Fímbria Diary: Session 1

So the first week didn't go amazingly. I don't want to pretend it was in any way catastrophic or a "horror story" type bad. Things were just a bit disorganised and all of us were getting used to the system and how we were going to approach things. I find there is always a bit of a mismatch of expectations when it comes trying to run something more episodic with this group. The other GM runs expansive sandbox games and a lot of people come in with that expectation that it's all going to be slow burn character study stuff.

We definitely had two players, one who has now dropped out, who perhaps came in expecting that slow burn and grounded urban horror. When putting the doc together I thought the rules would probably speak for themselves on this but looking back now on what I wrote I didn't use the word episodic even once. Probably a big oversight on my part.

It wasn't just the players that came in with the wrong expectations of the game though. I did too. The premise of journalists for a magazine uncovering the truth makes me think of more investigative modes of play and I perhaps leaned too much into that when I was preparing the session. My idea when it came to time management was to have half the session as a sort of investigative phase, gathering the clues that lead to the mist-creature and then a second half that involves going in and facing the horrors.

The rules of Fímbria are very much facing the horrors rules. Last week I compared them to the rules for Trophy Dark thinking about that again there are two main differences that I would point out that can perhaps guide my future efforts.

In Trophy Dark the equivalent to nightmare dice are gained from rerolls. Thematically they relate to pushing yourself on from greed or desperation to overcome an obstacle and it is for the most part that internal pressure that eventually leads to a character's fall. One the other hand in Fímbria all nightmare points are gained externally, they come from either inhaling the mist or seeing supernatural occurrences.
Conclusion: Make the monsters visible, have them act in supernatural ways to signal their presence. Place less emphasis on character motivations.
Monsters in Fímbria have numbers. They can be defeated. The strong supernatural creatures are still impossible to defeat but this tells me that I should be throwing in weaker creatures that the players can roll against. There's a bit of an issue I have here. The game has wounds rules for facing monsters presumably in physical, social or other kinds of challenges but also still has invincible undefeatable monsters. In the example scenario we're given the objective of uncovering the truth, finding the story. But implicitly as you read on the characters should also find a "solution" to the scenario. This solution must therefore exist outside of the given rules since the only tool a player has to interact with the world is a test and a test can not do anything to an invincible monster. This isn't MotW, there's no mention of finding and exploiting weaknesses to take down invincible foes it's just something that goes mostly unaddressed in the ruleset presumably because the monsters in other games in the genre also can't be fought.

How do I want to go about solving my issues? Well my idea is to add a mechanical resolution to how good the article to be written for the magazine is. At the end of the last session when things had gone a bit off the road and I was trying to pull things together before people had to leave I had the idea to start wrapping up by asking what we were going to put in the article, what it's headline was and what themes they were going to highlight. What I want to do is take this idea and give it some mechanical weight to highlight our objectives and let player know how well they are doing. It makes sense given we the players have a limited amount of time and so too do our characters, there is a deadline both IC and OOC. We're never going to get the full story but how much we get of the story might well determine how well our article does!

What I'm going to suggest is adding an extra sheet for the story itself. Something that might look a little bit like this:

Note: This is using the previous session as an example, if it feels like the inclusion of an abandoned shop is a bit of an outlier it's because I intended the clues of the investigation to lead the players to the abandoned shop. In future ones I'd make all objectives known and understandable from the beginning. Ideas might be get photographic evidence something like that.

During the investigation we would tick things off as we covered them or add in the extra bits we got at the bottom and then at the end of the session there would be a phase where the characters write up the story to submit to the editor. They assemble a dice pool out of the objectives they have managed to achieve. I don't have exactly what rules I'd use for the dice pool in my mind yet but I think this would be a good idea for both giving the players clear objectives for their characters but also letting them consider mechanical trade offs. Maybe you don't need to do the very dangerous thing, maybe you have enough of the story already.

Additionally it adds a narrative end to the investigation when the 3.5 hours of the session are over. Investigation is always going to be somewhat open ended, you'll always be able to find out more and write a whole book on the topic but we're meant to be writers working for a failing magazine not scientists. So I think it's going to be useful to narratively bookend the session to hopefully provide a more satisfactory ending than just "well you've found a bunch of facts on this case, good job."

Anyway, I'm going to go into the next session with this idea a bit more polished and hopefully we can have some fun with it! If not I'll let you know so you do not have to follow in our mistakes.

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