HillTown Studio Longform Content

In conversation with someone in DMAcademy, I was spitballing a monster concept that was the personification of paranoia, and then it occurred to me: the best monster for instilling paranoia is no monster at all.

That's not to say there was no monster to begin with, only that there is no monster now. What happened to it? It was probably defeated. Or it fled. But what it left behind was doubt. As long as that doubt persists, the monster still lives, in a way. It can generate sightings, clues, rumors, etc., indicating its continued presence. Those indicators all have non-monster explanations, but a monster remains a plausible explanation as well, so the doubt and paranoia linger.

Now, if you were to introduce this monster into a TTRPG, you might wonder how to run such a thing, as well as whether it can be done again. As for the second question, the fun thing about doubt is that you can instill this over and over again in your players. Think, for instance, about how many players instinctively have their characters reach for 10' poles.

But running the absence of a monster will take some work. It's not enough to come up with a monster stat block and run it according to the monster's tactics. There is no monster, remember, though because there WAS one, you can use its modus operandi as an inspiration for the various acts of malfeasance that will be attributed to it in absentia. These acts of malfeasance do not need to perfectly correlate with whatever the original monster did, would have done, or is even capable of doing, since the monster itself is not the point. That said, there are still some concrete things to consider:

1. The original monster should be something that is strong or vile enough to instill fear, especially in the public mind, if not the PCs' minds. Things that are known to hide well and wreak malicious mischief are good candidates. Think along the lines of gremlins, grindylows, etc., but less joyous in their mischief, perhaps. Vampires and werewolves make sense for this as well.
2. You'll need a table of acts of malfeasance that can be attributed ambiguously, but with a monster always a plausible explanation. Mysteriously dead animals? Monster. Missing person(s)? Monster. Something prowling the woods at night? Monster. Food, tools, or something else goes missing? Monster.
3. But it's not enough to have the acts themselves. They all have to be interpreted and reported with the idea of the monster already in mind. So for each act of malfeasance, you will need not only the true cause, but also the monster-based interpretation, what gets reported to PCs who go looking around for clues.
4. Which also means that the clues themselves should be reported to PCs rather than directly observed by them whenever possible. This limits the tools PCs can bring to bear on the clues, tools which, depending on the TTRPG system in question, may unmask those clues quite easily. You can do this by making sure the evidence itself is always contaminated in some way, reported through hearsay, or in other ways passed through unreliable (and biased) people.

So with all this in mind, let's create a scenario in which the absence of a creature is the animating force.

The monster archetype: A werewolf. Werewolves are good for this exercise because the lore surrounding them is often contradictory, they may or may not be aware of their nature, and while they're not in their animal form, they live among regular people. Additionally, according to many traditions, lycanthropy is a transmissible curse, so you can rely on this to infuse the community with a fertile doubt.

The acts of malfeasance/clues, and the truth in parentheses:

1. Local livestock has been found mauled and partially eaten. Farmers have dispensed with the carcasses already by the time the PCs arrive. (Truth: there are wild animals who sometimes raid farms).
2. Villagers report having heard sniffing and growling, or having smelled the musky scent of some predator, then seeing tracks the next morning “too big to be a wolf”. The PCs may catch hints of the remaining tracks, but should not have any conclusive proof that the tracks are too big/small or even wolf-like. (Truth: more wild animals, and/or a prankster or two.)
3. Local children have reported seeing a furry creature walking upright in the woods on their way home in the evening. They ran away before they could get a closer look ... or be eaten. The creature left prints, but they're a confusing mishmash of shod feet and paws, and it's difficult to know when each was made. The tracks lead off toward the village but disappear on the cobbled roadway. (Truth: A villager was out hunting and ran down a bear or dire wolf; the children saw that and conflated the two, which also explains the tracks.)
4. Several village teenagers have been reported as “missing for a good part of the night” for some nights, and are either cagey about their whereabouts or convincing in their assertion that they don't remember. When they return, they are dirty, scuffed up, and reek of animal. (Truth: the teenagers have found the cub of a predator and are taking turns caring for it in secret. It's caged up in a nearby cave, but getting to and from the cave in the dark is difficult.)
5. The family who recently moved to town? At least one of them appears to be quite hairy, causing people to gossip, especially since in the villagers' minds their coming is correlated with the rise in “werewolf” activities. The family is standoffish and a bit dour. (Truth: they're regular people who are being unfairly maligned, and their standoffishness is a result of the whispers that started the moment they set foot in town.)
6. Villagers are reporting that some animal appears to have dug up a grave or two in the cemetery. The digging was not done with shovels, that much is apparent, though there aren't any identifiable tracks around. (Truth: there's a grave robber in the area, and they dig with a pickaxe. By the time the PCs get involved the grave robber is probably moving on.)

Feel free to repeat these in variations, especially while the players have yet to uncover the truth behind the clues. Add some atmospheric details like howling at the moon, dogs and horses acting skittish, odd musky smells, etc., and let the players run with them. You'll be able to maintain doubt for a while, but players may eventually give up and just accept the hauntedness of the situation rather than trying to resolve it. That's okay too.

++++ Like what you just read? You can subscribe to new posts on this blog via any ActivityPub platform (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) at @aaron@blog.hilltown.studio or via RSS at https://blog.hilltown.studio/feed

The setting for Weardcynn is implied within the main rules text. That doesn't mean there isn't a more coherent setting present. I am building this new earth in the image of William Blake's already fallen/always falling Albion with his Zoas and Emanations. In this telling, the fourfold giant that comes to know itself as Albion stirs from within a great deep, void, or unknowing. This is perhaps akin to a Big Bang moment, from which all things proceed, representing the division of all things from the singularity that birthed them.

Physics likewise infuses other aspects of this process. For each action, as we know, there is an equal and opposite reaction, and this remains so even in the stirring of Albion from the deep. Albion is the action that spawns the immediate reaction, and his equal and opposite, or his reflection or emanation, is known as Jerusalem. Here Blake is appropriating and reshaping Biblical concepts into something else, and I am preserving as much as makes sense for what I'm doing.

Now, the awakening of Albion and the casting of his reflection as Jerusalem represents the first Fall, because it results in immediate division of what was previously a unity. But Albion is not finished falling. In fact, he will continue to fragment into countless pieces, and some of those pieces claim dominion over the others or, in some cases, claim to have created them. The eight chief fragments of Albion are the four Zoas and their respective Emanations.

This continual falling or fragmentation is the ongoing Fall that is at the heart of what I call the Schismata (which is also the name for the set of mechanics that underlie this system). This is my own embellishment and has nothing directly to do with Blake. It represents the idea that everything is already fallen and always falling further from unity, and will continue to do so until the harvest after the Final Judgment reunites all of the fallen.

If this feels like a heady and abstract mythology (godlar), I agree. It is, however, the basis for what the Weardcynn believe about their own origins. In their godlar, the primary of which they call the Albiones Hweol (Albion Cycle), the Weardcynn believe that mankind (Manncynn) were the creation of the Zoa named Tharmas, and that they had been seduced away from (disunited) by the Zoa named Urizen. This culminated in the spoliation of the natural world, that aspect of Creation they inhabited, primarily through overuse and exploitation. In response, the Emanation named Vala beseeched her Zoa brethren to entrap Urizen and destroy his hold on the Manncynn. It was Luvah's fire and Urthona's hand that created the trap. Vala caused the earth to birth its own new champions, the Weardcynn, to hem in the Manncynn and watch over them until they could learn to aspire toward unity once more.

There is of course more than this, and I will work through how this looks in a concrete sense as I continue development and lay out the mechanical implications. For these, I will make use of Ed Buryn's William Blake Tarot of the Creative Imagination. In the same vein as Invisible Sun (which has had a profound influence on the mechanics of this game), player characters will be able to use aspects of these tarot cards as mechanical touchpoints, not always to their benefit. The precise nature of these effects, however, are still percolating in my head. At the very least, I will have a spread of cards that makes sense for this game and use the positions of the cards to interpret how they influence the world at the moment they are laid out. Whether this can be done without vastly overcomplicating the system is still unclear.

I will undoubtedly return to this topic from time to time as I think about new lore and mythology pieces to slot in, but in no sense do I expect that players and GMs use the result of this work if they aren't interested. It is and will be a supplement to enrich their understanding of the implied setting.

++++ Like what you just read? You can subscribe to new posts on this blog via any ActivityPub platform (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) at @aaron@blog.hilltown.studio or via RSS at https://blog.hilltown.studio/feed

#ttrpg #osm #osr

In pursuit of an idea¹, I decided to run the original 1983 Ravenloft module. You know, the AD&D module that introduced us to the lord of the Domain of Dread, Strahd von Zarovich. The setup was simple enough: I proposed to run the adventure using Old School Essentials characters and mechanics, and it would take a session or two. Or so I thought. The reality is that at the pace my players were going, a full run-through of the module was set to take at least four sessions. Since I was allocating these sessions on a monthly basis, and I couldn't guarantee the players would be able to return (in fact, some didn't), I did not find this a sustainable path. I shelved that series, but it wasn't the length of the module that ultimately turned me off.

From the outset, I knew that Ravenloft was a troubled module. Its most recent incarnation via 5e's Curse of Strahd has done little to address the worst concerns, but my own tweaks² probably didn't fare much better. But with some changes, I pushed on. In the first session, the players concentrated their efforts on the gloomy village of Barovia, whose ambience the descriptive text adequately conveys. They spent the entirety of the four hour session poking around the village before holing up for the night with the Burgomaster's children. A nighttime attack gave me my first clue on how deeply difficult this module was intended to be for players. A mere handful of wolves and a swarm of bats was enough to seriously deplete the party, and the group barely made it through enough rounds before the wolves and bats faded into the night accompanied by the sound of Strahd's laughter.

Strahd is a Grade A Bastard. He has no intention of engaging in a fair fight, and if he can whittle down player characters, he will do so. But out of the box, I couldn't quite run the encounters associated with him without overtaxing the party. The module was designed for AD&D characters of at least level 6. I probably did myself few favors by having the OSE characters maintain roughly the same level, with the thought that by swapping in OSE monsters, it would be a wash. It was not. This first session, by the way, was the closest any group ended up getting to a direct encounter with Strahd, though the third got close without specifically knowing it.

I picked up the second session with a slightly altered mix of players, starting them at the dilapidated church in Barovia, from which they were to make their way to the castle above. Oddly (or not!) they tried to delay this as long as possible without really doing much else. The only tool in my toolbox was to spring another Bastard Strahd encounter, but I didn't have the heart to do that. Eventually they continued on up, passing through the camp of the wood witch I used to replace the module's bad caricature of Travelers (later modules called them Vistani and gave them a culture). Upon reaching the entrance to the castle, the party took one look at the brightly lit open doors and ... went around to the back of the castle looking for another way in.

Now, this session was my first using a very nicely made set of VTT maps, which I spent hours setting up in Foundry to use the walls and lighting tools. Explorable battle maps with dynamic lighting and fog of war are certainly very neat artifacts, but I feel like they change the overall tone of the module. Whereas relying on theater of the mind amplifies the dread of “what's around the next corner?”, an explorable battle map merely puts a fog over the unknown while undermining the sense of unknowability. And let me tell you, that unknowability? That's 80% of the module.

This didn't become as apparent until the third session, when I got a new group together to play from the castle entrance. Like the previous group, this one also steered clear of the open castle door, suspecting a trap. To increase pressure, I rolled up a random encounter and got a handful of incoroporal undead to harass the party. I treated them as extensions of Strahd, merely toying with the PCs, but in truth I was less happy about their level draining. Like the wolves in the first session, these level draining undead could easily have wiped out the party, and they were just plain old random encounters. More of them could be lurking around any corner.

But there was one more twist in this sordid tale. The players, eschewing the front door and even skipping the back door, decided on the least likely approach, which was included presumably to tempt fate. There is a window looking into one of the tombs in the lower level, accessible only by rope, which the PCs had. We finagled a setup that got them to the window and into the tomb, thereby bypassing the rest of the castle and pitting them against the sycophantic servants of Strahd, namely vampires in their crypts. Fortunately for the PCs, they grabbed one of the the items of power useful in combating the vampires. A lengthy combat ensued, during which the vampire charmed two PCs before being pinned down by the holy symbol's brilliant light.

Between the nigh impossibility of defeating vampires without this powerful artifact (the existence of which, I must note, depends on the PCs having caught wind of them in the first place), the charm, and the level draining, I determined that the module had just a bit too much provisionality, often of the save or die variety, for my taste. But the final nail was this: the pace of random encounters, many of which could end the party outright, was slow, and most of the castle feels empty. All of the evocative boxed text goes into ambience, but very little into offering things the players can use to solve the predicament. The PCs are, after all, trapped in Barovia unless they can find a way out. Scant and missable hints exist, but what good is a hint if nobody can find it? So the PCs wander around trying to interact with things that yield nothing or, if they are profoundly unlucky, instant or near-instant death.

In the end, I found this module requiring far too much additional prep work necessary to make it remotely usable for the table, and if I'm going to do that much work, I might as well just write my own module. Which I might. I have a very nice map.

Bullshit you'll encounter in this module: * Weird economics³. * Overpowered random encounters. * Evocative and lovely descriptions that are as interactive as a painting. * Complex traps I didn't even get to try out. * Helpful items, knowledge of which depends entirely on whether the PCs go the right way and pick up the right clues. * Harmful stereotypes of real peoples via fantasy tropes. * Level draining nonsense. Come on, just drain CON and be done with it.

In the Wikipedia entry for this module⁴, TSR desinger and author Rick Swan is quote as saying that there is “so much gothic atmosphere in Ravenloft that if it had any more, it'd flap its pages and fly away.” Perhaps it should have flown off into the sunset. The real curse of Strahd is frustrating the DM and the players alike.

I've shelved this module. Next month, I will take a group of adventurers into a modern OSR dungeon via Winter's Daughter. This will be my second time running it.

---

Notes

1. This is part of a series I am calling Old School Monthly, where I offer to run one game a month in the old school tradition: old school system, modern but old school renaissance system, or an adventure that fits one of those descriptions. So far I've only run two months, but once I get it going reliably, I will write up more about it.
2. I replaced Madame Eva with a wood witch of the same name. I modeled her after a Baba Yaga figure, which gives me some wonderful worldbuilding ideas. I don't know if it works in the Ravenloft context, but it might be fruitful in a rework of the material.
3. FOUR HUNDRED years of oppression by a vampire lord? You can enter but not leave? It's perpetually overcast? And nobody ever leaves their homes? This populace should have starved to death. The fantasy Travelers the module badly caricatures are unlikely to have sufficient numbers to bring everything a town needs, and so the economics of this place are deeply weird, almost as if they are an afterthought. Maybe it shouldn't bug me, but it really, really does.
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravenloft_(module)#Reception

++++ Like what you just read? You can subscribe to new posts on this blog via any ActivityPub platform (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) at @aaron@blog.hilltown.studio or via RSS at https://blog.hilltown.studio/feed