Spiral: Alpha Playtest

In the evening, I participated in an alpha playtest of a game called Spiral.

• GM: Don Corcoran
• Joseph (Jodi) Carrasco = Cultist
• Me = Cultist
• Frank Halevi = Victim
• Joann Clarke-Stein = Victim

The game had two play books, Victim and Cultist, and each player chose one of the two roles. You can't have more victims than cultists. The cultists had more of a GMing role, and a goal of driving the victims to a dreadful end of death and / or insanity, and playing the horrors.

There were several symbols that came up in the books:

• Elder Sign: Victim's control
• Dance of the Mad: Insanity, In the Know. NB: We don't care about everyday psychoses
• Spiral: Inevitability
• Keyhole: Glimpse into the Unknown -- drive to interact with crazy, press luck
• Open Eye: Elder Ones. Attention of the Old Ones. We don't care about Azathoth eating planets. One of his eyes opens and looks at _you_.

Joann (accurately, so far as I could tell): So, you got your ordinary people, your whack jobs, your monsters, your sorcerers, and your OMGs

The game play had to do with questions, many of which started out with answers provided by the group. E.g.:

How long have people been reporting seeing ghosts in the university library? Since the young librarian killed herself and all the visiting school children.

Why have no children been born to the families of Arkham in the last 15 years? There is something in the hospital drawing energy, and unborn babies cannot survive this.

Who rides the train that stops at the station 3 nights each month at the stroke of midnight? A troop of silent, nameless people, dressed in white, their eyes shut. No one ever sees them leave -- only arrive.

How long has it been since anyone has seen the butcher from 5th street? No one saw him for over 2 months. Then, he reappeared with no explanation.

Then, there were character specific questions:

• Professor Albert Markson: Will you ever tell your wife about Lilly Kinder?
• Josaiah Waltham: Where do you go when you leave your home late at night?
• Lilly Kinder, Librarian: What has the ghost of the dead librarian done when she's appeared to you?
• Abigail Hartley, Nurse: Where have you hidden all the bodies?
• Thomas Blackwell, Esq.: What documents did you draw up for the butcher?
• Doc Samuel Anders: What do you tell the parents?
• Father Kinder: Why doesn't he take Confession any more?
• Old Ely: What did the white clothed strangers pay you to look the other way?

Note that only two of the above were actually PCs:

• Joann: Thomas Blackwell, Esq.
• Frank: Pf. Albert Markson

Everyone else was an NPC.

• Jodi: Dancing Mad Man: Butcher Toby Smollett
• Lisa: Keyhole: Sorc Type, Glimpse of the Unknown

I'm not sure of the context for the following:

1. (Lisa) Asks / Mythos and why pursue it?
What do you hope to get in return for the energy you harvest?
To breach the dimensional barrier!
(arrow from Smollet)
How did the miscarriage affect you?
It doesn't matter. Nothing matters. My eyes are opened now, and I know 
nothing matters -- everyone else needs to know.

2. What is sup'l thing?
How did you get Nurse Hartley to put the crystal in the maternity ward?
By helping her abort her baby -- an unmarried woman, blackmailable

In addition to answering questions, there was a general DBAD rule, aka Don't Be A Dick.

Game quotes of the PCs based around a box that had been given to one to hold as a legacy:

PC: Of course, if we opened it, we'd know.

Don: Notice that he said "we".

PC: I might have jostled the insides. Best open it and see!

I think Jodi got to say what was in the box. It turned out to be a disfigured human foetus, on a pillow.

Players went backwards and forwards in their playbooks. Eventually, the Victim would meet a threshhold page (I forget the details here), at which point, the player would decide how this or her victim died and went insane. We never reached that point. Don noted that one could continue playing after that point, with the limitation that everyone knows the Victim is dead or insane, _or_ a cultist.

Frank: Lisa scared me.

Me: I'm flattered.

Frank explained that, while I was welcome to take it as a compliment and my play was fine, what he actually meant was that I scared him because of where in my playbook my bookmark was, like the kind of scared some of us once were by _The Monster at the End of This Book_.

We discussed the question of making this a computer game, as well as how to bring up questions in play, as there was a bit of inadvertently playing past each other. I also noted that there may need to be the same sort of caveat some need when playing the game Polaris: Yes, you may be completely fine with your PC meeting an awful fate, but fight like the dickens against it, as otherwise, there is no game play.

One thing I didn't feel like mentioning at the playtest: I'm getting really tired of folks bashing the game Call of Cthulhu. I'm fine with "Well, it doesn't do what I want, so I'm making a game that does." I am less than pleased by broad statements about how the game doesn't work when, for years, I and others have had a fine time playing it, thank you very much.