Gaslamp Fantasy game **SPOILERS for Phenomenon '13**

[Agemegos]

I felt that I ought to get back into things at the cons, and in a fit of enthusiasm I pitched a couple of games to the organisers of Phenomenon. One I suggested was a 1930s country house fantasy/horror thing to use Trail of Cthulhu, the other was a gaslamp fantasy with comedy tone and no Foglios harmed in the making, using FATE. They took me up on the gaslamp fantasy because, I think, no-one else pitched anything comic. So now I am committed. I need to produce a blurb for the brochure by early January, and a complete draft adventure for play-testing by the orgs in April.

SPOILERS AHEAD! If you think you might be playing at an RPG convention in Canberra in June '13 please read no further.

This
is
a
stack
of
blank
lines
inserted
as
padding
to
push
any
possible
spoilers
out
of
the
bottom
of
your
text
window.


• Phenomenon schedules three-hour sessions, and I get to run a one-session game. Writing for teams of five, but allowing for incomplete teams is encouraged more strongly than I have the standing to resist.

• I'm going to be using a custom hack of FATE 3 as the game system, which I think is suitable to the wacky antics of of gaslamp fantasy, the feature-rich but poorly-defined world, and the bold approach to consistency and causality. This is no place for rigorously-defined and quantified capabilities, nor for a richly-described consistent world.

• I back myself to write characters with such self-explanatory Aspects that there will be very little need for running text to describe the characters. In fact, I think that if I could find an artist to draw an appropriate sketch of each character I could get away with

• a name
• a descriptive phrase
• a cartoon sketch
• seven Aspects
• five Stunts, and
• a skills pyramid

as the complete description and mechanical definition of each character. That will, if possible, have the great advantage of making the characters much more* accessible for over-extended, sleep-deprived roleplayers who will be trying to play six characters in three days.

• This is the 21st annual Phenomenon. The orgs have declared a theme of "21st Birthday". Its use is not compulsory. I can see several ways to use it fittingly, but I don't have to, and there is every chance that the punters will be sated on 21st birthdays with twists.

• I'm not going to be able to fill my dance-card with players who are fully au fait with FATE and its back-to-front "story game" aspect. I'm going to have to either run it in conventional RPG mode with diminished use of Declarations by the character players, or offer teams a choice of hour much they get to take over the GMing.

•I'm not going to be able to fill my dance-card with Girl Genius fans, and for that matter I wouldn't want† to use any of the Foglio's specific characters and situations, any of their world-building, without their permission, which I won't have. So this has to be madcap adventure in a gaslamp fantasy/steampunk world in the spirit of, but not the same as, the Foglio's 'Europa'.

•These are the elements tht I have so far:

• a 'spark' (mad gadgeteer) is missing or dead, and the PCs are his dependents who have to find or rescue him, or escape from the mob-with-torches-and-pitchforks who torched his castle;
  
• the PCs are:
  1. a beautiful daughter
     
  2. a deranged and/or deformed assistant
     • perhaps he gets to choose from time to time whether to be sound in mind or in body
  3. a clank‡
     
  4. a construct§
     
  5. an uplifted animal
     • I was thinking, here, of a squid or octopus in a tank, that is, a tracked vehicle with an open-topped glass tank of water on top, with drive controls in the fish-tank.
• there is a Queen-Empress (probably called Gloriana and who is a shout-out to Spenser, some sort of immortal and mad Elizabeth I, and Queen Victoria) trapped in my brain and clamouring to get out.
  • I'm scheming furiously around ways to combine the Virgin Queen with the Widow of Windsor
  • inchoate dreams inspired by Frazer and Graves (of sacred marriages and periodic king-sacrifice) and by Burroughs, Folgio, and Vance (brain transplants, mind-transfers, and their unscrupulous use) are being dreamed in inchoate fashion.
• I have this vision of a castle, perhaps Windsor Castle, that is mounted on enormous caterpillar treads, with gear at the front to cut a trench as a road for it to run on, steaming through the French countryside at four-and-a-half-knots, leaving a wake of churned soil and rock where it has gone.
  
• I think the PCs might have to do something urgent for which they are comically unsuitable, such as infiltrate a royal-imperial wedding or birthday party.

• I have about three weeks to settle on an idea in enough detail to choose a title and then write a promotional blurb.

• I have about three months to find an artist to do the character drawings, if I can.


Footnotes

* Last time I did this, with Après Moi, L'Enfer (a.k.a. 9,401) each player had a column of universe description, a column of planet description, a page of character history and description, an elaborate character sheet, and a page of equipment. Plus evidence handouts for the course of the investigation. I won't be unhappy about front-loading more lightly this time.

† I think that is unethical and artistically bankrupt even if it is legal.

‡ i.e. a mechanical humanoid AI robot with a miniaturise Babbage-engine brain, like Tiktok in the later Oz books.

§ i.e. a person put together of parts and reanimated, like Frankenstein's monster.

[quarkstomper]

Here's a character of mine which might work either as one of the PC's or an NPC the players meet:

Major John Jeroboam Hunter

Somewhere in my files I also have a mercenary soldier who was given canine traits by a mad scientist former employer, but I don't think I have his point total tallied up.

As for plot ideas... I ran one Castle Falkenstein campaign once with a recurring NPC who was convinced that the Prince who acted as the party's patron had been replaced by a clockwork automaton. He was always showing up at inconvenient times to "unmask" the imposter.

In that same campaign I had a long-running plot arc involving rival secret societies searching for a lost Leonardo da Vinci manuscript that had been suppressed by the Vatican. (It contained the shocking revelation that Mary Magdelene did indeed have a love child... but that the father wasn't Jesus, he was the Disciple John. It annoyed a lot of conspiracy theorists when they found out.)

A race could make a good set piece in your game. I did one session in a different steampunk campaign involving a road race between steam-cars with various dirty tricks and intrigues among the competitors. It doesn't have to be a car race; dirigibles, steam-powered hydrofoils, electirc velocipedes; anything could work.

I'll think some more and see what other ideas I can sift from my back campaigns.

[Agemegos]

Here's a first draft of my blurb:

1. Writer/organiser’s name.
   
   Brett Evill
   
   
2. Game/activity name.
   
   The Queen-Empress' Birthday Bash
   
   
3. System/rules.
   
   FATE 3, lightly hacked for extra mad science!
   
   
4. Genre/setting.
   
   Gaslight sci-fi in a faux-Victorian Europe in which the Scientific Revolution was all too literal.
   
   Romance! Adventure! MAD SCIENCE!
   
   
5. Number of players.
   
   Five.
   
   
6. The blurb itself.
   
   Émile Polymáthe, Seigneur de Camargue and Doctor of Mad Science, has been captured by the Queen-Empress Gloriana, who might marry him at any moment! Emboldened by his absence, peasants are closing in on Château du Carmargue with pitchforks and fire! The Sieur-Doctor's dependants had better rescue him quick-smart! But that means infiltrating HMF Windsor Castle — a task for which a Beautiful Daughter, a Deformed Assistant, a Clank, a Construct, and A Squid in a Tank are comically unsuited — during Her Majesty's Birthday Bash.
   
   
7. The ratings for the game.
   
   Characterisation — 4
   
   Story/plot — 3
   
   Genre — 5
   
   Seriousness — 1
   
   Rules knowledge — 1
   
   Adult content — PG
   
   
8. Images.
   
   
   To be advised
   
   
9. Your designer biography.
   
   Brett Evill got his start with RPGs in 1980, with AD&D. Since then has been through TFT, HERO System, CoC, RuneQuest, Bushido, ForeSight/HindSight, Vampire, James Bond 007, GURPS, and Spirit of the Century, with about two dozen side-trips into other RPGs.
   
   His first con game was Escape from Fortress Fohgidon — the AD&D “module” for a tiny con at UNSW in 1983. In the late Eighties he was associated with the ForeSight flexiforms at CanCon, and since then Canberra by Night (co-written with Andrew Smith) at CanCon '94, an unsuccessful Jack Vance SF freeform at CanCon '95, Uninvited Guests (an SF freeform) at Sydcon '98, and Après Moi, L'Enfer, an SF mystery/thriller at Pheno '05.
   

Comments?

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Brett

• I have about three months to find an artist to do the character drawings, if I can.

I may have made contact with a suitable artist. He requires to be paid in home-made booze, which is promising, I think.

[quarkstomper]

Arg. I missed that you were looking for an artist too, or I would have offered my services. Ah well.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by quarkstomper

Arg. I missed that you were looking for an artist too, or I would have offered my services. Ah well.

That is a pity, since Tim Meyen's usual style is much less comical and cartoony than would be ideal, and I feel bad about winkling him out of his comfort zone for derisory pay. But he has been very kind and generous, and I really couldn't sack him at this point.

[Agemegos]

Righty-o!

The website for the con Phenomenon '13 has gone live, and the blurb for my game is there for all to see.

Notice character art by our very own Quarkstomper. He takes commissions.