ECS201: Advanced Topics in Campaign Tone: Hardboiled

Welcome to Advanced Topics in Campaign Tone 201. I am your instructor for the evening, Professor Jon. The purpose of this course is to encourage discussion of non-standard campaign styles and their applicability to the Eberron Campaign setting. We will expound upon the differences between the canned "Pulp Noir" encouraged by the introduction of the Eberron Campaign Setting. I do not expect that there will be any required materials aside from the ECS, but a class reader will be available at the Student Center for US$50.

So, let's get to business!

The topic of this class will be the "Hardboiled" genre, but before I begin, let me tell you where we're aiming this. All good campaigns need to have an overarching theme (or several, if the campaign is long enough). This theme can be as simple and to the point as "Find the schemas" or as nebulous and far-reaching as "Get out of my mind" (My current campaign's theme, shout outs to my crew that are reading this).

Constructing a good theme is key to creating a good campaign, but I'm going to assume that since you're taking this upper-division course, you paid attention to gamemastering 103, and you know how to create good themes. This series of threads will be about the tone of a setting. Less what the campaign is about, and more about how the campaign feels to the players.

With introductions out of the way, lets have a little rundown of what I consider Hardboiled so that we can start on the same page as far as definitions go. Hardboiled is an action-packed story of either bad or neutral people doing bad things. What they do typically involves as much violence and stylish martial arts as possible, but it doesn't really matter what they're trying to accomplish.

Hardboiled Characters
When starting up a hardboiled campaign, the PCs are typically all members of a group. They could start as low-level gangsters working their way up by crushing rival gangs and pulling of daring heists. Or the PCs could start as detectives or a vice squad for the local constabulary. Either way, the PCs should construct their characters to have a casual relationship with killing, and a willingness to accept violence as the solution to most of their problems.

Hardboiled campaigns are going to trend towards neutral. While evil characters do fit in nicely, most hardboiled action centers around mercenary type characters who fall in the "gray" area of morality. This is not to say that you should discourage people from playing overtly good characters. Just advise them that their character might have a problem when their boss tells them to use "any means necessary".

Intra-player trust is also not entirely required. The possibility of a mole is always a good plot element to introduce. As long as the players interact, but still keep secrets from each other (without causing an intraPC riot...) it's all good.

Hardboiled Encounters
Hardboiled encounters should have a certain feel to them. The PCs should either face similarly outfitted NPC groups (especially groups tailored to exploit a particular weakness of the party), mooks mooks mooks, and the BBEG showdown.

Similarly outfitted NPC groups are rather self-explanatory. To give them more character, have them run parallel to the PCs for a while; doing similar things or things at cross purposes. The PCs should get the sense that they are dealing with rivals, not randomly tossed down adversaries. Also, in the final showdown, allow the NPC group a horde of mooks.

The Big Bad Evil Guy takes on a more paternal role in Hardboiled. They should be kingpins, untouchable puppetmasters in mighty fortresses. The fortress doesn't have to be a physical construction, either. The BBEG could be unassailable because of his social position, or because of a lack of evidence against him. However he is constructed, killing the BBEG should either reveal the real BBEG, or end the campaign. Oh, and the final battle should have a lot of mooks.

Mooks can be anything, as long as there's a lot of them, they don't hit very hard (or effectively) and they go down easy. It's better if they're sentient goons, because Hardboiled is all about dealing with the agents of an organization. Criminal organizations don't typically rely on hordes of skeletons to do their bidding.

Hardboiled setting
Hardboiled really works best in an urban setting. There needs to be a lot of people around so that a significant criminal element can arise (also, this explains why there's so many mooks). Sharn is an ideal place for a hardboiled campaign for obvious reasons. Not-so-obvious places include the capitals of Aundair and Darguun. The former for a Medici italy style of fine dining and slit
throats, and the latter for rumblin' with the goblins.

Wherever you choose to set your campaign, make sure the PCs walk the seedy part of town. Elegance isn't the primary backdrop, unless it's to face the BBEG or to cause mayhem. Standard backdrop themes should be gray, featureless areas (Unless you want to add doves...) or back alleys or rooftops or seedy apartment complexes.

Hardboiled Examples
To get a better feel for "Hardboiled" by all means, read Frank Miller's Sin City, or watch Hardboiled. The genre ranges pretty far, from Reservoir Dogs to The Transporter.

How to deal with women RPG players (if you're a male GM)

Inspired by some idiocy on the Wizards boards.

Be a good GM.

Everything I needed to know to run a pulp game, I learned from King Kong

This weekend, I had the pleasure of watching Peter Jackson's 3 hour epic, King Kong. While the movie was flawed in some respects, the pulp elements infusing the core of this movie were pulled off superbly. So superbly, in fact, that every pulp GM should take some of Peter Jackson's lessons to heart.

Over-the-top Action. The action has to be over-the-top. The PCs escaping an apatasaur stampede is good, but an apatasaur stampede through a narrow canyon that leads to a crumbling cliff, oh, and there are raptors chasing the apatasaurs is better. It's not just a little step further, it's a whole leap and a bound over the "ordinary" apatasaur stampede.

Real danger. As a corollary to action sequences being over-the-top, pulp action scenes should have a real sense of danger to them. The PCs should feel that if they slip just a tiny bit, their character is headed to certain doom. Unfortunately, this may lead to a little bit of dice fudging as you try to keep the PCs alive long enough to view the next big action scene.

What NPCs are for. Non-major-villian NPCs of any depth in pulp campaign exist solely to provide dialogue until their inevitable grisly death. Whether the PCs have to throw the suddenly traitorous guide off of a cliff, or an NPC suddenly sprouts a bad case of spear through his chest (Whoops! Spoiled Heart of Darkness for you!), NPCs should add to the sense danger discussed above.

Those lucky dogs. The PCs should come out on top. Major PCs will never fall off of the cliff to their doom. They are always caught at the last minute by another PC, or fall to their supposed deaths only to be captured by the villian and kept alive for an eventual heroic rescue. When a major PC dies, they should be in the position to make a noble sacrifice, or at the very least make a dying speech. This is one of the more difficult aspects of Pulp GMing, as you need to balance the need for impressing the PCs that they are in Real Mortal Danger with this simple fact that no pulp hero ever dies to a random trap.

Camp. Pulp without camp is just a soulless action movie that takes itself far too seriously. If you actually sit and think about the apatasaur stampede I mentioned earlier, it's actually a really silly thing to think about. Pulp adventure situations tend to be mildly absurd. You can't just chase a thief through the city, the chase has to occur at night, over the rooftops, after a recent rain, and during the annual fireworks festival. The key is to either get the players to buy into the camp, or to just not let them notice.

Pacing. Pulp stories are not about intricate dialogue, or deft political maneuvering. Pulp dialogue is typically short and to the point; anything longer and more flowery is in danger of overloading the (already maxed out) camp. Don't roleplay shopping unless it's going to lead to an action sequence. Don't let the PCs spend all day talking to the king. Don't let traps be disabled without some sort of time pressure. The session should quickly move towards an action sequence after action sequence. Pulp thrives on the feeling of just barely getting to the goal, only to discover a new threat.

GenCon SoCal Con Report

So! My first ever gaming convention! I had a lot of fun, thanks to my good friends who let me sleep on their hotel room floor and didn't even charge me for it :confused:!!!

Anyway. The con was great. A little smaller than I expected (someday I'll get to Indy!), but I've been spoiled by COMDEX and ComicCon.

I got there on thursday, checked into the hotel, and went out to the Con floor. I poked a little amongst the dealers, and then headed off to my first scheduled game in the TCG HQ.

Game 1 : Friday 11am : Gloom (Card Game)
Run by Keith Baker : Published by Atlas Games
Heh, this game is fun, but it's even more fun with Keith Baker's twisted sense of humor behind the stories that get told around this card game. Gloom is a card game with clear cards, not unlike the edges of Hecatomb except over the whole card. Everyone has a family of strange people, and the object of the game is to have your people die as miserably as possible and keep the other players' families happy and/or alive. It's a great game, and I had a lot of fun. Also, Keith Baker was gracious enough to sign my Eberron Campaign Setting, and his first novel "City of Towers".

Game 2 : Friday 2:12pm : True Dungeon (LARP-ish)
Run By: True Dungeon Staff
If you've never done a true dungeon, take the experience if you can get it. It's basically a huge puzzle game played in the dark and with D&D flavor thrown in. Combat is done on a shuffleboard (rangers fight two handed!) and detect magic is a blacklight. My team got all of the way through, but I died in the second to last room...

Game 3 : Friday 6pm : Vanguard (RPG : Unknown Armies Variant)
Run by Todd Furlow : Rules published by Atlas Games
My one word summary for this game was "wow". After a refresher on the rules and a discussion about what constituted "Science Fiction" versus "Science Fantasy", we settled into our roles as the first manned mission to Mars. Things quickly go south as we find evidence of our lost crewmember and possibly Life on mars. Everyone goes nuts, and the whole game was just great. Furlow really has the pacing down, and was able to anticipate nearly every move that we made. Definately seek Todd out (I hear he has a great Angel[buffyverse] con game record).

Game 4 : Saturday 8am : Robo Rally (Board Game)
Run by who knows : Published by WotC
The players of this game showed up on time. The people running it did not. Eventually WotC got confused and thought that they had forgotten to run a game. They went and got us a game box and apologized profusely. We dove into the game (All of us had played the old version, and we wanted to see what the new one was like) and played a 6 player, 1 board (Maelstrom!) game. A lot of fun was had by the players as we jostled our robots around the board. A lot of damage was had, a couple robots exploded, and we even had one player lose all of his lives by getting unluckily pushed off the board three times. The real runners of the game finally showed up around 9am, but we didn't care to join them for their roborally game because we were about halfway through our original one. I'd recommend this game to any of my friends who are mildly into programming, or want to teach their kids how to program.

Game 5 : Saturday 2pm : Do Me This One Favor... (Mage)
Run by an Arizona Wrecking Crew whose name escapes me : Published by White Wolf
I must admit, I was afraid. I've been leery of the World of Darkness' fanbase since the very beginning. Vampire was a game for goth weirdos, so naturally I arranged to miss the bus. Fortunately, I've grown out of that hangup, so I showed up to this game. I was a little worried, as the GM was a little quiet and there were three complete Nuts playing in the game (the two other guys were cool, though). Luckily, once we got the caped and corsetted mongoloid woman to stop talking about some character she plays on White Wolf's IRC or board thing that had something to do with Angels, one of the normals and I (both newbies to the WoD system, which is really easy to learn) took over the Roleplaying. He was Azteca the "Den Mother" of our cabal, and I was Admin, the default "Manager". For some reason, there was a general anti-mastigos feeling at the table, but I had a lot of fun with my Mind centered character. Outside of the game, it was also a lot of fun to trade significant "What the hell?" looks with the GM and the two "normals".

Game 6 : Saturday 8pm : Revenge, Reciprocity, and All Things Made Even… (Vampire)
Run by Dave Martin of the AZ Wrecking Crew : Published by White Wolf
While making characters took a while, this 11 person game was great. From the nutty Ventrue, the accidentally russian voiced Rakshasa, the Oberlock family, and my own character (A hunchbacked super-spy Nosferatu from Fargo), we nearly died laughing as we unintentionally kept messing up the elaborate plans we had set up. My character died at 2am, as the Sanctum was about to capture me, so I had the computer nerd throw a grenade in my lap. FOR THE CARTHIANS! The game ended at 4am, so I can't remember much besides that I want to play in another game with the Wrecking Crew.

Game 7 : Sunday 10am : Intro to the Iron Kingdoms (3.5 SRD)
Run by one of the writers for Privateer : Published by Privateer Press
This sounded like it was going to be a pretty dry game at first. The GM was a little monotone as he pitched the setting to us (If you're familiar with Warmachine, it's the same setting). However, he quickly morphed into a great gm (even without the completely brilliant miniatures terrain he used) for a quick 2 hour romp through a troll fight and a trap-filled tomb. My dwarven bodger took 7 poison dart hits as he dashed into a cloud of poison gas to save the book that they had tried to pull out with a grappling hook. I only suffered 4 con damage, and managed to survive by the skin of my teeth. I'm not sold on the setting, but I'd play with this guy again.

Kicking the Door In: The Raymond Chandler Effect

Raymond Chandler, had this to say about plot creation:

When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand

Countless game designers have explicitly espoused some form of this or another (especially the Feng Shui main book), but it's something that all good gamemasters should also keep in the back of their heads. Sure, the basic statement seems like a cop-out; an easy way to throw monsters and GMCs at your characters until they play right. But if it’s not just a hack writer’s advice on how to be a hack writer, then what is it?

Breaking the door down illustrates a key insight into how to engage your players. If your players won’t go to the story, bring the story to the players. If the PCs need to assault a villain's castle, and they're spending days upon days planning, then feel free to send an infiltration squad down to "bug" the place or to "shake things up a bit." Also, if the PCs totally miss the bus and ignore every single one of your carefully planned hooks, it's quite alright to have the evil sorceror the PCs are supposed to look into send some goons down to pre-emptively rough the PCs up. It makes things personal if the PCs view the villains as caring what the "good guys" are doing.

And the best part is, if you do your job right, no one will know the difference.

Now Hiring: Writers and Ideas

Do you GM? Do you have a unique perspective on how games should be run? Please send me an email detailing your "qualifications".

If you don't write, do you have a GMing problem or idea that you'd like to see expounded upon? Send an email, or comment like mad!

Welcome to Save the GM

Hey there, everyone. While there are countless personal blogs and forums about roleplaying games in general, there is a distinct lack of blogs and forums that focus on the tricks of the GM trade. Articles like "Save My Game" are great, but they rarely step outside of their designated systems and genres.

I'm not saying that all systems are equal under the lord. What I'm saying is that all GMs must face similar problems irregardless of the system. Whether the problem be writer's block, unruly players, setting the mood, or even a reliance on the cliche, the problems are there.

Let's address these problems together, without worrying whether d20 is better than tri-stat.