Dirkterwalde: First Session (a welcome and bad dreams of a dark future)

Alright, I got to do those session reports. They'll be as detailed as I dare them to be (and remember it ...), spoiler free (as the players will most definitely read them) and with some musings about the game at the end. Most part of the first session was spend for character generation ...

System: CJ Carella's WitchCraft

Setting: Dirkterwalde, a mysterious backwater-town in East Germany at the end of the 90's (see here for the campaign set-up and here for an introduction to Dirkterwalde).

Characters (see here for a full description of the cast): Vale Viem (witch and owner of a small cabaret), Jan Jester (mundane sausage-salesman and a thief) and Gabriel Zöller (powerful psychic and a nerd).

Session 1 - Welcome to Dirkterwalde

The year is 1999 and it's Tuesday, the 7th of July. A mild summer day, if you believe the records. Nothing really interesting was happening in the news, many people were on vacation. All in all it was a really unspectacular summer in East Germany in general and in Dirkterwalde especially. I would hazard that on a day like this people actually thought more about either seeing Notting Hill again or checking out The Matrix instead (because everybody was talking about it) than about the upcoming Millennium and the end of the world (or other dark topics).

It's a nice evening. Jan and Gabriel decide after training (both frequent the same dojo) to go for a beer and see, as they often do, the evening performance at Madame Viem's Varieté Obscure. Lots of beautiful young women, reasonable prices and it was just a stone's throw from the dojo (it didn't take them long to become regulars).

This is where the 3 characters meet each other. The only event this evening worth mentioning was a poor old Sorbian woman that had managed to get into the Obscure to sell her trinkets to the customers. All three bought a small trinket before the woman was ushered out politely.

They stay until the end of the evening's entertainment and part ways after that, doing whatever business they got left for the day and went to bed after that. As they fell asleep and entered their dreams, a Willpower-check was in order. Gabriel was the only one succeeding and thus the only one being aware that he's dreaming. Jan and Vale accepted the dream as reality (what one might call "dream-logic" worked for Jan and Vale, but not for Gabriel).

A strange and frightening dream followed.

In their dream they were all back at the Varieté Obscure. Gabriel in front of it, Jan and Vale inside. The Obscure and the street going past it looked ruinous and deserted. There was no electricity, just a diffuse flickering light brightening the clouded night in the west of town.

When Gabriel saw a strange group of people with torches coming down the street towards him (they'd looked like Neanderthals in medieval armor) he decided to enter the theater. He heard someone talking, went for the noise and discovered Jan and Vale discussing their situation. Since he believes them to be part of his dream, he chats them up as if they were old friends, uses his abilities to ignite candles and makes them fly around, stuff like that. Jan and Vale on the other hand accept this to be as it should be anyway, since they are not aware of their dream-state.

Now, them talking to each other startled something on the floor above them and they decide to follow that noise. A door leading to a hallway with some stairs to the first floor is by the bar. Jan takes the front. He thinks a gun would be helpful in this endeavor and discovers he's already carrying one. Vale got a sword the same way: it has been there all the time.

They open the door to the hallway leading to the stairs to hear more noise, but this time from the kitchen to their left and confront some small and ugly humanoids with sharp teeth and pointy ears that were on their way out through an exit to a back alley. They snarled and hissed at the group and vanished with the words:

"This ain't your realm no more, humans. It is Zardok's realm now and you are not welcome!"

Closer examination of the kitchen revealed a ghastly surprise in the defunct cold store: eight dead humans, hung up on their ankles like cattle. The stench was revolting and just as Jan was about to close the door again, the corpse closest to him turned his head and lifted an arm to grab him. He closed the door so much faster after that and took care that it stayed shut ...

Examining the first floor they found the first rooms empty and demolished. One showed traces of old blood, another one looked like an improvised camp site. In the fourth room they discover a suicide and a note with the sad tale of a girl that hoped to get a chance and the world disagreeing. Vale checked if she knew the girl, but didn't recognize her.

Meanwhile they hear someone calling for attention down on the street. An old man in his pajamas who seems lost. They identify him as one of the guests of the Obscure just a few hours ago and think that he, too, might have bought a trinket from that old lady.

Things escalate pretty fast from that point on. The man gets attacked by those small creatures from the kitchen (or very similar ones). The group tires to help. After some shots are fired, a dragon makes an appearance and tries to burn the old man, Gabriel and Vale. Both characters wake up before dying in the flames. Jan fights some of the zombies that managed to break free from the cold store until they manage to overbear him and he, too, wakes up before it gets worse.

The next morning begins for Vale with the arrival of a new girl seeking shelter in the Obscure. The session ends with Vale recognizing the young as the suicide from her dream ...

Thoughts

I was quite happy with this first session. It seems like not much is happening, but it was more important to give the players a feeling for the setting and give them a chance to meet and establish some connection between them. What I wrote about WitchCraft the other day still holds true: very fast, very flexible.

In this first session I only got a glimpse of how powerful those characters really are. Most tasks didn't pose a problem and it became quite difficult to produce some tension because of that. At least within surroundings the players believed to be controllable (that is: reality). That changed quite a bit in the dream sequence as soon as those corpses in the fridge started to move ...

Most fun was the fact that Jan and Vale where immersed in the dream and Gabriel wasn't. Gabriel started to treat the others as figments of his imagination and found lots of opportunities to tell them about his psychic powers, demonstrated them even (which got quite important in the next session and helped getting the group together), while the others tried to find ways to use the dream world to their advantage. A fun first session ...

This got rather long. I'll try to keep the following reports somewhat shorter :)

Dirkterwalde: The Cast

Never done something like a session report on the blog, but it needs to get done anyway, so I decided to give this a shot. And maybe it's a good idea to give you all an impression of what our games are like when I'm the DM (you know, because I talk a lot about how to play the game and all that ...). After introducing the campaign last week, it's now time to write a few words about what did actually happen at the table. Enjoy!

Let me start with the group of characters the players created:

The Cast

Vale Viem (Lesser Gifted)

Resident of Dirkterwalde and a witch. She is owner of a successful little burlesque cabaret called Varieté Obscure. It's a front for her coven and helps sheltering young potential witches that got into trouble (shows are on Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays).

Emilie Autmn's live performance was an inspiration [source]

She's famous for her burlesque sword-dance performance, quite wealthy and well connected. The social hub of the group.

Favorite line: "It's not a brothel, you morons!"

Jan Jester (Mundane)

Also lives in Dirkterwalde. He's a part-time sales representative for a local meat factory, but his real calling is robbing those who got rich after the fall of the former German Democratic Republic. A splendid specimen, rather athletic and a competent fighter, he's generally referred to as "Captain DDR".

Captain DDR - actually not what the character looks like ...
(with a little help of HeroMachine, the Gimp and Inkscape)

He's shocked by nothing, never surprised and never out of cigarettes. The supernatural powerhouse of the group.

Favorite line: "I can do that." 

Gabriel Zöller (Gifted)

Unemployed psychologist fresh back from university, lived until recently in his parents' basement in Dirkterwalde. Favorite past-times are Ultima Online: The Secong Age and Kendo. So yeah, he's a nerd (and before it was popular, too).

Opinions differ, but I believe he looks somewhat like this guy [source]

He's also a powerful psychic and focused a large part of his studies on the occult. He's the supernatural powerhouse of the outfit (and somewhat of a mummy's boy).

Best line: "Mother!? NOOOOO!"

Kirsten Schneeberg (Lesser Gifted)

A young female inspector from the big city, hiding in Dirkterwalde from her past. She's a troubled character and a loner. Her powers give her visions and tell her if people lie. Very unpleasant, in her line of work and often enough she drowns her nightmares in booze and smokes too many cigarettes.

She's that kind of girl [source]

She just recently discovered that there are others like her and is eager to learn more. The groups connection to law enforcement.

Best line: "His mother?! NOOOOO!!"


Pepe (Lesser Gifted)

A tough gypsy and a trafficker. Earns his keep by smuggling illegal goods across the German-Polish border, ca. 80 kilometers east of Dirkterwalde. His powers allow him the observation of places far away and some protection.

I imagine him to be a somewhat sleazier
version of this guy [source]

He had never heard of the town before, but now he's knee-deep in supernatural events, confronting them head-on and with an attitude. The group's connection to organized crime.

Favorite line: "Got some booze, bro?"


That's it, so far

I really need to keep those things short. Next up will be the session reports themselves, with dark dreams of the future, a solar eclipse threatening the mystical protection of the city, mysterious strangers and some excommunicated up-to-no-good hillbilly Nazi Teutonic Knights. This should have been a horror campaign, fitting this time of the year.

And I tried. I really did.

Introduction to some German Urban Fantasy Storybox set in the 90' (WitchCraft, a Campaign and how to feed a Brain)

So I'm finally back to DMing a game and we already have 3 sessions under our belt (session reports will follow the next few days). Although I miss playing D&D*, it was time to give another game some room at the table: C. J. Carella's WitchCraft. Here is an exclusive behind the scenes of my new campaign.

Preparation

In the beginning were the X-Files. The girlfriend had never seen any of it and i had never seen all of it and in order. So we started with season one (which is 20 years old now, by the way!) and loved it. It was the start for a healthy diet of TV-shows, movies and music that got me back in the mood for some Urban Fantasy. Here is what's what and why (a selection):

The X-Files: Gotta love that show. 20 years old and still some of the strongest TV you can get. The first 4 seasons are pure gold, in my book. You get a supernatural twist to almost every topic still in the news today (dangers of artificial intelligence, factory farming, genetic engineering, war, capitalism, media, you name it, they probably made an episode about it). That is scary because it means that nothing has really changed for the last 20 years (or we really believed it back then to be science fiction, to see now that they were right all along and I can't decide if that's even scarier). It's a strong theme and one of the reasons to put the campaign into the nineties. All those alien mythology shenanigans are just a bonus (and entertaining at that).

Also quite refreshing was the fact that they stayed true to the shows basic premise for as long as possible and that means, it's a "show about two FBI agents who investigate supernatural phenomena" and not a "show about two FBI agents who investigate supernatural phenomena and the stories of their past, their mothers past, their boyfriends erectile problems, social misadventures, blah blah, blah" like you see it in almost EVERY TV-show nowadays. I blame Buffy. Anyway. Doesn't happen here (that much).

Twin Peaks: There's no X-Files without Twin Peaks and we soon enough started (re-)watching it, too. It is a strange beast, to say the least. A small town with lots and lots of dirt behind closed doors, corny music, even more corny drama and some supernatural threat that stays in the background, humming like an angry wasp. Add some early nineties visuals, great humor, a lot of weird, all that with a great cast and you are in for a treat. And it was helmed by David Lynch, no less.

Great potential for a show and excellent execution, way ahead of it's time. Until they killed it by solving the mystery of Laura Palmer's death in the beginning of the second season. For the campaign I took the idea of a small town in the woods with lots of mystery and secrets in it. I'll also try to remember that strange unexplained events and an eerie atmosphere go a long way to make a memorable story.

American Horror Story: If you need an example how too much of a good thing might be a bad thing, American Horror Stories does the job. What you get is a serialized amalgamation of all horror tropes sorted by sub-genres (so far: haunted house in Season 1, a (religious) mental institution in the 60's in season 2 and a coven of witches in season 3, next up is a freak show ...). Mode of story-telling: if it could turn worse, it will turn worse. All the time. And it doesn't really work, as far as drama or effective story telling go. Lots of ideas to steal, though. And I love those opening sequences (link to youtube):

Cabin in the Woods: Great and fun story and an unusual view behind the curtains. Not alone that the movie's basic premise works great for one-shot horror adventures, it also reminded me that a strong mythology (like in the X-Files) is a must have for every attempt to create a serialized story (The Truth is out there!). Because, you know, it's where it all makes sense (even if it doesn't).

John dies at the End (movie and books): If H.P. Lovecraft had written his books in the 21st Century, something like this might have been the result (or, the other way around, if Pynchon had a love-child with Philip K. Dick and that had decided to channel H. P. Lovecraft ... you get my meaning). Strong basic theme, filled to the brim with great ideas (how to open a ghost door with a phantom hand, how you couldn't remember someone if he was annihilated out of time and space ... and how such an act will influence reality, even how to implement Quake 2 in your horror scenario ...). I can't recommend it high enough.

Arvo Pärt (music): A brilliant modern composer. Great inspirational themes. Check it out (link to youtube):

Ghosts I-IV (Nine Inch Nails): A model project in modern music publishing (public domain, creative commons, all that jazz) and a showcase what industrial music is capable of. Complex, creative and  at times quite haunting. Very inspiring. If you don't know it already, give it a shot (link to youtube):

Now I needed a game to emulate all those sources and inspirations into a campaign  ...

The System

I always had a weak spot for Vampire: the Masquerade, you know, the prototype of what one would call a "storyteller" role playing game today. We'd had some great times with the system, but in the end it had run it's course and we moved on. It wasn't until, I don't know, 2012 maybe, that I read somewhere about WitchCraft and that it's not only free but also that it's the game V:tM always had tried to be. Three sessions in I have to say: it doesn't disappoint.

WitchCraft is quite fast and flexible, so it allows for improvisation, while keeping the transgression between idea and system nice and smooth. The assumptions and underpinnings they set for the gaming world are (especially those about spirituality/the supernatural) in such a way that they work fine with almost everything you might throw at it (from Paranormal Activity, over Walking Dead, the X-Files or Planet Terror to Halloween and Cabin in the Woods, you name it). It's part of the Unisystem line of role playing games (famous for Conspiracy X, All Flesh Must Be Eaten and many others) and to my surprise, it totally works for an Urban Fantasy setting I had in mind (and for almost anything else, really).

I believe it to be superior to the World of Darkness books and rules and even if I were to play again in the Vampire universe, I'd use WitchCraft/Unisystem as the engine of choice, as all of the concepts are easily enough ported and the system is less flawed. Another plus is that WitchCraft reminds me of Cybepunk 2.0.2.0. and I love that game ...

Anyway, WitchCraft is not perfect, as story-driven games so often tend to be. The advice for DMs is mostly bad (like telling a DM to fudge die results to help the "story" or how to railroad players, all that bullshit) and although it has some NPCs, stories and examples, it lacks stats for the most basic creatures (needed a dog, couldn't find one, etc.). There are a lot of ideas and concepts I might have to import to make the game tick just right (random encounters/contents I miss the most). So about that ...

The Storybox

The Barking Alien came up with the term some time ago. For me, it makes a lot of sense. When a game has a heavy focus on simulating the environment (like D&D does), a sandbox is one way to use such an engine. But in a more story-driven game system, the sandbox approach will fall somewhat flat, because the characters have a very different connection to the game world.

To give but one example, it is quite easy in WitchCraft to create a filthy rich cocaine addict with a small army of undead to protect himself from some angry Colombian drug traffickers he crossed a few years ago. And that's a starting character, just to be clear. Those characters are have very deep roots from the very beginning, which is something D&D characters might get with time, but won't have (need?) with Level 1.

So instead of shifting the world politics, powers and hidden treasure a campaign consists of when building a sandbox, you shift the social surroundings, dark powers and hidden secrets the characters might connect to** when building a storybox. That's not to say that there isn't a huge overlapping area in between, but the focus shifts somewhat.

This the story-pieces I got so far:

• We are in the year 1999 (07/07/1999, to be precise) to see it ain't that different from today. It's easy to google, to get information and pictures and whatever was news that day. Even the weather of a specific day in a specific area, if you want to. TV-programs, trends, advertisements. Easy to access, easy to twist, close enough to memory to remember and connect. The looming Millennium. So much more. 1999 is a very good year to start a campaign.
• We are in a small town (pop. of ca. 35.000) called Dirkterwalde in East Germany, somewhere between the Spreewald and the German/polish border. So we have organized crime from beyond the border, a Sorban minority, a very weak economy and the infrastructure that goes with it (to name but 4).
• The town has a castle and a historic district, linking it to the Dark Ages. If something like this can be preserved, some local traditions and folklore will continue to have strong roots in the population, too.
• This being Germany, the town will have some history with the Third Reich, of course. It is quite the popular trope, of course, to have the Nazis dabble with the supernatural (and fail) and it has great potential for some seriously dark horror. I have some ideas already ...
• It's located in the former German Democratic Republic (that had lasted until 1989), so there's a lot of history, too. In this campaign the Stasi was relentless in hunting, dissecting and destroying the supernatural. Dirkterwalde became a safe haven for many during that time.
• For the supernatural I got room for every and all ideas I want to realize in an Urban Fantasy setting. I got Grimms' Fairy Tales, elements from the World of Darkness (mostly closer to what they quote, to be fair) and Cthulhu, some Dark Fantasy (the players already had a glimpse into a dark future where a dragon and some Zombies had roamed a destroyed version of Dirkterwalde ...). Some classic witch coven with all the politics that go with it. And the town itself is a mystery, the reason for the magic obscuring it's location lost in the Middle Ages. Layers and layers of mystery and enough opportunity to stumble across some of them, even to be part of some of them.
• There are lots of interesting locations and scenes to connect to, like a disco, some theaters, bars, restaurants, the castle, museums, a stadium, a local newspaper, some punks, incompetent cops and whatever else I can come up with to put some life into this little town. 

Somewhere in there are the stories of the characters, connecting, dissolving, triggering their personal interpretation of what is happening around them with as much freedom as I could give them ...

Still a lot of work ...

Those thoughts, links and ideas are, of course, just the campaigns bare bones. And there's still a lot to do. But since we've had already 3 sessions and people keep coming back, I'm confident when I say that whatever I wanted to get done six weeks ago when we started, will get done in the near future :) On my to-do list are the following items:

• A map of Dirkterwalde and surroundings (80 % done, but not finished).
• Session reports 1, 2 & 3 (I want them finished before our next game, which would be in two weeks).
• Re-reading Violence The RPG for it's urban random generation tables (wanted to write a review, since it is a very interesting game (and still free, so go and check it out ...) and I need to loot some of it's mechanics for our next game ....
• Find a way to build NPCs fast, easy and random.
• Reread Cyperpunk 2.0.2.0. to search and exploit possible connections.
• Hunting down hard copies of those Unisystem-books ...

That's it so far. Now I should stop writing about it and start doing it! That and more work for the Goblintribe Simulator and something else I need to get written soon ...

* Main reason for this blog to exist is to come to a point where my own Frankenclone matures up to a point where I would be able to launch a major campaign. It's problematic ...
** I wrote about this a few weeks ago. For those interested enough in following my train of thought into that direction, feel free to read the whole story here.

Narrative Control vs. D&D

More posts about the Analogue Goblin-Tribe Simulator will be up very soon (as I have some free time to get things DONE right now), but since we just started the WitchCraft game I talked about almost a year ago, I'd like to share some (yeah, well, I tried to keep it short) of my observations about that in between ...

WitchCraft is a storyteller-game, D&D not so much

While there are several notable attempts to establish some point-buy systems for D&D (starting with the rule of "4D6, drop lowest"), none of them really went beyond giving players some more room in deciding what they're going to play*, because D&D works within a very strict class-system that's way to narrow to allow for a completely unlimited character creation as it is the case with, to name one example, WitchCraft.

The main difference here is the narrative control a player is allowed to have and the impact it has on the game. With D&D the first real compromise you have to make as a player is what function you're willing to play in the group**. This can be a good thing since it (potentially) connects a character to a group. It can be a bad thing if a DM is not very clear that this is how it goes down. You just can't "do everything, because it's a role playing game" as everyone and their grandmother would like you to believe. No, when you're playing games like D&D, you're allowed to move your pieces in a (more or less) very strict game, with freedom only within what the rules allow and the illusion of freedom for everything else. Freedom to choose, for instance, always goes along with the awareness of the possibilities. If a game just doesn't care to produce this kind of awareness, it won't be big about giving players a true choice.

On the other hand one could argue that a more structured game produces fairness and allows a focus on what should be important in the game. And yet, it's not rules that produce or guaranty fairness and "what the game is about" is still (for good reasons) a matter of debate.

But a neglect of narrative control and a narrowing of choices are a merit of their own, if all can agree of what is to be achieved in any specific version of the game. Rules-light variants of The Game, while still being structured, produce a different kind of freedom (less narrative control, more freedom of ... let's say: expression?) because of their lack of rules.

It is something a group can easily agree upon (and it is somehow part of D&D's popularity, up to the bloated straitjacket that is 3E and maybe even beyond that). It's not a bad thing either, but it's gets problematic as soon as it's believed to be the only option. As always, it's a lack of awareness that produces dis-harmonies, so to say.

So what is narrative control?

When I went and proposed to play a game of WitchCraft until I get to a point where I believe I'm able to DM a game of D&D again***, I got 3 Players confirming for the first session: a Newbie, a Veteran (that also is a regular in my group) and a player new to our group that had some experience with other systems (more like D&D, storyteller games not so much). The best mix I could wish for in the argument I'm trying to make here.

This is what they got to work with: A small strange town deep in the woods somewhere in East Germany and near to the polish border (Dirkterwalde, see link above for more information). The year is 1999, the genre is Urban Fantasy (I'm talking Twin Peaks, X-Files and, to some extent, American Horror Story: Coven here). They are free to build their own characters as long as they fit into this setting.

This is what they did:

The Newbie

Being completely new to role playing games gives a unique perspective to the hobby. A conscious DM will use this to his and the players advantage, because whatever approach a DM is choosing when explaining the system, will stick and inform later decisions of said player. So I tell her that the most important thing is to have an idea what person she wants to play, then we distribute the points she got in a way that makes the idea work.

There are 3 basic categories to choose from: Mundane, Lesser Gifted and Gifted (you might want to call them "classes", but they really just shift the available points on a scale from no magic to magical creature). She opts to play a lesser gifted witch, when asked for reasons to live in this town, she offers that her character somehow gives shelter to girls in trouble and she wants to have something burlesque to the character. In the end we agreed that her character owns a small Vaudeville theater that acts as a front for her coven to shelter young discovered witches until they know what's what.

Before she even started to distribute points she had a pretty clear picture of what she was aiming for. Now it was important to stress that for expressing her ideas in a character sheet she needs to spent the points to make it happen. It's where either the player or the DM gets narrative control. She wants a contact in the coven that helps her every now and then? The points she spends decide how effective that contact will be. And so on. She spends points on resources, so her etablissement is quite successful, her character is an artist with a specialization on dancing with blades, so her character can deliver on stage and gets a combat skill in there, too. She also spends the points to get that contact working.

The result is a character with great potential for a DM that does what the player wanted it to do. She has narrative control in the things she cares about, is connected to the setting in a way that allows for some stories that fit the character (a troubled-young-witch-of-the-week-feature would be my first thought ...), which is some sort of narrative control in itself, and offers a social scenario where the characters could have met. I couldn't have wished for a better result and she's quite happy with it, too.

There is one other form of narrative control she exercised: her character is an orphan and single with no children. No emotional links a DM could use against her. Good for her ...

The Veteran

This is a great example of someone that has played his share of different role playing games, because he did what all skilled players with some experience under their belt do: he covered all bases and formed a narrative around it, then he looked for weaknesses in the system to exploit them. It was a bit scary to behold.

Playing a Mundane was his first choice and a good one, at that. As far as points go, all three choices are pretty balanced, so it will be a character that works within the setting without feeling inferior****, plus it cancels the need to learn more than the basics of the magic system WitchCraft offers. He just needs to know how to protect himself from magic and how to hurt stuff (basically).

We wrote a few mails back and forth to discuss the specifics: His parents are already dead (anyone else seeing a pattern here?) and he has loose contact to a cousin that dabbles in the arcane (not a bought contact, but a connection to the supernatural for me to do with as I please: his decision to leave narrative control in my hands). He has a military background and we agreed that he had been in the Nationale Volksarmee (links to the English wiki-page) around the time the German Democratic Republic fell apart. In 1999 he's a sales rep for a sausage factory, living in Dirkterwalde and travelling East Germany. A job he uses as a cover for his real calling: he's a cat burglar, stealing from corrupt politicians and others that made a great deal of cash utilizing the German reunification to their advantage (and the disadvantage of others ...), giving all the money away for charity (again, he leaves narrative control in my hands: all he needs for his character is the skills a cat burglar has to have, not the money, nor the criminal connections ...). He also recently joined a Dojo to learn Karate.

You see, his approach is totally different to the one the newbie player chose. His character is ready to function in the game. He doesn't need narrative control because he's able to face what I'm going to throw at him. The areas where he exercised narrative control, where those he thought important in ensuring that he got the character he had in mind, leaving almost no room for me as a DM to threaten his character with something he decided to have on his character sheet. He wants to be a free agent in the story he's a part of and achieved exactly that.

Of course his character was finished when he arrived at the game.

The New Guy

Entering a campaign as a new player and complete stranger is always somewhat difficult. Knowing a DM is half the battle, in my opinion, so there is that. Add a completely new system with a different gaming philosophy than what you are used to and narrative control is the least of your concerns during character creation. And yet, there is some interesting symmetry to his choices that express exactly the dilemma I described and produce a well crafted character that has to ignore narrative control.

His choices: He wants to play a gifted psychic (so of the three choices the game offers, every player chose a different one). His character had pretty early discovered that he was different and had played it close to the chest. His way of  finding out what exactly was different about him was not by reaching out, but by studying the human mind instead. So he graduated in psychology and learned as much as possible about the occult. As of yet (before the first session) he is completely oblivious of others with the same or similar powers. Being poor, he had to move back to his parents after finishing his studies. So he's fresh back in town with nothing to do but playing computer games (before they were cool) and starting to learn Kendo (in the same Dojo the veteran's character is frequenting ...).

So yeah, it's a Nerd.

Maybe not a picture the player might agree upon,
but it's definitely the right direction [source].

A cynic might say this character is the perfect victim. Or it's Carrie waiting to happen. Either way, it's a fantastic character in that the lack of narrative control (intentionally or not) in nearly all aspects of the character's background should give a good player the opportunity to get a feeling for the new group, the new DM and the new system just because he's the perfect sounding board for all those things.

What does it mean for D&D?

It is quite difficult to see how this could work in D&D. The main reason for that is how players in WitchCraft are able to create a character by using the setting. They know the 1999's and the cultural background (or may google them) and have a fair understanding of what Urban Fantasy might be, so they can make (somewhat) informed decisions about what they want to play. I really like this kind of direct connection between a player and a setting and WitchCraft really does a fine job in facilitating this.

There are fantasy role playing games out there that use point-buy-systems  that work just fine (D6 Fantasy comes to mind) and don't define themselves as storyteller systems (D6 at least is older than the term itself ...). But is something like this even possible for D&D? The short answer: not the way it is done in WitchCraft and similar role playing games. One good reason: the discrepancy in power-levels between normal folks and high level heroes are far to wide a gap to produce a dramatic pressure strong enough to make it count in a game of D&D. Sure, you could do something like getting the mother of a level 25 character kidnapped, but D&D as a system has no connection to drama like that. It would be ruled with either a subsystem or just playing on a players real-life sense for what's appropriate.

The way I see it, a level 1 character in D&D doesn't need more than a club and an attitude. Character-development is something that isn't done during character creation, but by playing the game. The stories that are being told are not serialized events within a structured narrative, but picaresque stories of epic random fantasy that also evolve from the game. And this is what narrative control shifts to in D&D: it's a simulation of all the parts that, when used and interpreted, will result in a story, with the players and the DM working different parts of the machinations that make the game tick. You can play D&D without ever telling a story about your character, but as soon as you play the Game, a story is being told same goes for the DM that just starts with the dungeon crawl and nothing else).

*HackMaster (4E) is the only exception I know of, that bypassed this in allowing for a huge variety of results on the one hand and a  Drawback/Quality-system with an option to buy ability score points, etc. to an extent where class wasn't that important anymore (which means AD&D could be able to achieve an effect like this, too), but still, there's this huge distinction: Narrative Control (see above).

**In accordance to your possibilities, of course, but since there is such a huge variety of rules how to create those stats, the real first choice is the class.

***As in I'm still in the process of building my own Frankenclone and don't wanna do it while we're already playing  D&D(especially because world-building is next in line ...).

****Man, I need to write about this character at some point. His stats are that good, we started to call him "Captain DDR" pretty much from the beginning ...

Dirkterwalde - Urban Fantasy Setting (WitchCraft)

Halloween is approaching and I'm about to prepare a few sessions of an urban fantasy setting I was thinking about end of last year. Got already 2 players interested, so that's something. And since I'm blogging now more or less on a regular basis and the season is quite fitting, I'd say I share my ideas for the setting*. I intend to use the WitchCraft rule book for this endeavor (which is still free, by the way), so you can expect some NPCs for that game in the near future. But first some ideas about the setting:

Dirkterwalde

The year is 1999. This small town exists somewhere in east Germany. That's as precise a location in space and time as anyone would be able to give. Even google maps fails:

The day they shot the area where this town is supposed
to be, they got clouds instead...

You won't find it on old maps, too. The reason for that is some strange magic that was, if the legends are believed, always there. But what at first was only some weird and misdirecting magic where people got lost in the narrow alleys of Dirkterwalde, was blown to protect the whole area just before communism and the cold war threatened all occult communities in this part of Germany.

Maybe it wasn't the first time most of the known Covens would work together to protect their own, but it certainly was a well kept secret that they did and how they did it. And then the DDR stopped existing in 1989 and the world changed again. Now this town, with all it's history and all it's forgotten secrets, is facing a new challenge. Something is stirring in the dark and some gifted already start to feel it's presence.

Impressions of a very old town**

Castle Hundseck is right above Dirkterwalde. It was used for all kinds of
purposes in it's time, from hospital and asylum to public administration,
today, after some heavy renovations, it's a private elite school . (source)

An abandoned Russian military base nearby. 

More from the same military base (source for both).

The town has an active subculture...

Historical inner city (source)

Somewhere in the outskirts of town.

Just loved this guy in American Horror Story
and intend to use him...

This town will have a lot of history. It has seen two world wars and has deep roots in the middle ages. I'm pretty sure some Nazis did bad things here, too. And then there is the DDR, the whole reason this town went into hiding before the Stasi or the Russians could catch up with the covens. It's a pretty colorful little town, with a bit of a Twin Peaks vibe (I hope).

Lot's to do, but two players already said they wanted to give this a shot and I'm eager to get some gaming going!


* This is, of course, fiction. I used pictures of existing places and interpreted them new in the context of the game. Just saying...
**Found those pictures on my hard drive, so I did find them somewhere in the internet. I don't own them and if somebody wants his work attributed, I will certainly rectify that as soon as I know where it's from.