On Monday, it was Kingsday, but I don’t really appreciate that. As long as the majority of Dutch people want a king I have nothing against it, and this seems to still be the case, so that part is fine enough, but to me it really comes across as straight pride, so I rather stay inside. I didn’t: I visited my dad, who for health reasons doesn’t come outside, and went for a run after.

The rest of the week I played lots of RPGs.

Read

• continued in Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of ADD by Gabor Maté
• finished in Game Changer by Rachel Reid

I’m not sure if Game Changer is a book you are supposed to cry over, and I cried over parts that were certainly meant to be romantic, but hey, here we are. Cute book, would recommend.

Played

The title already says it: I played five RPGs this week. To put it differently: there were two days this week where I did not play an RPG, and one of them was Kingsday. Maybe I am overdoing it.

On Tuesday I played Mausritter again. This was the tenth episode and I’ve been writing a follow-up blog about how I run this campaign, so stay tuned for that. I am happy to report I found my groove in this one again. It was a nice balance between building out the lore of the world and some old school adventure in a fox den.

On Wednesday, I had proposed The King is Dead, but cancelled my session due to lack of sign-ups, and also because The Quiet Year got posted, a map-making story game that I’ve been wanting to play for a while now. It was a bit chaotic with the 5+1 players that signed up, but we got an interesting map and story out of it, full of electric eels, ancient coins and poisonous swamp gasses.

On Friday, we played our first real session of Pasión de las Pasiones. Last week I tried playing this game with another group of people, but we just made it into a social evening. This group, however, is more serious about the game, so we did play. The game itself was not at all serious, as expected. Our beauty confronted the plastic surgeon of our hotel with the fact that they signed a five-year contract, but she wanted out of it now that she also declined his prior marriage proposal, and this all resulted in quite a scene. We had a lot of fun.

On Saturday, I played in the open table Under Hallow Hills for the third time. This was the fourth session and I was the only returning character, but I am also the most returning character, having deliberately missed the previous session to not be there every episode. I love the structure and the vibes of the game, which is about changing the lives and being of the characters in it.

On Sunday, I played By Endurance, We Conquer at the Side Quest Bar, formerly known as The Armoury. We were three GMs, and one player had shown up to play, and they picked my game to run. It was a bit rough, as this is a dark game that in hindsight wasn’t really suited for the noisy environment of an open bar. Some of us were also a bit tired (this could include me) which hindered the improvisational nature of the game, but in the end I was happy with the ending we came up with.

Ran

On Monday I went for a run, and since I had time I thought: let’s schedule the long run of this week for today. It was 16km in increasing intervals: 6km at 5:00/km, 5km at 4:50/km, 4km at 4:35/km and then one more kilometer conversational.

The other thing I planned was to run to the border with Utrecht (about 4km) and then follow a specific 10.5km segment that I had just discovered. I would easily run a top 10 time on Strava, given the aforementioned structure of my run.

Unfortunately – and I was aware when I started – the run took me through an area where wild grazers are living. “Keep 25m distance!” say the signs when you enter the area. I didn’t see them for the first half of that segment, but then they were there: part of the group on one side of the path, part of the group on the other. There was no way I could keep the required distance, the horns were really big on some of them, and I really didn’t want to run in the middle of their group. I took a detour and now I have to try the segment again.

Also, this long run was a big too much. I felt my calf again, and decided not to do any runs nor volleyball for the rest of the week.

A few month ago I wrote about my ongoing open table Mausritter campaign. We play out an episode of it every two weeks with ever different but mostly returning players. And it is still a lot of fun (again). I promised last time to make a new post after the tenth session, so here we are.

I squeezed in an “again” because I have to admit I had a hard time with it a few weeks ago. I wasn’t really motivated and didn’t know what other events could further the story. My players also gave me that feedback: they liked the freedom the game provided them, but felt lost “for the first half of the session”. It’s okay if not every session is a great session, but I felt as lost as they were.

How I prepared

In the weeks in between Mausritter I run a campaign of Brindlewood Bay with mostly the same players, but obviously completely different set of characters and vibes. The preparation of Brindlewood Bay is also very different: each week I pick a mystery, which comes in the form of two printed A4 papers with very structured lists of elements on it (Moments, Suspects, Locations, Clues). I don’t prepare much, other than reading the text.

Mausritter on the other hand required more preparation: I made up the world myself, with a lot of help from the random tables provided by the book. The story is what happened at the table, connected in hindsight. This gave great freedom and less stress: I didn’t have a story to prepare, and there was no need to police my players into following a line. They can do whatever they want. But that doesn’t mean I could get away with preparing nothing at all.

I had used up most prompts and the ones that were left grew stale. For example, I know since day one that something is up with the newly built house. But since session one, things never moved forward on that story line, which left me with a sort of Schödingers Cat: so long as my players would not interact with the new house, they would never discover that this was the week the new cat came out of the house. And at some point I lost my excitement about Puck.

Another pain-point was that I started relying on published material. At one of the hexes I had hidden Honey in the Rafters, in another one was Faeflower Grave. I thought that – when in doubt – I could direct my players to these locations and have a proper adventure. Unfortunately, while they does provide cool locations, they both don’t provide tensions for a story in the way that Brindlewood Bay’s game structure and mysteries provide it. In both cases I found myself swimming for my life.

Changing the game

When you are really stuck, you should change the game. So I did. Secretly. I don’t imagine my players will notice much of a difference, as they are still playing the same mice with the same player facing rules. But from my perspective, I try to structure my thoughts in a different way, and thus, I changed the game I am playing. I think it’s so subtle that you might even say I didn’t. Let me explain.

In the previous post I’ve described how I filled the map and later expanded it, and how I have filled it with factions. I did all of this following the instructions in the Mausritter booklet. These are obviously notes I will keep, as they provide me with the structure of the world the players know so far. What I am changing, is borrowing a bit more from Apocalypse World and the Powered by the Apocalypse games that are derived from it (such as Brindlewood Bay).

Recently I’ve been reading some PbtA games from the “no dice no masters” family. These games such as Dream Askew; Dream Apart and Venture; Dungeon rely on all players creating a character, but also all picking up one or more setting elements. Both their character archetype and the setting elements come in the form of sheets that have lists of “Moves” on them. Players can then make these moves to move the story forward. Examples include “spread disease” and “alter the world to cause doubt and confusion”.

Another game I like to mention is Zhenya’s Wonder Tales, which has these moves on cards. When a player makes one of those moves, they flip the card and follow the instructions on the other card to fill in the details of it. And in Apocalypse World itself these moves come in the form of “threat moves” and “terrain moves”. Examples include “stall someone” and “reveal something to someone”.

To bring it back to Mausritter: I’ve started to create lists of moves I can make, explicitly calling them “moves” in my notes. The examples of moves I gave so far are pretty abstract and in my notes I actually put some things that are much more concrete. An example that I already used: “a pigeon shows up with a letter from Fizzles” (this is a character who’s player has been away, yet the party has sent him stuff).

I’m thinking about having a few types of these moves. First off: I have player moves. These are moves I sort by (recurring) player, and are usually involving something that I think they will be interested in. I also have location moves: things that I want to be reminded about that could happen at a location. There is also structural moves: I want to open each session with the “bring the party together” move. And then I want some abstract moves, taken from the sources I just described, for inspiration during the session when the other moves are empty.

Principles

I do realize that it might be a bit silly to call these bullets “moves”. Many GMs will maybe just call this “preparation”, and they are probably correct. Some people say that PbtA is just great GM advice, and I take it as such. It’s all about presenting the information in a way that frees up your mind so that you can run the session smoothly.

Another element of the Powered by the Apocalypse games is that they usually come with an Agenda for the GM, and a list of Principles. I’m also creating one for my Berryhill campaign, just to make some things explicit for myself. “Being fan or your mice” is a staple and was already on there.

Another common one is: always make the biggest move possible. If I really like the idea of the new cat, I should just have a messenger bring the news on the market square (I did that). In the last session, a new player rolled the Magic Missile spell for his new mouse. This spell is significant in the campaign, because in a previous session the party had lost it to the pigeons. He seemed unsure why his test-subject background would’ve given him this spell, so I called for a flashback, in which the spell fell from the sky, and a pigeon appeared, looking for it. It was a super cool scene, and now he canonically has the Magic Missile spell. That is a big move on my side – I loose control of that spell again – and I think it’s those kind of moves are what keeps the game interesting.

In a way, this is also not really a departure of Mausritter and OSR style play. If you make sure all of your lists have an even number of entries, starting with a number, you are basically making random tables. The difference is that you intend to pick from it, instead of rolling, but you could always convert a random table into a moves list and vice versa by either picking or rolling on it.

And to be fair to Mausritter and the initial setup: I should have just rolled for my factions, so that the clocks would tick down, and stuff would happen. And when it happened, I should’ve made the big moves. I think I had just a few too many, so that it felt like they would overwhelm the session if I did. Maybe I’ll come back to faction clocks, I’ll just have to make sure they are interesting.

I’m going to take Mausritter five episodes at a time from now on. I will certainly do five more from here and will report back after episode 15!