You Got Your Gothic In My Monsterhearts

For the last couple of years, I've been tooling around with a hack of Monsterhearts, the game of messy teen romances in a dark urban fantasy setting created by Avery Alder. I've been running and playing Monsterhearts consistently since it came out, from running one-shots as an introduction to indie TTRPGs to campaigns for small groups of friends, and while I love the structure of the game, I'd also had some toxic experiences while playing it. On top of that, I'd been feeling burned out on the whole high school drama thing anyway, with a glut of games, films and TV series over-exposing the genre without really understanding it all that well. Since I'd pretty much run through all the playbooks I was interested in and dabbled with creating my own, I was reaching a point where I was done with Monsterhearts, even though it remained one of my favourite games.

Then Wednesday came out on streaming, the Addams Family inspired series based in a highschool for monsters, which you would think would serve as a natural inspiration for some more Monsterhearts gaming, but it actually inspired me to write a playset for my own game, Troublemakers, which is a softer take on young adventures & mysteries. Readers, this was the beginning of my Gothic Era and I ran several successful sessions of my Wednesday-inspired playset over the next couple of years; the main reason I didn't run it with Monsterhearts is that I was finding the game a little harsh. Monsterhearts deals with the realities of growing up, through the use of metaphors in the form of its monstrous protagonists, all of them struggling to find their place, and I soon came to realise that I've burned out on that grimmer style of play. I wanted something a little softer, more romantic and escapist, more melodramatic if you will, and so I found myself writing a deep hack of Monsterhearts I dubbed 'Monsterhearts Gothic.' I relocated the action from a modern American high-school to an historical European boarding school and asked myself, what differences would that make to the mechanics of play? What I came up with was a remix of Monsterhearts, taking familiar moves and concepts and shuffling them around, but also adding my own distinctive touches, like a new way of depicting physical conflicts and a new(ish) set of playbooks to fit the tone.

This hack soon became a favourite of mine, after a little back & forth with the initial playtesting to refine some of the ideas, and just recently, I offered to run it on Start Playing, the pay & play TTRPG site, just to dip my toes into the waters there. I'm not going to go into all the ins and outs of the hack here, or my experiences so far on Start Playing, which are limited anyway; instead, I want to talk about unexpected choices and why they can make games great.

Let's start with 'The Beloved', my remixed version of 'The Mortal' from Monsterhearts; like the Mortal, their story is intimately entwined with another character's, but in a Gothic, melodramatic way, with the focus on the scandal it can create if the secret passion between the two should become public. The intent, as with the Mortal, is for whoever plays this character to agree with another player that their two characters are romantically entwined, but what if the Beloved's admirer isn't a character at all? When discussing concepts for PCs, the idea came forth that the Beloved could be the fixation of a non-corporeal entity, an ideal or elemental rather than a living being. What if you were loved by the springtime? Or by a river? Or by the night itself? With the Beloved's ability to toy with their admirer's affections, this has the potential to create devastating consequences for everyone else! Imagine if spring itself listens to your confessions and forgives you; what might they do to those who gave you regrets? If you runaway to be with the river, where do you end up? If the night shapes itself to be mre pleasing to you, what does that mean for the moon & stars, and for the hours of day & night themselves? Will an adoring manifestation of night create permanent darkness across the land so that they can spend more time with their beloved? These questions and more have still to be answered.

Next we have 'The Invisible,' inspired by classi literature like The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells, but also taking notes from modern fiction such as the "Out of Sight, Out of Mind" episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the 2020 film version of The Invisble Man from Leigh Whannell. The concept here is simple: what if you could turn invisible whenever you wanted and take advantage of the power it granted you, but turning visible again took some kind of effort or sacrifice? The intent here is for the character to be played as literally invisible, but here we talked about social invisibility and a character who just wants to vanish from the perception of others to escape the burden of popularity, a kind of inversion of the idea in Buffy, where an overlooked student quietly disappears entirely. Normally with The Invisible, the trigger to change back is something like an injection of fresh human blood or sharing a moment of intimacy with another, but we also talked about strings, a social currency in Monsterhearts also used in this hack. One suggestion on the playbook is that another character must spend one of the strings they have with the Invisible to make them visible once more, but we discussed the inversion of this, using an existing string mechanic: what if you spent a string with someone to tempt them to act, with the simple instruction "See me"? This simple plea, backed up with resource mechanics, changes the outlook of the Invisible signifcantly. Towards the end of our first session, the Invisible had slipped out of sight, just hours before they are due to make an appearance at a school group, so we'll see how that gets handled in the next session.

There's also 'The Hybrid', less werewolf and more The Island of Dr. Moreau or the folklore surrounding Spring-Heeled Jack; the playbook is tilted towards action and violence, but does provide space for other interpretations, which is what we got. The Hybrid in our game is more of an instinctive, semi-tame beast, with heightened senses and a need to obey others who give him clear commands, which is actually kind of perfect for a Victorian boarding school, so he should do well. On the downside, it turns out he's one of the heralds for the apocalypse, along with another Hybrid student, and while they want to embrace their destiny, the PC isn't so keen on ending the world. I was not expecting armageddon to be on the menu so soon in this game, but it turns out we're starting there and the clock is already ticking down towards doomsday.

Finally we have 'The Vampire', possibly the nearest to one of the original Monsterhearts playbooks, but remixed to focus on the powerful & mysterious bond between the Vampire and those who choose to give their blood willingly. They are still the most traditional of the character types, without getting into weirdly twisted versions like energy vampires or youth vampires, but the blood-drinking and the sensuality that goes with it is such an intrinsic part of Gothic fiction that I'd hesitate to mess with it. To shake things up a little for this character in the first session, I had them find the body of another student who had the hallmarks of death at the hands of their hated blood sire upon them, which lead to all kinds of misadventures, misunderstandings and suspicions. The body disappeared shortly afterwards, of course, leaving little evidence behind other than the Vampire witnessing it and the Hybrid scenting the lingering blood, so together they sought out the victim's body, asking the question, "Where is Bernard Thomson?" The answer was supplied right behind them as the cliffhanger of the session, when Bernard Thomson greeted them and asked them what was up, shocking both the PCs by his apparent resurrection. More to come in the following weeks, I can't wait to see what other surprising choices get made by the players and me.

In Its Shadow: Unnatural Resources

 I was in the mood for some extra gaming on Friday the 13 of March, so I roped together three friends on my Discord server for a game of my card-based, prompt driven game of Hunters seeking the lair of a Beast in order to end its reign of terror.

We were seeking a monstrous billionaire who had holed up in a compound within the wilderness around
an old, abandoned summer camp (I think maybe some teenagers got killed there back in the 1970s?) The party consisted of:

- A property developer with a long-standing, family grudge against the Beast

- A public defender with huge debts that could be wiped away if he agreed to work for the Beast

- A lookalike of the Beast who was determined to end him by any means

- A park ranger who'd lost their job when the Beast bought out the land

We progressed through the wilderness, approaching the compound, disturbing the wildlife on the way, but the Beast knew we were coming and deployed his resources to whittle away at our resolve; he utterly destroyed the life of the property developer remotely, forcing him to retreat in shame. Then, as we reached the compound, our big reveal occurred: the lookalike and the Beast were twins and their mother was within the compound, ready to help us bring down her billionaire son!

The plan to stage the scene so that the lookalike could smoothly take the Beast's place, with their mother vouching for the 'good twin,' immediately went south when we saw what atrocities the Beast had perpetrated in his compound. There was a running thread about the exploitation of the genetic diversity of the wilderness to provide biotech breakthroughs, including increased human longevity: we never said exactly what we witnessed in the compound but it was enough to make the lookalike snap and wildly attack the Beast with the butt of a rifle!

Despite being bloodied and broken, the Beast rallied, grabbing some sharp edged ornament to 'fatally' (yes, another twist is coming) stab his twin brother, who had at least had the satisfaction of bloodying his evil twin. This gave our park ranger a window of opportunity to KO the Beast, allowing us to revert to the original plan... sort of.

The park ranger knew first hand how powerful the biotech breakthroughs were and wanted to share them with the world, but carefully: his first act was to revive the lookalike, allowing him to take the Beast's place, with the testimony of his mother to support his claim. The true Beast was painted as a disgruntled lunatic who had broken in with the intent to kill and was sent away for good; however, this big lie meant we were all compromised.

- The public defender accepted the offer from 'The Beast' to clear his debts, so it seemed to the world that he'd sold out and become another capitalist lackey

- The park ranger opened Pandora's Box and started on the slippery slope to exploiting the natural resources that he cherished

- The lookalike, now the New Beast, faced the temptation such absolute power can bring, as well as the burden of giving up almost every aspect of his old life to immerse himself in his new role

We had a good time with this and the new Act 2 rules in the Reviled Edition made for a much more tense and focused finale than the old version of the game. I need to run my own creations more often, I just always feel a little guilty when I run them, like an actor always insisting that his friends watch his own movies when his friends come around for pizza!

Contingency 2026: The Twelve Labours of Groundhoggoth

 It's that time of year again! I've once again been to Contingency, the TTRPG convention on the East Coast of England in the delightful town of Hunstanton, a lovely historic location overlooking the sea. Let's start as tradition demands, with a brief tale about getting to the convention.

Aaaagghh!!!

Actually, maybe let's not dwell on the journey, involving broken down cars, postponed lifts and general background mayhem causing a lot of stress; onto the games!

Yes, I Do Play Games, Actually

After a good meal, watching the Only Connect final and getting the most sleep I would all week, I had Tuesday earmarked for playing games with Graham, Sarah and [Redacted 4th Player - still not sure if I am allowed to name him in public!] This had been arranged well before the convention, with Graham kindly offering to host all day, providing us with a couple of meals and a wonderfully convivial setting to get into the convention mindset in a relaxed way.

We play tested a game that Graham and 4th are working on, a lovely combination of evocative roleplay
and intriguinging puzzle solving, set in a fantastic world of faded grandeur, with magnificent backdrops against which to mark the slow passing of our civilisation, built on the ruins of the past. Thus a merchant, a mechanic, and a robot constructed by a lost & fallen people set out to discover if a breakthrough had been made in translating the language of the ancients and what it could mean for us now.

After lunch and a stimulating conversation deconstructing the aforementioned play test, we continued the linguistic theme with my first face-to-face play of Dialect, a game about languages and how they die. We used the Thieves' Cant background and created a society of criminals based out of an opera house in 19th century London, evolving our own private language for our activities, e.g the HMS Indefatigible was our Moby Dick, an unimaginable hoard of wealth in it's hold that was unobtainable, so the 'HMS' became converted into 'hit & miss' expressing our hopes in an uncertain future. This later became corrupted by a splinter faction who had misgivings about our alliance with another gang who had less exacting modern standards, so they referred to the future as 'sink or swim.' Eventually, sink we did, as our gang became completely subsumed by our rivals-turned-allies and our past was all but forgotten. Dialect is going to be in my regular rotation of 'game-in-a-box' offerings that are easy to learn and play in a single one-shot, as you'll see further into this report.

Wednesday

Session #1: "For the Queen" and "Oh Captain! My Captain!"

Two really awesome deck-based, prompt driven games where you just take turns drawing cards and answering the questions on them to build the story and your character's place in it, until you come to a collective crumch point where all players need to make a decision about the outcome. In For the Queen, our disturbingly immortal queen was stealing parts from her subjects, espcially eyes which she used to spy on us all; in Oh Captain, our dashing captain was concealing a failing memory resulting from a head injury and was thus involved in a very complex love triangle.

Session #2: Dead Talents Society (ft. Best Friends)

Inspired by a viewing of the Taiwanese horror comedy of the same name, I very quickly matched up the content to the Best Friends RPG, to exploit its use of group character creation and a non-random task system that relies on the reasons you are jealous of your friends in the game. Most of the session was taken up with convoluted plans to create a new urban legend around a KFC franchise, so that the dearly departed could live off the fame generated by it. Those dearly departed PCs were:

• Measha as Employee 01/04, a KFC worker who died in a horrific deep fryer accident, which later turned out to be murder committed by their serial killer boss!
• Harry as Jack Jackson, owner/manager of a double glazing firm, who died proving that his windows wouldn't break even if he did a flying kick against one; he was right, it didn't break, even when it hit the ground several floors below, with Jack falling with it.
• Richard as Hunter, a street artist who died in the aftermath of his greatest work, a detailed mural of his tag, meant to show Banksy who was best; unfortunately, using a lot of aerosol paint in a confined space doesn't combine well with a naked flame, so Hunter ended up really putting something of himself into his art.
• Steve as Jason from Survivor, a very minor reality show contestant who died when he was left behind on the island after being forgotten by all the other competitors and the TV crew.
• Tijs as The Annes, an acrobatic troupe of five sisters who died when the circus tent collapsed in the middle of their act, then ended up amalgamated into one grostesque entity that would have made David Cronenberg reach for a sick bag.
• Esther as Rhona, a sweet old lady who was very concerned over the education of the next generation; also, when she died, she was half-eaten by her own cats.

This haunting eventually beat out their arch-rivals, the Sarahs, a troupe of girls who'd all died when their school bus crashed and were dressing the same to create a very powerful urban legend inspired by modern J-horror. The PC's urban legend was franchised, spreading to multiple drive-thru outlets and making them all overnight celebrities in the spirit world!

Session #3: Hazbin Hotel (ft. Blood & Water)

Look, I have to fit at least one of my own game designs into every convention, it's the law, so this year is was my Blood & Water game system pressed into service for a non-canonical episode of the popular animated show about damned souls in Hell seeking the path to redemption. This game flew, taking off under the power of the four players who'd signed up for it: they left me in the dust! There was instant chemistry between our Charlie & Vaggie stand-ins, while issues were created by their Hotel staff members, an eel-like grifter and a voracious appetite monster. We kicked off the day after Heaven's purge, with Virgil, the manager of the hotel, missing and opportunistic music-demon Gershwin arriving to apply pressure to the power vaccuum. Also, it's a musical! When a PC rolled the equivalent of a critical fail in the system, they had to describe a song their PC sung that revealed their true feelings! This was such an awesome game that the next day, I offered to run it as a short campaign for my local club!

Thursday

Session #4: One Last Fight

My first chance to play this, since the Kickstarter fulfullment meant I only just reecived the game exactly one week previously; it's another game-in-a box ttrpg, but it adds a little dice rolling beyond the card-based prompts, so technically you could just play this as an epic fantasy card game if you wanted to. The prompts tie the narrative together beautifully though and you'd be missing out if you didn't create your own story for the adventure you're on. Every card in the game (Hero, Nemesis, Challenge and Loot) has at least one question on it and players either individually or collectively answer these to build up a backstory at the start of play and then explore it further as they progress towards a final confrontation with the Nemesis.

We played it straight out of the box and embarked on a quest to overcome an Angel sent down by God to erase the old world and make way for a new one, triggered by the discovery of a Philosopher's Stone-like material that was transforming everything it touched. It was epic, it was glorious, we faced old allies turned bad and fought monsters corrupted by the transformation, until ultimately, in the very last confrontation, on the very last card of the game... we died and the world ended. This was such a great game and will also be entering my regular rotation of one shots and convention games.

Session #5: Dialect

My first time faciltating Dialect, but with two games under my belt, I was fairly confident I knew what I was doing, and we used The Compound as our background: set in the 1980s, we were a group who had withdrawn from society to become entirely self-sufficient, but the outside world proved it wasn't finished with us yet. Based on our shared belief that wise voices spoke to us, our community banded together in a meteorite crater and added a wall around the rim to further isolate us, but harvest problems eventually lead us to invite agricultural experts in to help; this gradually eroded our grip on the land, starting from when we ceded the 'Abble' to them, a canyon-like feature that naturally focused sound into one point, and it was decreed that the term for bad omens ('Post', derived from the post bringing bad news in the old, pre-compound days) could no longer be spoken. Eventually, a corporation stole our land from under us and many of us ended up working for them as they extracted natural resources and the fertile land witthered.

Session #6: Monsterhearts Gothic

I created this deep reskin of Monsterhearts around two years ago, to relocate the drama from modern American high school to a Victorian English boarding school, with more emphasis on melodrama and chaste intimacy. This session featured:

• The Ageless, a Dorian Gray stand-in who was bored after 300 years of immortality and seeking a fresh new challenge.
• The Vampire, whose family exchanged him for wealth and was thus raised by his sire as a surrogate parent.
• The Invisible, an amateur sorcerer and occult dabbler who had accidentally inflicted this curse upon themself, and
• The Hybrid, whose mother had used him and his sister to advance the cause of science, leaving them both with a hidden animal nature that came out under stress.

As the students crammed for their final exams, the history teacher was found brutally murdered, leading to suspicion being thrown in every direction, but when the Vampire was struck by lighning, they knew theere had to be a more supernatural explanation for events. The Ageless took a bet from the Devil who had taken his soul in exchange for his immortality and had until dawn to corrupt an innocent, while the Invisible and Hybrid had a cute enemies-to-lovers arc, once they got over their suspicions that the other was a cold-blooded murderer. It didn't end well for everyone, but the Devil got his due and was thus sated for the time being.

Friday

Session #7: For the Queen

Another of my 'Double Decker' offerings, but we got so deep into the first game that we ran out of time for a second and just used the remaining time in the session to decompress. This time, our Queen was a cyberpunk princess at the head of a royal space yacht cruising the depths of space looking for a new home after the destruction of Earth long ago. With five players, the story we wove contained a lot of
twists, turns and revelations, such as :

• The queen's double, who took her place in some functions for security reasons, had an implant in her brain that she knew nothing about.
• 
  The last forest, a fragment of Old Earth, was overseen by the Woodcutter, an almost mythical figure who oversaw the transition between reigns by executing the previous monarch!
  
• The queen's head of physical security had arranged an ambush of the royal yacht to persuade the queen of her folly and return to a safer area of the galaxy, away from alien threats.
  
• An alien scholar possessed a secret 'Immersion Pod', a banned piece of technology that provided total VR, and was allowed it because the queen and her double knew about it and sometimes used it.
• The queen's head of digital security was a religious zealot who had persuaded the queen and her entourage to embark on a quest for the mythical Space Whale.

When the inevitable attack came, the digital security expert accidentally took the double to an escape pod, while the personal security saved the real queen, and the alien scholar died because no-one had ever converted the yacht to accomodate his greater height and girth, so he couldn't fit into an escape pod! Thus he took to his grave the secret of the poorly translated name of the royal forest, "Grit-tone-pork!"

Session #8: Rumblebugs (ft. Pico)
Another of the handful of games I've backed on Kickstarter in the last few years, this one is best described as a post-apocalyptic version of A Bug's Life, so it's wholesome bug-sized fun among the detritus of a humanity who have utterly & mysteriosuly vanished. That's not important though, as this is just a fun adventure game, with the pitch in this case that the PCs are a troupe of travelling wrestlers and their manager/promoter, who are headed to the community of Covered Hollow to put on a show.

Pico encourages a 'play to find out' attitude, in particular through using doubles to trigger wildly outrageous events that the table makes up on the spot; at least this time we didn't get a critical fail with a wild coincedence until the second roll of play, creating a brief diversion to a cannibal cockroach cult, but this then 'fed' into later storylines. The troupe finally made it to the right place and staged their show on an old DVD that served as the settlement's central plaza, but at the climax of the performance, a storm that had been playing out in the background triggered a flood in the hollow. The troupe immediately got to work saving the day, though we must take a moment to remember the price paid: their mode of transporation, a Lego version of Bilbo Baggins' home in the Shire with wheels on it, pulled by two slugs, was swept away by the flood, The last we saw of the two slugs alive was one floating on top of the circular green door while the other clung to the edge of it.

The day was saved, at last, with the creche saved from the flooding, along with a congregation of bugs praying to a human child's doll for salvation, while others used the DVD and a lens formed from a drop of water and a fleck of glass to focus light into a beam hot enhough to ignite a trash barrier and divert the flood onto a new path, reminiscent of the end of Tommy Lee Jones vehicle, Volcano. This makes total sense from a bug's understanding of science.

Session #9: A History of Folk Horror (ft. Microscope)

This is arguably the grandparent of all subsequent storygames and its influence can be seen in a wide spectrum of modern games, particulary Dialect, a fresh new favourite of mine. In this session, we played out the history of a site through hundreds or possibly thousands of years, from "The Raising of the First Stone to Utari" in a pseudo-Bronze Age to "Travellers Settle and Camp" many generations later after the wilderness reclaims the land from a fallen modern civilisation.

Microscope gives the players licence to dance up and down the timeline they create with disregard to chronology, so it's hard to give a definitive, sequential narrative, but we did learn that there was Utari, a deity (?) who left the Eight, rendering them the Seven, and it was their influence at this site down through the ages that shaped local, then national, then global events.

• A shepherd who sleeps by the monolith dreams of Utari but rejects being seen as a prophet.
• 
  
  
  
  An early ampitheatre later built on the site stages the first performance of "The Child's Lament', but the lead actor dies on stage, in front of a hauntingly silent audience.
  
• As home to a famnous composer, it becomes the stage for a descent into madness, as the whispers associated with a violin interfere with a great composition.
• Under corporate ownership, the ghost of the actor plays a part in the unexplained death of a CEO; their children seek official goverrnment help in staging an exorcism.
• 
  
  As a commune for the followers of a legendary band, it
  becomes a focal point in a fight for freedom, but not enough to prevent a ban on the performance of music here.
• It ultimately becomes a place of execution for the government, who publicly put an end to 'The Gods', an anti-authoritarian grass roots movement, but this does nothing to lay the ghosts to rest.

I love Microscope, especially the way that Communism seems to be am emergent property of all the games I've ever run using it.

Saturday

Session #10: One Last Fight

Another session of this game-in-a-box, but this time I pitched it as more of a Stranger Things vibe, but we pivoted to It:Chapter 2 and had adults returning to face the horror that had terrified us in our youth. The Nemesis this time was the Hungry House and we settled on the idea that it had once been the local drug den, with one PC's much older brother doing the dealing; my PC was a troubled youth who'd burned the place down and trapped himself with all his friends inside. Completing our quartet were another couple of friends who later became a couple despite their diverging spirituality: one was the local pastor and the other was a New Age witch.

Since we were last there around 20 years previous, the house had been rebuilt and repurposed as the local community centre, and with the pastor's taccit co-operation, it was feeding on the pain & despair of those who sough help and shelter there. Brought back to lay old ghosts to rest, we proceeded cautiously through the building one evening, being haunted by apparitions of all those the house had fed on, including ultimately the drug dealer who had died there all that time ago, along with memories of his gang of cronies. We just barely won the game this time; with three of us dead, the survivor was speed running the last few cards for the final battle and deftly played a '"Win any Key Challenge" card to defeat the Nemesis once and for all! Another great game, expect to see this in many of my future convention appearances.

Session #11: Dialect

My second game of Dialect from the facilitator's chair and the most players in one session for me, but it went very smoothly as we used The Outpost background, a tale set among the first settlers on Mars who have lost contact with Eartth. Living on a knife edge of spreadsheet calculations about oxygen, water and other resources, we clung together under the banner of being the illegal excess of Earth's strictly controlled population, dumped on Mars to either survive or die out. Our language included references to the idea of being the second children in a culture that only allowed one child per family, so to us, being a 'Second' was an honorific and 'hand me downs' encapsulated a feeling of sadness. Ultimately of course, a desperate Earth sent a second wave of settlers that overwhelmed us and our community was lost among the new arrivals who sought only to exploit the red planet, not to colonise it.

Sunday

Session #13: The Premier Ship (ft. Primetime Adventures)

Wait, what happened to Session 12, yoiu might ask; good question; I had a 10 player game up on the board and it got no sign-ups. None. I put it down to con lurgy, tiredness, people going home early and other games on offer; I get one game every couple of conventions that doesn't run, so I just took the evening off and put in a game for the Sunday morning instead. This turned out to be very serendiptious.

With just my basic game kit along, I had to ask myself what coulod I run without the rule book or any character sheets? The answer was quickly Primetime Adventures, which only needs a deck of cards and some poker chips, while characters are defined by a handful of fairly basic, well-defined traits, so no complicated skill calculations or special abilities required. The next question was then, what to pitch? PTA is a televisually inspired story game, using the language of television to present an improvised drama of the groups' own making, taking the roles of writers' room and actors as they play. Since it was such a hot property recently, and I had the first couple of books with me, I went with Heated Rivalry, so my basic pitch outline was drama and romance in professional sports. I got three players signed up for Sunday morning and after a brief outline of the concept, they picked English women's football as

their sport and got on with making characters:

• Ella was Jess, the veteran striker mentoring an upcoming generation of young female players but also dealing with her own closted trans masc nature.
• Ava was Paulao, a Spanish tranfer to the Man City women's team, finding her feet away from home and trying to be authentic to herself.
• Ray was Paige, a new chef in the team's kitchen, under the thumb of a rude head chef and trying to find her own voice and be heard.

This game was brilliant! I think only Ray had played PTA before, but the three of them really understood the assignment and brought maxium drama to every scene;

• We started with Man City vs. Everton for the women's cup final and a dirty tackle taking out the team's striker; the crowd went wild demanding Jess took the penalty and Paulao tried to keep her temper in check so as not to start a scene.
• Later, Jess, presenting male and using the name Jay, met Paige in the team kitchen and had a smoothie pressed onto him, as Paige was oblivious to the idea that she was talking to one of the players on the team!
• Paulao struggled with family matters, under pressure from her mother to come home for the summer after the devastating news that she hadn't been picked for the Spanish team for the World Cup.
• A team building event with the Under 18s went well, with the older and younger players bonding over a practice penalty shoot out (I brought in a Higher or Lower minigame with the cards to decide the result of the practice) and one younger trans fem player noticed the sparks between Jess and Paulao.
• However, a later charity event turned into a disaster, with Paulao's mother complaining about the food served and getting directed to take her complaints to Paige, who was trying to hide from her boss, while the Under 18s were getting out of control on the dance floor with a kickabout! As Paulao tried to rescue Paige, Jess (still not recognised by Paige as Jay) tried to stop one of the Under 18s from crashing into the buffet. Everything went wrong that could go wrong, leading to some very mocking stories in the press about 'Breaking the Glass Ceiling' and a full meeting of all players and staff for Man City the next day.
  
• As the picks were announced live on TV for the England World Cup team, Paulao had to field calls from both Jess and Paige, who had mixed feelings about each other after an awkward moment where the penny finally dropped for Paige that Jay and Jess were the same person. Sacrificing her own chance of happiness for now, Paulao selflessly directed both of them to the same non-sports bar to meet and sort out things for themselves, just as Jess/Jay learned that she had also not been picked for the World Cup!

It was a dramatic cliff hanger that basically left us all wishing we could have another session, or even a full campaign; definitely the best pick-up game I've taken part in for many years! As ever, the whole of Contingency is a joy and even though is is hard work, I've gotten extremely good at maintaining myself through the week, staying well anchored by friends in my lodge who make sure I'm not overdoing it. Also, everyone there is lovely, whether there as players, volunteers, staff or our wonderful Wyrd Sisters. I will be there for 2027, but I am already planning to change things up a bit; we'll see how that works out in a year, See you all next time!

Pico @ Concrete Cow

Boy, stuff happened since my last CC a year ago, I missed out on the one earlier this year due to other arrangements having already been made, but I have been out of one relationship and into a new one since then, as well as realsing I'm neuro-divergent! Who'd have thunk it after all this time? Anyhoo, back to the point of this post, an actual play report after running Pico at Concrete Cow!

Pico is essentially A Bug's Life: the RPG, so if you get that esthetic, you already understand this game and there were lots of cute moments as we described bugs using the leftovers of human society to furnish their homes and adorn themselves. I pitched this taster session as a traveling troupe of professional wrestlers arriving at the town of Covered Hollow (meta: it was a tire track left in the mud by a motorbike, which was like an entire enchanted valley to the bugs.) We got off to a good start as the manager/promotor of the troupe tried to hype them upon arrival and immediately failed their roll, so the welcoming party looked behind them at the huge, flashy carnival that was just arriving and explained that the welcoming committee was for the carnival, not the troupe!

The troupe itself consisted of Bagulus the manager; Legs, the long, crawly bug; Splag, the transparent
protoplasm; Calasnap, a big dependable beetle; and The Mimis, a swarm of glowflies who acted as one individual. They immediately set about sabotaging the carnival, so as not to lose their place in the spotlight. but this exposed a heist caper, with the Ringmaster of the carnival working in conjunction with the Mayor of town to steal the precious gems from the vault!

The sabotage of the carnival was completed by an unwelcome magpie who flew in to complicate matters as a result of a twist on a dice roll and became the next major threat faced; the troupe managed to kill two birds with one stone though and got the magpie to choke on the Ringmaster, neatly neutralising both threats, for the time being at least. The Ringmaster and the magpie would both return to challenge the troupe later!

With the dust settling, the troupe took over the Mayor's home, an old waxed-cardboard Happy Meal box: they were living in a literal McMansion! From here, Bagulus challenged the Mayor for their position, opening up a race to be elected, while Splag trailed the Mayor to a secret tunnel in the industrial part of town that lead to the vault! Meanwhile, the Ringmaster threw their name into the rin to be elected mayor and started a smear campaign, ably fought by The Mimis who could act as a flying, glowing billboard!

Legs used their superior speed and appendages to pass out lots of fliers very quickly, encouraging citizens to vote for Bagulus for Mayor, but as these were hastily drawn on the back of a 10% discount coupon for the local store, a crowd soon formed downtown demanding their bargains. At about this time, Splag returned with a now captive Mayor, at the same time as the dam broke and a flood threatened to drown all the bugs in Covered Hollow!

The last act saw the troupe co-ordinating efforts to save the town, with Calasnap serving as the foundation for a new dam, Bagulus cutting a drainage trench out of the hollow and Legs ferrying stranded children to safety, while Splag and The Mimis faced off against the Ringmaster in a final showdown using a pike (the fish, not the weapon.) Once the town was saved and the mayoral race was decided, with the help of some newly-unionised termites, we skipped forward a few days to the opening of the Covered Hollow Water Park (the residents having decided they liked the new look of the downtown area) and most of the troupe decided to settle down here, with only The Mimis deciding to continue to travel and increase until they were truly omniscient and omnipresent!

This was a great fun game, but a lot of the bulk of the character sheets, focusing on special abilities & powers, barely came into it: each of these was so niche and tangential that even trying to tailor the situations to provide opportunities to use them didn't really work. The basic mechanics were a lot of fun though and the aspects still served to provide narrative bonus dice and health tracks, so they weren't a complete loss. It's definitely a scenario I would offer again and a game I would look into running as more than a one shot, it was just pure enjoyment from start to finish!

Death's Door 3: Deja Voodoo

Thackeray returns to the clinic after a brief but profitable tour of the Sto Plains, but wonders if he is in the right place as he is greeted by some kind of tiki bar with a preserved merfolk in a tank behind the reception desk. Shrugging this off as something that will probably make sense later, he proceeds into his surgery to await the arrival of the rest of the staff, who get dropped off by a group of friendly dwarves moments later. Clarrida Murphy returns in a distraught state, having now been employed at a restaurant to sing for customers' birthdays, a sad fate for a banshee who can't foretell death anymore. She is treated to a "Sea Breeze," a concoction decanted from the tank holding Saphy Mariana and as the fluid level drops, Saphy revives and also seeks further treatment.

Hold on. Didn't we do this before?

Indeed, yes we did, as it is revealed that the clinic staff are caught in a causal loop and if they can't find a way to break free of it, then the universe will swallow itself and reset back to this moment. The staff put their heads together to find a resolution, but only briefly as Thackeray has enjoyed a few too many mushroom-infused Sea Breezes and is seeing purple crocodiles everywhere. He has the drunken inspiration to ask Gudrum Thare, the clinic's offce-manager and tiki bar hostess, where she's getting all the pineapples and coconuts from? She reveals a portal in the storage cupboard that leads directly to a tropical island paradise and now an idea starts to form: what if they get everyone in Ankh-Morpork to go through the portal to somewhere else? Then the city will be empty when its doom befalls it and everyone will be saved! The team swings staggers into action and each take responsibility for a part of this bold plan!

• Toby visits Ponder Stibbons, research wizard, and asks for his help in amplifying the gnomes' ability to open doors to other places with a particular wiggle of their feet. Exploiting his peculiar relationship to causality, he reaches into hs pocket for a piece of paper that has the necessary formulae on it and makes note to write this down tomorrow and put it into his pocket yesterday.
  
• Count Holloway cashes in a barrel of rat checks at the bank and departs with a barrel of gold. What? Yes, people write checks on rats now, it's very mdoern. He also powers up the dancing gnomes who are gathered throughout the city, ready to perform a very tightly choreographed routine.
• Analogue makes sure all the animals of Ankh-Morpork also evacuate the city, just in case, which turns out to be largely redundant as many of them have already made their own far superior arrangements.
• Thackeray gathers a team of labourers with enough wheel-barrows to gather all the private wealth of Ankh-Morpork in the heist of the century, taking advantage of all the rich people being away from their houses as they rush through a portal.
• Celia takes a break.

Finally, after the Patrician issues a proclamation that no citizen of Ankh-Morpork is to go through the portals and endanger the city's economy by bringing back untold riches, the enitre population of the city goes through the portals and is saved. Analogue takes the children to her animal sanctuary, where they enjoy the scorpion petting zoo; Thackeray and his merry band start a new socialist state based on equally sharing the vast wealth they have stolen; Count Holloway returns to Uberwald triumphant, able to afford a properly dank & crumbling castle of his own at last, with spiders and everything; while Toby meets Death, for the last time, but also the first time. DO YOU BELIEVE IN PREINCARNATION? Death asks him and sends him back in time to be born once again!

Death's Door 2: Apocalypse How?

Thackeray returns to the clinic after a brief but profitable tour of the Sto Plains, but wonders if he is in the right place as he is greeted by some kind of tiki bar with a preserved merfolk in a tank behind the reception desk. Shrugging this off as something that will probably make sense later, he proceeds into his surgery to await the arrival of the rest of the staff, who get dropped off by a group of friendly dwarves moments later. Clarrida Murphy returns in a distraught state, having now been employed at a restaurant to sing for customers' birthdays, a sad fate for a banshee who can't foretell death anymore. She is treated to a "Sea Breeze," a concoction decanted from the tank holding Saphy Mariana and as the fluid level drops, Saphy revives and also seeks further treatment.

With all staff now aware of the imminent apocalypse, Toby dies, again, seeking further counsel with Death and the God of Causality, so the burden of actually dealing with the impending doom falls to the other staff.

• Thackeray makes a deal with Saphy, who was in AM to strike a deal with the newly reopened Post Office; Thackeray promises to go and speak to the Post Master, while Saphy uses their fishy smell to attract an army of cats to battle the rats who have slowly been annexing parts of the clinic site.
• Count Holloway upgrades the glass tank Saphy currently resides in, adding metal plates to strengthen the glass, wheels so it can move about, and a battering ram on the front to clear obstacles. This upgraded "tank" smashes it's way out of the building, driven by a delighted Saphy, and gives the rats ideas on how to escalate their war with the cats.
• Celia and Analogue head to the offices of the clacks company, surmising that perhaps they are behind the thick smog that seems a likely cuplrit in the whole "everyone is going to die" situation, but when she Borrows her rat, Mossy, she gets drawn into a skirmish in the rat/cat war instead.
• Across the square, Thackeray calls upon the Post Master, who immediately recognises him as a fellow conman and they strike a deal where each thinks they have scammed the other; he leaves secure in his financial arrangements, for now.
• Earlier, Count Holloway had tried to construct a crude breathing apparatus for the now alcohol-dependent Saphy Mariana, consisting of two beer bottles glued to a hat, but fell victim to his own experments. Waking some time later in an unknown dwarf bar, he is chased from the premises when he inadvertently exposes the dwarven singing troop as frauds with high-pitched, squeaky voices.

The staff collide, literally, in the square between the clacks offices and the Post Office; regrouping, they decide they need more information about the apocalypse and an answer to the involvement of the smog hanging over the city. A visit to the Unseen University produces a brief discussion with Ponder Stibbons, an exchange of information with Hex, the thinking engine, and a walk to the top of the 888 foot tall Tower of Art to get a view of the whole city. Sizzle, the demon bound to annoy & harrass Thackeray. arrives to do just that and eats the contract he had signed with the Post Master; attempts to retrieve it go badly and he returns to the clinic with Celia, both of them in need of a shower. In the meantime, Analogue and Count Holloway have devised a fool-proof, simple technique of clearing up respiratory problems by punching patients on the nose, but medically. They go off to cure AM's dwarven population of the epidemic of high-pitched, squeaky voices, resulting in a whole choir of baritone dwarves whose singing causes the entire city to shake to its foundations.

It's time to get serious though: their investigations have revealed the existence of an interdimensional portal in the Unreal Estate behind the University, a result of dumping magical waste there. With the help of Count Holloway's recently acquired super-intelligence, they concoct a plan to throw the waste into the portal, closing the loop and saving the city, despite the super-intelligent knowledge that doing so will create a paradox that will tear reality apart. They take sensible precautions, propping the still dead Toby on a clacks tower outside the city, wearing a shirt that says "Will Be There, Will Do That" and attached to a delayed resurrection device that will revive him if everything goes wrong.

Everything goes wrong: reality folds in on itself as the last of the magical waste is swallowed by the portal, which then swallows itself, taking the universe with it. Nothing remains, not even a void, but into this nothingness steps three Auditors of Reality, congratulating themselves on their plan to get rid of this whole, inconvenient existence. Their smugness is spoiled as one of them turns around to sees a familar figure with them and asks their companions, "Does anyone know him?" Yes, Toby has survived!

Next Session: Deja Voodoo

Death's Door 1: Why Does Everyone Die?

With the first book in "The Clinic" sub-series of Discworld stories complete, the campaign moves onto the next book, Death's Door. Like all Discworld series, such as "The Guards," "The Wicthes" and so on, this features the same cast of characters but in a new story. This story begins a few months after the events of Alternative Medicine, with Ankh-Morpork now under a literal cloud, as the smoke of progress meets the fogs of Autumn and plunges the city into a week-long dark smog.

• Analogue Cockaday now shares lodgings with her nephew Cosine, in newly built affordable housing in Dragon's Landing; she receives a disturbing legal document and needs Celia Woodruff's help to decipher it as a request for a dissolution of marriage form her husband Obediah, who is still managing the animal sanctuary back in Lancre!
• At the clinic, Toby Determined examines new patient Clarrida Murphy, a banshee who no longer wails outside the homes where a death is going to occur, but finds herself compelled to wail at children's birthday parties, to the consternation of all. Toby determines to ask Death about this the next time he sees him, and with Toby's special relationship to causality, the intent is the same is the action, so he considers the job done.
• Another patient is seen by Count Holloway Harris, when a highly inebriated merfolk stumbles through the door and collapses, their condition growing worse when Celia throws water over them. This is Saphy Mariana, who is suffering from the unusual ailment that they can't breathe water, only alcohol! Count Holloway decides to pickle them for the time being, but this goes a little too well and kills the patient, but the Count is confident he can revive them later!
• Thackeray Ambrosius is away from Ankh-Morpork at this time: something to do with finances, again.

Celia encourages Analogue to get on the coach to Lancre to confront her husband, so of course Count Holloway and Toby come too, leaving the clinic under the care of Epidermis Foxglove, the reanimated skin puppet version of Analogue. On the way, they have some narrow encounters with Death, who seems to have something he wants to say to them, and also aid Langran Bilth, a dwarf emissary returning from Ankh-Morpork with a high, squeaky voice. A tap on the head from Analogue's hammer resets him to "Antonio Banderas" mode, which still isn't right, but Langran seems quite happy with the results, so takes them the rest of the way in his personal coach, so they complete the trip in luxurious but very cramped style.

A confrontation with Obediah, Analogue's husband, leads to more confusion as he knows nothing of the divorce papers, but suggests it looks like somethng that might have been drawn up by Mr. Kipling, a travelling lawyer who was in Lancre recently. Beside making rather disappointing, soggy individual apple pies, the lawyer explains that he didn't write the document yet; rather, it looks like something he may write, in the near future, when Analogue is missing, presumed dead. Meanwhile, Count Holloway and Toby take turns dying and resurrecting each other, enabling a more complete convesrsation with Death, who wants to know why everyone dies, a philosophical conundrum they have no answer for.

A consultation with the Queen of Lancre, and occasional witch, Magrat Garlick, only shows that the letter uses retrograde ink, that is, ink that travels backwards in time. Some near future event is so huge, so important, and so intimately woven into the lives of the clinic staff, that is has produced echoes in the past before it happens.

The staff get back on the coach with seven other dwarves, following the lead of Langran Bilth in the hope of getting sexy voices of their own, so they stop at the same dwarven long hall they enjoyed hospitality at on the way out. Toby goes to relieve himself on a convenient tree but a very inconvenient door opens and he stumbles into Death's domain again. The reaper is busy at his work, picking hourglasses from the shelves and arranging them on his desk, and asks the question again: "WHY DOES EVERYONE DIE?" The only consolation Toby can offer is that it's just their time, but Death shows Toby the huge collection of hourglasses on the table, thousands of them, with the names of everyone in Ankh-Morpork and clarifies his question.

"WHY DOES EVERYONE DIE... IN TWO WEEKS?"

Next Episode: Apocalypse How?

Alternative Medicine 4: It's All Just Me, Me, Me, Isn't It?

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming for the end of the first story arc of the game, starting where we left off as panic spreads at a dinner party about the collapse of the Bank of Ankh-Morpork, while Celia investigates the alchemical factory of Dr. Frank Winkie. She discovers a goblin workforce producing shampoo made from the runoff of Dragon's Landing, but also gets chased by Todd Candiman, a disgruntled toymaker with a very realistic dragon cosplay.

Things break-up back at the dinner party and the team regroup at the clinic to discuss strategies for the following day, as the city descends into more rioting that lasts much of the night. The next day, the team returns to Dragon's Landing for a closer look for the source of the magical energy spilling out there and discover a crack in reality; they'll need a wizard to check this out. Also, at last night's party, Gail Lambshead, founder of the clinic, suggested that rather than pay Dr. Frank Winkie AM$10,000 a month for the dubious pleasure of being a member of the Guild of Medical Practitioners, she could write a cheque for AM$50,000 to put a price on his head with the Assassin's Guild! Thackeray takes the cheque and immeditaely tries to change the Payee bit, ruining it in the process, so it's left to Analogue to take it along to the assassin's guild.

After a visit or two to Unseen University, the team recruit the services of Ponder Stibbons, research wizard, and Kinrich Hardaw, who has had a very disturbing idea, that ideas themselves can come alive and become like plagues. He postulates to them that ideas behave selfishly in order to propogate & survive, with a "Me! Me! Me!" attitude, hence he has dubbed these living ideas mememes. While Ponder helps to measure and explain the crack in reality at Dragon's Landing, Lago Balmedie and his MAMMA group have begun a rally at the site, where he announces that he will return the property to it's original owners, on the understanding that they will build new housing here, and announces his intent to replace the Patrician! They also start to spread rumours about the "Vermillion Virulence," a plague that makes you turn red, then drop dead.

Speaking of the Vermillion Virulence, Lord Vetinari shows up at the clinic with some apparent victims, who are examined by Count Holloway, who discovers that it is real and now he has it too! The city is in uproar and it seems likely that the Patrician will have to step down and let someone else take the job; already, as a result of a meeting between Kinrich Hardaw and Mandan Barr, the power of mememes has grown exponentially, resulting in a wave of Communism gripping the city, causing the Assassin's guild to slash their prices to AM$50 per inhumation!

The power of mememes comes to the rescue, however, as Count Holloway discovers placebos and walks the streets, healing those infected with the Vermillion Virulence by speaking like an absolute authority on the cure for it and dispensing said cure, which were really peanuts rescued from a pub ashtray. The clinic makes an attempt to stand in the way of Lago Balmedie's plans, but popular support has given his campaign too much momentum, even after they neutralise his dragon & plague plans. They do, however, manage to repair the fracture... well, move it might be more accurate, as Analogue and Thackeray use the former's retrophrenology to relocate the crack into the latter! Almost as an afterthought, Thackeray persuades his personal torment demon Sizzle to tear up the contract with Lago Balmedie, because it technically only promised him the position of Patrician for life, so he and Dr. Winkie end up getting inhumed by Casey Crawford.

Just for Fun

I worked out a number of NPCs I wanted to use in this campaign in advance, to fill various roles in the story and the roster of employees/patients needed for the clinic. Some of these names were just made up to sound "Discworldy," but others had their origins in word play. Here's a few notable ones who we probably won't see again.

• Lago Balmedie: You've no doubt all heard of "Maralago" but did you know the owner of that resort also owns a golf course at Balemedie in Scotland?
  
• Dr. Frank Winkie: So, the Winkies are a race of people in the magical Land of Oz, hence effectively 'Dr. Oz'; I just threw in the 'Frank' as a trtibute to another Oz.
• Todd Candiman: tribute to Tony Todd, the original Candyman, another boogeyman haunting the streets of an urban ghetto.
• Dydon Harlyn: the clinic's first patient, whose name breaks down into the same elements as 'Lyndon Hardy,' author of a book that has a lot of sympathetic magic in it.
• Kinrich Hardaw: same principle as the above; who else was I going to name the inventor of mememes after than Richard Dawkins?
• Mandan Barr: the God (?) of Rumour's (?) secret idenity derives from mangling the phrase "I heard it from the man down the pub," but 'Mandan Pub' would have been a bit too obvious.
• Justin Enterica: sufferer of the peripatetic boil, whose name... actually, I'll save this one, his full story is yet to be told!

Next Episode: Death's Door

Alternative Medicine #3: Blind Dates

 A new patient calls in at the clinic, or more properly is dragged there by his wife Donica Grace, who complains that her banker husband Caldon Grace is giving away their possessions to charity, in the form of donations to the convent of the Sightless Sisters of Sek! Count Holloway consults with Caldon in Uberwaldean so his wife won't understand them and learns that he is trying to impress a pretty new nun he has a crush on. This simple revelation has repercussions for all the staff members for the rest of the day.

• Thackeray persuades Caldon that he needs to make a much larger donation to the convent to impress his sweetheart, and so they set off to the bank to take a large amount of gold from it and give it to Sister Bennitta Qulp.
• Count Holloway and Analogue decide that Donica needs to feel more appreciated and should just make her husband jealous of the attention she gets from others, so they set out a convoluted plan to find her a lover.
• Celia senses that Caldon is also tied into the strange form of magic she has sensed around their previous patients, Dydon Harlyn and Lago Balmedie, but their wigs were the cause of their ailments and Caldon doesn't wear a wig.
• Toby has an appointment with Justin Enterica, who has a peripatetic boil: it comes and goes, appearing in a different place every night and vanishing by morning, but always exactly the same boil. Toby's attempt to examine Justin leads to acquiring the boil himself, but it becomes entangled with his unique relationship to causality, causing temporal copies of the boil to appear all over his body!

Much ado follows, with many diversions and distractions from what might loosely be thought of as a plot, including such highlights as:

• Count Holloway enlists Analogue's help in resurrecting a dead rat: this is a success, but it also resurrects Analogue's dead skin cells, when she leaves her hand in the electric eel tank. This results in the creation of a floppy, skin-puppet copy of Analogue, henceforth known as Epidermia Foxglove, who becomes the new caterer for the clinic.
• Thackeray goes to the bank with Caldon and Analogue and acquires the gold; they then team up with Celia to take this to the convent, which currently has a lot of construction work taking place. They meet Sister Bennitta, a novice who joined the order last month and now wears the Holy Blindfold, but they also learn that the nuns donate their hair to make wigs! A little further digging reveals that Sister Bonnitta's shampoo is the source of the unknown magic, but there are still questions to be answered.
• Count Holloway and Toby put their plan into action, which involves taking iconograph pictures of corpses in the morgue so that they can present these to Donica Grace and get her to choose the one she is most attracted to, so that they can resurrect that one to send him on a date with her! This simple, flawless plan inexpicably encounters a few hiccups: first, the pair find prior patient Dydon Harlyn dead in the mrogue and second, they also find currently alive clinic employee Toby Determined dead in the morgue! Putting these troubling discoveries aside, they take their pictures and leave, headed for a social gathering hosted by Donica Grace, where they take her to one side and show her the images of dead men.
• Toby and Count Holloway contemplate how to get out of jail (no text missing here, that's how the session went as we played) and hit upon a genius plan! If Count Holloway temporarily kills Toby, the guards will take him out of the cell, where he can be resurrected and then come back to rescue the Count! This plan works better than they could have expected, as Toby wakes up in a drawer in the morgue which is then pulled open as himself and Count Holloway take pictures of the corpses! Toby plays dead so as to not break causality, then returns to the jail and terrifes the guard into releasing Count Holloway.
• The gang finally make it to the dinner party of Gail Lambshead, the patron whom they have never met, where they mingle with luminaries of Ankh-Morpork society, including the Graces, Lago Balmedie and Dr. Frank Winkie, creator of the shampoo that has caused so much trouble. Celia sneaks out of the party, while Toby flirts with Donica Grace (and also his boils are cured remotely when Justin Enterica applies a mushroom poultice to himself at this time.)

Two last twists occur at the end of this narrative, with the shocking announcement that there's been a run on the bank, causing panic at the dinner party, and Celia discovering a gutter carrying the runoff from Dragon's Landing leading right into the alchemical laboratory of Dr. Frank Winkie, but nothing leaves from the other side.

Next Episode: It's All Just Me, Me, Me, Isn't It?

Alternative Medicine #2: Mamma Told Me Not to Come

Continuing my short campaign of Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork, the staff of the Lambshead Clinic for Indistinct Medicine were having their morning meeting to catch each other up on yesterday's shenanigans, when a new patient demanded to be seen immediately. This was Lago Balmedie, an entrpreneur afflicted with [BEEP] verbal censorship. Celia got to work on diagnosing his condition, making a connection between his wig and the Voodoo Wig of Harlyn Dydon from the previous session, while Analogue administered treatment, i.e. she tapped him on the head with a hammer.

Meanwhile, Toby found a golden envelope on his deck, containing a card with a set of numbers printed on it; decoding this lead him to the Assassin's Guild and one Casey Crawford working the desk. Checking the ledger for the day, Casey found that Toby had a site visit booked, to case the joint and provide an estimate. The site in question proved to be the cemetry though, specifically a gravestone with Toby's name on it! Casey thoughtfully distracted Toby and then whacked him on the back of the head with a cosh: Toby awoke a little while later in the afterlife, apparently, with the God of Causality looking down on him and demanding to know why he was here early! The God offered to adjust the celestial calendar and move the date of his death to 'Today', but Toby politely refused and instead walked through the door the God indicated would take him back to the land of the living. Walking through the door, Toby entered his surprise birthday party, with all his colleagues from the Clinic there! Naturally, this was the suprise party Toby will/had organised for himself.

In another meanwhile, Thackeray went to negotiate the bill with Harlyn Dydon but arrived at the architect's office to find it boycotted by Cosine Cockaday and others, protesting the way their property had been taken out from under them. Thackeray took a moment out of his schedule to stitch up the scratches across Cosine's face, noticing in the process that they resembled the marks left by a dragon's claw. After that interlude, he went into the office and pushed Harlyn for a payment, subtly suggesting that the truth about Harlyn's wig might get out if he didn't pay up; Harlyn was in no position to argue, literally, as he collapsed to the floor, choking, so Thackeray helped himself to some golden ornaments on the desk and left. In actual fact, these trinkets were intended as a bribe for Sizzle, a demonic entity that had been contracted to beleaguer him but instead took the bribe and pointed Thackeray towards Mandan Barr, the God (Maybe?) of Rumours (Possibly?)

Back with the mainish plot, Analogue and Celia thought it would be a good wheeze to follow Lago Balmedie to his meeting with the consortium that had bought out Dragon's Landing for redevelopment, as they had left him with some post-treatment total honesty. It turned out the consortium was a political rally of some sort, united by their desire to Make Ankh-Morpork Magnificent Again, known as MAMMA for short. Unfortunately, Lago's brutal frankness had the crowd on his side, cheering him on and begging for the opportunity to give him their money. Even Celia and Analogue got caught up in this, finding themselves back outside 5 minutes later wearing MAMMA badges. Celia had gotten another whiff of strange magic about the proceedings, suggesting something larger was going on.

Further investigation by the clinic team... well, it didn't exactly go the way they wanted. A swift revisit to the Dragon's Landing site lead to Cosine Cockaday's revelation that he had been attacked by a dragon! This rumour began to spread like widlfire around the city, along with one about the River Ankh rising, but most people ignored this and decided to panic about the return of the dragon instead.

• Thackeray met with the God (maybe?) of Rumours (possibly?) in a bar that mostly sold erotic peanuts and found favour in the divine presence of a shadowy figure in the furthest corner, who told him that something more powerful than magic was at work in the city and their troubles were being driven by an idea. The God pointed him towards Kinrich Hardaw, a wizard who had committed himself to a sanatorium and refused to speak to anyone.
• Celia, Analogue and Toby went to see Lady Sybil Ramkin at the Sunshine Sanctuary for Sick Dragons, to seek her opinion on the dragon rumors flying about the city. She poo-pooed the idea while allowing them to pet Floofy, an adorable swamp dragon who only caused burns they could easily treat. Not only did Lady Sybil direct them towards the university for answers, she also promised to get them an invite to dinner with Gail Lambshead, their mysterious patron who was behind the founding of the clinic.

With the city in panic over the rumoured return of the dragon, a large crowd had gathered around the walls of Unseen University, demanding that the wizards do something, or blaming them for the whole thing. The clinic team decided to enter through the simple ruse of hijacking a sedan chair belonging to one of the high class citizens here to consult directly with the wizards about the whole situation. Naturally, this turned out to belong to Lord Vetinari, Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, who calmly stepped out of his chair to introduce his abductors to Mustrum Ridcully, Arch-Chancellor of Unseen University. Of course, the Patrician had known what was happening all along and had arranged for the clinic team to meet the wizards for his own inscrutable reasons.

The team now have a purpose: find out what in the Nine Hells is going on in the city and put a stop to it, or face the Patrician's attention! Gulp! He might... talk to them!!

Next Episode: Blind Dates

Alternative Medicine #1: Keep Your Hair On

I've started running a game of Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork at my local ttrpg club, the Milton Keynes Roleplaying Group, after successfully pitching to enough players who wanted to take part. Here's the pitch that got them hooked:

Existing in a previously unknown back street of infamous Ankh-Morpork, The Lambshead Clinic for Indistinct Medicine offers hope to those whose ailments respond to neither traditional nor modern methods. The staff* here will do whatever it takes to treat your condition, whether that's praying to the Small Gods for an intercession on your behalf or replacing the inefficient organs of your body with exciting new versions of their own design! Bring us your tired, your sick, your broken, but above all, bring us your money.

Alternative Medicine is a game set in Terry Pratchett's Discworld, using the quickstart version of the rules for Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork from Modiphius. This is a fully trait based system, with characters defined entirely by short, descriptive phrases about their backgrounds, skills, interests and baggage: there are no numbers involved at all! There are still dice though, with players rolling a d4, d6, d10 or d12 against the GM, who always rolls, um, you know, the other dice.

PCs will be practitioners or consultants in unorthodox areas of biology & medicine, such as these suggested starting points:

• A Witch or other practitioner of headology
• An Igor, skilled at all kinds of organ transplants
• A Priest capable of praying illness away
• An Undead, with experience of the other side
• An Assassin, consultant on poisons and "accidents"
• A Troll, providing a very different perspective

All is not well in Ankh-Morpork, which is business as usual for the city and a great opportunity for you, but the forces of destiny and coincidence are weaving their threads, and the Clinic is caught right in the middle of the closing web. You all have your parts to play, along with a guild of snake-oil salespeople, a wizard with a strange idea about ideas, an embittered toymaker and rumours of the Patrician's imminent retirement.

*Legal advice from the Guild of Lawyers requires the Clinic to inform all prospective clients that our staff have not earned the titles of 'Doctor', 'Nurse', 'Medic', 'Paramedic', 'First Aider', 'Coroner', 'Responsible Adult' or 'Gravedigger'

Last night saw the first session of the game take place, which consisted of a chunk of character creation and then a lot of absurd running around after patients of the clinic. The breakdown of the player-characters is:

• Celia Woodruff, a mycelial witch who believes that mushrooms are the answer to most of life's problems, ignoring the fact that they also create many of those problems. Celia is her own guinea pig for testing new treatments and she is very diligent about trying out the mushrooms on herself. When she is in contact with reality, she takes care of her pet rat Mossy, who acquired a magnificent green coat when he fell into the River Ankh and bounced.
• Count Holloway Harris, an irritatingly sane scientist from Uberwald, who just has no luck with the typical accoutrements of his profession. Like most Uberwaldean scientists, he just makes it all up as he goes along, but always attracts the wrong type of weather for his experiments: he needs a nice fresh storm, he gets a lovely day for a picnic in the park.
• Analogue Cockaday, a rural domestic goddess (not literally) whose life was changed forever when she was kicked in the head by one of her pigs and her whole outlook was changed overnight. Converting her farm & family to new vegan principles has not been easy for her, but she has come to Ankh-Morpork to share her passion for retrophrenology* with a wider audience.
• Thackeray Ambrosius, self-proclaimed opulentologist, he takes money from the rich, thus relieving them of the terrible burden of having more money than him. He might get around to sharing the wealth with the poor someday. We also learned that one of his ex-clients almost put a price on his head with the Assassin's Guild, but dire finances limited this to a price on his foot.
• Toby Determined, born nine months prior to a night of passion between a couple of reannual crop farmers, most of his life is lived in the wrong order as he feels the effects of things before their causes. As a medical practicioner, he finds conditions that match the symptoms his patients report, exposes them to the cause of the condition and then cures them of that.

*Analogue hits people on the head with variously sized hammers in order to give them those personality-defining lumps & bumps that contribute to the melting pot of Ankh-Morpork!

The focus of the first episode was Dydon Harlyn, a successful architect with the contract to redevelop the Dragon's Landing site, who was plagued with mysterious physical injuries, such as his arm suddenly twisting and breaking in front of witnesses at the clinic. A lackadaisical investigation eventually revealed that his teenage daughter had made dolls using her father's old wig and given them out to her school chums, inadvertently creating a whole set of voodoo dolls! The team gathered all the dolls and safely neutralised them, but some danglng plot threads remain, that will be revisited over the course of the campaign:

• Celia, an experienced witch, observed that the accidental creation of voodoo dolls isn't how witchcraft works, leaving her perplexed over how this happened.
• Toby paid off Dr. Frank Winkie, a representative of the newly founded Guild of Licensed Medical Practitioners, but the clinic is now expected to pay another AM$50,000 every month or face closure!
• Finally, Cosine Cockaday, a relative of Analogue who she had met that day at a protest over the Dragon's Landing redevelopment project, was seen late at night, drinking while brooding over the wasteland where his home once stood. His fire was blown out by a mysterious gust of wind and the last we saw of him was as he was engulfed in the shadow of a dragon's wing!

Next Episode: Mamma Told Me Not to Come!

Contingency 2025

 Here's another of my... good lord, are these annual now?! I have got to get out more; anyway, yes, it's that time of year once again when I have just returned from the Contingency table top role-playing game convention (there must be a way to shorten all that...) and I'm ready to reflect on my experiences. Well, you lucky readers now get to share those reflections! Unless you're a vampire, in which case I assume you won't share reflections here, but enough filling up the first paragraph to make it look like I know how to write, let's get on with it.

Getting There is Half the Journey

Don't question the headers, just roll with it; my friends Dave and Lora drove up from Milton Keynes in Dave's car on Monday afteroon, enjoying a brisk if slightly damp 2+ hour drive, taking in the magnificent flatness of the Norfolk Fens on the way. Checking in at Searles was a breeze and we were unpacking in our lodge (after a brief life or death struggle over who got the room with ensuite) within 10 minutes of arrival.

Mondays are the quiet days of the con, when it begins and ends, so we didn't have much planned and that's exactly what we did: not much. Basically, we said hello to a few people, my hug counter started heading towards infinity and we ended the day with dinner at Smokey Jo's, then back to the lodge to relax and touch base with the outside world before the delirium consumed us all.

Hunstanton: Closed on Tuesdays

Hunstanton is closed on Tuesdays, something we need to keep in mind for next year, because as we walked into Hunstanton with some loyalists from my prior Contingency group, we did indeed discover a tremendous amount not much being open. We did manage to find some warm clothes for Lora who, despite repeated warnings from us about the weather on the East Coast of England in January, still arrived with the idea that if she just put on an undershirt with her dress and brought a raincoat with her, she'd be fine. Readers, she was not fine. Anyway, the YMCA shops came to the rescue, and suitably warmed, we all then decamped to one of the fine cafes for an excellent brunch, before returning along the promenade and then cutting back across the road for essential supplies from Tescos. I tried to pick up a week's worth of groceries in 5 minutes, which explains why I still had a little food to take back with me at the end of the week.

Tuesday afternoon was occupied with tea time, with various friends dropping in to say hello and enjoy a cold collation of cured meats, creamy chesses, oregano crackers and endless tea & coffee. I must make this a more formally organised thing next year, because it was so nice to see everyone socially, rather than as part of a game, which is pretty much how I spent the rest of the convention seeing people. After some thought about accomodation and the increasing demand for tables in the main gaming area, I'd decided to run all my games at my lodge for this year, which undoubtedly lead to some friends thinking I was absent for this con. Note to self for next year: get out more.

Wednesday [Slots 1 to 3]

Foretold: In Its Shadow

So,  a couple of notes about this game and the slot it ran in, which applies to all my morning game slots on all the main days of the convention:

1. At the end of the con last year, I got talking to Alyssa Griffiths about gaming, as one does, and she said something so profoundly enlightnening that I went on to write, playtest and publish four narrative games once I got home. I would love to share her words of wisdom with you all here, but I can't for the life of me remember what she said. It was good, though!
2. Since I was running all my games in my lodge this year, I thought it was only fair and prudent to give my lodge-mates a chance for a lie-in when required, instead of foisting a group of total strangers upon them at 9am every day. Hence my 10am start time for all my morning games, giving not only my lodge-mates a chance to ready themselves for the day ahead, but also the players who signed up for the games. This proved to be such an attractive strategy that I plan to repeat it next year!

All the Foretold games use an 'oracle' system, a list of prompts tied to a deck of ordinary playing cards; on your turn, you draw a card, read the prompt, repsond to it, then the other players can ask you to expand further if they want. In Its Shadow is a story of a group of Hunters in pursuit of The Beast, which in this case amounted to a team of corporate troubleshooters dropped onto a colony world to roust out the alien leader of a rebellion against their occupation. We were totally the bad guys in this, and while we mostly got what we deserved in the end, the collaterel included all other organic life on the planet, excluding the CEO who was safely inside an environment suit, so she ended up stranded and alone on a dead world.

Monsterhearts Gothic

Have you played Monsterhearts? I have, a lot, enough to be burned out on American high school student dramas and had a hankering for a different tone, so I hacked this together last summer. It's a version of the game set in a 19th Century European boarding school, with a Gothic angle, all scandalous intimacies, dark brooding and unrequited passions. The Beloved's boyfriend, a bestial Hybrid, kept trying to scare the Risen away, afraid of what might be going on behind his back, and the Risen could not have given less of a fig about the whole thing. This left the Ageless time to attempt a little corruption of the Beloved, which they were not completely averse to, but then matters came to a head as the Risen learned that the school librarian was the one who had returned them from the grave. This lead to a confrontation with the now undead librarian, who had brought the cold of the grave back from the dead with them, and the jolly school chums burned all evidence of the horrifically awful mudrer they committed.

Gentle & Extraordinary

A Leage of Extraordinary Gentlemen inspired hack of Lasers & Feelings, this saw a trio of brave

adventurers trying to overcome a cult utilizing zombies for their own nefarious reasons. Things did not go smoothly for the League however, as the sudden disappearance of their leader had lead to infighing over who should take control of the organisation, or indeed if anyone should. In between bouts of accusations, they managed to set up another cult as a fall guy for their plan to steal a zombie for themselves and found the bolt hole of their erstwhile leader. In the end, they thwarted the Prime Minister's plans to use a Thames Regatta as cover for a purge of the homeless and poor from the City of London, and completely forgot about the approach of an unknown planet between the orbits of Earth and Mars: it's easy to let little details like that slip your mind when your consciousness has been spread out over a few dozen undead host bodies.

Thursday [Slots 4 to 6]

Foretold: Mile's End

Inspired loosely by The World's End, this is a pub crawl game in which a group of old friends come

back to the town they grew up in 10 or 20 years later and relive old glories, whilst also stirring up memories that are perhaps better left forgotten. It turned out we'd all had good lives, after a shaky start in our youths, and the change in fortune had something to do with the night where one character had been arrested for dealing in psychedelics, which another of the characters had tripped out on that night. A few more stops, and many drinks & a curry later, we started to suspect that all was not right within our group; in fact, we came to suspect that one of us was not who they said they were, but the more we tried to push at those memories, the more migraines and nose bleeds we suffered from. Ultimately, one of us returned to wherever they came from, after failing to fully integrate into human society, using the camouflage of a stolen identity, and the rest of us never saw 'them' again.

Tithe Barn

One of the two creepy games I ran at this convention (well, deliberately creepy at least), this scenario uses Dead of Night to mash-up ideas from the Kelly-Hopkinsville Encounter and the recent TV series Teacup. Six residents of a farm barely keeping itself solvent had to welcome a wedding party to their home and weather the storm of complaints and blundering about until night fell, at which point the monsters came out to torment them all. The PCs barely survived the ensuing onslaught, and there were a couple of times it seemed like the wedding party had died horribly, but as the sun rose, it became clear there had been only one fatality, and it hadn't been at the hands of the monsters. There were some rather more pressing revelations to be dealt with that morning however, including one that would change the PCs' lives forever, but I won't spoil all that here, as I definitely want to run this one again.

Fiasco

A nice quiet game to end the day with would have been a good idea, but I'd offered the chaos of Fiasco

instead and I was committed to it, as were some of the players as well I think. We picked the Home Invasion playset, but With Added Goose, so we wove together a tale of goose-like aliens attempting to create goose/human hybrids with limited success. Have you ever seen Mother Goose? We have and we deeply wish we'd been spared the sight. Anyway, after much shenanigans with genetic deficiencies, a lot of bodies buried under the lawn and the alien captain's very uncomfortable nest communicator (you don't want to know about the aerial) the aliens finally found the solution they were looking for and the single human PC took the fall for pretty much all the laws they'd broken, particularly all the murders.

Friday [Slots 7 to 9]

Foretold: From Earth

A game in three acts, which begins when the people of Earth (some of them, at least) receive a message from space and determine to build a spaceship to seek out the source.

• Act 1: we assembled a crew through some tense international alliances and funded construction of the vessel with some shady investors. One character already had such divided loyalties at this point that even she didn't know if she was a double agent or not.
• At the interval, our rivals got the drop on us and take off early in a hastily converted submarine!
• Act 2: the voyage began and tensions rose as the crew fought among themselves and plotted against each other, leading to a mutiny in which the privileged investor who came along for the ride was evicted from their luxurious private cabin, while other crew members became addicted to the hallucingenic effects of the engine emissions.
• Just before arriving at our destination, we received new orders, so now instead of exploiting the new world for resources, we had to implore the aliens to aid us against the invasion of a neighbouring country back on Earth.
• Act 3: all was not as it seems on this planet, with time istelf ebbing & flowing, causing years to pass by in moments and vice versa. With two of the crew totally compromised and metamorphosed into alien forms, the sole technician remaining sent a message back to Earth seeking to confirm that the data we had was complete. Due to the unstable nature of time on this world however, this ended up being the very message that drew us here in the first place!

Fellow Travellers

The second and some would say even creepier game I had planned for this con, it ended up being a lot

more disturbing than even I had in mind when it began! This game uses a ghost story-style PbtA game I've been playtesting and refining for the last few years on my personal Discord server, with a focus on the divides between us: gender, class, generation and even those gifted with the Sight and those without it. As six travellers shared a coach through the unseasonably cold woods, some saw that there were more than just six travellers aboard; as the apparitions made themselves known, a rash decision to encourage the coach to go faster resulted in a broken wheel and an altercation with a pagan cult who could steal the warmth from those they embraced. After narrowly escaping this, the coach had to stop at an inn overnight, so that the coachman could effect repairs; this was the cue for a lot of secrets to come out and confessions to be made, culiminating in a struggle over who would continue to their destination and who would go back to where they came from. While some were glad to reboard the coach and rest in the warmth at last, it came down to a battle of words between the preacher and the highwayman to see who would occupy the last seat.

What Ho, World!

This is a very silly card-based RPG in the vein of a Jeeves & Wooster misadventure, as a foppish Gadabout had her heart set on winning a golf tournament with the help of a particularly ugly copy of the Mona Lisa. Her aunt somewhat disapproved of the whole thing and was rather more invested in interfering in the engagement of a noted artist to the son of a wealthy family, whle the aunt's capable maid became inveigled in the machinations of a high court judge who only wanted what was best for his Great Aunt Ermintrude. Ultimately, after several chaotic golf contests, the artist was married off to the judge, the latter promptly passing away in a portrait accident on their wedding day, leaving the artist free to have the marriage she'd wanted all long.

Saturday [Slots 10 to 12]

Foretold: The Mayor of Elphame

Perhaps this wasn't the best time to run a politically charged story game about prejudice against the

Other, but when, these days, is it a good time for a game like that? We did get a lot of perverse enjoyment from it though, as we found ways to integrate Fae society with 1920s New York, whilst also largely retaining our own traditions and identity. In the end, despite the efforts of the embodiment of Temperance to mediate between old tradionalists and forward looking oracles, it was the embodiment of Blood Sacrifice who proved to be the popular, centrist candidate for Mayor who could bridge the divide between us. It might have been their policy of butchering human criminals and selling them back to mortal society as a savoury meat delicacy that swung the vote.

Down the Witches' Road

This is a playset for my Blood & Water RPG, inspired by the TV series Agatha All Along; four witches form a circle for mutual aid, though the baggage they each bring with them may be what tears them all apart. It started small, with a group of incompetent Satanists and a forgotten alarm call, but soon escalated to an apocalypse that could only be averted by placing a tablet upon an altar.

"Where's the tablet?"

    "Don't know."
"OK, where's the altar?"

    "Don't know."

"Well, we're effed then."

Luckily, they did find the tablet, hidden under a tattoo on the ex-apprentice of one witch, who had grown jealous and wiped her mentor's memory, but at least they all managed to avert the end of the world. However, the Blood Witch had entered into a vow to kill her ex and her ex's new partner once the world was saved, but opted to spare her ex by making the new partner's death take as long as possible.

Wizards Aren't Gentlemen

By this point in the convention, I was barely aware that games even have rules, but that was a fine way

to wrap up, as we crashed our way through a convoluted tale of wizardly scheming. Our wheelings, dealings and back-stabbings were accompanied by a chorus of comical bandits, oversharing inanimate objects and a Philosophical Raven whose major contribution to the annals of reflective thought was that there were't enough eyeballs. I think we finally arrived at some kind of ending, possibly by stealing another wizard's apprentice away from them through a marriage proposal? It was the kind of game where it's hard to keep track of why things are happening even when the players aren't frazzled and running on fumes, but it certainly contained lots of big laughs, which is all you want from your final con game.

It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over

It's over.

Sunday morning was the last day at the con for myself, Lora and Dave, but we started as we ended, by having a bunch of friends come over to our lodge, though for brunch instead of tea. It was nice to just socialise at last, after almost four solid days of running games, sleeping and eating meals. It was also just lovely to share thoughts & feelings with old friends and new ones, with much thanks to Alyssa, Sarah, Lizzie, Andrew and of course Becca, who we could have made some serious coin off if we'd charged her rent for all the times she came over! 

I'm back at home now, feeling those Post Con Blues a little bit, but at least I have a game to look forward to tonight, which will help a lot. I'm already considering what to do next year, not just in terms of games I run, but also how I schedule my time: for me, it's a tough balance between all the games I

want to share and all the people I want to hang out with, and in each slot you really only get to choose to do one or the other: everything else is just as the Fates' decree.

It's been a blast again and I will sign off as usual by thanking our fantastic Wyrd Sisters and their army of volunteers, the amazing staff at Searles, all the GMs and players, the traders and everyone who supports the convention and also supports us, enabling us to take this week out of our regular lives to be fantastic with friends.

Same time again next year?