The Dracula Autopsy

Well then. Twenty-two sessions and almost a year later, my Dracula Dossier campaign is finished. Twenty-two sessions! I think that may be the longest campaign I've ever run; Rogue Trader ran for fifteen sessions, as did The Enemy Within II: Enemy Withiner, and while it did take about a year to play through Horror on the Orient Express back in 1998ish I'm almost certain that we didn't get twenty-two sessions out of it.

You can read individual session summaries here, but now that the game is done and I don't have to worry about spoiling anything for the players, I thought it would be good to have a look at some of the behind the scenes stuff.

Spoilers follow!

Breaking the Rules

The Dracula Dossier is written for Night's Black Agents, a Gumshoe variant, so of course I ran it with a patchwork of Call of Cthulhu, the new Delta Green rpg, Mongoose's RuneQuest II, some mechanics of my own design, and even a bit of Pendragon. I did this because I'm an idiot I kept banging my head against the NBA rules and couldn't make sense of them; it's not a complicated ruleset, but something about the game was not sinking in, so I went with something familiar, the Chaosium d100 system, albeit a hybrid version.

Given that it was such a Frankenstein of a ruleset I think it worked quite well, much better than if I'd used NBA, but as the campaign evolved it moved away from investigation and more towards action; towards the last third or so I did begin to wonder if Savage Worlds would have been a better choice.

Scot-Free

One niggling problem with my jerry-rigged rules was that I had nothing in place to model the agents' finances; I would have liked to have seen fewer private jets and more shady deals, with the player-characters having to work to get access to equipment and funds, but they operated with more or less infinite resources and that lacked drama.

I also don't think I made enough of the player-characters drawing heat from the authorities. I modified NBA's mechanics for tracking the agents' notoriety, but when they did get spotted by police, or got picked up on CCTV, and so on, I didn't push back hard enough, so I don't think the players ever felt like they were in trouble.

I think that perhaps building time limits into the campaign would help with this; yes, the agents can lie low for two weeks, but they need to raid the shipping company in the next two days, before the records are destroyed!

Modern Life Is (Mostly) Rubbish

One advantage of running a game set in the present day is that it's easy to research; most people know how the modern world works and it's easy to find out what you don't know; you can Google it!

The problem is that player-characters in a modern setting can Google things too, and that can suck the drama out of the game.

It seems churlish to ban the modern era as a setting for investigative games, but if you're going to be running DD in the present day be prepared for tech-savvy players. Look up how computer hacking works, and the sort of information and services that are available through computer networks. Can the player-characters mess around with the traffic lights in London? Can they access blueprints of the Palace of Parliament in Bucharest? Can they hack MI6's bank account?

These are tricky questions because it's difficult to know on the spot what the answers are. You can make something up about Generic Fantasy World #87 but if you start making things up about a world that's just like ours except it's got Dracula in it, you may get caught out.

One way to avoid the issue is to set the campaign in the dark pre-internet days, and there is some material in the book on setting the game in the 1970's, the 1940's, or the 1890's; in hindsight, I think I would have enjoyed a Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy style game set during the Wilson/Heath era.

All that said, there was something quite fun about the players asking "can we do X?" and then everyone using our smartphones to find out.

Who Built the Pyramids?

This campaign was a pain in the neck -- ho ho -- to develop. The Director's Handbook is bursting with content -- it has hundreds of pages of characters, locations, objects, and organisations, not all of which will be used in even the most sprawling campaign -- but is somewhat lacking in practical advice of what to do with all the piles of stuff.

There's a brief example at the start of the book of a conspyramid -- the default NBA campaign structure -- with some of the DD specific elements slotted in, and there is a little bit of discussion on who Dracula is, but that's about it for gamemaster advice. Given how much content there is, I think there needs to be more and better guidance.

Each of the entries in the book gives suggested connections to the others, so it's possible to brute force your way through and then go back and populate your conspyramid, but it's not an efficient process. What I did in the end was use a random generation method -- a deck of cards was released as part of the campaign's Kickstarter -- to get the basic structure, then I filled the gaps with the bits that seemed most interesting from skimming the book. After that I went back and tinkered with the plan so that the connections made sense and there were no dead ends, and I was ready to go.

Except I wasn't because I had no idea how to start the campaign. There is zero advice on how to kick things off, beyond a short starting scenario lurking in the back of the book or a separate adventure released for Free RPG Day. Again, I made something up, borrowing from both.

What does Dracula want? No idea. We are given a number of candidates for who Dracula was in life, but almost no discussion at all of his possible goals, needs, and wants. We know what EDOM wants, or at least what it claims to want, but there's zilch -- not even a list of suggestions -- of what the main antagonist's motivations are. The best we get is some vague references to him hating Turks, and as I was sitting here in March 2016 trying to put a campaign together, that didn't seem anywhere near good enough.

As it turned out my players didn't seem interested in Dracula's goals, so perhaps it doesn't matter.

Excuse Me, Have You Seen Mr Dracula?

The Dracula Dossier looks like an investigative campaign but it plays almost like a hexcrawl, or maybe a pointcrawl. There are clues and connections everywhere and all lead in the end to Dracula, but some are more direct than others; this is what that conspyramid structure is supposed to illustrate.

In theory there are no dead ends in this kind of structure; if a line of investigation stalls and the players can't go any further "up" the conspyramid, they can always go sideways or down to find another route, and perhaps can return later to the original thread to pick it up again once they know more.

I didn't make this concept clear to my players and I think the campaign suffered a bit as a result. There were a couple of occasions where they felt like they'd exhausted a line of enquiry and I think they got frustrated; I felt like they were overlooking other paths when in truth they'd just forgotten, because there were so many threads to monitor.

In the last half of the campaign I started issuing index cards with notes on them, so the players could see what they'd discovered so far and where the gaps were, and I think that helped, but I think it would perhaps have been sensible to discuss the campaign structure with them before we began.

Super Nature

Where the book gives the option of a campaign element being mundane or something more eldritch, I almost always went with the latter. My version of Dracula's "wolf gypsies" were actual werewolves because why not? Bram Stoker's The Jewel of the Seven Stars is also a redacted mission report, so there's a mummy running around too -- the players didn't meet her -- because why not? Jack the Ripper's disembodied spirit is floating around London because why not?

At some point in preparing the campaign it went from The Bourne Identity to Hellboy and I thought that was good and appropriate, but I acknowledge that's not going to be for everyone; I know some of my players raised an eyebrow when things started getting a bit silly, but I think I got away with it and, after all, the Director's Handbook itself allowed the possibility.

On the other hand, the Director's Handbook didn't suggest that an immortal Rasputin was the head of Russia's secret vampire programme. That was all my fault. Nor did it suggest that Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is also a mission report and that Jekyll's potion is an early experimental use of Seward Serum. That's my fault too; yes, the dates don't quite match up but it's close enough.

They are lucky that I didn't make Dracula an avatar of Nyarlathotep.

Fangs for the Memories

I think I got a lot wrong in running DD. I was unused to the format of the campaign, I struggled without robust GM advice, and I made things more difficult by chucking out the intended rules system and using my own. All that said, I think it was a success; everyone had fun along the way and I think the players felt that they achieved something significant when they pinned Dracula down and defeated him.

The Dracula Dossier is not a great campaign out of the box -- I think it relies a little too much on quantity of content over utility, and on the central gimmick of Dracula being the biggest player handout ever -- but with a bit of work it can be a good one, and once it gets going it sort of runs itself. It kept me and my group entertained for half a year, and that's not bad at all.

Update! One of my players shares his thoughts on the campaign here.

The Enemy Revisited

I was asked about Fantasy Flight Games' version of The Enemy Within on G+ a few days ago and I remembered that I was going to write a post about my experiences of running the campaign but never got around to it. This is me getting around to it. Sorry.

If you're going to play the campaign do not read on as there will be spoilers. I mean it; there's a central mystery at the heart of the plot and it will be ruined if you know about it, so bog off if you're a player. Go and read Goblin Punch or something.

Game Masters, read on.

It's Not What You Think It Is

The Enemy Within II is not a remake of the original campaign, nor does it have much to do with the earlier adventures. To be fair this is explained in the introduction, but Fantasy Flight could have done a better job of advertising the fact -- it's the question I get asked most often -- although then the title would come across as an exploitative cash-in and we wouldn't want that, would we?

The new campaign does share some ideas-- it concerns a conspiracy to undermine the Empire -- and some locations with the earlier version, and the cult of the Purple Hand makes a cameo appearance, but otherwise it has no real connection with the original. It is set about twenty years later but also follows the timeline of the wargame and I'm sure there is a message board somewhere about how canon has been violated one way or another.

The campaign is written for the third edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay but is light on actual game mechanics so is easy enough to convert to another version of the game, or even an unrelated system. I noticed that beneath all the cards and funky dice a WFRP3 character is not that different to a WFRP2 character and I posted my conversion notes -- and they are little more than notes, because it's that easy! -- here.

That said, I did bump up the Black Hood's statistics a tad as he was a bit weak for a villainous mastermind. I regret nothing.

This Is a Bit Familiar

It's not a remake of the original campaign but neither is everything brand new. I was out of gaming for most of the life span of WFRP2 so I'm not familiar with everything released for it but I did notice that a fair bit of Ashes of Middenheim is reused -- sometimes amended, sometimes verbatim -- and I wouldn't be surprised if other stuff is recycled too; you may need to work on those parts if you have players familiar with the earlier material.

Rogues' Gallery

There are lots of non-player-characters in The Enemy Within II and a key part of the campaign is keeping track of who everyone is, where they are, and what they're doing. I don't mean for the GM either -- although it is important that the GM knows all this stuff -- because it's the player-characters who are going to have to pursue the Black Hood and counter her or his schemes.

In my first draft of this post I wrote that character portraits would be "handy" but I think "essential" is more apt. The campaign comes with character cards -- it is for WFRP3 after all -- but I thought these would be difficult to see at a distance so I created some larger images -- see left -- based on the original art and pinned them to my GM screen. I can make the images available if there's interest.

The Black Hood

This villain is behind most of the obstacles the player-characters will face and the mystery of her or his true identity is one of the key threads in the campaign. The writers introduce three key NPCs who could be the Hood -- and each of the NPCs plays a major role even if they aren't the villain -- and provide plenty of advice on how to modify the plot to fit the GM's choice of blackguard; there are even some brief notes on how to use some different NPCs in the role if the main three don't appeal.

The book also suggests that the GM doesn't choose the identity of the Black Hood until later on, so that the players don't guess too early. I think this is a little unfair -- ogrish even -- and I suggest choosing before the campaign begins and sticking to that choice; all that said I did ponder the possibility of two of the NPCs working together -- spoilers for Scream there, sorry -- and there's no reason why all three couldn't be in on it! I also considered using one of the NPCs as the villain and have one of the others also turn to evil but have no connection to the conspiracy, as a sort of double-bluff.

When I ran the campaign there were enough suspicious NPCs -- it helps that the Skaven all scurry about in black cloaks -- that the player-characters were never sure who the Black Hood was until the end, although their first guess turned out to be correct.

In the Beginning

The WFRP3 background mechanic is not used in earlier editions but if you are playing the campaign with an older version of the game I suggest making use of the cards -- it is WFRP3 after all -- to tie the player-characters into the plot and to each other. It can be difficult to get the player-characters involved at first and the suggested backgrounds help give them reasons to do so.

On that subject, the player-characters don't get drawn into the main plot of the campaign until a couple of game days have passed and so you may need to give the players a nudge to get them to stay in Averheim -- the starting location -- until then. You could also skip those first few days and jump right in but I think there's enough good material in there that it would be a shame to lose it; if nothing else the player-characters have a chance to build relationships that add depth to later events.

Whatever you decide, it's worth paying close attention to the start of the campaign and working out good reasons for the player-characters to hang around the Averheim docks looking for missing vagrants.

Bonus Content and Deleted Scenes

The campaign is structured much like Neverwinter Nights -- for those old enough to remember it -- in that most of the action is confined to three locations and there's not much in the way of connecting detail. You do get what are more or less random encounter tables -- converted to WFRP2 here --but that's it. You could just skip straight to the next location but my group was in no rush to finish the campaign so I put some effort into expanding the in-between bits.

If I had more time I would have come up with a secondary campaign that would play out in the gaps in the main plot but as it was I came up with a number of self-contained bits and bobs:

The barrow wights were used to give the player-characters something to do on the way to Middenheim and also introduced a plot element that came into play later on but wasn't explored in full; I hope more will come of it if and when we reconvene for the sequel.

The campaign has the player-characters stop in Delberz for a night on their way to Altdorf but as written nothing much happens, so I expanded a line from the WFRP2 supplement Sigmar's Heirs about unsolved killings in the town into a fullish adventure.

Also on the way to Altdorf the players-characters have a chance of running into a river troll. I wanted more than just a fight with a monster so I created the village of Mistheim and gave the player-characters a reason to stop and explore. I kept the river troll anyway because it seemed like fun.

The Beast of Krankendorf was my invention; there are a few lines in the book about a monster attacking the village but no further details are given; I can't decide if this "plot seed" is half-arsed or inspirational but I took it as the latter.

Some of the central plot points are light on specifics too; in Middenheim, the player-characters will be asked to go and obtain some ingredients for an important ritual and the campaign as written only gives brief notes on what could happen so it's worth fleshing this part out in advance. I added giants and beastmen in an attempt to make it a bit more interesting than a simple fetch quest.

As you can see there is plenty of room to add extra opportunities for adventure but there's also a bit of flab here and there and I did prune some of the text. I cut out three quarters of the -- optional -- fourth chapter of the campaign as it seemed a bit much to visit areas devoted to each of the four Chaos gods and then to play through four similar "are we in an illusion or are we home?" episodes on the return journey. Instead I skipped straight to the flying tower of Tzeentch and only put the player-characters through the illusion once; they almost fell for it too.

The players also missed a major subplot in Middenheim and as a result an innocent man was executed and a Chaos cult prospered, but I believe that player choices should matter, even if it means a major plot is skipped or a campaign finishes earlier than it should.

That's a Big Un

It took my group about six months of weekly three-hour sessions to run through the campaign. There were a number of gaps in which we missed a session for one reason or another or played a different game that week, so it was probably closer to four months. As mentioned above I expanded the campaign in a number of spots so if played as written I reckon it would take my lot about three months -- or twelve three-hour sessions -- to play from start to finish; even if you don't put in any extra work you'll get your money's worth from the adventure. Unless you stole it.

The Enemy Concluded

There you go. That's my briefish guide to running The Enemy Within II: Enemy Withiner. We had good fun with it and it's probably the most successful campaign I've run, even if it's not as good as the original; that said, it does have a better ending. I hope it's been helpful; if anyone has any further questions then post them in the comments and I'll do my best to answer them.