the revolution!" And then play proceeds to the next set of supplements about the revolution, who were putatively the bad guys up to this point.

3) The Big Bang. The Secret opens up a set of new choices, any of which offer an interesting set of opportunities; essentially a new game has started using different parameters from the old one. "We're all androids, eh? And what is an android's place to be, then, in this world?" I call it the Big Bang because it's merely a Setting-heavy, high-potential version of any old regular Bang.

Best,
Ron

I'm running SLA Industries (by request of the players) and the Big Secret is about to be revealed fairly soon - that the SLA universe is a hallucination in the mind of a psychiatic patient. I'm using that as the jumping-off point for a Matrix-esque game where the PCs will be flipping between the psychiatric hospital and the SLA-world.

The thing about big secrets in published games is that every fan of the game knows them. Both the SLA fans in the group knew the Big Secret of SLA Industries before I did. In L5R, the nature of the ninja is a Big Secret - but impossible to use in a game "straight", because every L5R fan (or card player) knows it.

At best, you can use these Big Secrets as examples on how to twist the setting, or a kind of odd grace note/in joke. If you include ninjas in your l5r game, you're not going to surprise the players with the revelation of what ninjas are, but you can try to work it in in an elegant and surprising fashion.

I actually like Big Secrets, but anyone who even thinks the players can't know them is fooling themselves, and anyone relying on the players not knowing is a fool.

Strangely I love my players because they are wargamers first. Thus, they never buy any RPG stuff, and don't care to know secrets before hand. Thus, any secret I reveal in play is something new. I even had the pleasure to run Call of Cthulhu for a couple of people who had never heard of Lovecraft or his work before. Now, that was cool.

"You mean they're walking corpses? Aiiiiiii!!!!"

I am very careful when running this sort of thing. First, I often don't tell the players what game we're playing. That's right. Just say, "I've got this game that's set in the 20's, about a group of friends who have weird things happen to them. Sorta like the X-files set during prohibition." Why must the players know what the game is before hand? Especially if it's about secrets? I didn't even want the players I mentioned above to see the cover of my CoC book.

Isn't that problematic? Don't you need to refer to the rules? Use GURPS. Seriously. There's nothing abour the CoC system that can't bne replaced by GURPS. And GURPS will keep all your secrets for you. Or FUDGE if that's more your speed. The point is, just don't use the system that the secrets come with.

Most importantly, do not use the chargen systems that these games provide as written. They give a distinct forward progress to player knowledge. The worst culprit I've seen for this is, perhaps, Dark Conspiracy. There are actual lifepath choices like Empath and Renegade Android. This seems to me to be getting the players past the most interesting secret right off the bat, which is that there's "something going on". DC chargen text assumes that the players understand that there is something going on, but they do not know what.

This has an advantage, certainly, as the GM doesn't have to figure out why the characters stay together. But this can be overcome easily with other standard methods. Often I allow the players to decide. Just say, "You have to determine a reason why you would not leave each other no matter how hairy things get." Then I let them decide. I've had brothers, and a detective team. whatever.

The advantage to starting with "normal folks" is that the player can really get into the idea that they are not "adventurers" or "superheroes" or even "Paranormal Investigators". Which means that on the first encounter with the abnormal, that they see that they are supposed to react with dismay. Actually it's more subtle than that. Basically, the player is playing somebody who they know would not make any assumptions about the nature of oanything odd. So they just go about things "normally" until whatever happens, does.

Which then further informs every later revelation. If you start with the cool "experienced" character, the players will always assume that their character is sorta immune to these things, and won't be able to get into the feeling that the revelation is supposed to invoke. The player of the experienced character starts with the assumption that the character will approach any odd situation with caution, which reduces the tension. So play everyday people when it makes sense at all to do so.

I call this method the Hitchcock method. Hitchcock's characters were always "just folks" who got thrown into situations that they weren't used to, and had to figure out how to use their everyday reources to get out of.

Believe me, Zombies are much more terrifying when encoutered by the soccer mom than by the ex-green beret. And it's more fun when the soccer mom figures out how to off them.

I used this method with Over the Edge, and it was the best thing I did in that whole game (which dissolved due to GNS incompatibilities). This is another culprit which informs players that there are strange things afoot in chargen, and allows for the characters themselves to be strange. This seems really odd to me as the rest of the text is written with an implicit assumption that the characters who encounter the things on Al Amarja will be normies. In one of the supplememts there is an adventure where a character thinks he is one person but finds out he is another. First, the scenario assumes a normal person and so actually has to produce one as an NPC (woudn't it be cooler if it were a PC?). Second how weird will that seem at all when the other players are aliens and androids? Played with normies, however, the scenario sounds cool as hell.

I can't stress enough that one should just run such games with average folks. I'd like to even see this in a D&D campaign about secrets.

Pacing is everything in game with secrets. You can't let the cat out of the bag too soon, but if you don't give the players something, they lose interest quick. Take my Dark Conspiracy game. I remember the first really weird discovery in one campaign was two detectives who found themselves led to a gas station at a crossroads far from civilization. You know the place, with a several buildings all not too far away, but not enough to even call it an unincorporated town. It's the middle of the day, and there's nobody in sight. Shoudn't there be somebody around? The buildings don't look to be abandoned. They go inside the garage and start snooping around. The first finds what he assumes is a big oil slick in the garage and the other goes into a parts room and turns on the lights. Body parts on the metal storage shelves all over. The oil slick is dirty blood.

I've never had players wig out on me so well. Sure the characters are PIs. Which means they're used to chasing cheating husbands and delinquent fathers. This is just waaaay beyond anything they'd ever encountered.

OK. now they know that what they are involved in is grotesque beyond their ken. But they know little else. The characters fled, not finding what had caused the carnage. But now the player's appetites are whetted, and they want to know more. What could do such a thing? Why? They're in, and in for the long haul.

Later revelations revealed what might have been aliens, and certainly odd bioscience stuff going on. A man dissolves before their eyes at one point. The game pendedt as I moved (and very reluctantly on all parts), and just as they were about to take the big leap into knowing that there were people who were actively involved in fighting the menace. Which is normally where the game starts. So by starting with normal people I probably added 50% onto the potential life of the campaign.

Yet, at no point were the players overinundated with info they coudn't use, nor bored with the lack of information. DC is great this way, and if done right. There's just so much to learn that can be metted out in small doses that you can go for a long time. What you have to do is set things up so that what they PCs are investigating is important to the characters such that the revelations come "naturally" through the course of their own actions. And further, the revelations must not only be shocking and mind-boggling in their own right, but have the potential to lead the characters further down the road.

Difficult balancing act. I won't say this is easy. We're talking hardcore Illusionism here, the best I[ve ever done to make this all work. My favorite was using "The Weekly World News" as a playaid. I'd show the players a real copy of the WWN, and ask them what they thought seemed most like part of the "Conspiracy" as related to what they were currently looking into. They'd choose something, and go to investigate. Then, no matter what it was, I'd figure out how to wrap up what the story was about in the adventure that I'd prepared. Not easy, but hella fun.

This is just one example of Illusionism in such a context. Done right, the "Secret" RPG can be a hoot. As always you have to have players with the right temperament (the second DC campaign players were big fans of the X-Files). Simulationists only! Narrrativists will find things not engaging enough, and Gamist will likely end up dead or ruining the atmosphere.

Mike

Hey, Mike.

You know, that's almost exactly how I introduce Unknown Armies to people. Part of the reason is that I don't feel like doing a full data dump, but I also enjoy the "normals in over their heads" feeling, and my players have as well. When you said:

I call this method the Hitchcock method. Hitchcock's characters were always "just folks" who got thrown into situations that they weren't used to, and had to figure out how to use their everyday reources to get out of.

Thought I'd throw in my pennies. I ran Conspiracy-X with two different groups, two different setups, interesting experience all round. In the first place, Con-X does have Big Secrets that are Big and Fun, IMO, although t has to be said we didn't play to the point of revealing any of the major biggies. In the first game, I used the full-blown cell setup of a group of Insiders, but similar to Mike I had serious doubts about the rules content soI photocopied the chargen section, censored out the bits I didn't want them to know about in classic black line fashion, and then re-copied those. I didn't want to just obscure, though, I wnated it to be an obvious and appropriate censorship. This worked pretty well and I had similar good experiences of doling out small secrets or alluding* to secrets very effectively.

The second group was set up as a pair of FBI agents with pregen characters, both characters and players knew nothing about anything. This was partly because this one of the players first games and I didn't want to waste it with the aforementiond data dump. They had a much more gosh-wow experience although they did know which game they were playing. The other player was very experienced, and one with whom I have a very comfortable playing relationship, and all that helped as I had the best of both worlds (he was my drummer I guess).

I used more special effects the second time around because the characters had much higher thresholds of disbelief regarding aliens and whatnot than the Cool Dudes had, but the Cool Dudes had a perfectly self-reinforcing attitude of superiority which helped carry the portrayal of a MIB; their character and player insider knowledges supported each other. The secrets were much more easily overcome than the Insiders game, which rapidly settled on the fairly mechanical routine of investigation and surveillance.

One of the things I really like about conspiracy x is that the secrets are in layers and can be revealed in part or sequentially, and make sense in a different way again when the Big Picture is put together. I can see this working over the long term but it would need care. I think this has relevance to the idea of whether or not it is possible to build games that are played once; this would solve the potential problems of ga,es woth actual secrets.

* edited to expand on this. The importance was not that the secret was X, but that there was a secret - this allowed me to leave real clues and not worry about contradicting myself, so the players could authentically put the pieces together. Having a consistent backdrop from which to play was a great boon in extrapolating events in game, both for the purposes of obfuscation and revelation.

By far the single best secret I've ever heard of being unveiled in an RPG was in a Toon campaign. Yes, that's right, a CAMPAIGN of Toon...close your mouths, it's actually possible.

Some friends of mine played in this campaign where they were hired for a gazillion dollars, and sent off all over the world looking for this item called the Tis Bottle. Now, this isn't just some ordinary bottle. Nope. This is a TIS bottle. What it does, and what's so special about it, they have no clue.

After three real months of play, they eventually found one of the four rumored to exist. It got broken in the process, so back to square one.

Finally, after a year and a half of game time (and nearly 8 months of play), they finally found and aquired one. They packed it in a huge iron case, full of styrofoam, and gave it to the mouse to carry (this is Toon, after all).

They laboriously crossed the globe with it, dodging attacks by enemies, and protecting the precious bottle.

Finally, they returned to the city to deliver it. They took it up into the office of the guy who hired them, unsealed the case, and gave him the unbroken Tis Bottle.

Completely satisfied, their employer had his helpers roll out the wheelbarrows full of money, and bid them good day.

Of course, one of the players HAD to ask what the Tis Bottle was for.

Their employer said, 'Simple'. He pushed a button, and the floor opened up, revealing a table covered in bottles that rose up to normal level. Each of these bottles was inset in a precision crafted slot, protecting each and holding them secure.

There was ONE empty spot.

He carefully inserted the Tis Bottle in the slot, making sure it was securely fastened, and then stepped back.

He pulled out a pair of sticks and, with great flourish, began to play 'My coun-try TIS of thee.....'

The GM, while the players sat with jaws agape realizing what they've just spent 3/4 of a year questing for, quickly packed up his books and got out of there before they awoke from their stupor and killed him.

Guys, guys ...

We're discussing secrets that are provided in game texts, which by the rules and guidelines are intended to be sprung upon the players after extended play. We're not discussing secrets that a GM has thought up, incorporated into the background, and seen realized through play.

Best,
Ron

Ron Edwards wrote:
We're discussing secrets that are provided in game texts, which by the rules and guidelines are intended to be sprung upon the players after extended play. We're not discussing secrets that a GM has thought up, incorporated into the background, and seen realized through play.