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A Post-mortem of My Hot Springs Island Campaign
My group recently gave up on Dark of Hot Springs Island. Given the campaign’s reputation, I think it’s worth trying to figure out why. How much of it is the published campaign has problems? How much of it is a skill issue on my part? How much of it is that the published campaign leads to a play style that just isn’t a great fit with me and my group?
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Gonzo cowboys
People occasionally ask on fora like r/osr “what is gonzo?” and my new answer is the 1935 Gene Autry serial Phantom Empire. You can watch the whole thing on YouTube. It is totally bananas. It has singing cowboys, kid investigators, gangsters, an evil scientist, and a subterranean lost civilization. When I told a friend about it he replied “I love this country. I didn’t even know this show existed but I’ll fight and die for what it represents.” I also think it has the potential to inspire good game material.
OK, so as in real life, Gene Autry is a singing cowboy performer. In the serial, he performs from Radio Ranch every day at 2pm and failure to do so would void his network contract and cause the ranch to close. Unbeknownst to him, beneath the ranch is a) valuable radium deposits and b) the subterranean space opera civilization of Murania. A group of crooks led by an evil scientist wants the ranch abandoned so they can get the radium. The Muranians want the ranch abandoned so nobody will notice the portal to their realm. Both of them repeatedly scheme to make Gene Autry late for his radio show (thereby bankrupting the ranch), including by framing him for the murder of his business partner. Meanwhile, there is a coup brewing against the brutal but clueless queen of Murania. And here is the best part, it enters public domain in 2031 so in a few years you can make $150,000 on Kickstarter for a box set campaign setting with singing cowboy and Murania minis or whatever.
I can see two ways to go about adapting it to a game scenario: Trail of Cthulhu or a DCC funnel.
Trail of Cthulhu version
Trail of Cthulhu, especially the pending 2nd edition, would be a good fit as it matches the 1930s America threatened by the supernatural setting. Moreover Trail 2e will have relevant character classes like cowboy and gangster. And much of the plot consists of solving mysteries.
One big difference would be the tone. Nobody in the serial ever rolls sanity. At one point a man in murdered and his own teen son is sad for about four seconds before they resolve to figure out who framed Gene Autry for the murder in order to have him put in jail, where he would be unable to sing on the radio.
Another potential difference is that whereas in the serial the teen fan club has the most agency and Gene Autry’s performances are a MacGuffin, a game adaptation could make the player characters adults and make singing an interpersonal investigative ability.
DCC/Shadowdark funnel version
In this version, either the backup band / ranch hands or the teen fan club are 0 level adventurers who first deal with the evil scientist and then head into the Muranian underworld to rescue the kidnapped Gene Autry. PCs who survive the funnel could then graduate to a sword and planet setting, such as the recently republished Purple Planet, in which the Muranians are only one faction.
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The Multiple Designer Model
While tradition ascribes the authorship of Dungeons and Dragons to a legendary figure called Gary Gygax, a recent wave of scholarship has posited a multi-author model as the best explanation for inconsistencies in the rules. The inquiry began by noting differences in language and then noticing different viewpoints systematically associated with vocabulary and style.
Whenever the text uses terms like “D&D” and “referee,” the author emphasizes that the game is endlessly flexible and customizable. In contrast, passages using vocabulary like “AD&D®️” and “the DM” uniformly stress that the rules must be strictly followed to ensure compatibility between tables and even warn of the curses that will befall anyone who uses unlicensed supplements and accessories.
These patterns have led game scholars to a two Gygax model, with the current text being redacted by a source called “M” because in German, “Mike Carr” starts with “M.”
Recently, scholars have split over whether the source who uses “D&D” and “referee” vocabulary is one source or two. The current consensus is that all of the surviving text comes from a single author, but this author was working from an earlier oral tradition that never produced any surviving written texts.
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Halls of We’en
Over at Itch, I posted a Shadowdark funnel for the Weird Tales game jam. I used the Watts-Strogatz algorithm to generate the map.
Also at Itch, my conversion notes for running Hot Springs Island in Shadowdark or OSE.
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Artic Salvage
In segment two of episode #603 of Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff, they discuss a 1962 CIA operation to salvage an abandoned Soviet drift station and how it would make a great Fall of Delta Green one-shot. I loved the idea so much that I hit pause on my regular Shadowdark campaign and ran it as a one-shot last night. Here are my scenario notes.
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Randomizers
As every gamer knows, we generally use randomizers within our games. As regular readers of this blog know, I have a working knowledge of probability. As such, I figured I’d give a brief non-technical primer of types of probability distributions and how to approximate them at the table. Some of this is widely understood in the community and I’ve discussed some of it before, but thought it might help designers and GMs to have it all in one place.
There are a few properties you may want your randomizers to have. The first two are gamer slang and the later two are probability terms that don’t have gamer slang synonyms.
- Swinginess — How unpredictable do you want the outcome to be? Who wins at arm wrestling should probably be less swingy than who wins at rock-paper-scissors.
- Granularity — How many intervals do you want the outcome to have?
- Skew — Should the distribution be asymmetrical, usually because low values are common but extremely high rate values are still possible (“right skew”). In real life, right skewed distributions describe issues like how many, how powerful, or how long.
- Replacement — Do outcomes repeat?
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How many repeated attempts?
Suppose you, the GM, allow repeated attempts at … say, picking a lock. Often this comes with some type of risk (random encounter rolls) or resource expenditure (eg, torch timer, spell expiration, etc). If each attempt has a high probability of success then you can just roll and roll a second time if necessary and probably won’t have to roll a third. But if each attempt has a low probability, you may be rolling for awhile and it would be nice if there was a shortcut for “how many turns will this take.” Here is that shortcut:
- If each attempt is around 1 in d6 / 15% / DC 17 +0, then roll 2d12 keep low for number of turns before you get it right.
- If each attempt is around 2 in 6 / 25% / DC 15 +0, then roll 2d8 keep low for number of turns.
- If each attempt is around 3 in 6 / 50% / DC 10 +0, then roll 2d4 keep low for number of turns.
- If each attempt is > 50%, just roll separately for each attempt.
That is the shortcut. Here is how I got it.
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Dungeons as networks
A Melan diagram is a way to simplify a dungeon design to its bare topology to show if it is Jaquaysed (i.e., not linear or branching but with loops that allow meaningful choices). In the comments to a Justin Alexander post on Melan diagrams, there’s a discussion of whether explicitly invoking graph theory adds anything to dungeon design/analysis or only confuses the issue with jargon. I don’t know about pure graph theory, but you can definitely learn about dungeons through social network analysis (SNA), which is a major offshoot of graph theory.
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