Harlem Hunters

I was too tired to run the finale of City of Mist: Dead of Night yesterday so instead we created our group of hunters for Harlem Unbound: Monster of the Week Edition.

We had an extensive brainstorming session for our group concept, and settled on a small periodical/alternate weekly newspaper, The Black Cat’s Meow. Our team of Hunters are not the owners but they are the heart and soul of the newspaper.

Blanchard

Using the Expert playbook, Blanchard is an aspiring playwright and novelist. He started his career as a black vaudeville actor on the Chitlin’ Circuit, where he was involved in a play derived from a heavily redacted version of The King in Yellow. This changed him in subtle ways, and he found himself driven to uncover the truth behind the supernatural which he now realizes is everywhere around him. He’s the archivist and a senior writer at the newspaper.

Starting moves:

• Haven: Lore Library, Mystical Library, Protection Spells
• I’ve Heard About This Sort of Thing
• Often Right

Delia Ross

Based on the Spooky playbook, Delia is the up-and-coming society page editor and advice column writer. Her polished appearance hides another facet: she is the grand-daughter and apprentice to a successful if discreet conjure-woman (grandma has not yet been named). She doesn’t yet fully control her powers and as a result, struggles with side effects of occasional hallucinations, lust, and poor impulse control.

Starting moves:

• The Sight
• Hunches
• The Big Whammy

Persephone Fox

Built on the Flake playbook, Persephone is a young conspiracy theorist who happens to be right more often that not. She is also Blanchard’s niece. Although few people take her seriously (aside from the other Hunters), Persephone sees all. and has a finely honed talent for investigation.

Starting moves:

• Connect the Dots
• See? It All Fits Together
• Suspicious Mind

Whales

Based on the Hard Case playbook (2020 version), Whales is the workman of all odd jobs at the newspaper, a job he got thanks to Blanchard; before that he was a dockworker and day laborer. He served in France with the 369th Infantry “Harlem Hellfighters” and came back a changed man, now driven more by willpower than anger. If you need the printing press moved or the delivery truck loaded, Whales is your man.

Starting moves:

• Hard Knocks: Street Fighter
• Furnace
• Unstoppable
• Ascetic

As part of character creation, we created a relationship map between the Hunters using the ready-made backdrop included in Evil Hat Productions’ Roll20 modules for Monster of the Week.

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Photo credits: Nathan Francis Mossell, c. 1882, University of Pennsylvania archives; James Van Der Zee, Strolling, 1925, Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York; unknown; and Laborer (Stevedore Longshoreman, Norfolk, Virginia), from the project The Negro in Virginia, Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Next: Harlem Unbound

My bi-weekly campaign Ariadne’s Spindle, which explores the universe of The Expanse using the Fate system, is going swimmingly. Dead of Night, my weekly series of City of Mist, is reaching the Season 1 finale after about 25 episodes and very satisfying gaming. So here I am, planning another limited series, which will be set in Darker Hue Studios’ Harlem Unbound.

This award-winning book offers Lovecraftian mythos investigations amidst the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s-30s. I have the original edition, which was statted for both the GUMSHOE (Pelgrane Press) and Call of Cthulhu (Chaosium) systems. A second edition has just been released under the auspices of Chaosium, statted only for CoC but offering four new scenarios; the contents otherwise look substantially the same. I may eventually purchase the PDF version to get these scenarios when I have a bit of spare change; however, neither of these systems floats my boat as GM.

Instead, I decided to use Monster of the Week (Generic Games/Evil Hat Productions), a game Powered by the Apocalypse with which I am very comfortable: I playtested the Revised Edition, I wrote a scenario for the Tome of Mysteries supplement, and along with Sean Nittner and Fred Hicks, I put together the five adventure compilations on Roll20. It’s like taking off my steel-toed boots and getting into my slippers.

More Roll20 tricks

I had never thought about using the Stylish app (an extension for Firefox, Chrome, etc., see the respective stores) to modify how Roll20 displays. It turns out that people have created many such stylesheets! I’ve just found two that are quite useful to me.

One lets you add rows to the map tab, i.e., the list of pages (maps) wraps instead of extending off to the right of the visible area:

Example of wrapping page list

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Example of tightened sidebar list

The other creates tighter sidebar lists in the Art Library and Journal tabs:

The important thing to remember is that in all cases, the modifications will only be visible to the person using the stylesheet. So if you pick one of the many pretty themes, you’re the only one benefiting from it unless others in your group also add the Stylish extension and this specific stylesheet.

In some cases a stylesheet can interfere with a particular character sheet or API. In that case, it’s easy to disable the stylesheet in the app controls.

Stylesheet controls in browser

Fate and The Expanse on Roll20: Playmat

I just wanted to share what the playmat looks like right now.

Edit: To answer questions I received, the blank character card was made with the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) 2.10. The original dimensions are 1000×700 but I place the card at 50% size, 500×350, so it will look good even zoomed in. If you would like to use them, here is an archive with .xcf, .psd, and .png format files. The fonts used are Alenia by shanayastudio and Spotnik demo by Alexatype.

I place copies of the blank card on the Map & Background layer on Roll20. The character info is filled on the Objects & Tokens layer in Contrail font.

The Fate bookmark is available from Evil Hat Productions as a free download. And I discuss the aspect tokens in a how-to post on Evil Hat’s website here.

For more tips, including where I got the idea of the character cards from, see How to Run Fate Online.

The Expanse: Ariadne’s Spindle

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times recently, I have put in a lot of work in creating modules for Evil Hat Productions on the Roll20 virtual tabletop (VTT). Of the 36 modules I have worked on, 29 have been Fate modules, 21 of which have been released on Roll20 already. And this really drove home the point that circumstances have driven me to a Fate-less gaming schedule right now: none of the games I have played this year are powered by Fate. This is unacceptable and there was only one thing to do: start a Fate game.

Setting-wise, I have been itching for a long while to play hard science fiction. Rather than going for a ready-statted Fate setting, I decided to adapt The Expanse. It’s funny, of course, because the book series and later television series have their origin in a role-playing campaign led by one of the authors (GURPS, I believe). A couple of years ago Green Ronin Publishing picked up the license and published The Expanse Roleplaying Game based on their AGE system, which I had played in Dragon Age and run in Blue Rose 2nd edition.

I feel that Fate is a great system to run and play exciting adventures in this setting, and it certainly makes preparation easy for me as GM. On the other hand, The Expanse RPG is crammed full of information and I want to get as much of this goodness as I can, not reinvent the wheel. This led me to hew as close as possible to the original character stat profiles.

• Player character creation (below)
• NPC creation
• Interlude: Thoughts about spaceship rules
• Spaceship construction and combat rules
• Session 0
• The Playmat

Player Character Creation

Here is how I paralleled the AGE character creation in my Fate version. The steps listed are those from The Expanse RPG and the notes describe how I adapted them.

Carnival of Mystery

Our friend Bryanna ran a game of Monster of the Week last night for two other friends, Edmund, and me. It’s a custom mystery but she used some of the tools we (Evil Hat Productions) included in the recently released Monster of the Week collection modules on Roll20. It was gratifying that she found a lot of use from the material even running a brand new mystery.

Our hunters were members of a travelling carnival that tries to bring wonder wherever they go and help the towns we visit. We played Chief, a Spooktacular carnival master (Edmund); Lydia,, a Constructed tattooed woman (me); Valentine, a Hex stage magician (Steve); and Violet, a Pararomantic fortune-teller (Dani). All of these are from the newer playbooks released by Generic Games.

A couple of screenshots from last night’s game:

The relationship map between our hunters using the template in Evil Hat’s Roll20 modules.

The playmat, as customized by Bryanna with images she chose but using the Evil Hat format and tools – right when I rolled that big juicy failure that advanced the countdown clock!

What I’ve been working on

Since mid-April, Evil Hat has been working hard on creating a lot of high-quality modules for the virtual tabletop Roll20 for gamers besieged by the pandemic and social distancing. I have put a ton of time and effort into these. A few more were published today so I wanted to give a view of the Wall of Awesome:

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Released in the wild

In the last two months I’ve done a lot of work for Evil Hat Productions, setting up adventure modules for play on the virtual tabletop app Roll20. After setting up three Fate Worlds (The Secrets of Cats, Deep Dark Blue, and Red Planet), I worked on the five Fate of Cthulhu modules and these were just approved by Roll20 today.

Our team is now working on more Fate goodness and on Monster of the Week adventure modules. It’s so exciting to see these go live!

Dragon Age for the Underage

It takes a geek village: tonight we tried the Dragon Age RPG for the Underage campaign that Edmund has been running for two 10-year-olds and two parents plus me, ported to Roll20 for the first time. We had last played in person the weekend before the Bay Area counties decided to shelter in place.

To help the kids focus their plan, I yanked the Scheme Worksheet from Mistborn RPG, and it really helped.

Here is our start page on Roll20, with all the pets, er, animal companions the party has collected…

City of Mist: Fight!

The one thing in my life that has improved thanks to shelter-in-place is moving our online game of City of Mist from a biweekly schedule to weekly. It makes it easier to keep momentum.

Here is our Roll20 board right now: