Hella_Tellah
Explorer
I just finished running a really successful game about steampunk monster hunters in Victorian London, and I thought I'd share my thoughts with you all.
Why Did It Work?
The game I ran, "Monstrosities by Gaslight," worked because I knew my players well, got them on board with the idea, and tailored it to them. For this game, I stopped worrying about having a bunch of stuff prepared, and accepted more offers from the players on how the game should go. In short, I focused on being able to come up with entertaining situations on the fly and really getting a feel for what the players wanted.
The Pitch
I pitched "Monstrosities by Gaslight" as one of three games I was interested in running, and emailed the group about a month before everyone came back into town for the semester. I found that the players were pretty evenly divided; one was really jazzed about the four-color superheroes game set in the 1970s, and another was really pumped about playing Mage during the fall of the Roman Republic, but everyone had some interest in steampunk monster hunters in Victorian London.
The Pitch: a game of Victorian monster hunters
The System
We used Victoriana 1st Edition, by Cubicle 7. The choice of system really made a difference in this case. Victoriana's character creation system strongly emphasizes social class (upper, middle, and lower) and encourages players to assign skills based on their childhood experiences and professions. Nearly everything is a roll of 3d6+Stat vs. a target number, so all I needed for most situations was a list of skills and a table of target numbers. Combat has some clever little details, including a pretty in-depth initiative system, which allows players to penalize themselves to take multiple actions spread out over the course of the battle. That sub-system is a bit complex, but the players who weren't interested in using it didn't have to use it, so it didn't get in the way of anyone's fun.
Preparation
I've done in-depth world-building before a few times, and enjoyed the exercise, but I didn't find it all that valuable in actual play. For "Monstrosities," I did almost no prep work at all. I learned the system, then thought of monsters I'd like the players to go up against. Every adventure began with the characters meeting with the head of Her Majesty's Investigative Society for Unnatural Occurances, Captain Sir Richard F. Burton, so for each adventure I wrote a little speech for him. They also had a quartermaster, Inspector Sir Archibald Quincy, who was the "Q" of the organization, and I came up with a bunch of silly invention ideas for him to hand out.
I didn't really write out stat blocks, either. I took an average of all of the characters' combat stats, and made a few generic stat blocks. Big beasties were designed to take an average of five hits (one per PC) and take a hit 70% of the time they were attacked, while dealing enough damage to knock a PC around but never kill in one hit. Minions were made to take two hits, and did about half as much damage. Those stat blocks were about all I had in front of me when we played.
Getting Our Feet Wet
Our first session was a group character creation and a short demo to showcase the system. We got a demolitions man who had experiences the Amereican Civil War first hand, a debutante with a passion for horse-riding, an heiress by day/enchantress by night, an Irish novelist/necromancer, a flowershop girl who went mad at the sight of blood, and a young woman posing as her dead brother in order to keep control of the family fortune. From that session, I absolutely knew this was going to work--my players came up with amazing characters that fit the setting, had interests and goals of their own, and were cool enough that the other players would want to watch what happened to them.
Captain Burton sent them to bring in Dr. Jekyll, who had kept himself in an opium stupour in a den down in London's chinatown. The players immediately lept into roleplaying their interactions with the "chinee" doorman, sneaking into the back room where Jekyll was kept, and attempting to silence a point-blank gunshot with a pillow. Fun! Jekyll woke up, everyone got a couple of rounds of combat to try the system, and we called it a successful night.
By the Seat of My Pants
At the beginning of each adventure, the players got a mission from Burton, which was really just a set of leads for them to follow up to find out what kind of monster they were fighting that week. From there, I left them to come up with their own ways to investigate. I had only one plan: spend one gaming session learning about the creature and how to find it, then have them hunt it and stop it in the next session (The two-session pattern usually ballooned into three or four per storyline, mainly due to players engaging in all kinds of mischief outside the investigation--which I was very happy to see).
I knew I could do this, because I know my players. These are the people I played Nobilis with, so I've seen them make decisions based only on what would make the best story. That's the rubric I went with, too: whenever I set a scene, I decided based on what was most flavorful, atmospheric, and fun--not on what is most realistic. The players played seasoned investigators of paranormal activities, so it just made sense that they'd solve the mystery, even if sometimes it was just by dumb luck.
This is not to say they couldn't fail, however. At one point, Quincy, the "Q" figure, was abducted by vampires, and the players set the building on fire with Quincy still inside. Quincy, one of the characters they really came to like, died as a result of their actions. It was a meaningful failure, and it had consequences on the game. Even though they failed, the players enjoyed the story, and that was the most important thing for me.
I also took the players' input very seriously. After the first major investiagtion, in which the players hunted down a medical student experimenting in re-animation, I got them to vote on six proposals for monsters to hunt down. I then ran the three they wanted to see most: vampires, werewolves, and a Cthulhu cult. More than that, when a player suggested that a scene should start a certain way, or said "wouldn't it be cool if," that's usually what happened. Sometimes I would have them decribe their surroundings for me, especially if the character owned the place. Other times, a player would suggests a fun little twist, and I went with it.
I even let the entire tone of the game shift, pretty dramatically, as players began to suggest funnier things, and one character even worked at being comic relief almost exclusively. I had originally imagined a dark, gritty set of investigations, but the group turned out to be better at making each other laugh than squirm, so it became more "Young Frankenstein" than "Bram Stoker's Dracula." I was fine with that, and it really panned out when the game ended with the players attacking an enormous Cthonian mud-golem with a turrent on their submarine/hansom cab, propelled forward by mechanical manitees. Why not? Everyone laughed and had fun. Why deny what the group is good at, just because it didn't fit the idea I had for the game four months ago?
The game turned silly. But so what?
The Little Things
I gave each of the players a little spiral-bound notebook at the beginning of the game. The notebook contained their character sheet, NPC contacts, maps of London and England, an explanation of Victorian-era British currency (we're Americans), a summary of the rules, and a thematic picture of the Thames on the front, and a large picture of Queen Victoria on the back. These booklets really made the game feel different and unique. I also had music from the period (Edward Elgar, Chopin, etc) on a playlist, lit the room with candles, and I wore a top hat to the table. I referred to characters as "Mr. Weller" and "Ms. Porter" exclusively, which re-inforced the importance of etiquette in-game. I made one rule about accents: no one has to use one, but no jokes about bad accents are allowed. About half of the players used an accent, and it worked out fine. Oh, and I served tea and gin with each game.
Conclusions
The best thing I did for myself with this game was to focus on game night itself. I made sure that the players felt comfortable giving offers of how things should happen, and I set up an atmosphere that got them in the mood to tell a story about Victorian monster hunters. Leaving the prep work behind, abandoning the pre-built set-piece fights I was accustomed to, freed me to let the players lead things where they wanted them to go. I was surprised to learn that I could be every bit as creative at the table as I was sitting at my computer, doing prep work--usually, a lot more creative, because I had five other people laughing, making suggestions, and engaging with the game.
A lot of this depended on the energy of the group, and comfort among the players, who have played together for more than three years now. I learned it's a lot harder to keep that energy up when more than one person is missing for instance--so in the future, we're doing one-shots if we're down three players.
I learned a lot from this game about how to run a narrativist, player-driven campaign. Ask me questions, tell me your experiences! What's made a campaign work out for your players?
Why Did It Work?
The game I ran, "Monstrosities by Gaslight," worked because I knew my players well, got them on board with the idea, and tailored it to them. For this game, I stopped worrying about having a bunch of stuff prepared, and accepted more offers from the players on how the game should go. In short, I focused on being able to come up with entertaining situations on the fly and really getting a feel for what the players wanted.
The Pitch
I pitched "Monstrosities by Gaslight" as one of three games I was interested in running, and emailed the group about a month before everyone came back into town for the semester. I found that the players were pretty evenly divided; one was really jazzed about the four-color superheroes game set in the 1970s, and another was really pumped about playing Mage during the fall of the Roman Republic, but everyone had some interest in steampunk monster hunters in Victorian London.
The Pitch: a game of Victorian monster hunters
The System
We used Victoriana 1st Edition, by Cubicle 7. The choice of system really made a difference in this case. Victoriana's character creation system strongly emphasizes social class (upper, middle, and lower) and encourages players to assign skills based on their childhood experiences and professions. Nearly everything is a roll of 3d6+Stat vs. a target number, so all I needed for most situations was a list of skills and a table of target numbers. Combat has some clever little details, including a pretty in-depth initiative system, which allows players to penalize themselves to take multiple actions spread out over the course of the battle. That sub-system is a bit complex, but the players who weren't interested in using it didn't have to use it, so it didn't get in the way of anyone's fun.
Preparation
I've done in-depth world-building before a few times, and enjoyed the exercise, but I didn't find it all that valuable in actual play. For "Monstrosities," I did almost no prep work at all. I learned the system, then thought of monsters I'd like the players to go up against. Every adventure began with the characters meeting with the head of Her Majesty's Investigative Society for Unnatural Occurances, Captain Sir Richard F. Burton, so for each adventure I wrote a little speech for him. They also had a quartermaster, Inspector Sir Archibald Quincy, who was the "Q" of the organization, and I came up with a bunch of silly invention ideas for him to hand out.
I didn't really write out stat blocks, either. I took an average of all of the characters' combat stats, and made a few generic stat blocks. Big beasties were designed to take an average of five hits (one per PC) and take a hit 70% of the time they were attacked, while dealing enough damage to knock a PC around but never kill in one hit. Minions were made to take two hits, and did about half as much damage. Those stat blocks were about all I had in front of me when we played.
Getting Our Feet Wet
Our first session was a group character creation and a short demo to showcase the system. We got a demolitions man who had experiences the Amereican Civil War first hand, a debutante with a passion for horse-riding, an heiress by day/enchantress by night, an Irish novelist/necromancer, a flowershop girl who went mad at the sight of blood, and a young woman posing as her dead brother in order to keep control of the family fortune. From that session, I absolutely knew this was going to work--my players came up with amazing characters that fit the setting, had interests and goals of their own, and were cool enough that the other players would want to watch what happened to them.
Captain Burton sent them to bring in Dr. Jekyll, who had kept himself in an opium stupour in a den down in London's chinatown. The players immediately lept into roleplaying their interactions with the "chinee" doorman, sneaking into the back room where Jekyll was kept, and attempting to silence a point-blank gunshot with a pillow. Fun! Jekyll woke up, everyone got a couple of rounds of combat to try the system, and we called it a successful night.
By the Seat of My Pants
At the beginning of each adventure, the players got a mission from Burton, which was really just a set of leads for them to follow up to find out what kind of monster they were fighting that week. From there, I left them to come up with their own ways to investigate. I had only one plan: spend one gaming session learning about the creature and how to find it, then have them hunt it and stop it in the next session (The two-session pattern usually ballooned into three or four per storyline, mainly due to players engaging in all kinds of mischief outside the investigation--which I was very happy to see).
I knew I could do this, because I know my players. These are the people I played Nobilis with, so I've seen them make decisions based only on what would make the best story. That's the rubric I went with, too: whenever I set a scene, I decided based on what was most flavorful, atmospheric, and fun--not on what is most realistic. The players played seasoned investigators of paranormal activities, so it just made sense that they'd solve the mystery, even if sometimes it was just by dumb luck.
This is not to say they couldn't fail, however. At one point, Quincy, the "Q" figure, was abducted by vampires, and the players set the building on fire with Quincy still inside. Quincy, one of the characters they really came to like, died as a result of their actions. It was a meaningful failure, and it had consequences on the game. Even though they failed, the players enjoyed the story, and that was the most important thing for me.
I also took the players' input very seriously. After the first major investiagtion, in which the players hunted down a medical student experimenting in re-animation, I got them to vote on six proposals for monsters to hunt down. I then ran the three they wanted to see most: vampires, werewolves, and a Cthulhu cult. More than that, when a player suggested that a scene should start a certain way, or said "wouldn't it be cool if," that's usually what happened. Sometimes I would have them decribe their surroundings for me, especially if the character owned the place. Other times, a player would suggests a fun little twist, and I went with it.
I even let the entire tone of the game shift, pretty dramatically, as players began to suggest funnier things, and one character even worked at being comic relief almost exclusively. I had originally imagined a dark, gritty set of investigations, but the group turned out to be better at making each other laugh than squirm, so it became more "Young Frankenstein" than "Bram Stoker's Dracula." I was fine with that, and it really panned out when the game ended with the players attacking an enormous Cthonian mud-golem with a turrent on their submarine/hansom cab, propelled forward by mechanical manitees. Why not? Everyone laughed and had fun. Why deny what the group is good at, just because it didn't fit the idea I had for the game four months ago?
The game turned silly. But so what?
The Little Things
I gave each of the players a little spiral-bound notebook at the beginning of the game. The notebook contained their character sheet, NPC contacts, maps of London and England, an explanation of Victorian-era British currency (we're Americans), a summary of the rules, and a thematic picture of the Thames on the front, and a large picture of Queen Victoria on the back. These booklets really made the game feel different and unique. I also had music from the period (Edward Elgar, Chopin, etc) on a playlist, lit the room with candles, and I wore a top hat to the table. I referred to characters as "Mr. Weller" and "Ms. Porter" exclusively, which re-inforced the importance of etiquette in-game. I made one rule about accents: no one has to use one, but no jokes about bad accents are allowed. About half of the players used an accent, and it worked out fine. Oh, and I served tea and gin with each game.
Conclusions
The best thing I did for myself with this game was to focus on game night itself. I made sure that the players felt comfortable giving offers of how things should happen, and I set up an atmosphere that got them in the mood to tell a story about Victorian monster hunters. Leaving the prep work behind, abandoning the pre-built set-piece fights I was accustomed to, freed me to let the players lead things where they wanted them to go. I was surprised to learn that I could be every bit as creative at the table as I was sitting at my computer, doing prep work--usually, a lot more creative, because I had five other people laughing, making suggestions, and engaging with the game.
A lot of this depended on the energy of the group, and comfort among the players, who have played together for more than three years now. I learned it's a lot harder to keep that energy up when more than one person is missing for instance--so in the future, we're doing one-shots if we're down three players.
I learned a lot from this game about how to run a narrativist, player-driven campaign. Ask me questions, tell me your experiences! What's made a campaign work out for your players?
