Campaign Journal 3: Planning & Character Creation Session

Originally published October 3, 2012

As my campaign design process for my upcoming Hunter:the Vigil game, Corrupted Transmission, slowly steams towards its first session, I gathered the players together to answer some very basic questions about the game: what will they be playing and what stories we will tell.

I started by reviewing people’s responses to my prospecti. The responses were pretty varied ranging from loathing to chomping at the bit to play.

The votes were:

• Take Back the Night: 4, 2, 5, 4, -2
• String Theory: 1, 5, -3, 2, 5
• The Abyss Stares Back: 3, 3, 2, 3, 3

Looking over the responses it was clear the “The Abyss Stares Back” was likely to be the winner but I wanted to know what people liked and didn’t like about the various concepts. Partly I want to avoid those elements that were disliked when we play the actual campaign but I also wanted to insert in those aspects of the other plots that were popular.

In talking to them in detail, some of the answers were quite surprising. Two players were interested in mystery and less in combat giving “Take Back the Night” low scores. That I expected. The negative (and low interest) responses to “String Theory” were more interesting. For one player (who unfortunately was unable to join the game) it just seemed too esoteric while another, my wife, felt there was a risk of backstabbing. This later comment helped me realize that I need to be clearer about such matters in my prospecti. String Theory’s betrayals were always going to be external to the group. I firmly believe group trust and cohesion is crucial for an enjoyable game.

With the core themes established, I then brought up some house rules. As I’ve discussed before I dislike the standard Morality system for World of Darkness. This time I decided I would replace it wholesale with the Madness rules from Unknown Armies. As quick overview, in Unknown Armies there are 5 kinds of madness stresses: Violence, Unnatural, Helplessness, Isolation, and Self. For each there varying levels of that stress called ranks. Killing someone might be a Rank 4 Violence stress while watching someone you love be tortured to death would be Rank 10, which is the highest level. As you succeed in checks against a certain stress, your character eventually becomes hardened against it. If you have four hardened marks against violence, killing someone no longer bothers your character. Conversely if you fail, your character freaks out, either running away, freezing or blindingly attacking. Your character also becomes unbalanced, slowly sliding to true madness.

I like the system because it allows for multiple axes of madness. You might fail a series of checks as the stress breaks your character's sanity. Or you might just slowly succeed and become a sociopath as violence and other stresses no longer matter to your character. After all, if you can watch a loved one be tortured to death without being bothered, how sane are you?

The group approved of the house rule and we moved on to deciding on how the group came together. For this I let the players discuss the possibilities while using the questions in FearTheBoot’s group template and questionnaire to steer the conversation to how the group became established and what purpose and shared history binds them together. I recently discovered this idea and I think it is an excellent way to ensure that you have a unified group at the start of the game. After decades of herding disparate characters together in game through somewhat arbitrary means, I enjoy the idea of the players doing that work for me. The questions in the group template help your players to better flesh out their existing relationships.

My group tossed around several ideas including a group of Federal Agents and the employees of a small private investigation company. Eventually they came to favor the PI’s because they wanted to start small but have the potential to expand into the wider conspiratorial world of the chronicle.

With that in mind they turned their attention to location. Some players wanted to be familiar with the location while others wanted to avoid any cities that were too large. I personally dislike running games set where I currently live. Since my players are from the West Coast, this limited us to a few mid range cities. I decided on Seattle from the ideas we came up with.

After this talk moved on to the history of the company and what roles people would play. My wife wanted to play the company’s owner with the idea that one of her detectives went missing and returned in a fashion that suggested something supernatural. One player wanted to play an ex-SEAL whose unit was eaten by monsters in Afghanistan. The group decided he might be a recent hire, brought on after things started to get weird.

Another player was thinking of playing a doctor or psychiatrist. After some more discussion, the group decided the missing detective was the company’s founder, Frank (last name to be determined later). The doctor was brought in to determine what happened to Frank and from there became attached to the company as a consultant. His own reason for being involved is the desire to learn the skills of the trade so he can gather evidence on his old employer, a nefarious pharmacology company which was doing something with possibly alien fetuses.

The final character is a jack of all trades, sort of an intellectual drifter who was hired to do office work but turned out to be too useful. He is also a second character who remembers the old (sane) Frank and thus has a vested interest in finding out what happened to his old boss.

After that we went to the standard character creation. As they were fairly experienced characters already (an ex-SEAL, a crack detective, and a skilled psychiatrist), I decided to given them 20 experience points to start with to help fill in the missing bits of their characters.

So after the first session we ended up 4 (fairly developed) characters:

• Shaw, an ex-police officer turned famous detective and owner of the agency
• Dr. Trevor Sorenson, a psychiatrist trying to take down an evil corporation
• Robert Mill, a jack of all trades who started as office help
• An ex-Seal sniper whose unit saw too much

We also created a short history of the company:

• Around 2003, Shaw and the jack of all trades character joined Frank at the company, as a partner and assistant respectively.
• Shaw has a big break, rescuing a kidnapped child in 2005. She becomes a minor celebrity.
• Business booms and Shaw takes over the firm.
• In 2008, Frank goes missing only to resurface a few weeks later, driven crazy and prematurely senile.
• Sorenson is brought in to check him out but no natural cause is found.
• A mysterious message appears referencing some of the crazy things Frank has been saying.
• Directed by message the detectives investigate some occult phenomenon.
• As things get dangerous Shaw becomes more hands on and hires new employees such as the ex-SEAL.
• In early 2010, the official chronicle begin.

I'm looking forward to seeing how this all turns out. I'm also curious to hear how you deal with bringing a group together.