Here is a question for you: can good things come out of confusion? I’m a fan of avoiding confusion. Ensure the game’s texture is understood. Clarify the purpose of scenes if things are a bit vague. Utilise a session zero so everyone is on the same page. We can go on and on.
Despite this, the session had a smidgeon of confusion, and neither of us understood it until it was over. It worked anyway. It was brilliant. It might even be said that the brilliance of it was born out of the underlying confusion.
As usual, these posts about the game don’t break down the plot of sessions; they’re more my takeaways of the experience. You can check out the GM’s (Neil @omnihedron.co.uk on Bluesky) view of events as well.
There was a plot?
The most critical observation of this session is that I had no idea there was a plot until the final moment. You’d think this was a bad thing. You played the whole session on such a grand miscommunication that meant you (1) weren’t engaging with the plot and (2) didn’t even know it was present?
I agree, without any context, this is a terrible thing.
The truth is, I didn’t know because I was totally focused on the personal elements introduced, and I just perceived moving them forward as the focus of the session, which was, by far, rewarding enough. The ‘absence’ of plot wasn’t perceived as negative; the rest of the session was so engaging. We’d established my dead wife’s father, a Benjamin Horne figure from Twin Peaks, was moving against my father, the town sheriff, and that seemed to be the conflict in play.
The plot seemed to be a corporate entity that was corrupting the area, but the snowstorm I thought was just colour, an attack of the winter spirits I didn’t attach to wider events, and I trekked up to the mountain to speak to the powerful spirit for my own purpose, and I had no idea it might have been in someone else’s mind that I was doing it to resolve the plot. I was surprised to find conclusions to a plot I hadn’t been aware of when I got to the top.
This is point of confusion number one.
The flashback forward
We opened with a flashback, which was interesting as I had no idea where it was going at first due to both working on the principle that the order of past events can be broadly correct (rather than creating some sort of military timeline) and the fact that it started in the bar with Bryce, the best friend from high school, randomly added in session one. I suspect also when I responded in an unexpected way to where are you next and I invented a whole High School football game, and Bryce got added as the coach.
At first, it was about adding more layers to Bryce around our characters’ two different approaches to their relationships with women. Bryce is becoming one of the most detailed characters in the game despite having very little screen time. He’s basically the high school quarterback superstar to Caleb’s running back, who, for reasons I’m not sure we’ve established, ended up staying in town (or maybe had a career and came back – all characters have a circa fifteen-year gap to fill that is pretty fluid). It then moved to a flashback of Caleb’s wife’s death, well, more the reactions at the ‘crime scene’.
When asked to react, play, and contribute to these things, I always try to find something that isn’t just the obvious, like Caleb clutches his wife’s body and cries. The emotional throughline is important, but if this were in actual fiction, it would somehow contribute to the story’s momentum. This sometimes works under pressure, sometimes it does not. Anyway, I used ‘Sense the True Form’ to see that our daughter was not just playing near her mother’s body but drawing a death sigil in the blood. Later, we established that this was not present at the crime scene, creating two versions of events. Anyway, it’s great how play evolves as people interact with the signals that are presented and add their own.
At the table, I perceived the flashback as a literal narrative construct, so I approached it as a means of establishing the truth of what happened in the play. As it played out, it turned out to be my character dreaming, which changed the texture somewhat, adding to the reliability or not of these natural events, which was better.
This was point of confusion number two.
All the interesting people
After painting a fascinating picture of Caleb’s parents in the first session, we began adding more detail. In this session, Nikkita, the reporter, gained more prominence, and Harland Smallpaw entered town, and we interacted more with Harry, my spirit mentor.
Before we comment on each, it’s worth putting down how I see NPCs, and it’s similar from a GM and player perspective. I see them as mechanisms to drive the protagonist forward. I know they exist for other reasons in role-playing games, but the most important one for me is how they exist to tell the main protagonist something about themselves. As a player, I think this is an interesting way to view them, as it’s the most informative from the perspective of creating and navigating scenes with them.
Nikkita is interesting for two reasons. I personally seem to like her for reasons I can’t fathom. I think it’s the small-town girl who stuck around and is trying to make a difference. It’s also because she challenges the concepts of trust in Caleb (low out of session zero) and leadership (zero out of session zero) as she probes who Caleb is and, by extension, a reality that exists outside her perception (a werewolf world rather than a superhero one). How does Caleb deal with that? He dealt with it this session via retinence and obfuscation, but as Nikkita investigates and Caleb changes, will that remain the same?
Harland Smallpaw is a different beast as he exists as multiple things at once. Smallpaw is a character who must be navigated, as he serves as a judge, which means he can pivot from Caleb’s biggest ally to the physical embodiment of the wider Werewolf world, bearing down on Caleb’s shoulders. He’s essentially the point man for the wider Werewolf world on how the concerns over his daughter will play out. He is interesting to interact with.
Harry is an interesting one as he’s acting a bit like a game tutorial for the wider Werewolf world. It sounds terrible, but it works because we make it part of the dynamic, and the truth is, Caleb and I are exploring our place in it. The challenge with it is there will come a point where the tutorial sort of ends, and instead of dealing with the past, the protagonist becomes more of an agent in the forward momentum. At this point, Harry will have to change or become superfluous. It’s also weird, since Harry is effectively part of my character sheet, but he hasn’t been mechanically represented yet.
It’s all an interesting play to find out journey.
The Moonborn mystery
Neil and I have very similar views on mysteries in the background: they exist to be exposed and change shape, not to remain mysteries for aeons. These things can go from being a strength to the character to chains that hold them back. What’s behind the mystery is meant to propel the character forward, not remain a perpetual sink hole. While people might not push the transition as fast as we do, the principle remains true.
So it was good that Smallpaw started revealing some of the events and struggles behind the black spot in Caleb’s memory about being a pack killer and his daughter being missing. Apparently, she is Moonborn because she was born on a full moon. Not to mention that her mother was born on a full moon as well, nicely explaining how she was always seen as special in ways many could not articulate. She is an event nexus that could go good or bad, and the pack may have decided to cut it off early. Anyway, that potential could go one way or another and Werewolf society is..interested.
Will her Moonborn status lead her down a dark or an enlightened path? Will the answer to that question be intrinsically tied to how the father-daughter relationship plays out? I mean, I can’t say for sure that’s where we’ll land, but it would be pretty crazy if it wasn’t.
We also established that my dead wife’s father is involved with the nefarious corporate entity, which is acting in the Werewolf world. Now, is he acting in the Werewolf world or is he just an acquisitive pawn? I guess we’ll find out at some point.
An issue of system apathy
Let’s just lay it out there. I’m suffering from severe system apathy. The system doesn’t excite me. It doesn’t engage me. I’m not sure it adds to the game much in a material way. As a system does matter person, this is a strange experience.
Is this the system’s fault? I have no idea, which is also probably telling. It’s just..present. I do suspect there are whole elements of it we’re not using, as there are terms and special words that have not come into play. This isn’t a call to bring them in; it’s just to establish the reality. I also suspect we drift toward the widest possible interpretation of things on the character sheet, to the point of AI-level delusion.
All of which is fine, but I am not sure the campaign is materially served by the system beyond say a version of Fate. Actually, the most interesting part was the character creation for the setting concepts, tribes, etc. It just forked in a different direction once play started.
It’s been a while since we’ve had a play experience where the system is so disconnected from the play experiences.
Messy can be good
The one thing I’d take from this session, aside from it being a great experience, is that messy can be good. Not total, crazy, cluster-fuck levels of messy, but the sort of constrained mess and confusion that comes from having the texture of the game primarily sorted.
It creates the positive confusion that sometimes arises when people send signals and others respond. That creative endeavour is inherently imperfect. Playing at the table is not a perfectly orchestrated process. We just put the tools in play to stop the cluster-fuck levels of game derailment and let the rest do its thing.
When everyone is on the same broad creative page and acting in good faith, the imperfect process is part of the excitement, as who knows what might result? But it’s likely to be great.
Next week on…
Writing this is a bit odd as the third session has already happened, but we did set out some goals. We’d be going to the carnival Caleb spent some time at on his odyssey of exile. We’d be using one of the characters established in the background to take Caleb on a spirit journey to get some answers.
This is what we need. The pivotal third session. I guess why third sessions often land as pivotal is a story for the next one, and if it lands like most do (oh come on, it’s happened, safe to say it did).