Practice makes a kind of ok session (lol)………….Hotel Hell by Sandy Peterson (Spoilers in here - you have been warned!)

Resolutions or just get stuff done.....

New Year resolutions are a pretty awful concept.  I mean why wait till the 1^st January to do something you should have done at some point during the year?  Feel fat?  Stop eating so much and get some exercise – now. Wanna stop smoking?  Do it – now. Want to solve climate change? Go to school get a degree in something related and find the solution – now.  Stop moaning and throwing paint at pictures and just get on with finding a solution. As for dry January – get outta here! Whose idea was that! Crazy………….

Anyway I digress…..it is with some smugness that in the summer of 2022 I thought – the last few years playing online has been great – I have lots of people I can play with and the community on discord is fantastic, but the wholesomeness of actually playing with other people across a table and interacting just can’t be beat – so I need to get back to that.  A quick interweb search and I found a club about 30mins drive away that meets each Monday night.  Primarily it is a wargamers club but they seemed to have a small cadre of RPGers that also attended according to the message board.  So, me and a mate went along last summer and introduced ourselves.  Turns out the RPGers weren’t coming back for various reasons but they were keen we should start RPG games and when I mentioned I’d ref some Cthulhu a few people turned away from their Napoleonic armies, their eyes lit up and their true calling was made evident with their enthusiasm for playing the game. 

A slightly strange incident did occur that night – we walked in and the wargamers were doing their mock battle stuff and when we introduced ourselves as RPGers, there was grunt from one of the tables and a wargamer type said – ‘oh bloody hell here they come, bloody roleplayers!’.  It kind of took me by surprise and we laughed it off but it did have that 80s wargamers vs RPGers type of vibe behind it…very strange!  Good to see those old divisions are still in place decades after I last came across them, but hey that’s wargamers for you always living in the past………

For the future we decided this was the place to be on a Monday night, however due to holidays and work and every other bloody excuse we only managed a couple of visits last half of 2022, which brings me onto Monday 16^th January.  Well actually we’ll start at Saturday 7^th January when I ran Hotel Hell by Sandy Peterson for the first time. 

Write as we say not as we do.....

I have had the Chaosium Abominations book for a while and decided to run each of the scenarios on there for players on RPG Nook.  And thought I may as well run the same scenarios for the ‘real life’ RPGers at the Monday night club.  So I run it on the Saturday virtually and then again on the Monday face to face. My aim is to do a scenario face to face every two weeks and run the same scenario online every two weeks. You gotta have a goal and this one is mine.

So Hotel Hell – well its an interesting scenario – although Sandy has evidently not completed the Storytelling Collective's RPG Writer Workshop as the layout of the scenarios is kind of all over the place.  Concepts like Dramatis personae, timelines and coherence which you find in most Chaosium products are not present here!  Its like jumping into a 80s scenario where it was all a bit chaotic and the writer kind of just streamed their consciousness and idea onto the page…bit like this blog really. It’s a bit unexpected and I can see that those indoctrinated to the ‘Chaosium way’ would be turned off by the layout, however its fine – its actually a bit refreshing to really have to work to get the scenario and story straight in your head and then consider how it will play.  Hotel Hell is kind of sandbox but there are some key items you need to ensure occur at the correct time during game play, more on that later.

The conceit is that one of the investigators has been left a Hotel in the will of a long lost uncle who has recently died.  The hotel is in remote British Columbia and needs serious renovations.  The investigator up sticks from their current jobs and go to the Seven Stars Hotel (its obviously not called Hotel Hell in the game – that may put off the characters lol) to renovate it and turn it into a hikers / mountaineer / survivalists / hunters paradise to stay in while they do their various activities in this remote region of British Columbia.  Unbeknownst to the characters the hotel has been built on a gate to hell.  It is one of seven gates and when they all open a variety of hideous events occur – mainly involving volcanoes and earthquakes leading to the Pacific Ocean unscrewing and the planet having some serious issues.  The gates are arrayed around the Pacific Ring of Fire.  The characters get involved as the workmen renovating the hotel come across strange murals and the characters themselves start having hallucinations, strange experiences and manifestations of hauntings and evil goings on.  There are some key events the characters need to engage with – including a hidden room in the hotel, a ancient tree and a basement mural.  One of the challenges of running this scenario is that the Keeper has to make some story / connections to ensure the characters have an idea as to what is going on and then how they could possibly stop the end of the world happening.  As written in the scenario this is not clear as from the clues provided I doubt the players would be able to figure this out.  Hence a bit more work for the Keeper to ensure information is presented in a manner that leads the players to some conclusions or get some feel for what they need to do to stop the end of the world.

Needless to say the first time I ran this on RPG Nook I messed this up a bit and had to improvise a lot to keep some semblance of a coherent story together.  But it went OK from my perspective and I felt I learnt a lot about the scenario and how to run it and what not to do and how to pace it from this running.

Keeper screen excitement....

So I had a week to prepare for the face to face version of the scenario.  One issue – doing games virtually on Roll20 for the last 2.5 years makes you realise how lazy you become as a Ref!  all those handouts easily copied and pasted into Roll20, no problems to quickly add a note or a handout that you forgot to add to Roll20 – even during the game! Not so with the face to face stuff – luckily I have access to a decent photocopier (thanks work!), but on the Monday when I was printing out the sheets and handouts etc I did have a nagging feeling that I had probably missed something vital and wouldn’t be able to provide it to the players (I didn’t but I still didn’t relax about it until I got to the table and sorted out my notes!).

The club is in a working mans social club – one of those establishments that hasn’t realised the 70s have ended and never bothered to clean the nicotine yellow stains from the ceilings.  I love it. The gamers go upstairs to the function room to recreate their battles or enter the world of RPGs.  I had four players and just used the pregens from the scenario.  I had never met three of the players before so it kind of had a little bit of a convention vibe – what would they be like?  Would they be games lawyers? Would they think my Keeping style was way off?  You know the usual self doubts we all have as refs (we do have all these doubts, don’t we?).

Something else - i bought the Keepers Screen just before all the pandemic shenanigans so at last i was going to be able to actually use it, with real people, roll dice behind it and be able to reference all those quick look tables! This was so exciting for me - its the little things eh?

Once we had all arrived, got the necessary beverages and they had chosen their pregens we got underway.  All the players had played Cthulhu but not 7^th ed.  It was all older versions from 2^nd to 6^th. I gave them a quick run down of Luck, Pushing the roll, combat and Sanity mechanics and we started. 

The lessons I learnt from the run through virtually were implemented and it made for a better experience and a more cohesive story.  It was also much easier running the game in person with all the visual cues you get then running the game online.  The players really enjoyed it and are looking forward to the next one.  I enjoyed it so much I decided to run it for some other players on 21^st January over on RPG Nook again.  Running the same scenario three times in the space of a couple of weeks – now that’s getting your moneys worth out of a scenario!

People are great.....

As a ref the face to face experience was so reinvigorating it made a real difference.  Last year I ran a DG game at Grogmeet and had a similar experience where you could really get into the story with the players when sitting around the table and riffing off of what the players were saying or the looks on their faces or just the general vibe.

So now I have a club to go to, I can run more games, I can socialise with clientele in the pub and the club, we can have a laugh, we can talk about the games we played back in the day and we can most of all enjoy this amazing hobby of ours.  Best of all my ‘home group’ have now all decided its time to play face to face as well – so every other Wednesday my house will be filled with my mates and we will roll a D20 or several and take some DnD 4^th ed characters from 1^st to whatever level and have a laugh doing so.  Meanwhile I’ll still be on RPG Nook (and other servers) playing and reffing – it really is a case of getting the best of both worlds.

If you only play virtually at the moment take a late resolution and try and find a club or a group to play face to face – I assure you it is worth it – go on do it.

That's it for now - remember Parrying Is For Wimps!