#311

Books

This week I read:

• cuneiform by Irving Finkel and Jonathan Taylor

  It’s an little interesting book about cuneiform and the cultural context, but not so much a book to teach cuneiform; though it does have a listing at the end of syllable-signs, which is enough to transliterate words that sound sufficiently Akkadian (like “ba-ru-ka-du” = “barruadu”). If you were to be in a beginner’s cuneiform class, it’s probably the sort of introductory material that would be covered in the first one or two sessions before you get into the actual material.

  I’ve ordered some of the books it lists for further reading, along with some other cuneiform, Sumerian, and Akkadian textbooks, to try to actually learn something.

• Delta Green: A Night at the Opera from Arc Dream Publishing

  This is a collection of unrelated scenarios of very different styles, there’s probably a scenario in here for any Delta Green campaign. I particularly liked one about a haunted house, that I might use to start my next campaign.

  I want to begin with the player characters being Delta Green outsiders, who experience something weird and then get recruited. Music from a Darkened Room would work great with the PCs being private investigators (or even federal agents), asked by a contact to investigate a recent unexplained “suicide” that the authorities have swept under the rug. Along the way, they encounter some weird stuff (and possibly a Delta Green agent investigating the same matter), do well by surviving, and then get approached by some shadowy feds afterwards. It’s set in the 2010s, but looks pretty easy to transplant back to the early ’90s, which is when my campaign would begin.

• Occam’s Razor from Stygian Fox

  A collection of modern-day Call of Cthulhu scenarios which don’t involve any mythos at all, just weird mundane things. I backed this on kickstarter over 5 years ago, back when I was running a Call of Cthulhu campaign, and I did a poor job selling it to my players at the time: they thought it was a “gotcha”, taking advantage of the players’ genre-expectations to get one over on them. And yes, it is definitely playing with the genre-expectations, but the scenarios are still enjoyable mysteries.

  A few things really stood out to me in this collection which I’m not so much a fan of.

  Firstly, every (I think) scenario involves hacking into a computer, the book says the PCs can figure out the password becaue there’s (say) a big poster on the wall and the password is the name of the artist, or there’s a photo on the desk and the password is the location of the photo, and so on. But that’s kind of ignoring that there will, of course, be lots of other things in the room as well! Unless you describe only the plot-relevant things in the room, the players would easily miss the clue; and if you only describe the plot-relevant things, that feels like a point-and-click adventure game rather than a mystery…

  Secondly, plots: the scenarios tend to assume certain things happen in certain orders, and that certain clues will be found. To mitigate this, the scenarios recommend lots of Idea rolls to deal with the players missing things. But Idea rolls are supposed to be rare, they’re for if either the GM or the player fucked up and we need to metagame a little to get things back on track. If your scenario relies on the player either passing a Spot Hidden roll (say) to find a clue, or passing an Idea roll to realise that they missed that clue, it feels kind of fragile. Follow the three-clue rule!

  And thirdly, most scenarios have an NPC who becomes fixated on the most attractive PC and acts weirdly around them. I can see that working well every once in a while, but if you were to link the scenarios in this collection together into a campaign, it would be too much.

  Despite all this criticism, I think there are some good ideas here, but it would just take a little work.

Roleplaying Games

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