LOOK OUTS! In this thread we will talk about White Wolf games!! OH NOES, TEH BRAIN DAMAGE!!

(Hmm, is that joke old yet?

No, it is evergreen.)

So Calexico is the greatest band in the world that you don't listen to - you plebian fool - and I've always loved their border stylings and combination of rockingness, sadness, and dreaminess. They're a local band to me here in Tucson and they perfectly capture the Tucson experience. (In addition to Spanish and English, they also sing in French, and if that makes sense to you, you should move to Tucson.) John Convertino is the greatest American drummer working today.

Thus, I have often used them in music mixes for various games, but never as a centerpiece, always as just a bit of flavor.

Now recently, the local gaming organization (plug goes here) has started a project for shared universes. One would be a D&D universe, the other would be a nWoD universe.

I've been a part of shared universes before. At the height of our 5-year Vampire LARP, we had something like 3-4 events a month, between big events, clan meetings, conspirators having a smoke in an alley downtown with a GM there to help answer questions and adjudicate things, and so on. That is a wild amount of things to try to keep track of, and this was before wikis entered the public eye and were still that little "Portland Pattern Repository." (I can't imagine what great things we could have done if we'd known about them...)

Although I enjoyed the game of D&D4 that I played, I haven't bought it yet because I know my current group would not like it very much (they do not like miniatures, and movement even in the 3.5 game that we winged without miniatures was stretching about as far as they'd go in that direction). I didn't feel like recruiting an entirely new group and finding time for them, so I decided I would only participate in the nWoD universe.

I listened to what others had as suggestions, made a few of my own, then spent a few minutes flipping through rulebooks. The game was going to be set in Tucson (and Southern Arizona in general), and we came up with a few things (i.e. the large numbers of undocumented persons in Tucson led to a higher population available for Vampires to feed from than would be counted in population figures, so we could wing people playing and NPCing a lot more Vampires than a city our size could, by the book, support...) here and there, but nothing really grabbed me.

Until I remembered that on the way over I had been bopping to my very favorite Calexico song: "The Crystal Frontier".

What, you never heard it? Well, go listen now.

That's when something from that song, my experiences in Tucson, The Wire and Changeling: The Lost crossed over and made a spark - I was going to run a game where the player characters were polleros - immigrant smugglers who brought human cargo over the border. Dodging the police, avoiding entanglements in drug gangs, and their adventures in the creepiness of ghost towns, empty deserts, angry ghosts, and desperation.

It was perfect. They could even have guns and nobody would ever say "Let's call the police!"

More soon.

And of course, The Changeling: The Lost demo - how they got through a whole book about escaping across a terrible border into a land where they may not be wanted and pursued by overpowered authorities without, as far as I can tell, mentioning la frontera once...

The Ballad of Cable Hogue used to be my favorite Calexico song (mixing languages in songs are cool, y'know) but The Crystal Frontier has sinced climbed to the top. Basically only heard Hot Rail though... and I was amazed to hear the original of Alone Again Or after hearing the cover - they're just so much alike.

Anyway! With a song like that in the mix, you can't really go wrong, can you? I'll be checking for updates.

JD: Bless you and keep you. I dig this vibe.

(About turning your own city into setting, I do think that the use of Boston for Mage was just about perfect.)

The nice thing about starting with a band that I'm a complete fanatic about is that I have a giant pile of albums to listen to and pull things from. Here are the things I got from "Crystal Frontier" specifically:

* A border television factory
* A woman who lost her child along the border
* The shadow of the colonial Spanish past
* A trader who can get you anything
* The border as different mystical images: a crystal, a river of tears
* Really upbeat feeling while saying some really horrible things - in other words, despair doesn't slow the world down.

The woman who lost her child was easy to make into a tragic and frightening figure, who made a deal with fell supernatural forces in order to get her child back, but ended up haunting the deserts, barbed wire lashed around her, searching endlessly for someone who's not there.

The colonial Spanish past is dead simple to adopt to a horror game for anyone who knows anything about how creepy old-school Catholicism is.

The trader who can get you anything? Well, I haven't quite decided what to do with that, since I adapted some other things to deal with "what people want" and "how to get it to them". Stay tuned for that.

The border as different mystical images is straight from Changeling: The Lost, so no real adaptation here.

The television factory might as well be an iconic World of Darkness image. You can see it in your mind's eye, can't you? By the way, add cheap breath masks to it. I know. It's perfect.

The upbeat feeling is one that I had a hard time with. I knew that my players would crack wise and make jokes about everything that happens (they do this all the time, it is part of their fun), even while effectively roleplaying some terrified people. But some of this is really heavy.

I decided the best way to go about this was to make the game really big. In other words, the following series of events would never happen in this order:

1 - a terrible shock (monster, creepy event, etc.)
2 - a dawning, dreadful realization that the shock is born out of or is causing some awful tragedy
3 - downtime in which people don't have anything to do but dwell on the tragedy

That is not in line with the rhythm of the Crystal Frontier.

Basically I want the downtime to be after the shock (so that people can zoom away from the shock and run around with its inertia trying to figure out what's going on), and after any tragic realization, I need to give them something new to do, either as part of this particular plot arc, or as part of something else, or even just as blatant space-filler.

That meant I needed to do a lot of one-page preparation of "Three border crossers need new identities, but we're running low on fake birth certificates. Can we bribe the same clerk at Health Services to give us some more blanks?" scenarios, so that if things started to drag a little and people started to say things like "Wow...that really sucks...it's really shitty..." I can just pick up and go on to the "next verse".

I unexpectedly discovered that this means that if a shock isn't much of a shock, I can just pull the eject handle and zoom on away from that and into the next 'horror' scenario.

Now, because of the way time works in shared games, you sorta need to keep semi-normal time. It's not advantageous on a weekly game to say "Okay, three weeks later" too often or else you'll end up jumping way ahead of everyone else, and A) potentially fucking up the timeline, and B) at the very least, losing the benefit of the shared world.

So I needed two things:

1 - a plausible reason for a lot of fucking creepy events to happen near the same time.
2 - interesting things going on that were not supernatural, so it would feel like there was some distance between supernatural things even if - if anyone ever sat down and sketched out the timeline of the game - the supernatural things were still really close together in time.

And that is my next post!

Better than my last post, it's...My Next Post

So when we last left off, I needed to come up with 2 things:

"1 - a plausible reason for a lot of fucking creepy events to happen near the same time."

This turned out to be pretty easy. Every so often there are news stories that mention, often quite sidelong, that a dastardly criminal paid a lot of money to a fortuneteller or witch to curse their enemies or lift curses from them. All I had to do was come up with a sufficiently occult-knowledgeable criminal badguy and his spazzy meth-addicted ritual magician, and we were good to go. The new Second Sight book has a lot of good material on this, including some cult stuff, so adaptation was easy once I had the concept down.

"2 - interesting things going on that were not supernatural"

This was a little more involved. I got myself a nice letter-sized journal on sale from Office Depot (post-back-to-school-sale-sales are great for getting office supplies cheap) and started putting people and problems on each page.

One thing that I ran into right away was that I didn't want the player characters to be drug mules - yet that is where a lot of money is in crossing the border. I didn't want this to be a game of drug dealers but it's quite tightly enmeshed.

So I decided that the organization the PCs worked for used to do both immigrant- and drug-smuggling, until an opposing organization beat them savagely in a war several years ago, forcing them to limit their activities only to immigrant smuggling. This indirectly made them very good at immigrant smuggling, with a lot of organization and infrastructure for handling that. It also meant that the PCs organization, unless something wild happened, would always end up way down on the police's to-do list.

It also set them up with a powerful institutional enemy - the drug gang that beat them. After all, any successes which the PC's organization has exists primarily because the drug gang beat them. Living well is the best, most infuriating revenge, and I intended for the PC's group to be living relatively well.

I named them: The PC's organization was the Gomez Family, the drug gang that hated them was the Montes De Oca family (abbreviated MDO by law enforcement and graffiti, due to actually extending well beyond the tangled Montes de Oca family tree).

Next step: deciding on the degree of supernaturalness of the player characters. This is a big deal in World of Darkness games. Many (most?) assume that player characters will be able to wield the very occult strangeness that makes the world creepy and/or horrific.

I decided that I wanted there to be a limited number of "supernatural" player characters and that they would be limited to a certain list of potential abilities, most taken from folk magic of the area and minor occult abilities.

Once I had that down, I had a general idea of the setup of the game: these two organizations - the PCs, who are immigrant smugglers, and the badguys, who are drug smugglers and dealers - against a backdrop of militarized Border Patrol officers, drug war-obsessed police and desperate border crossers.

The next step was to get it across to players and see what direction they wanted to take the PCs.

Notice I did a whole giant amount of work before I ever put this in front of players, and if I had not done it, nothing could have ever possibly been accomplished. The fetishization of "player input" here would be of no use. This preparation is absolutely necessary for flexible - what virtuous persons call, in their innocence, "incoherent" - games. I need to be able to take player proposals and evaluate them against the core of what I'm enthused about presenting, and focus their ideas inwards towards what I'm after, that very same Crystal Frontier. Otherwise they are put in a position of brainstorming with no, uh, borders, and that ends up sucking for them (because they can't push against anything) and for me (because I end up running something that doesn't target what I want to target.)

We're still playing it! I just haven't had the time to sit down and update the thread. (Thanks for the whisper, here's a public response for everyone to hear.)

Further reading from Uncle Bear:

Discussing his character Carlos Moore

Explanation of Carlos' notebook blog

The blog itself

Supernatural abilities in horror games in general are a weird subject, and that's because supernatural abilities in horror novels are approached in so many different ways. Normally the protagonists don't have supernatural abilities - thus increasing the sense of wonder and/or dread when they are encountered.

In Call of Cthulhu, the protagonists are expected to be forced to wield magic despite its consequences, much like protagonists in the stories - this is an oft-unheralded kickass piece of Call of Cthulhu.

When Anne Rice turned horror on its ear, meshing protagonist-as-monster (which had been done before) with romance novel sensibilities, Vampire: the Masquerade sprung out of that same creative well. The expectation, for the most part, ever since, in White Wolf games, has been that characters will be able to wield some kind of supernatural clout. There were a few exceptions -some hunter supplements, etc. - but for the most part White Wolf gave you kewl powerz, and man, those powerz were KEWL. I can't think of a White Wolf game, even their lamest game, that didn't have awesome, exciting, often provocative powers in them.

But for this game I went to a different source - there's a branch of horror fiction in which the protagonists wield just the very faintest touch of supernatural abilities. A medium, a psychic, a shaman, something where they know the dangers that are around, don't have to go through the "disbelief" phase of what's happening, and can detect paranormal junk before the rest of humanity. It was very popular in the 70s and 80s - and in RPGs, Chill tapped this source.

So in this game I made a list of possible supernatural abilities from the material White Wolf has published, and gave a very handwavey "folk magic"/"psychic abilities"/etc. pitch for them - we would tailor the explanation for them to each character.

Thus, my wife's character had Automatic Writing, a Willpower-intensive "single question of the spirit world" power, although she's been so good at racking up the specific bonuses to talking to specific spirits that she's gotten a long way with it. This happened because her character was at the site of a supernatural massacre of her family - it turned her loopy, but also opened her mind and perception to the other world. That gives me some plot hooks (does medication suppress the gift? what about the massacre?) Again, Calexico, tragic.

My wife's friend's character took communication with canines, which permitted me to bring in nature spirits and posit that her family had been blessed in the past with some spirit pact that she would eventually be called upon to handle. This was just weirdness. :)

The cool thing about what they picked was that they were both information-gathering powers - which fits with the subdued, problem-solving aspect of the organization that I was trying to build.

As I mentioned above, 99 percent of the game system-wise can be found in the main World of Darkness rulebook and Second Sight. When I incorporated some Changeling stuff, I used that rulebook to help design me the antagonist/creepy ally situation. Really the World of Darkness rulebook could easily have provided enough of a framework to get everything done on, but Second Sight has a lot of really great ideas (as well as the aforementioned White Wolf kewl powerz.)

I'm taking back 'kewl powerz' and using it unironically!

Also, The Wire, which is going to probably be an inspiration for virtually every game I ever play from now on...and a parallel in real-life history...

Before 1995, it was common for Border Patrol officers and cases to take them far from the border. It would not be unusual for them to turn up in Nebraska to bust some part of an immigrant-smuggling ring. The focus was, at least in part, on building cases against troublesome smugglers rather than on detention and deportation. After 1995 (and greatly enhanced after 9/11) the mission statement changed to be primarily focused on stopping the actual border crossers. It became rarer for ICE agents to pop up "in the interior", and when they did it was always to round up a large number of illegal immigrants, not to apprehend those who had helped them get here or punish employers who helped keep them here.

What I love, from a literary perspective, about this shift, is that it is so beautifully blinkered and parallels the drug war futility of The Wire so nicely. Do you build cases, or do you do "rip and runs"? Do you solve problems with brains or do you solve them with brutality and firepower? What effect does that have on an institution like ICE when building cases is no longer the focus? And in the end, what can possibly change in a system if all the attention and energy is focused on one part of the system?

In the Gomez family (protagonist organization), I paralleled this a little with the jefe of the organization and his great-nephew, a player character, who really would prefer that the family stop the family business and go legit. (Sort of a Michael Corleone type, we decided after several sessions.) The top guy is genial, friendly, but he only sees one way to do things - the same way we've always done it. He sees no reason to change it since it's been successful. The PC sees the current situation as untenable. You can't walk a tightrope between drug cartels demanding mules on one side and Homeland Security machine gunners on the other side, not forever. By focusing only on one part of life on the border, the protagonist organization tries unsuccessfully to turtle from the big picture, which keeps intruding on them - like organized crime, racism and politics keeps intruding on the ICE mission.

So I have ICE agents talk about different aspirations they have, frustrated by the brass, I have them knowledgeable but helpless about the situation, and sometimes enormously frustrated when, although they win every engagement they get into, it seems to have no impact on what life is like. One PC then says similar things.

We finished the game! It was beautiful. I used a bit of an experimental ending.

One of the big conflicts of the ending of the game was that one of the big patriarchs of the game was dying of cancer. He had kept the family out of the drug game, after having lost two sons to the 2000 drug war, more or less out of cowardice and grief. Another, younger jefe, Uncle Eduardo, was trying to take advantage of the chaos of the ongoing drug war in Mexico (real) and the expanded drug war in Tucson (fictionalized/sensationalized) in order to get the family back into the business. The player characters opposed him. What I liked about the conflict was that in order to oppose him they ended up doing each and every thing that drug cartels do except smuggle drugs. They had to kill, they had to torture, they set someone's house on fire, they set a pack of wild dogs on someone. It was great watching them struggle with their morality and conscience as the vise closed tighter.

I thought about a lot of different ways to end things, but in the end I decided to let them have a go at the vise. If they could cut Eduardo off from his support, I would just have him surrender. "I give, I'm not going to do this anymore, don't kill me." And see if they, knowing he'll come back later and try it again, will kill him. They decided not to. It was a big moment.

Another thing I tried out was a variation on White Wolf's suggestions for "theme". Ever since Vampire First Edition in 1991 White Wolf has been telling us to have themes for our games. That's a very cool way to organize and focus what could be a big sprawling game. What if, I thought, I made a super ridiculously specific theme, something that wasn't like "Love" or "Passion vs. Security"...but something REALLY specific. So I did! I used the theme: "You can't fix anything without going to Mexico."

Holy shit, the game took off like a god damn rocket! Plots became much easier to concoct - I now had a very clear boundary. Characters could have a checkbox next to their goals: did they go to Mexico yet? And the PCs could feel like crossing over and crossing over the border was vital to accomplishing things and never want to stop doing it. Problems could be investigated, ameliorated, thought about, argued about, even stymied or delayed, but they could not be fixed without going to Mexico. I was staggered by this. I highly recommend being as specific as possible with at least one theme when you are designing a game that takes place in a broad world.

Bah. It is comforting to know someone is still carrying the 'hey, you can actually make fantastic WoD games' torch -- but I really wish I had a magic Tucson-and-back teleportation device.

Awesome write-up, JD. That 'You can't fix anything without going to Mexico' thing is fantastic -- I'd love to hear any other examples/attempts you come up with. It seems so diabolically appropriate to the specific game that for some reason I am doubting the same sort of concrete-theme approach would necessarily translate to other set-ups.