synthboy

Herein are secrets. Read no further players of mine or anyone who wants to maintain the mystery.

Spoiler:

Today’s lesson: be careful of what you wish for. After moaning last week that my players were all being too boy scout and insisting on playing everything by the book this week they took it to the other extreme and truly embraced the horror. It meant that this was one of the best sessions we’ve had, lots of shock, disgust, excitement as well as plenty of laughs.

Much of this session was improvised from a well-developed framework. The intention of this scenario was to really try and create a sandbox experience with numerous mysteries and adversaries for the agents to possibly tackle but with only key fact they had to discover in order to progress the campaign. I know this sounds a little like a bottleneck but I did think of several ways to reach this goal, namely discovering that someone called Galt was after a book that was now owned by Stephan Alzis. However, aware that the campaign had been very low key so far I also put together a couple of vignettes that I could insert into the plot in order to provide the players with some excitement and also help push the plot along.

This was the thinking behind the whole meth factory shootout business which turned out to be a lot of fun. The whole issue of Agent Fischlin entering the warehouse provoked a massive discussion amongst the players over whether they should break cover to save him or let him blunder in and use his death as evidence to incriminate Congressman Bolt. The fact that they even considered this gives you some indication of where they are all headed morally. Their actions here will have some bearing on the SAN reward their gain from completing this scenario.

This moral debate cropped up several times during the session, notably when it came to executing Paul Winters. The players tried valiantly to think of a way to keep him alive but ultimately acknowledged that he had to die. As a character it was a shame I didn’t get more of Paul Winters in as he had the potential to become a really well developed individual. As it was his eight foot leap into the air genuinely had the players slack jawed and the whole description of his death left them all feeling very dirty. They were all so chuffed to have passed their SAN rolls which I think indicated that they realised how far over the line they’d all stepped.

This whole notion of debate leads me onto one thing I think I need to address with my players. As you’ll have read they have tendency to be reticent. Rather than run in, guns blazing they’ll prefer to sit back and wait to see how a situation unfolds. Although a little frustrating for me at times (I am a Keeper after all, I do want to cause some degree of mayhem) I can’t fault them on this approach to problems. After all, it’s kept them all alive so far. However, this reticence does also have a tendency to also apply to what should be tense, exciting situations. Rather than acting on instinct they’ll begin to discuss what to do, completely destroying any atmosphere I was attempting to create. I’ve started using a countdown (“You have to act in 3, 2, 1, NOW!”) which hopefully will help deal with this problem.

The interesting point next session will be to see how they handle being forced along the campaign route despite leaving some loose sends behind. Caleb is effectively going to order them onto a flight leaving in about twelve hours so they’ll have to the option of either getting a good night’s sleep (having just slit a teenager’s throat in cold blood) or using that time to try and get to the bottom of things. I suspect it’ll be the former but they might surprise me.