Gaming on the Fringe

Anyone noticing a pattern this TV season? Could we have a few more cop dramas?

We have, what, two Law & Order spin offs? There are at least two CSIs, The Closer, Saving Grace, Monk, Pysche, then The Mentalist and Fringe. Might as well toss in Raising the Bar and Boston Legal. So, either they are trying to be Law & Order or X-Files - or both.

Nearly a decade ago, I ran an X-Files-like game. I think it was one of the best things I ever ran. My group seemed to like it, one of my old players still talks about it.


It worked great - until the players found the truth ...


I started with, frankly, the perfect game system for it: GURPS. Simple, easy GURPS. I supplemented this with a great book - Delta Green. DG is a supplement for modern Call of Cthulhu, worth the cover price as a horror novel in its own right. (They have recently released it for d20 - Get It!) On top of this, I had the excellent GURPS supplement Cthulhupunk.

I started the game by sending all the potential players a real-life snail mail. Envelopes, stamps, the whole bit. (From the beginning, this campaign exercised my love of props.) The letter was from then president Bill Clinton, inviting the player to a meeting at the White House. The letter named the time and date. Most of the players were smart enough to get that the time and date were actually at my apartment.

In separate emails, I informed the players to show up with a character concept for an "investigator" type character. The night of the game, the players and I worked on their characters. We pulled info directly out of the Delta Green book. I passed it around and let them all look at it. (This will be important later.)

One of the best parts of the Delta Green book is the HUGE list of US government agencies with an investigative wing. Most would think of the FBI, the DoJ and a few might think about Treasury, but there are dozens of agencies. In our group, over the course of the campaign, we had FBI, CIA, NSA, Defense Intelligence Agency, Government Accountability Office and a Marshal from the Treasury department. And that just scratches the surface!

The fun thing about using members from all of these agencies is that they have to be secret! In real life, this kind of inter-agency co-operation would require Congressional oversight. Doing it without oversight and getting caught will get you jail time at least and shot for treason at most. So, you might consider doing it with oversight, until you think about how much red tape that might throw up.

Oversight was also taken off the table by the situation. After character creation, the PCs attended their meeting at the White House, or more precisely, a few dozen floors below the White House. When they arrived for the meeting, they witnessed a man talking to, could it be? President Clinton himself? "Clinton" left the room leaving the gentleman behind. He explained to the group that there was something going on, and that the group needed to explore it. Whatever was going on was highly unusual. He wanted them to keep their eyes open for the truly strange - even supernatural. But, most importantly, to report only to him and stay quiet about it - they were doing the bidding of the President.

The supernatural aspect of the game at this point was aided by our Air Force Lieutenant Colonel from the DIA, who had recently come off project Stargate. She was a Remote Viewer. In reality, many would say Remote Viewing is pseudoscience, however, in this campaign, RV was working technology. Every game needs a mage, right?

The game got weirder from there. Right away the group is investigating a murder and a series of seemingly disconnected events; the delivery of a clay vessel of rice from a archaeological site to the wrong museum in Illinois, a group of drug smugglers moving a load of africanized (killer) bees in Miami, mushroom pickers in the Pacific Northwest and several people walking around with old Chinese coins. In the end, the connection was to a cult, trying to assemble an ancient diet that would grant them immortality. In their attempts to gain immortality, they managed to steal, smuggle and even murder. Fun group.

As the PCs liberated or arrested or killed each member of the cult, the remaining members became more desperate. It was revealed that the leader had changed tactics and now wanted to build himself a jade coffin to somehow grant him immortality. The group found out the cult leader would be attending a raw jade auction. The group showed and saw that the leader was indeed present. But, he never bid on the jade. Eventually, the auction ended and the leader managed to avoid observation as he left.

The jade was transfered to a truck and the PCs involved themselves as security for the shipment. Sure enough, the shipment was attacked in a coordinated fashion. In the end, the attackers used a 007-esque vehicle to get under the truck while it was moving, open a hole in the bottom of the trailer, remove the jade and then high-tail it into the desert. The group had lost the leader and the jade. They later found the leader again and he was again able to elude them a second before they closed in on him by use of a sky-hook.

This whole "Jade Cult" story line ran over the course of more than a year. (Two years?) We played two or three times a month. I also ran other stories in the process. I tried to use X-Files creator Chris Carter's theories. Carter would write stories that were either "Monster of the Week" or "Mythos". The "MoW" episodes were just strange things that might never be explained. The "Mythos" episodes extended the longer running story arcs, sometimes connecting them. Carter explained that sometimes the Monsters of the Week came back to become part of the Mythos. I liked this idea a lot. We had a group of whacks killing people by driving "shillelaghs" through their hearts. We had people infested with symbiotic worms that granted them certain powers. The Knights Templar, The Masons, Nazis and a computer hacker that fed the PCs information whether the group wanted it or not. Et cetera, et cetera.

One of my favorite sessions was Project Peach Crate. (I have tried to write this up for Pyramid or some other magazine and I just can get whatever it was that made this so much fun on paper.) "Peach Crate" was a group who had split off from the DIA, built sensory deprivation tanks, used various drugs and performed remote viewing. They used an oil supertanker to move around. They had papers that showed that one side of the boat was not seaworthy to carry oil, but was filled with gravel ballast, when in actuality it was filled with freaky remote viewers! My favorite part of this was that I gave one of the players a map. As I said, I loves me some props. So, I mailed the map to her. But, this wouldn't be fun if it was that easy. The map had been shredded!! So, this poor player had to take scotch tape and rebuild this document. The worst part about this is that I didn't own a shredder. I was working at Boeing at the time, I used theirs. I walked out of a government contractor's building with a shredded document. Thank the gods this was before 9/11!

If the above "sensory deprivation tanks and drugs" sounds like a recent episode of Fringe, you should have seen our reaction to the first X-Files movie! The campaign had been going on for a while before the first X-Files movie came out. The player with the Remote Viewing PC and I went to see the movie together. There were about three things that seemed to be pulled directly out of my game - including the bees! I was convinced for a week that Chris Carter and I shared a brain!

But, all good things must come to an end. As the PCs got deeper into their plight and moved further out of the control of the US Government (and the conspiracy that had brought them together that night under the White House), they needed a base to work from. Their hacker friend found them just the spot - a banana plantation for cheap in Brazil. At this point, I went for broke and finally turned on the Cthulhu full blast. The local villagers and plantation workers worshiped a statue of Ol'Tentacle Face himself. The group found a Book of Knowledge Man was Not Meant to Know in the mansion house library, etc. For well over a year, I had been running Call of Cthulhu, but had never gotten them this deep into the mythos. Unbeknown to the players, the cult leader had been talking to one of the Great Old Ones - that's where he was getting his knowledge. The group had several brushes with the mythos, but nothing this direct.

The players were completely shocked at this revelation. They were not keen on playing characters that would slowly go mad. The thing that bugged me was that I hadn't realized I had done this good of a job hiding what I was doing. I sat with two Cthulhu related books next to my chair, prominently displayed, every game session. We had pulled material out of both books. I thought it was pretty obvious.

My players were not impressed and the game broke down. I had folders of information and pictures I would never use. The cult leader remains at large to this day. And, somewhere in my apartment, I have an envelope of old, Chinese coins and a terracotta pot filled with rice, both purchased at Cost Plus.

With the advent of all these cop dramas and the reemergence of X-Files-like shows on the TV, I'd love to run or play in a game like this again. I keep thinking something a little less global, more local. Maybe a "paranormal task force" in a large metropolitan police force, I think Chicago might be perfect, but New York, LA or even Seattle would work. It would be easy to blend old world mysticism and Cthulhu mythos with modern tabloid urban legend. Maybe one of the cops is psychic or they work with a psychic NPC. Throw in some interference from the Feds, especially Homeland Security and it would be as frustrating and fun as Law & Order meets The X-Files.

In the words of Dr. Bishop: "Excellent! Now let's make some LSD!"