Fímbria Diary: Session 0
I'm going to be running a game in a ttrpg discord server soon using Fímbria. It's a lightweight system designed for a group of journalists working for (but maybe not being paid by) a failing supernatural magazine based in a 90s city that is being overrun by a supernatural mist. I've had this game for a long time but had never got around to running it before and I've decided to write down some of my thoughts and will try to maybe post some updates as the game continues.
The PDF of the book is 65 pages long and 36 of those are spent on the descriptions of the 36 professions you could roll for your character. This section is doing most of the work when it comes to setting the tone of the "Lost 90s" setting and I think it does it very well. They are funny and clever and conjure a very clear image of what the writer was thinking.
We've got another four pages outlining character creation and seven explaining the rules. Following these we get the example scenario taking up the rest of the book.
What there isn't is much guidance in how to run the game. I guess to me this is very noticeable because of the strong similarity to the rules of Trophy Dark. This is a genre I love and when I think of Trophy Dark I think of the very strong guidance it has to how to structure a game. In most RPG's I own this is my favourite section of their book, the part that gives me as a GM ideas for how to run games.
Now I've run a lot of games in the genre of episodic investigations alongside Traveller stuff it's probably what I've done the most. In the last few years I've done a lot less, old playgroups disbanding and new ones having different tastes, but I'm looking forward to going back to my roots.
I'm not going to claim to be an excellent GM, I'm not a professional at this it's just a hobby. But I think it's possible that my thoughts on this could be useful to other people wanting to run this system or other games in the genre. So I'm going to try and write a bit about my experiences, reflect on the successes and the mistakes and hopefully grow a bit along the way.
These aren't going to be articles or a reviews. It's more like a blog so expect me to ramble a lot and probably have a bunch of typos that I don't spot.
Session 0
Well I haven't run the first session yet, well there was a bit of a session 0 last week but not everyone could make it. I don't envision this being too much of an issue, we've all already got our characters ready, we're all good friends and I've GMed for this flock many times before. I don't think this game will be tackling serious issues or sore points. Probably going to aim to have a quick chat with the group at the start and end of each session to monitor that but yeah, this is going to be a comedy fun time relaxed game (I'm running this in a discord server where the other GM runs gritty urban horror sandbox campaigns that are heavier than rocks).I'll go through what I have prepared for the first session in the next entry but I guess I might talk a bit about what came first. In this server there is sort of an expectation that you post the pitch to draw in players. This is normally formatted as a google document in which you include the information like tone, touchstones, any rule changes, when we are going to run, safety concerns and anything else important. This might seem like a bit much for a server that has around 10 active users but it functions as a players guide to be referenced and you can update them to include any useful information and rule changes to keep all of that in one place. We've found them really handy in the past.
What am I drawing on for this game? Well my first thought was Hamish Macbeth, I feel that show has a perfect stew of comedy with eeriness and the supernatural. I want to try and hit that balance where it's fun and light hearted but can quickly slide into bizarre. Now most of my players haven't seen Hasmish Macbeth, I feel that's a kind of specific thing that you are unlikely to pick up unless you're from thistle country. So I added a couple of other touchstones to get the feel across: the x-files and Mob. Not perfect but it'll do for now, the descriptions can get the rest across.
Not mentioned but definitely affecting my own thought process were the films Still Life and Ash is Purest White. I'd watched them recently and they have a ufo in them and they are kinda buried in Jia Zhangke's nostalgia for the 90s. Nostalgia feel like a pretty important component of the "lost 90s" aesthetic and I definitely wanted to imbue the city (which we are calling Sandgrouse city) that I was setting the game in with that same feeling that Jia's characters have of being in a world that has left them behind.
One impression that you do strongly get from the rulebook is that the mist has caused a great decay in the city. People don't get out as much, they're afraid and the economy is crumbling. I wanted to flip this on it's head. Rather than a red comet coming and causing the mist the mist instead began to creep in as Sandgrouse city entered a downward economic spiral. Abandoned factories and closed businesses are a result of a changing world and the mist creeps in to fill up the empty spaces. And so urban decay becomes a theme.
So how I am going to introduce our players the the world? What will their first steps be? Find out next time!
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