Fringe (mtv3.fi/fringe for us Finns) is pretty much the second-best American show airing these days. Before it started, J.J. Abrams, the creator, told that the show would be Jumping The Shark at every possible opportunity. And it’s pretty much delivering, but not in a bad way. Nearly every episode of the show changes things in a way that’s somehow relevant to what the show’s about and characters jump across the board all the time. All this without things getting all Lost-y and confusing.

The thing about this is that by changing the angles all the time and keeping the pressure on, the show has managed to stay fresh, episode after episode. It is clearly planning on being a long series, as more questions are being asked than answered. But also, they’re taking great care that in the grand scheme of things, there are no “filler episodes”. Even the ones that seem like they’ll turn out to be just a monster without a greater motif are suddenly turned around by tying it to one of the aspects the show is about. Like posing a personal threat against, for example, a relative of one of the main characters. And because you know the show can do with the crazy turns, you can’t be sure if things will be okay in the end.

And that’s the thing. Fringe keeps everything essential to the whole by keeping them connected to something that is explored actively in the show. While each week, there is a new monster or some other new strangeness, they’re not just loose incidents. Nor are they a part of some story arc that progresses step by step. They’re part of what I love to call a Story Thread – a form of thematic tie that binds things without them actually needing to follow a neat step by step story structure. There are a lot of these threads running in Fringe – You know the Observer is there. You know the Pattern is there, and it’s probably the main thread of the show. And you notice how that guy from that one episode is connected to this thing here. And now there’s that butterfly motif that is telling us what’s coming up. And now we find about how that odd thing that happened is actually related to Walter’s relationship with Peter. Or the relationship between Olivia and John. You know, the underlying feeling how things are connected. Without them needing a story arc that has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Taking a leap from Fringe to RPG campaigns, it’s a neat structure to work on – there are not so much “Story Arcs” that get completed, or even “Mythos Arcs” where the big plot gets pushed forward in the sessions that are tied to those. There are these threads that get resolved during the game. And every game session is somehow connected to one or more of these threads.

In a long campaign, we would of course have the Big Thread, the one that’s about the player characters working towards something. That would tie into most of the games in some way, just like in a typical game. But just progressing Big Thread in every game will leave it empty of ideas quite quickly and the players feeling a bit let down – “Doesn’t anything happen without it having a major part in the big plot? I mean, those old bag ladies that were terrorizing the local store were actually Vampire Queens. And I was just planning on buying a soda from that store.” Thus we will have some other threads running beneath the surface that get touched when the need arises. There might be a relationship between two player characters that’s not on such secure ground, played by both of them “having” to seduce other people because of their job. There could be a social commentary thread about hospitals being corrupt, and the characters seeing sides of that every now and then. There could even be a symbolic thread about crows being the harbinger of doom – they’d show up eating the corpses of the dead and caw in the distance when things get ugly. And when you would normally run a “filler game” to keep the players from criticizing the fact that everything has to do with the big plot, you hit them hard with a session that’s all about one or more of the other threads.

There is a sudden flocking of crows at a small British town near where the player characters are based. It has nothing to do with the big plot, yet it will tell something about the crows. Maybe one of the lovers needs hospital care, and the only way to save him is to find his brother, who can act as a donor for a transplant. And as the hospitals are corrupt, things get a bit more complicated. A “filler game” becomes much more connected to things. Without being connected to the big plot. This should really mean that the hospitals have nothing to do with the Big Thread, but being a secondary thing you’re exploring.

Also, the threads serve as a way for the Game Master to jump the shark without a) it feeling totally disconnected from the rest of the game and b) being connected to the big picture. If you want to shake things up, have the hospitalized character die and the brother take his place in the team. It’s a relevant death because the hospital thread has been explored on the background before. And it’s not a “Okay, the aliens killed our friend, we need revenge” thing because they didn’t kill him, the accident that got him hospitalized was his own fault. And it’s a great thing for the relationship thread because frankly, that has been going nowhere for like 10 games. Now there’s this identical brother who looks and feels like him, but is not him.

How are these threads different from running subplots in the game? Have a big story arc about PCs fighting some aliens and a lot of smaller subplots going on, one about the crows, another about the hospitals and so on? The difference I’m trying to point out is that Story Arcs are arcs. They have a beginning, middle and an ending. Threads are more thematic and symbolic things without so much to do with story structure. They only become part of the game when you want to take a break from the main thing. Otherwise, you notice them running in the background and it’s more or less just color. They are more about exploring a subject than trying to resolve it by taking steps. A Big Thread about the player characters fighting an alien horde would have more to do with getting to know the aspects of what the horde is than about taking steps that will eventually lead to a big confrontation that will determine the outcome of the war. Of course, you might want to keep your Big Thread more like a story arc, but it doesn’t stop you from using the thematic style to make the “fillers” more relevant.

Ok, I’ve finally managed to browse through Mouse Guard RPG – not read it completely, but enough to make some notes about it. The production values of the physical book are high – Full-color hardcover book with solid typography all the way through. The layout is given a lot of room, which is nice after the cluttered Burning Empires. Art is of course top-notch, not a surprise since it’s from the Mouse Guard comic. The rule system seems quite good (well, it’s Burning Wheel and then some), but so-far, nothing in it really makes me go “Ooh, I want to steal that for my homebrews”, which usually would be a marker that the game has reached its goals for me. That doesn’t mean the game is bad (good things I spotted were, for example: more or less formalized plot-twisting, animals getting and edge with their basic natures, seasonal changes), just that they don’t really inspire me.

That is also a bit of a problem with the whole book. It’s good. I can easily see the appeal and it works out just about as I imagine it would. And there are cute mice and villainous weasels. It’s very loyal to the comic and you could easily represent the events of the comics with it. All in all, it does what it promises very well. And yet, I feel somewhat cheated when I’m reading a 320 page RPG book that doesn’t stray from its purpose. I’m odd like that.

I’ve used the “RPG books are like cook books for me” -metaphor before when talking about games with friends. I originally stole it from some conversation thread on some forum, but it’s so true in describing what I get from RPG books these days. They contain recipes, ideas and inspiration. “Ooh, coriander chicken, sounds good, I’ll try something like that next time I’m inviting my friends to eat some chicken-based food. I’m not really keen on the idea the recipe has on the rice, so maybe pasta would be better” When you’re starting to play games, you follow the instructions by the letter, but once you know your own (and your group’s) tastes, you just cherry-pick things from new material and use the ideas to spice up the stuff you know that works.

And in this respect, Mouse Guard feels like a 320 page book about a wedding cake. After reading the book, you can do a wedding cake with it, and you know a lot more about wedding cakes and their history. But you already knew how to make a cake, and the recipe itself is quite normal. Also, you now know how to do the groom and bride from sugar, and sure, you could use that in your future cakes, but do you really want to the next time you’ll bake a cake for your birthday? Mouse Guard is that book for me. I could probably use it to host a great game about Mice with Swords, but if I wanted to do something else with the rules, using the game as a basis seems a bit more trouble than it’s worth. And no, playing Rabbits with Axes isn’t “something else” in this context

I have to compare the book to Burning Empires again – both are very narrow in scope, but at least with BE, changing the color of the game doesn’t feel so awkward. The innovations in that game are quite re-usable and they are on a higher level than just mechanical – the structural stuff is really something that draws me in (which is funny, as MG’s structural stuff just seems bland and uninteresting to incorporate into a game other than MG) there, as are the basic ideas of the world.

I’ll probably read Mouse Guard RPG through properly once, and then give final judgement to it. At the moment it seems like it’s a great game that I probably could never GM as it feels very uncustomizable. But then again, if I ever want to do something that has to do with little animals with a human side and a human society, I’ll use this game for it, for sure.

Summary: Great book, just not for me.

So, Finally managed to get the second game of Henryn viimeinen iso keikka played on Tuesday. I won’t do an actual play report or anything, but there were a few things that really worked quite nicely. I already know that when I’ll run another campaign of it, I’ll do some things differently, but some things would stay the same.

This was the spotlight game of Mikko’s character Johnny Smalls, who is a great conman, an expert womanizer, and 100% on top of his game, always. His aspects (important thingamobs that quite well define what he’s about) were “Stylized image”, “Non-violence” and “Lyonne Ritz – an heiress girlfriend” plus the two that all characters have “Health” and “Primary role”.

When a player is in a situation where he still wants to accomplish something in the scene with his character but he is out of chips (the mechanical way to track how much stuff the character can still do) he can trade in one of these aspects to get more chips. Now, Johnny-boy has been spending the past two games hanging out with a rap-star Puppy D and his crew of gang thugs to get Puppy as a pawn in his schemes. During this session, Johnny ended up with D’s gang on the desert, where the gang was doing drugs, shooting cans and drinking booze. For a while, everything is good, but then the drugs come in. Johnny declines taking any, and a moment later he won’t shoot beer cans with the guys (Johnny has a strict no guns policy). The thugs aren’t happy. I set up a challenge with two parts – “Stay good friends with Puppy D (3 chips)” and “Stay in terms with Puppy D’s crew (2 chips)”.

(I might remember the details wrong, but it went something like this) Mikko has one chip when he actually got to paying things off. He decided to use his Con Artist role to buy off the three chip part of staying friends with Puppy D, but that meant the crew would be left disgruntled. So, Mikko sacrifices Johnny’s “Stylized image”, and Johnny unbuttons his shirt, lowers his Armani pants to a ridiculously low gangsta-position and gets a scarf on his head and some bling-bling and a funny hat… and by lowering Johnny from the standards he’s set for the character, Mikko gets 3 chips, two of which he uses to get the gang-members to accept Johnny even if he doesn’t take their drugs or shoot their guns.

Now, why I think this was very nice test of that part of the system – until Mikko has a moment to take a break, and enough chips to buy the aspect back, it’s gone. This means that for the rest of the session, Johnny was never quite as sharp-looking as he’d like to be. He chose the wrong shoes for the suit, forgot his belt, that sort of stuff. And according to Mikko, when I talked with him after the game, it was something that really hit him bad. Since the aspects are character-defining things, loss of one feels like a loss. A blow to even an insignificant one like “Stylized image” can hurt like a bullet in the upper leg area.

Mikko also lost the “Lyonne Ritz” aspect during the game, to keep the FBI from realizing Johnny’s schemes and keep the secrets for a while longer, by what was probably the most horrible break-up I’ve ever seen or heard of in my life. Matti’s old Russian gentleman mastermind ended the game session as a short-tempered drunk who didn’t care if people got roughhoused around during a gig. Matijas and Maija on the other hand, survived with everything just fine. Such is gambling. When I say I’d do things differently on the second run, I’d make the gig a bit more personal – the fact they’re running other peoples’ errands makes it less about “what I want” and more about “what I have to do”.

But the greatest thing is that we got the damn game session played after 6 weeks of cancelations. Next session coming up maybe in a week, unless something goes wrong again

(Warning, post contains spoilers of the movies Feast and Beerfest, not that you’ll ever watch them anyways)

So, there you are with your traditional RPG group, with great ideas about what the campaign will be about – you manage to get the players to do a perfect mix of characters and know how you’ll make the plots personal to the characters. Or the other way around – the players make a great group of characters made with great plot ideas you intermingle with the core thoughts of your campaign. In either case, the Dark Prince and his Troop of interesting NPCs will be essential because one of the characters used to work for him, and the birds are singing as the day is perfect.

And then the character dies. You have spent some 10 game sessions building up things and everything has gone by so well, and now a blank hole is staring at your face. The respectable way is to look at the character sheet, shed a tear and roll another character. If you’re lucky, some of the personalized plots you’ve created are such that they can be salvaged and reused by changing a couple of names and details.

But a lot of things are now lost for good. And if you as a GM had built the game heavily on very personal involvement of the characters, you might be screwed. If you had built the Dark Prince and his Troopers to be the character’s old company, full of his old friends, offing this character turns these NPCs more or less into faceless thugs with maybe some interesting characteristics, but thugs still. The personal attachment is gone.

But hear ye, hear ye. I have seen the light, and I shall preach of the light. In the movie Beerfest, the protagonist group is made of essential individuals, who are personally invested in the plot. In particular, there is a character in the ensemble called Landfill, who is a key part of the team. And he dies in the film.

After his death, there is the typical pause to remember how good man he was, and the characters are at his funeral, wondering what to do. Without Landfill’s unique skills, everything is doomed and a couple of plot points are left dangling.

Insert Gil, a new character to the film, who is the identical twin brother of Landfill. When I mean identical, I am talking how he manages to fill the spot of his now-dead brother. He is described as being the person who taught Landfill everything he knew about beer, and is implied to be as good as, or better than, Landfill in every possible aspect of life. And to top things off, Gil asks to be called Landfill, to honor his brother’s memory. And the movie goes on as if the death had never really happened.

Wait. What?

In Beerfest, the death of the character isn’t essential, which is pretty uncommon thing – normally characters only die, when it is required by the plot to happen. In Beerfest, death just happens. Thus it quite well fits a typical RPG death where the character dies because of the rules of the game, not because of the reasons of the plot. The Risk/Reward thing that’s written in the rules usually require that there is the risk of death for the characters, and it rarely follows the needs of the plot. So, what can we learn from the untimely death of Landfill and how can we abuse it for our own games?

I’m claiming that by taking a look at your plots, you can convert some of them into viral plots that can transcend a single character. Of course, doing it the full Beerfest way and just making a carbon copy of all the plots and abilities on the next characters, will be just silly (Beerfest was a comedy, and comedy is hard). But it doesn’t mean that some of the plots cannot continue living past the character’s lifespan in other people.

One thing this will need is some added transparency between the GM and the players during the game. Once the basics are there – characters are ready and you, as a GM, have an idea where you want to take them, you’ll need to be honest. This means saying to the players that “Ok, looking at your group and your characters. You are all unique snowflakes that are needed to complete the story that will unfold. Should one of you die, these here are the skills, traits and plots that I want to keep in the group. So take a look at them, and think who would work as a backup for them should things go bad.”

And the players should then form minor connections that can serve as full-fledged anchors for the plots should the push come to shove. And if you can’t make the current characters fill the shoes of a dead character, plotwise, make sure their replacement will fill them.

So, best case scenario, when a character dies, his plots will get distributed amongst the other characters, or there will be a pre-visioned Landfill’s brother out there to fill the parts of the position that won’t be distributed amongst the survivors.

This all was done much better in the horror/comedy/monster movie Feast, where the characters are very much nameless stereotypes filling a very specific role in the plot. A role that is exploited very much is that of “The Hero”. In the beginning of the film, The Hero rushes into the bar, explains the situation and how if people listen to him and do as he says, they’ll stay alive. He then immediately gets killed by a monster. After this, The Hero’s wife (now introduced as The Heroine) takes charge and keeps the hope alive amongst the diminishing group of survivors.

When she eventually dies, there is a short transition scene where one of the minor characters of the movie looks at the Heroine’s stuff and finds the conviction she needs to take up the mantle, turning the character into “The Heroine 2″. Bascially, the character had the potential to become the one who keeps the hope alive and takes charge, but doesn’t do it before the need for such a character presents itself. This transition isn’t unbelieveable, and you can imagine the GM telling the players that “Ok, to make this work, there needs to be one character at all times who is willing to take charge. Think in which order this role gets passed on should the current Hero die.”

So, to return to the Dark Prince and his Troop of Named Minions, where the main plot point you want to keep alive might be that character #1 has been a part of the Troop in his past – and thus sees the Troop as something else than just a group of faceless thugs, eventually leading to the question of “are minions evil and is it ok for us to kill them?”. This is such a personal plot that it would normally die along the character, but creating a backup, should things go bad, will be worth it.

A player wants his personal plots to be personal. This means that when you make backups for the plots of the player’s characters, you should make it clear that they are just that, backups. They do not activate until the original character is unable to interact with them. It means that a new character joining the group should have his own personal plots, but the potential to take over the plot of some of the older characters. If in Beerfest, Gil had been previously introduced, he shouldn’t have been a person that didn’t have anything to do with beer. The fact he’s a beer-expert would come to play only when he needs to take the position. Nothing is as annoying to a player to realize that the personal thing he had going for himself was in fact just a huge consipiracy everyone was involved in.

And with character #1 and his backup #2, and their relation with the Dark Prince, One example could be to keep a certain Dark Trooper and #2 apart as long as #1 is alive, because they actually know each other. Should the need to pull #2 as #1s backup arise, just have the Trooper and #2 meet and develope their relationship on a humane level. The players know beforehand that there is a backup to the plot in the meeting, and will keep the characters apart until it is needed.

In summary. When you do a traditional game where your characters’ personal plots are in fact huge parts of the main plot, you should talk with your players and make sure that the vital plots can survive the death of that character. But also to be firm on the fact that the personal plots of the players stay personal as long as the character is alive.

So, new year begins. During the holidays, we had a heated discussion amongst the gaming group about our lackluster ways of starting and abandoning projects. Thus, I’m setting a preliminary plan for the games I’ll be GM’ing this year, here and now.

Henryn viimeinen iso keikka – The current heist mini-campaign I’m running. It’s only 7 games + prologue and epilogue, so I should very well be able to make it happen. The band of thieves have now set their sights on their score and are about to pull it off. Considering we have 6 games and the epilogue to go, and we hopefully manage to do a couple of sessions per months, I’d say this one will be completed somewhere between April and May. I will run a second game of it with fewer game sessions after I’ve completed the first one, and possibly a couple of one-shots, followed by it hopefully giving me a free pass to RoPeCon with a couple of gaming runs. At that point, I also hope I have a nice PDF version ready to show the internets.

College of War – The fourth incarnation of the campaign should continue soonish. University Drama. Magical theory as a science. It’s a lighthearted campaign. Something of a Fantasy Heartbreaker. And most of all, it’s a campaign that I love a lot. And that has been the stage for various stories in the past years. The CoW has something like at least 20-40 game sessions left in it, so barring any players leaving the country (which caused the current pause the campaign is on), we should have more than enough for the whole year.

Sneak:run – This is a campaign that almost got started, and one that I would still like to run. The previous try to start it got horribly mangled by people having ideas and me not having enough preparation to bring to the table a basic proposition what I wanted the campaign to be. Basically it’s a dualistic campaign – two player groups with similar goals but different means. I’ll probably start this campaign after Henry’s is done.

One-shots and playtests – apart from the previously-mentioned Henry-oneshots, I’ll try to have a couple of other small games that aren’t related to things. I’m still rooting to get the play group to try out The Shab-al-Hiri Roach at some point as well as run a game of either Burning Empires or Mouse Guard to them. Also we’re doing playtesting for the Tokyo Rain RPG, so we’ll probably continue doing those playtest runs as long as they’re needed.