Listen to the Rain

We were in some kind of spaceship, which was still brightly lit and in good condition even though it had been uninhabited until we got there. I say we because there were a bunch of people with me, including schoolpsychnerd, though I don't remember exactly why we were there. I think we were sent in to explore an abandoned ship and discover what had happened to the crew, Space Hulk style, though we weren't wearing any Terminator armor or even had any weapons or armor at all that I remember. I don't remember any kind of major organization either. It was just a bunch of people in street clothes poking around through bulkheads and down corridors trying to figure out where everyone had gone.

While searching, the group that I and schoolpsychnerd were with heard some kind of telepathic broadcast, and we moved to investigate in that horror movie fashion where people just blindly walk into danger without even bothering to take proper precautions. We found a room that might have been a hydroponics station, and might have been a garden. Either way, it was filled with plants and the sound of flowing water, with a dais on one end. On the dais was a man in a grey robe, but he was subtlely...wrong. His skin was a little greyish, his eyes didn't reflect the light right, and his hair was suspiciously immobile as he moved. We all moved closer to him and he started talking, and in the manner of dreams I have no idea what he said, but there was some kind of altercation that ended with the man/alien/thing launching off a barrage of spines from his skin into the crowd. A couple of them hit schoolpsychnerd, and as I saw the blood splatter and the holes in her skin I thought, "That can't be right."

And then the dream rewound back to the beginning of the scene where we entered the garden room. However, this time as soon as I saw the strange man, I ordered the other people with us to open fire. They pulled out their guns--and of course they had guns, because what kind of complete idiot explores a space hulk unarmed?--and shot the man, who died in an explosion of ichor and chitin, and that's when they started coming out of the G-ddamn walls. We started a fighting retreat back to the central area, and that's when I remembered that I had had this near-exact dream before. schoolpsychnerd wasn't in it that time, but the same gleaming white walls and groups of people exploring a space hulk and horrible aliens murdering everyone was all the same, so I immediately started organizing the people, setting up patrol groups, making sure there were guards on chokepoints with overlapping fields of fire, that kind of thing.

And as I was doing that, the lucidity of realizing I had a previous dream and trying to change the current dream woke me up, so now I'll never know if my tactics would work better a second time around. On the other hand, the dream did convince me to head down to Dice Dojo and pick up a copy of Space Hulk after work. Their website says they still have a couple copies left.

Choose federal law enforcement. Choose the military. Choose NASA or the CDC. Choose lying to your superiors. Choose to ruin your career. Choose no friends. Choose divorce. Choose life through the bottom of a bottle. Choose destroying evidence and executing innocent people because they know too fucking much. Choose black fatigues and matching gas masks. Choose an MP5 stolen from the CIA loaded with glasers, with a wide range of fucking attachments. Choose blazing away at mind numbing, sanity crushing things from beyond the stars, wondering whether you'd be better off stuffing the barrel in your own mouth. Choose The King In Yellow and waking up wondering who you are. Choose a 9mm retirement plan. Choose going out with a bang at the end of it all, PGP encrypting your last message down a securely laid cable as an NRO Delta wetworks squad busts through your door. Choose one last Night at the Opera. Choose Delta Green.

— Anonymous

Yesterday was the end of my long-running Delta Green game. I didn't get to run through all the content I had planned for it due to scheduling conflicts, but in the end I only had to cut out two scenarios from the list of 16 I had planned out, which is pretty good. One of those scenarios did involve a trip to Carcosa that we never got to play out, and that was kind of sad because early on I ran F Cell through Night Floors (PDF warning), which is probably my favorite Delta Green scenario ever and involved F Cell investigating a building that was on the threshold of Carcosa and the extra floors of the building that only existed at night. I wrote another scenario based on The Repairer of Reputations, involving alternate realities(?), a wish-granter, and another brush with the entity Delta Green refers to as TATTERDEMALION. For the endgame of that minor plot, I was going to run F Cell through a heavily-modified The Past is Doomed, but I didn't get the chance. Ah, well. There's always more than could have been done.

TATTERDEMALION was my favorite recurring antagonist/thematic element, but F Cell also learned to hate MAJESTIC, who they ran into in "Puppet Shows and Shadowplays" before they had formally been inducted into the conspiracy; then again in "A Fall of MOONDUST," where they were actually captured by MAJESTIC before being broken out of military prison by the entity dubbed PARIAH, who they had previously had dealings with in a case in New York ("Water/Retention"); in "Convergence" they narrowly avoided being spotted in the aftermath of the barn; and in "A Victim of the Art," they bungled the case so badly that MAJESTIC rolled into the town, sealed everything off, and threw them out.

I also ran two long-form, more epic scenarios, one of which was stolen from Allan Goodall's excellent M Cell campaign--look at "Provenance," though my version, called "The Emperor is Missing," eschewed the End Time setting that Goodall used in favor of pulling from Cthulhutech and The Night Land--and the other of which was based on the Younger than the Mountains PbP game run on the RPG.net forums. And for my players (and anyone else who has time), I recommend both those links to see what was the same in our game and what turned out differently. "Younger than the Mountains" is especially good, though it does starkly illustrate how much more badass, eloquent, and tightly-plotted everything is when you have a whole day to think between posts.

I realized that even just counting published scenarios I have plenty more Delta Green left in me. I didn't get to finish what I wanted with TATTERDEMALION and I could easily run that arc again. I didn't even touch the Karotechia at all, and there's an entirely separate beginning scenario ("Dead Letter") I could use to induct a cell to do a more Karotechia-focused group. Or I could focus on the mi-go, starting with PX Poker Night (PDF warning), moving on to "A Night on Owlshead Mountain" and culminating in "A New Age." And that's not counting anything I want to write myself.

F Cell accomplished a lot in their career, and all with no deaths! Part of that is because I added a Luck mechanic (backported from Wild Talents) that they used to save their bacon occasionally--and I was totally vindicated when the 7th edition of Call of Cthulhu added a Luck mechanic--but a lot of it was just good planning on their part. Over the course of 14 operas, they got into combat situations maybe 6 times, and while FENTON did get shot in the head twice and clawed up by a byakhee once, FELICITY and FIONA escaped without any major injury. At least, not any major physical injury. Psychologically, well...FENTON read quite a lot of books, and at the end was working his way through a copy of Unaussprechlichen Kulten given to him by PARIAH and FIONA had had her digestive system replaced during "Convergence" and developed psychic powers after "The Emperor is Missing." Also, while FELICITY had a husband and a son, FENTON and FIONA basically only had each other as friends, meeting every Thursday to watch X-Files while FENTON ate take-out Thai food and FIONA didn't eat because she could only eat one small meal a day due to her hyper-optimized digestion.

Delta Green--not a job you want your kid to aspire to.

Every long game I run, I learn something. The Vampire game I ran in university taught me to set out expectations during character creation so I didn't end up with a group of mismatched yahoos with wildly different competencies and skillsets. The Exalted game I ran for years taught me how to float the plot over the sea of the character's past actions and the importance of not letting social skills devolve into which player was personally a more charismatic speaker. The Delta Green F Cell game taught me that often the most interesting part of the mystery isn't finding the clues, it's what the investigators do with the information they've found. This is the whole point of the Gumshoe system, but I started doing something similar, because when you're agents of the government you can't always just go in shooting, and when you work for Delta Green you have no indication of whether your bullets will even have an effect. Also, wild conjectures from incomplete information are fun, but players are perfectly capable of coming up with hilariously inaccurate conjectures from complete information as well. They don't need any extra help.

The ending was way better than I expected. No deaths, except FENTON's faithful Taurus that had been with the group since the beginning. An alliance forged between Delta Green and the Queen of Sarnath-in-exile. Next Opera might always be a tragedy, but for the moment, everything is coming up roses.

Be seeing you, F Cell.

Edit: The rules system I used for the game wasn't Delta Green's version of Call of Cthulhu, it was NEMESIS, available for free here, along with Cthulhulike to convert creatures from one system to the other.

marianlh's post about the cutest little rust monster reminded me of the webcomic Dark Places and how sad I was that by the time I had discovered it, it had stopped updating. Late in its run, though, there was an expository page that really caught my attention:



That comic really got my imagination firing, combined with Exalted setting elements and some concepts from the Avernum series of games, and it mixed into (I like to think) a great campaign pitch.

So, take that comic as the backstory, but replace the dwarves with the Mountain Folk (with artisans removed). The Fair Folk are obviously the Fair Folk from Exalted, who swept in from Faerie, threw down the kingdoms of men, and reigned in madness from their thrones of bone and crystal and shadows until they were overthrown. Subsequently, humanity grew more and more xenophobic and paranoid, eventually developing into the Empire from Avernum. With the discovery of the great caves far below the surface of the world, below even the furthest reaches that the Mountain Folk dare to go, the Empire had a place to dump its malcontents, its Faerie cultists, its political dissidents, and anyone else that the Imperial power structure thought were a threat to the survival of humanity. Player characters being notorious malcontents and threats, the game would start with them being dumped through the portal into Avernum.

PCs would be god- and elemental-blooded (descended from various spirits), fae-blooded (descended from the Lords of Madness and their human slaves), ghost-blooded, demon-blooded, and Mountain Folk exiles, who are exactly the kind of people who wouldn't fit in on the topside unless they slot into some highly-specific roles in society that suitable PCs probably don't come from. Put them down in Avernum, which has the standard D&D-esque paradigm of a society on the edge, with civilization as precarious points of light in the midst of a vast, unexplored wilderness filled with dangerous monsters and mysterious terrain, and let the adventures roll in.

I shall plan my cousin's escape from that Canton mad-house, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y'ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.
-H. P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Over Innsmouth

"The Shadow over Innsmouth" is one of Lovecraft's most famous stories, and it's not that hard to see its pull. A secret family heritage whose ramifications echo down through the ages. Factors beyond one's control that can change the course of one's life forever. Fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers whose deeds that cannot be escaped. A change that becomes increasingly welcome to its subject as time passes, even as others become more and more repulsed.

No wait, that's The Rats in the Walls. "The Shadow over Innsmouth" is literally about the One-Drop Rule. Dammit, Lovecraft.

Anyway, schoolpsychnerd and I went to go see Wildclaw Theatre's production of The Shadow over Innsmouth yesterday, and it was great and you should all go see it if you're a fan of horror or Lovecraft. I'm always a bit suspicious of any attempt to adapt Lovecraft to a non-literary format, both because so many previous attempts have been so terrible and because a lot of the greatness of Lovecraft is in the slow, creeping terror and the mindset of the narrator as the revelation comes upon them, but "The Shadow over Innsmouth" is actually a pretty good candidate for a more kinesthetic version--it has an extended chase scene, for example--and on the whole, the quality of the stage adaptation was pretty good.

Obviously there were more characters and dialogue than in the original story, but nearly everyone is taken out of brief mentions from the text and then expanded upon, like the curator of the Newburyport Historical Society, the purveyor at the Innsmouth grocery, or the narrator's cousin. There are a few additions and reshufflings as well, the primary one being that the main character is a woman, though I didn't feel like it had a significant effect on the changes made to the story. In addition, there were a few more characters added in Innsmouth, and a trip to Arkham carried with it a visit to a professor at Miskatonic University. Some of this did feel like padding--I wasn't particularly impressed with any of the conversations with the Marshes in Innsmouth, as it seemed like an attempt at comic relief that mostly fell flat--but stretching out the beginning did allow a much better sense of creeping horror than in the original source.

In the text, the vast majority of the time is spent in the exploration and subsequent escape from Innsmouth, with the body horror aspect only coming in at the end in the last chapter. In the play, the evidence that there is something odd about Olmstead starts quite early, from the brief mention of damage to her lungs in a near-drowning when she was a child and subsequent asmatic fits to the occasional dreams she has to the whisperings she hears when she views the pieces of Innsmouth jewelry held at Miskatonic University and the Newburyport Historical Society. The audience learns early that there's something odd about Olmstead and her cousin, and it is continually reinforced throughout the play. I especially liked the repeated phrase:

"Tell me--do you ever find it...difficult to close your eyes?"

and the way that flashbacks and dreams were added in, though I personally found it somewhat difficult to distinguish the two until about half-way through the course of the play.

I did feel the ending fell somewhat flat, though, about which more later.

The sound design was fantastic. Innsmouth had a constant sound of water, from the crashing of waves when Olmstead was talking to Zadok near the ocean to the sound of rain on the roof when she was staying in the inn. The whispering whenever she saw the odd jewelry was suitably creepy, and the way that the characters from Innsmouth talked... Honestly, I have to give them huge kudos for being able to do all that coughing, hacking, rasping, wheezing, and gurgling night after night. I played a Gangrel in a Vampire LARP once whose bestial deformity was an animalian voice, and as I discovered rather quickly, having to growl and rasp out everything I wanted to say made actually participating in the LARP quite difficult.

I also have to praise the stagehands. The actors did all the moving of props, and as the story went on the props came more and more to be moved by shrouded and shambling figures making disturbing coughing sounds as they worked. It did a great job of adding to the mood.

One of the text's major scenes, the conversation with Zadok Allen and the revelations about the past--and present--of Innsmouth was good, and the actor who played Allen did a good job, but I can't help but feel that some of the growing horror that pervaded the entirety of the play should have been introduced into this monologue. Olmstead treats Allen's conversation with disbelief and scorn--not surprising, considering the content--but Allen remains jovial throughout, and only attains a slight note of seriousness toward the end when he's describing how Obed Marsh took control of the town. Only when Allen sees that the other denizens of Innsmouth have come to punish his transgressions does he really turn serious, and then he gets grabbed and dragged away in a sudden mood whiplash--a few people in the audience even laughed. In the text, Allen starts out laughing, but becomes more and more serious as the conversation goes on until he's not laughing at all. Then he starts ranting and raving and eventually shrieks as he looks over Olmstead's shoulder, causing Olmstead to whip around and stare out to sea, but all he can see is the pounding of the waves. I would have preferred a more gradual build-up of the tension during the monologue. Maybe not to the level of the text, since the over-the-shoulder scene is difficult to do on the stage--though there were several robed and shrouded figures standing among the audience the served as the thing in the water Allen saw--but a bit more than the sudden change.

That's part of my complaint with the ending, and as some changes were made, this part will be spoilered: In the text, Olmstead escapes from Innsmouth by sneaking from street to street and then going along the old, abandoned rail line. In the play, this is suggested by the mortally-wounded grocer, but Olmstead goes back for her cousin. In the depths of the church of the Esoteric Order of Dagon, she finds her cousin tied up on an altar in the depths, meets Obed Marsh, who gives her a monologue about her ancestry and entreats her to join the Deep Ones beneath the waves. Then the shoggoth comes out.

I really didn't like that. Marsh's comics-style villainous ranting completely shattered the tension that had been building up to that point for me, and because of that, I just thought the shoggoth was kind of silly, even though it was pretty well staged. I was much happier with what followed--Olmstead's mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, who had been appearing in her dreams throughout the play, appeared in the flesh to invite her to join them, leading to a coughing fit, Olmstead being dipped in the water, and the final line of the play: the whispered, "I can breathe." It would have been just as effective if Marsh and the shoggoth had been eliminated entirely, and Olmstead had fainted when he cousin was carried away, and then the maternal line had come out. Their enticing whispers to join them were much more effective at conveying the attractiveness of swimming down to Cyclopean and many-columned Y'ha-nthlei than Marsh's raving.

Basically, the text makes this part about a thrilling chase scene and tension of wondering whether Olmstead will escape or not, and then changes gears and switches to body horror and transformation into something inhuman. The play skips the chase almost entirely other than escaping from the hotel and keeps the focus on the Innsmouth Look. That part I liked.

The play took different tactic with the body horror than the text, but I think the tension was actually better in the play, since the "who am I?" aspect is only present in the final chapter of the text. Since turning into an inhuman monster and welcoming it is the horror that moderns take out of the play now that no one worth listening to cares about miscegenation any more, emphasizing that aspect was a good change.

But despite those quibbles I have with it, overall The Shadow over Innsmouth is probably the best adaptation I've ever seen of a Lovecraft story to another format. It is definitely worth your money and your time.

So, last weekend schoolpsychnerd and had another party finally! And true to form, schoolpsychnerd couldn't decide on a day to hold it, and so I picked the weekend, and then it rained. Of course. If we had had the party on Sunday, it would have been a brilliant sunny day, and then we could have gone on our two-hour-long walk to get a new keyboard on Saturday instead, when it was probably ~8 degrees cooler and cloudy. Then again, maybe I wouldn't have spilled chrysanthemum liqueur on my keyboard if we had it on Sunday and we wouldn't have had to go for a walk at all on Saturday, which if you notice, would have been anticausal anyway.

I missed out on playing Betrayal at the House on the Hill, but I did get to try Elder Sign and...I thought it was pretty terrible, honestly. It was pure Ameritrash--a very strong theme, of investigators trapped in a museum and hurling themselves at the terrible horror from beyond the stars (the King in Yellow, in our case), but with mechanics that are kind of forced through the round hole to fit the theme. I mean, I suppose all of your actions being at the whim of the pitiless hand of the RNG does fit Lovecraft's uncaring universe and the lack of any special place for mankind, but I felt like there was very little I could do that would actually affect the outcome of the game other than occasionally add a couple more dice into the pool. And even that wasn't always good, because those dice were supposed to be more favorable results, and thus didn't have the tentacles "Terror" icon, but sometimes there were locations that required multiple Terror results and the extra dice didn't do any good. The strategy relied on determining where to allocate the results of dice after they were rolled, which is strategic, yes, but it wasn't very satisfying.

It was described to me as Arkham Horror-lite, which if that's true, makes me glad I've never played Arkham Horror. I'll stick to games like Android.

Unfortunately, as I said, I managed to spill alcohol on my keyboard, and despite schoolpsychnerd's heroic and nearly-successful attempts to repair it, it was too far gone. She managed to get some of the keys to work again, but there were still about half of them that were broken, including both enter keys, and the second attempt to fix all those caused it to give up the ghost completely. Fortunately, in a burst of foresight two years ago, I had deliberately bought a $19.99 keyboard, reasoning that before mechanically failure hit I would spill something on it and ruin it. And what do you know...

Anyway, we ended up going on a two-hour walk trying to find a new keyboard. First to Target, which had a spot for the wired keyboards but nothing actually in stock, and then to Radio Shack, except Google Maps listed them as seven blocks south of where they actually were, so we had to walk that distance and then all the way back home. On the other hand, we did pass by Golden Pacific, which is good because we needed another bag of rice, and because I got to walk through Little Saigon around Argyle Street. As I told my father when I called him for Father's Day, I was walking through a place where I looked different than the average person, I couldn't understand most of what people were saying, and I couldn't read half the signs. I felt right at home.

We'll have to go back. There were a ton of restaurants I didn't know were there that we have to try.

Just beat Doom 3 around an hour ago so I figured, why not give my thoughts?

( Contains spoilers for Doom 3 and System Shock 2. Somewhat lengthy )

Whew, that was long. Maybe I should go back and do something similar for Arcanum in full. Anyone interested?

Soundtrack for this entry provided by The Dark Side of Phobos.

I beat System Shock II finally. After doing so, I can see why people keep voting SHODAN as one of the best computer game villains of all time. Just the dialogue alone is awesome.

Lo-lo-look at you, Hacker. A pa-pa-pathetic creature of meat andbone, panting and sweating as you ru-run through my corridors-s.H-h-how can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine?

Best FPS/RPG hybrid ever. Better than Deus Ex, and that's saying something. I hope they do make the System Shock III that I've heard might be in the works.

I've been chosen to learn how to touch up photos because the paper is short-staffed. They have enough people to cover normal times, but not enough to cover any time someone wants to go on vacation. Right now, it's been a lot more stuff about file management than photos, because one of the primary jobs of the photo department before we switched to the new system was looking for photos for people. A lot of the older people in the paper haven't yet gotten completely used to the idea that they can search for the photos themselves. It wouldn't be a change to my current job description, since I'd only be doing it when one of them is gone. It'll be useful to learn photo editing skills.

Up to days of the week/month in Japanese. 日曜日, 月曜日, 火曜日, 水曜日, 木曜日, 金曜日, and 土曜日. After that, forms of address.