Unlikely Inspirations- Cube (1997)

                                                                                                                                                                                         IMDB

When trying to find inspiration for roleplaying game sessions and characters, I find it useful to turn towards less conventional sources. Most good systems have a rich background for GMs and players alike to draw upon. However, it often pays to look towards more unexpected areas to breathe new life into your games. I personally find movies and TV shows useful for coming up with encounters, premises, or even character dynamics. Obviously, I’m not advocating for you to just wholesale steal from other media. But virtually all art has outside inspirations and so the same applies when doing something like RPGs. The inspiration in question doesn’t even have to be particularly good.

The 1997 film Cube has long been a cult classic, offering a unique premise and interesting take on the horror genre. It follows five people who find themselves in a series of near identical rooms differentiated only by the variety of lethal traps they house. As they desperately try to escape this apparently endless prison, they begin to come into conflict with each other. Cube is by no metric a perfect film, as it's plagued by goofy acting, a garbled message, and some questionable stereotypes. However a GM or even player could learn a lot from the way the film engages its central premise.

The most obvious lesson is the way it uses traps, which, as I’ve previously discussed, are difficult to use. Cube gets around their contrived nature by integrating them directly into the plot. They are the most immediate, physical threat to the protagonists and their presence impacts all of their decisions. Additionally, the film has a very “RPG” like premise, as it features group of individuals with certain specialties forced together by circumstance. While that storytelling convention that's hardly unique to Cube, it's rare to see it quite so "gamified." 

You could run the plot of the movie as a session, or even a whole campaign, with very little changes necessary. Not that I recommend doing that. Besides the issue of originality, a Cube RPG campaign would likely be a hard sell. However, it’s “trap room” setup offers a number of roleplay opportunities and could be easily applied to almost any genre. Case in point, the Star Wars: The Clone Wars episode “The Box” was very clearly inspired by it.

However, the film has more to offer than just a unique adventure seed. One of the least addressed but most pressing issues in the majority of roleplaying game systems is why the adventurers are even together. The real reason is that the players are there to be a part of the game. But within the context of the actual story, what’s a brave paladin doing with some deplorable bandit? Cube takes characters from various backgrounds with unique skills and deftly uses its premise to force them together. A GM could do well to learn from the film's approach of directly using the premise to force an unlikely group of heroes to form.

Additionally, Cube fully explores the consequences of such a strained team. The death traps and hope of escaping only exist to create the film’s real conflict, the threat the group poses to each other. As their journey drags on without any respite, the group quickly finds themselves becoming more and more hostile. They’d never come together outside of this unique situation and even the hazards of their current predicament can’t erase that fact.

Daring players and GMs can integrate inter party conflicts into their campaigns in a similar way. They can even use strenuous situations as a way to get otherwise amicable characters to fight each other. As long as the boundaries are clearly established beforehand, this approach can give everyone a better understanding of the player characters and their roles within the group. It can also make their classes, careers, etc. have more than just a mechanical role in the campaign. Cube might not be more than an average if unique film but it showcases conflict between its protagonists in a very RPG-like manner.

Book Review- Gotrek & Felix: Trollslayer

                                                                                                                                                      Black Library

 

The Gotrek & Felix series was one of the most enduring elements of Warhammer Fantasy, what was once Games Workshop’s primary wargame. The books would later become the foundation for Black Library as one of its most successful and longest running ventures. However, Gotrek & Felix’s earliest entries predated the publisher it would help build, all of them written by prolific Warhammer author William King. The first book in the series, Trollslayer, was published in 1999. However, every story in the anthology had been published over the course of the previous decade. They had primarily appeared in rulebooks, as well as the magazines White Dwarf and Inferno! Trollslayer simply collected these stories, while future entries would be novel length. Gotrek & Felix came to a conclusion alongside the setting it was so integral to with 2015’s Warhammer Fantasy: The End Times. However, Trollslayer was developed when the wargame was at its peak. Even if it doesn’t always seem that way.

Trollslayer’s various stories all follow Felix Jaeger, a university student turned fugitive after a dueling mishap, and Gotrek, a Dwarf fanatic that has sworn to seek death in battle. Oft referenced but unseen events see Felix swear to spread the tale of Gotrek’s journey after his demise. However, that means he has to be there when it happens. Unfortunately, that’s not as close as either of them imagined, as they find themselves venturing into the darkest depths of the Old World.

Game Master Guidance: The Joy is in the Journey

With “adventuring” being the central theme of most roleplaying game systems, travel takes on considerable narrative and mechanical significance. While planning out their campaign, a game master needs to decide how this will factor into the narrative they have in mind. Even if you confine the player characters to a single city, you need to capture a sense of travelling in some way. The players shouldn’t feel like their characters are instantaneously zapping to their destination. Unless that’s literally what they’re doing. Regardless, a GM should decently simulate the idea of traveling without negatively affecting the flow of the game.

After you or the PCs establish how they intend to get around, determine a way to integrate that into the narrative. No matter what option they’ve taken, it can offer an opportunity for an encounter. Cars break down, coaches get robbed, and starships get boarded.

Book Review: Ghostmaker

                                                                                                                                                      Black Library

Dan Abnett’s Gaunt’s Ghosts series defined the direction of Black Library’s Warhammer 40,000 novels. However, it began as a series of short stories in Inferno! magazine, a monthly anthology of Warhammer fiction. Like all anthologies, the magazine's content was something of a mixed bag. The same goes for the Gaunt’s Ghosts stories published there. Ghostmaker, the second novel in the series, collected all these stories, along with a few new ones. It's all brought together with a new, overarching plotline. This framing device had Gaunt preparing to charge Chaos forces gathering in alien ruins and its climax tries to offer some sense of closure for all the disparate plotlines. Ghostmaker diverges a lot from the rest of the series in its content and its resolution is absurd compared to the comparatively more grounded conclusions of its goes before and after it.

While somewhat justified by its climax, the overarching plot has its issues. It mostly consists of Colonel-Commissar Gaunt approaching whatever character the next story focuses on. At times, this will last a little under two pages. While simple and noninvasive, this approach feels almost like an afterthought until the last quarter of the book.

Game Master Guidance: Creating a Mentor

The mentor, the older and wiser teacher that guides the protagonist along their path, is one of the most enduring figures in storytelling. It’s easier to list stories that don’t incorporate that element, one way or the other. A mentor can be indispensable for a science fiction and fantasy narrative, as they can be used to establish the rules and nature of the world in an organic way. Additionally, a student’s interactions with their teacher gives the story to show the former’s growth and development in a meaningful, tangible way. Like many archetypes, the mentor requires some work to fit in the context of an RPG but can nonetheless serve a vital role.

A mentor’s relationship with their student, regardless of whether it is positive or negative, should always be personal. As RPGs are an inherently social form of storytelling, it’s hard to find a place for such interactions. The mix of character types make it even harder. Someone who can expand a wizard’s magical prowess isn’t going to be much help to a bounty hunter or knight. Writing a mentor that can educate the entire group has its own problems. It can push the suspension of disbelief or force the involvement of players who have little interest in such an arrangement. Most importantly, having the mentor dispensing their services for the whole group undermines the close master-learner bond by spreading it thin.

Ideally, the mentor works best with smaller parties and with game masters that can handle splitting up the group. Basically, make sure you give the rest of the group something to do when the mentor is instructing one of their members. Of course, other player characters can sit in on the lesson, if they wish. In Star Wars, Luke’s blind duel against the training remote isn’t just memorable for Obi-Wan’s wisdom.

WFRP 2nd edition adventure: The Unwelcome Guest

I did an entry for the "The Five Page Fiction" context over at r/WFRP. If there is enough interest, I will release an expanded version, as I had to leave some stuff out due to the page limit. In "The Unwelcome Guest" the quiet village of Hugelberg finds itself at the mercy of a Bright Wizard. Hopefully some adventurers can deal with the situation without burning the whole town down. If you have any questions, concerns, praise, or anything else, please leave it in the comments below.

PDF Link:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YXO1K9plEnWAHvrKmSdeWOj1qHPUNeVC/view?usp=sharing

Game Master Guidance: Using a Setting's Major Characters

One of the trickier parts of using a preexisting setting is using its established characters. Even ones designed for tabletop games have major figures that drive the story forward. This topic comes up the most when roleplaying in well known properties like Star Wars. But a game master has to be careful how they use such characters. Or decide if you even should use them. Throwing in a setting's major character can disrupt the players' immersion in the story. In a particularly bad scenarios, it can end up completely overshadowing the player characters. A game master should approach these mythic figures with caution, assuming you want to use them at all.

A GM looking to use a preexisting major character should first build a story that can stand on its own. If the story you've written doesn't function without this character's direct presence, then you've deprived the players and possibly even yourself of agency. Going back to Star Wars, in most cases a player knows they won't get a chance to kill the likes of Darth Vader or Obi-Wan Kenobi. Unless it's an alternate reality game, which has its own sets of problems. If you're looking to incorporate a setting's big names, make a story they can logically fit into but don't dominate. Otherwise, you are taking away the group's influence over the story and giving it to another, more "important" character.

Then there's the matter of accurately representing the character. Established settings can potentially be as vast and varied as our own world. A GM can get away with taking creative liberties or ignoring the rules as long as the campaign "feels" like it takes place in the setting and they adhere to its fundamentals. Characters are more rigidly defined however. If you don't present a major character as being consistent with their established personality and traits, the players will likely notice. The more players interact with these characters, the bigger the chance that this will be a problem.