I’m also partial to a ghost story or two, and as my friend Mark leant me an audio book featuring a variety of ghost stories I’ve been scaring myself into the Christmas spirit every night on the way home. So, what better way to mark the yuletide than with a post about running a traditional Victorian ghost story using Dead of Night?

Victorian Ghost Stories

When I talk Victorian Ghost Stories, the short stories that spring to mind are those of MR James (of which his best are Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to you my Lad, the Mezzotint and Number 13), although there are many others who wrote in the genre, such as Walter de la Mare, as well as later authors such as Henry James (The Turn of the Screw) and even Susan Hill (the Woman in Black).

The protagonist in a Victorian Ghost Story is typically a gentleman and a scholar, often a bachelor or widower, alone in some strange place on business. This strange place might at first seem innocuous, but it is oft unsettling and forboding – bleak and isolated, ill thought of and with some dark happenings having occurred in its past perhaps.

The ghost of the piece does not necessarily conform to our traditional view of a ghost – it is not always the apparition or undead creature, as the strange creature made of cloth in Whistle is evident of. And whereas a modern ghost story might demand some manner of resolution or closure, a Victorian Ghost Story rarely ends so. The protagonist often escapes, but badly shaken and scarred, yet the matter is unlikely to be resolved, the ghost not laid to rest. The machinery of the supernatural, as James once put it, remains unseen.

The titular monster is most likely to be a Formless Horror (Dead of Night p68) or Vengeful Dead (p54) although I’d be tempted to lose its Vulnerability and play up the psychological threat over the physical as the ghost does not normally harm its victims. There are exceptions, of course – just take a look at the Woman in Black to see how the threat switches between psychological and physical violence, even if it’s not always aimed directly at the protagonist.

Within a Victorian Ghost Story, survival point loss could represent sanity loss and startling revelations, the entity taking an increased attention to your character or even the untimely demise of other victims (either in the present or, via flashbacks or other ghosts, in the past).

Tension Point Circumstances: can only be spent to increase Identify and Pursue checks – revelations come thick and fast, but there can be no escape.

Intensity: Any amount – the tension in a Victorian Ghost Story often goes from the horrific to the mundane very swiftly indeed.

Starting Tension: 3 or 4, although it starts innocuously enough, the set-up is fairly forboding.

Mood: Claustrophobic, isolated and forboding, with sinister goings on and suspicious circumstances at every turn.

So there you have it – an early Christmas present for all you Dead of Night fans looking to get into the festive mood. And, if ghost stories aren’t your cup of tea, the Christmas-themed slasher movie adventure, Night of the Santa Claws, that I wrote for 1st ed is still available at RPGNow. What’s your favourite ghost story?

We talked about memories last time, so this time I’ll talk about how they fit in with the mechanics of the game when the dice hit the table. Remember in my last post I talked about bidding for memories, and how the amount bid for a memory was its value? Well, in a conflict, you get to roll a number of dice equal to the value of any related or relevant memories, so the more powerful a memory, the more potent it is when you draw upon it in a conflict.

The dice in question are D6s and you roll them as a big pool. Much like in Sorcerer, Cold City and Covenant, you’re looking to get more dice of a higher result than your opponent.  I find there’s something oracular, akin to casting the bones, about fishing through a dice pool looking for high dice and sorting out the result. If you have more dice higher than the opponent, you’re winning the conflict. Note the use of the present tense there, because it’s not a done deal yet.

Players – all of them, not just you and your opponent – can then get involved influencing the outcome, reflecting the long, drawn out Machiavellan back and forth of elven intrigues. Influence is applied by spending coins – the other currency aside from memories, gained as tribute for winning conflicts or selling memories – and for every coin spent a dice on either side can be added in or re-rolled. Only once every player has passed his turn to apply influence is the winner determined. But it’s not just blind coin pushing and dice rolling, as each time a coin is spent the player must narrate how his elf influences the conflict, no matter how distant and removed the influence might be, creating this slowly building narrative intrigue potentially spread over years.

The final twist is that once the winner is determined, both sides take one last look at the dice pools for any 6s and 1s. 6s garner bonus coins, whereas 1s… oh 1s are treacherous , they bring nothing but madness. Madness reduces the value of a memory, turning it into a madness coin on your character card. Short term, madness coins can be used against you, opponents able to spend them as though they were their own coins, but long term madness is where the whole tragedy kicks into a higher gear.

When an elf has more madness coins than the combined value of his memories – and this might happen swiftly, for an elf might find himself without many memories all of a sudden if picked upon by his fellow courtiers – he descends into madness, forever going insane and exiting the story. But that’s not the end for the player, for they get to take on a far more delicious role… that of the creeping ruin about to befall the Eternal Court.

And that’s what I’ll be talking about next time.

In other news, although I’m out of print copies in the Steampower shop, you’ll be able to find it in all good online retailers (I recommend Leisure Games in London), and of course the PDF is available from RPGNow.

As I described last time, at the heart of elven culture are their memories, some of which are their own, some of which are stolen, traded or otherwise acquired from others. These memories make up the core of the game as well, defining your character and what he can do in a conflict in much the same way as a skill, trait or aspect might in other games. The difference is, memories are written on index cards and over the course of the game can be traded, stolen or lost, so not only do the elves change what they can and can’t do, they also change what they know and who they think they are.

Memories are all created collaboratively at the start of the game in a process known as Memory Creation. Each player takes it in turns to write a memory on an index card and these are then put in the middle of the table. Players take it in turns to bid coins for them, with the winner not only getting the memory, but also setting its value as the amount he was prepared to pay. The higher the value of the memory, the more dice the player gets to roll when it comes into a conflict, so these memories can become highly desirable and the subject of frantic bidding.

Almost all of the game play centres on these memories, whether it’s an elf’s hunt for new, exotic memories or his quest for answers to the questions a memory might have posed, a player attempting to ‘acquire’ a memory from another character or an elf’s descent into madness as he slowly loses his memories over the course of the game, and whenever a player gets to take his turn it’s inevitably to the memories around the table that he’ll turn his attention first.

And it’s how a player goes about this that I’ll talk about in my next post, when I’ll give a quick run down of the conflict system and how those juicy memories can be leveraged to assist an elf in his ambitions.

I’ve posted it up in full colour because I wanted to share George’s awesomeness, but the book is in black and white. You can see for yourself now – I’ve put the PDF up on RPGNow for sale.

The elves of the Eternal Court stem from a thought that had rattled around in my head for a while, and that was the notion that in fantasy elves tend to be presented as a race past their prime, creatures fading from the world, their glories firmly in their past. I wanted to find out what they were like in their golden age. The answer, it turns out, is not nice.

In this respect they borrow a fair bit from the Ancient Eldar in Warhammer 40,000 or the pre-Sundering Elves in Warhammer, not to mention unwitting comparisons with the Melniboneans from Elric! All gothic grandeur and darkly decadent ways, living out their long lives seeking pleasure and indulgence in all its forms.

But when you’ve got a long life behind you – and an eternity ahead – lounging about the palace becomes tediously dull, so the elves seek out new, exotic pleasures in the form of the memories of others, exotic lives vicariously experienced through magic and memory. And it’s these memories that are at the heart of elven culture and – as I’ll explain when I come to talk about the mechanics – the game itself, as the elves trade, steal and otherwise acquire new memories.

There’s a downside to obtaining the memories of others, however, and that’s the inevitability of insanity. Having all manner of often conflicting memories – some yours, others not, and the inability to tell the difference between whose is whose – leads to eventual madness, and it is this madness that will bring the elves to ruin and destruction.

But that’s a story for another time.

First up, here is a look at the awesome cover – the picture is by George Cotronis, whilst the design is Paul Bourne, and combined they make for a very striking piece of art.

The interior art is all in the same vivid style, and Paul has used each of the pieces as chapter heads. I’ll post them up over the course of the week too.

They then fled the flat, where they ran into a group of rioters including the now-infamous Billy Hunt, who tried to bully Alan into holding the big tv he’d just nicked. This scene was great, as it set up Billy as a hard case, as well as putting Alan’s own bluster and bullish manner into perspective (Billy bullies Alan, so Alan bullies Ollie). Cops arrive, coven flees, only to find Simon’s body crucified in an alley, his phone filled with frantic voice mail messages from Julianne telling Simon she’s hiding out in the derelict flats.It’s about this time they first notice the car with blacked out windows and an Italian number plate following them.

After tipping the cops off, the coven catch the bus to the flats but are accosted by an elderly blind man who shouts “Witch! Witch” at Raven. The group respond with bluster and are all chucked off the bus, whereupon the man rounds on them once more, this time with a demonic voice. Raven pushes him over, accidentally killing him… or was he already dead, as his body is cold? Despite the horror of the situation, the coven remain teenagers and Raven takes a certain amount of pride in her violent accomplishment.

At the flats, Alan goes in on his own, only to find a smashed widescreen TV on the floor, a dead guy crumpled in the stairwell and Billy Hunt cowering in a corner, scared of something he’s seen. Alan talks to him, Billy persuades him to give him his knife, and then he slits his own throat! Alan flees, but tries to make himself look hard and tells the others he had to knife him.

The group then notice the Italian car is back and head into the flats together. They find Julianne in one of the empty flats, a pentagram on the floor and the book floating in the middle. She persuades them to help her cast out the demon, getting each of them to cut their own hands and bleed on the pentagram. Raven then hands her Billy’s knife and Julianne then cuts her own throat! The players can’t believe they’ve just fallen for the same trick twice!

The disbelief is brief, however, as the blood starts to pool unnaturally and the demon – now cast out of its host – starts to pull itself free of Julianne’s throat. The coven start to flee, but Raven desperately flips through the grimoire to find the proper banishment spell, and a tense combat ensues as the coven try to distract the demon long enough for Raven to complete the ritual. She does and the demon vanishes.

The group retreat back to Raven’s house where they fail to take much notice of the Italian car parked further up the street. They get in, and after Ann-Marie decides to go upstairs to get showered (she’s covered in blood at this point) she finds a well-suited gentleman wearing a large crucifix holding a silver gun to Louise (Raven’s little sister)’s head. He demands the witch be brought forth, at which point (no pun intended) all hell breaks loose. The witch hunter starts chanting, people hurl themselves at him, several people get shot and Raven tries to cast a spell. On the inquisitor. I blow through much of the tension accrued during this scene (mainly accrued by Elaine, Raven’s player, spending survival points to cast spells), bouncing Raven’s spell back on herself and nearly killing her, not to mention a few of the others too.

They finally manage to kill the inquisitor, after he tells them the demon was not banished but was cast out into a blood relative of the coven. He hints that his cane has a splinter of the true cross in it too. Cue Louise’s entry, full-on possessed. Survival points get spent to grab cane and silver gun and the coven wade into action. The demon is slain, finally, but not before I get my hands on a player – poor Josh has his head neatly screwed off.

We finish with an epilogue, as each player wraps up their own story. Raven goes back to being Rachel, magic well behind her, Ollie goes properly mad and ends up being institutionalised for his ramblings about demons, Carver gets to stake his claim on being a real hard man and takes over Hunt’s gang, and as for Ann-Marie? Well, we last see her getting off a plane in Paris, a rather weighty tome in her hand luggage…

… to be continued, perhaps?

Partly because I hadn’t had time to prep characters, and partly because the last time I had the players make up a relationship map to tie their characters into the story – Grendel, Alaska, from Indiecon a few years back – it created an awesomely compelling game, I had the players create characters to fit the premise. As they created characters, I made them tie themselves to each other on a relationship map in the middle of the table, to the two members who had not turned up, as well as add additional NPCs to the map too.

You can see the relationship map above (click for a closer look).

As I’d hoped for, we ended up with a great cast of characters:

Raven (real name Rachel) Harris, who was Julianne’s best friend and heavily into the magic.

Josh Fellowes, Raven’s boyfriend, who is the only one with a job and a reluctant participant.

Alan “Carver” Harris, Raven’s cousin and Josh’s best friend, who is jealous of all the time he spends with the coven.

Ollie Freeman, a troubled teenager who has problems distinguishing reality from fiction.

Ann-Marie de Pouvre, Raven’s exchange student, who is convinced it’s all scientific, but can use magic anyway.

As I mentioned last time, I gave them the option of taking a supernatural specialisation to represent their magical knowledge but, interestingly, only two of them took me up on it. The others were happy to be non-magic using members of the coven.

They also created quite a few NPCs:

Julianne, the founder of the coven, now missing with their magic grimoire.

Simon, Julianne’s boyfriend, whose basement flat they meet in, also missing.

Louise, Raven’s little sister, who she often has to babysit for.

Billy Hunt, a hooligan who Alan looks up to and is beaten up by.

And a few others, who never came into it. I do like creating NPCs for a scenario like this, as the players all know who you’re talking about when you introduce one of them – no blank looks and people struggling to remember names – and I end up with a ready-made stack of victims to kill off that the players actually care about. Call me heartless…

We kicked off with the coven assembling in Simon’s flat, the door slightly ajar and neither Simon, Julianne nor the grimoire anywhere to be seen. And I’ll tell you what happened next in part 2!

The idea I had was to run a game inspired by the Craft or the Covenant – you know the schtick, a group of teenagers mess around at playing witches, end up summoning something bad and getting into trouble. I wanted to run that game, with the players all as witches with supernatural powers, running from something worse.

So at Furnace the other weekend I ran Salford’s Lot (I’ve got an actual play report of the game in the works so keep an eye out for that), which posited the victims as members of an amateur cabal out to cause trouble of an evening. I had the group create their own characters as normal – complete with complex relationships (I’ve got a post brewing about this too) – but gave them the option to take Sorcery as a power. In game I treated it as any other specialisation but with a vastly expanded remit, albeit at a price to use – a survival point per attempt.

This worked rather well, albeit rather painfully for Elaine’s character, who ended up nearly burning herself out trying to hex the witch hunter during the climax. This was pretty much what monsters did in 1st edition – burn through survival points trying to use their cool powers – but I didn’t find it such a problem for a player to have to endure as it limited their supernatural nature to when it mattered.

I’d like to try it another way next time, perhaps actually throwing open the Monstrous Specialisations section (p73 of Dead of Night 2nd ed) to the players, or else inflicting a price of some sort – perhaps like a Bad Habit. What do people think?

And while I’m on the subject of Dead of Night – don’t forget the PDF is only $5 over at RPGNow until Monday.

Dead of Night is the roleplaying game of campfire tales, slasher movies and b-movie horror. It’s designed to be quick and easy to play, with rules that help you tell horror stories without getting in the way of the fun. The rules are simple and straightforward to learn, yet offer all the options and depth to allow you to customise the game however you like.

Dead of Night is perfect for Halloween horror gaming – with character creation taking no more than 5 minutes and a host of advice and resources for running games on the fly, you can be playing in no time. And, if you’re really impatient to go, there are four ready-made scenarios in the book and downloadable PCs available on our website.

Go on, give us a scream!