The previous week’s game had been very much ‘let’s have an adventure’. This week was about letting the players run around in their Ruritanian sandbox and do what they felt like.

Which is how two of them came to be fleeing through the woods with the Queen, pursued by a giant metal machine, that strode through the forest on five telescopic legs. Sometimes things just escalate.

Downtime actions

We had a good mix of downtime actions, with the group successfully rigging the auction of mining rights in favour of Mathen Mining and Minerals. This meant ignoring the growing clamour for war though, and Ruritania is now on the brink of throwing its lot in with the Prussians in their campaign to crush the free city of Dresden.

Another action saw social climber Elmira successfully snag herself a wealthy, influential husband. He might be 73 years old, twice widowed and the father of eight adult children but that doesn’t make ‘Whiskers’ any less perfect in her eyes. This made the GM particularly happy, since it meant I could unleash a plot based on her past as a ‘lady of negotiable virtue’ – could she supress her secrets and save her engagement? At least Captain Emil Gustav and Radimir were on hand to help out.

Spiritualist dandy Easton’s downtime saw him fail to repair his relationship with the king. So when the game started a miserable Easton decided to abandon the capital, and headed off to Zenda, where the young Prince Michael was being treated for some kind of nervous exhaustion. Concerned about Easton’s drinking Johannes went with him to keep an eye on things.

Processing the downtime actions doesn’t take too long. The players have been pretty good at keeping their instructions to a couple of sentences, and it’s generally clear what skills / talents / reputations to apply. The most time consuming part has been drawing the cards, determining the result and keeping track in a spreadsheet. But now I’ve made a google sheet that lets me generate the results of card draws, so next time will be *much quicker*.

Sandbox activities

That set things up nicely for the sandbox session. Elmira needed to save her marriage, and Easton was looking into the Prince’s illness. The card of fate system gives you a nice structure for this kind of thing – each objective has a number of challenges and when the Protagonists have resolved a majority of them either positively or negatively the objective has succeeded or failed.

I ended up handling this as follows. When the Protagonists encountered the first challenge we’d play it through and resolve it. Then I’d explain what the associated mission was going to be. As an example – Elmira went to visit her fiance but was forbidden to enter the house. The first challenge was to get in and find out what was going on. Once that was resolved the objective was revealed to be ‘Preserve Elmira’s reputation by putting a stop to the blackmailer’s activities’.

Over at the castle Easton spoke with the young Prince and confirmed his suspicions that his malady was supernatural in nature. The biggest problem was the entirely rational alienist who had been hired to treat him. Meanwhile Johannes noticed that one of the towers in the castle was unusually well guarded – for no obvious reason.

A note here on stake setting. The stakes for Johannes’ observation test were not about whether or not he would notice the unusual presence of the guards, but whether he would tip off those responsible that he had done so. As it turned out he succeeded, and so when he crept across the castle roofs to break in he found the Queen, apparently held prisoner*. Had he failed the observation test he’d have arrived to find the room empty – someone was being held prisoner, but who?

A dramatic escape

Having found the Queen Johannes decided to rescue her. The only question was how. In the end we decided that a swordfight (see above) was the right way to go about it. We made a single melee test, Johannes aced it, and we narrated things through to the point where he, Easton, the Queen and a few cossacks they’d borrowed from Gustav were fleeing through the woods.

Which is when the giant machine turned up.

* Which raises the question of just who has been masquerading as the Queen for all this time, and why?

The write-up on this session is a week late, so likely to be a bit briefer than usual. The purpose of the session was ‘to have an adventure’ and get everyone into the swing of things. I also wanted to showcase some of the elements of magic in the world, as the group includes three magic using characters.

First though, I had to process the players’ downtime actions.

The Protagonists had been given a bunch of tasks by the Inferno club when they arrived in Strelsau. They were to keep Ruritania out of the current military conflict, they were to rig an auction of mining rights in favour of Mathen Mining and Minerals, and they were to ensure a proposed railway line went to Prague rather than Warsaw. The party focused their attention on the issue of neutrality, giving speeches, talking up the folly of war and generally doing their best to keep Ruritania out of conflict.

Adjudicating this stuff was pretty basic, but I think the system I’d come up with for ‘how a country works’ was in itself a bit too complicated. I’ve now drafted a simpler version and will shift the campaign over to it.

Reputations

Some of the players chose downtime actions that were intended to boost their profile in various parts of Ruritania. When these succeeded, the obvious thing to do was to assign them an appropriate reputation to reflect this. But… reputations can also be bought with experience points, while acquiring them through activity might be much more efficient. One option is to say that reputations can’t be bought with experience, and have to be acquired through activity in game. Another is to let both happen. Thought required.

I’ve also been contemplating limiting the number of different Reputations you can have to your influence quality. If you let people acquire reputations for stuff they do, you might want an upper limit on how many they can have.

And I’ve been thinking about adding some classifications to Reputations to reflect which sphere they belong to. Basically because the person with the highest appropriate reputation in a country should gain some influence. e.g. the person with the highest martial reputation is ‘The defender of the realm’, and so on. This is mostly relevant for the projected *really big game* with dozens of players who can argue over these kinds of titles.

But – in a small tabletop game achieving such a title could be a major milestone. The point at which your protagonist is acknowledged as the greatest scientist in all of France could be pretty cool.

Prestige

This is working now. Adding the criteria for earning prestige (per house) to different character sheets makes it easier to administer, and now I’ve got written lists of what is revealed to players at each security clearance that’s easy to do to. Sometimes this results in players being told things they might have already learned, or guessed in play, sometimes it provides them with important clues, and sometimes it makes them aware of bits of the world they haven’t seen yet. Mostly though it provides players with some more information about their House that they can lean into during play.

I do need to clear up the link between Prestige and security clearance though. In short, as your Prestige increases, so does your security clearance. It’s that simple. But without a clear explanation, this is hidden from the players.

The adventure

The game opened with Benson letting the Protagonists know that there was another member of the Inferno club in Ruritania. The Count Montcriffe, a senior member of House Scorpio was living in the countryside, having been chased from his home in Saxony during the recent uprising by a mob with torches and pitchforks. The Count had not been heard from for some time, could the party check in on him?

Part of the goal for this session was to let the Protagonists discover just how odd some magic users are. They arrived to find the Count’s home was empty, although there were signs of a struggle. There was a temple in the basement, devoted to something carnivourous and unpleasant. There were lots of books. There was a ghost on the staircase, but only one of the Protagonists could see it.

The ghost was that of the Count Montcriffe. He didn’t know what had happened to him, but he wasn’t going to let it stop him. Could the Protagonists please get on with things and put him into a suitable body as soon as possible? The Protagonists were skeptical about this. It seemed the Count had summoned the carnivorous and unpleasant thing in the basement and commanded it to murder his enemies. They didn’t approve.

The Count argued that since he’d died the carnivourous and unpleasant thing wasn’t under anyone’s control anymore. Yes it had killed his enemies, as instructed, but any time now it was going to start killing anyone it felt like, and only he could stop it. The protagonists weren’t sure if this was true, but decided to try necromancy.

Which worked! And so one of the players got to play the Count for the remainder of the session as the party set about hunting down the escaped entity.

Aftermath

Perhaps the best bit about the adventure was the amount of in character angst and concern it provoked. Is it typical for members of House Scorpio to go around murdering people who disagree with them? Is raising the dead OK? Where does the Inferno club stand on all of this? Just what have we got ourselves in to?

Magic in Inferno is a tricky beast. There are three houses in the Inferno club who practice magic – House Cancer are conjurers, House Scorpio are enchanters and House Pisces are Magi. Each group do magic in a fundamentally different way and I want these to give magic in Inferno a very specific feel.

The conjurers of House Cancer

House Cancer are conjurers, able to perform magical effects seemingly instantaneously and out of thin air, but the practice is actually very different. Cancerian magic works by summoning entities from beyond the veil and making pacts with them. Once a deal is made the entity invisibly shadows the conjurer until its services are called on.

In game terms this means that conjuurers need to find entities that can perform the kind of services they want, summon them, and agree a price for their services before they can do magic. The more powerful the entity being summoned the harder the challenges will be. As summonings take days they should usually take place in ‘downtime’ between games.

In time a conjurer might have a ‘spellbook’ listing many entities, all able to perform different services in exchange for different prices, and might have some, or all of them on call at any one time. Although there are side effects to having creatures from beyond the veil following you around 24/7…

To help GMs come up with entities on demand I’ve written some tables for use in the game. These list the appearance, powers and price of an entity. And because the internet is wonderful perchance.org lets me turn it into an online generator for anyone to use. This generator produces a single, weak entity, which a new conjurer would be confident of controlling.

Invoking entities

When a conjurer summons an entity they get a certain number of reputations with it. Each time they invoke it they spend one of those reputations. Particularly powerful entities might require more than one reputation to be expended to invoke their powers. When a conjurer has expended all their reputations with an entity they have to summon it anew. Conjurers can also spend reputations to restrain entities by putting conditions on the price they have agreed with it.

If a conjurer wants more reputations with an entity they can agree to a higher price. This will always be in keeping with the first price, but escalate the requirement. For instance a conjurer summons the following spirit

“An Owl, with a burning beak. It has the power to command the weather. In exchange you must permit it to vandalise a statue.”

Finding themselves in urgent need of a snowstorm, but lacking sufficient reputations the conjurer agrees a new price with the entity. After a bit of thought the GM suggests “It agrees, provided you permit it to desecrate a holy place after invoking it.”

Dealing with entities should lead conjurers down dark, and questionable paths. But in exchange they get to wield extraordinary powers.

The first full session of the second playtest campaign saw a new member of the club join the party, and generated a number of useful playtest insights. First up, the question I ended last week’s write up with… will secrets work in play?

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