As far as DMing goes, the cast of characters is too large to prep, from inmates to orderlies, the house is large enough to support a lot of people! The challenge comes in the dance, I want the players to feel confined, but not railroaded. Their identities have been stripped from them, paranoia is rampant as you never know if you are talking to a fellow patient or if it is an orderly. In regards to role-playing, this thing is fun as hell! I get to play many extreme characters, but there is a problem. Part of the game also involves isolation, which as a DM made me nervous. I knew that I had to have a plan to deal with that. I’ve always had to remind them that we need to stick together and never separate as when that happens a portion of the table is just sitting there listening, but in this game they are forced to do the opposite. This is definitely outside of my comfort zone. The question I had was how to do this without the game getting boring for those that aren’t technically in the scene at all. I had some ideas, but as luck would have it I had recently purchased Creative Campaigning, and it featured a small section on what they called “Freeform Gaming”, it is a very literary style which is more akin to a novel-like approach rather than the typical RPG format which we all have adapted to. I don’t know if I would want to play that style long term, but for this game, it had to be adapted.
How do you keep a table full of players engaged? Once you find out how to do it, then you are a decent Dungeon Master, but changing your normal approach is scary. I knew that I’d have to break them up from time to time, but I did give myself a safety net, I put them all into a “Guest room” until we got to playtest some and get comfortable with the format, and then we’d complete the process by placing them all into cells, which worked great! We got to ease into it.
I knew that when I was running scenes for individual players, I had to make sure that they were interesting to listen to, and I had to really watch the speed and tempo of how the scene flowed. We also had to limit PC to PC Role-playing, which I really hate doing, but I’ve got to control the pace like a RPG Nazi! I did allow them to do it, I had too, we got a new character, but I had to make sure that PC dialog was always productive.
As far as the module goes, while it is confined to the mental hospital, the setting is surprisingly open. There are only a few key events that must take place, but they all are up to the discretion of the DM to trigger once I am ready, so I am allowed to set a good pace, add my own material and what not.Though it is a 2nd Edition module, it is written along the lines of the early modules where they just detail the setting and the rest is up to you, like Vault of the Drow but not that big. It wasn’t that difficult to add my own material into it, and cut out what I didn’t like or things that just don’t work.
As far as the narrative goes, it wasn’t as difficult as I feared. Prior to play I warned them what was about to happen, and to just be patient (ha ha ha), we were just going to take our time and work through this thing, but at the end of the night I wanted to get their feelings about it, which were positive! I found that we could do things that we had never been able to do before, I could have little cliff-hangers, give players time to think about their actions, or even enhance feelings of helplessness. We adapted just fine and the players even took to the style, and initiated it themselves a time or two.
I do have experience with DMing One on One games, meaning one PC and one DM, and really enjoy how deep we can go, so adapting to this style suddenly wasn’t as difficult for me as I feared that it would be. I was able to switch between characters or groups of characters fairly briskly, and keep everything interesting to everyone.
Another difficult aspect of Asylum is railroading, while it isn’t done by the module itself, the players are prisoners, and the villain has more control over their movements and decisions than they do, but it is very passive. I want the players to feel this, but without getting so railroaded that we are just scene jumping, I am reacting to them and they are reacting to me, it isn’t just me playing by myself telling the PCs what they are doing unless they are restrained and receiving treatment. They must comply with the Doctor’s rules, but they still have lots of choices to make, and everything gained from him must be earned.
In a nutshell, THIS THING IS FUN! I had to adapt it from Ravenloft over to Masque of the Red Death, which was easy, with the exception of placing it in my world. In the module the asylum is on an island, but in my world it is near Berlin. Looking at Google Maps, I was able to place the Asylum in an old forest, by looking at the terrain I could guess at what this area looked like in 1890 and draw a decent map, it doesn’t match the real world scale, as I am not a cartographer, but it is functional for our purposes.
I have no idea how or if the party will escape, so I had to prep the wilderness and surrounding areas generally, just enough so that I am ready for anything that could happen out there. Inside of the Asylum I was rather stuck. Typically I create a time-line of triggers, but that just didn’t seem appropriate to me. What I ended up doing was writing each of the characters names down and writing short and very brief stories for each of them, THAT got me excited and ready to play!
Story-wise, this is a game of secrets, exploration, and torture. Everything that the players have discovered thus far only leads to deeper questions. They’ve assembled a decent amount of clues, but they have no idea how they fit together. Once they know more I can post more.
We did finally get to an NPC that has been referred to and evidence pointing to, but never actually encountered, for years (real-time), Boyd Weathermay. As a boy, he murdered his little sister and the crime was covered up, Boyd has spent every day since locked up in this mental institution, and driven mad. He didn’t murder Isabell willingly; it was the demon which possesses him. I’ve been building this idea and building it, and in this game finally came the payoff. Fiends are special monsters, you don’t want to use them much, and when you do you really want to play them up. If you get into a quarrel with a fiend, you want to have the party walk away with lots of scars to remember the encounter by. We never want this one to become old hat, they are some of the greatest monsters in a DM’s arsenal! It was great fun finally getting to role-play this character, in his mind he is still 10 years old, if he is allowed to speak, as he is mastered by this creature.
This isn’t the only character that was important to me either, my original players don’t know it but they had encountered Dr. Dominioni before, it was the first truly complex Villain that I had ever played as a Dungeon Master, in that game the party escaped. His first appearance was in the very first module specifically written for the Ravenloft Setting called “Feast of Goblyns” and while we never finished that module, as it is a really long one, and, at the time, well beyond my ability to DM anyway, we did play through that part, and I probably botched it. This time I can give this NPC the attention to detail that he deserves, so in a way, I have come full circle! I’m allowed to cover up an ugly tattoo with a beautiful one.
So, in a nutshell, prep was very intense, and took the entire month to prepare, but what I have prepared is going to last me a very long time. The most challenging aspect of it is controlling the pace without controlling the PCs, and I must say that I am enjoying it! It is rare to be challenged by a module. Typically I try to avoid using them, but there are really good ones out there that are worthy of playing through, and Bleak House is one of them.
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