In 1583, court spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham sent an adept gnostic team to Prague on a mission he didn’t commit to public record. These men journeyed through rough and heretic-infested lands engaged in a task of maximum-security in the defence of the realm from increasing Catholic-fuelled aggression.

In the beginning, The Dee Sanction was a slightly different game from one that exists today. At that moment in time, I had as much interest in creating a system to support a Brave New World-a-like called Complex 214 as I did to release tales of esoteric espionage into the world. Indeed, if you read 214 — the first post on this blog, which span off from another blog (I have so many) called Omega Complex — you can see that my key objective seems to have been to spout a riff on The A-Team introduction with Elizabethan trappings.

However, though I might have cast suspicion and paranoia aside, much of what The Dee Sanction was back in 2014 remains.

Never Inaccessible

I always wanted to leverage the notion of Elizabethan times that people had from school, casual reading, TV serials and movies over high-end academic insight. The classic paperback roleplaying game Maelstrom definitely inspired. That little paperback made me want to play AND study more about history while not teaching a tedious lesson of the 16th century itself. I wanted to step forward—away from the simple adventure of an assassin contained in the books, choose your own adventure—and enter the wider world that Alexander Scott’s game spread before me.

On top of that, I wanted simple. I had one mechanic (more or less) from the outset. I wanted that level of simplicity that has allowed a tsunami of amateur game designers to bring their creativity to a welcoming public.

I wanted something I could bring to a convention and not spend 30 minutes explaining everything before the adventure kicked off. I could run The Cthulhu Hack almost instantly, spending 5 minutes creating characters from scratch and 5 minutes explaining the mechanics. The Dee Sanction needed to be that, too.

I wanted something I could sell to gaming newcomers and veterans alike based on that accessibility as a concept and a gathering of mechanics. Roll a die to face a challenge; a result of 1 or 2 means making progress with a complication, while any other result means simple success. Three hits, and you’re down. Sometimes, you can work simple miracles. Now, go. Play.

Something like that.

Competence with Threat

I wanted a game where a character could be broadly competent in a small number of areas to ease the team into the concept of working together despite the paranoia and suspicion. In The Dee Sanction, there’s a death sentence egging you on to help your companions and get the job done. In Complex 214, the punishment for failure wasn’t much different or less terminal (although advanced genetic tech meant that the latter wasn’t a permanent thing).

At heart, the current iteration offers a 50/50 chance of success doing something that you have some skill in. An Ability makes it possible to face a Challenge, and a D4 in a Resource means a coin flip to succeed. In the original, with a skill, you had a 44% chance of success, wanting a 6, 7 or 8 on a roll of 2d6.

The threat isn’t about being incompetent or outclassed (well, OK… maybe); it’s about vulnerability—you’re fragile, death-marked, in enemy territory, and reliant on other people, no less vulnerable. And you’re facing inhuman forces, both natural and supernatural.

All in One

The Cthulhu Hack often sells because you can play the game with only that book. You have all you need, and once you have done playing that first investigation, you have the tools to go on. Along with a simple core mechanic and an easily carried form factor for the book, it could set the game apart from the competition.

The Dee Sanction needed to be just like that.

There were tokens, cards, and odd dice in the early days, but they fell early in the playtesting. People enjoyed the game but didn’t feel that the accessories would make it an easy sell. What if you didn’t have the cards for character creation? What if you didn’t have the dice to support the narrative twists? What if a gust of wind carries away all the tokens?

The version of The Dee Sanction available right now can be played from the book with a normal pack of playing cards. Without the playing cards, you can take a pencil and stub the back onto the character creation pages to determine occupation, associations and so forth. It’s tempting to create some tables—like the one for Combat in the back of the old Lone Wolf books—to make it possible to recreate dice throws without dice or another handy randomizer (trust in the Internet or apps to save the day when you forget your dice… unless the batteries dead).

The first draft of the Oblivion Index, for The Cthulhu Hack, is accessible to Patreons supporters — at Investigators, Dwellers and Bearers tiers— through a recently published post.

The core of this one popped into my head quite suddenly. Thankfully, I immediately took notes — I have a habit of not doing that and losing all the good ideas in the passage of time and sleep. Or just from walking through a new doorway.

It’s a work in progress dealing with the business of eldritch tomes in The Cthulhu Hack and how to handle them (really, really carefully). While in playtest, patrons can expect to see updates, as playtest and revelation strike.

It was an interesting writing exercise.

RPG Geek had a 48 Hours RPG Supplement Contest that — if the name doesn’t give it away completely — requires that you make something cool, from scratch, in a 48-hour period. This supplement was my thing; but, as the last element (provided by Cthulhu Hack stalwart of Wendigo fame, Richard August) was written in 2016 (for another system/publication) and the image isn’t public domain/Creative Commons (but, used with the kind permission of talented artist Daryl Toh, who you can support on Patreon), I wasn’t going to meet the entry criteria.

Nevertheless, it spawned new Cthulhu Hack material put together in about 48 hours, hatched from this great game design challenge and assisted (as usual) by a pretty decent level of Saturday creativity (in the midst of supporting #VirtualGrogmeet organised by Chris Hart from The Grognard Files).

I just thought I’d mention it, as Patreon also serves to support my general creativity, including The Dee Sanction. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, my day job seems to be consuming more, not less, of my time – which has left creative writing taking a distant backseat. The support of patrons helps a great deal to spur me on in those moments I can glean.

Worse yet, my attention has been momentarily drawn away by Safety Lies in Fear – a sort of West Marches-style prequel to the events of the game set in the years after the Dissolution of the Monasteries, where ruins and lawlessness find brave souls seeking to uncover treasures and battle a strengthening supernatural force in Henry VIII’s England.

Prevarication knows no bounds.

Therefore, I have offered a probably unplayable draft version of the current text to both patrons (on Patreon) and traders (those who sponsored a business in the Ossulstone Hundred), as there’s no UK Games Expo and no progress toward a proper release.

The version: 

• contains no art and it also contains a bunch of sections that I have scattered in notes, but haven’t written up;
• contains the adventure I’ve been running to playtest the game for the last year, along with a few bits of another adventure that I’ve run for the last five years but never taken the time to write;
• has a layout that is basically scrapped, as I have stripped all the text out in the post-v0.8 version and put it elsewhere for further work. I have a habit of worrying about style before I’ve filled out the substance.

As supporters, they deserve this. But, keep in mind that this version is far from the finished product. Far, far from finished.

Clearly the moment grabbed me, as 5,000 words just flowed out over the weekend, with some measure of relief.

To be transparent, the adventure spins off of material from an existing D&D adventure – so, this is not something I’ve created from nothing. However, as well as writing the adventure up from scratch—word-for-word brand new material—I’ve also sought and gained permission from the author to publish it with credit for the original.

It will form part of the ashcan release of the game, as the playtest adventures I’m keen to write up all effectively communicate the themes and atmosphere I want from the game. I fully expect a polished final adventure will also appear once the full version of the game sees release.

Characters track their physical and mental condition with a Wellbeing grid – but all characters broadly have the same capacity to withstand harm. I may well tinker with the mechanics in their as well, which will be novel as they’re untested as it is.

The adventure is one thing I’m certain of, as I have run it before – but that means I can worry less about the specifics of the story and give more attention to the way the game runs, mechanically.

I also have a degree of confidence in the character generation process, which has worked seamlessly on all occasions I’ve run the game. I haven’t done any expansion of it since the last time I ran it – which should be on my list of things to do.

While The Cthulhu Hack underwent playtesting, that covered a small aspect of the system that varied from the source of The Black Hack. Here, the whole thing comes from somewhere inside my fevered imagination. I hope that in the not too distant future I will get the core of the game down in written form, rather than a pile of written notes and random thoughts inside my head.

Once I’ve got through my game development To Do list, expect draft v1.0 of The Dee Sanction next.

I’m happy with the character generation process. I like it; players like it. In all the sessions of the game I ran, I got positive feedback about the ease of the process in choosing three cards and then working from there. The three cards can, as easily, be replaced with three tables in the rules, so I won’t be tying the GM down to possession of a special deck or anything. However, that would be an obvious and nice thing to offer.

I like the idea of the original success mechanic, so I’ll be sticking to the seven for success. Roll dice, get a seven – succeed. Otherwise, fail. Most of the time. Or, at best, succeed with unpleasant (or dire) consequences. The base mechanic means that characters are decidedly average at most things they do. However, they do have an edge when it comes to anything mentioned on the card.

Instead of adjusting the range to achieve success – I propose that if the player can leverage something from the character’s cards that they get an extra die to roll to get the seven. If they then throw three dice, a seven can come from any combination of two. If they score seven on three dice, they score a special success; they’ve used their raw ability backed up by expertise and excelled at meeting the challenge.

The alternative? Well, this is Elizabethan Europe in the time of King Rudolph and Doctor Dee, so esoteric and angelic support just happen, right?

The players, as a group, have a deck of cards with letters on them. They draw seven cards and have them all at their disposal. If they attempt to do something and they can spell a short word with the available letters that helps them, they can roll an extra die.

Master Gyles Hepton faces off against a burglar attempting to get away with his satchel and all the worldly possessions therein. He isn’t especially tough nor has he mixed with types known for their melted skills, but he can spell RAGE from the letters in the pool. The threat of loss sends him into a fizzing fury and the GM agrees that he can roll an extra die.

If they find themselves in a situation where they could do with a bit of help, but the cards don’t spell anything useful, they might try calling on the Angels. If they can discard three identical consonants and a vowel, two identical vowels and two consonants, or anything combination of five different consonants, they call on angelic assistance and automatically succeed at the action they attempted. Those cards, however, are lost for the remainder of the session – discarded cards leave the game.

Anyone familiar with Enochian Magic and the Great Table of the Earth will broadly know where this angle on the mechanics comes from. It seemed thematically interesting to allow the players to spell out a nonsense word to clear their hand and get more letters to work with for later skill rolls.

Anyway, I’m going to see how it works out in play testing and start to get some stuff down in writing. We’ll see how it pans out.

The Dee Sanction

Players take on the roles of outsiders, dabblers, and criminals, given a second chance when recruited as investigators into Queen Elizabeth’s intelligence task force for handling magickal and supernatural threats.

Headed by her long time confident Doctor John Dee, the setting covers both investigations on home soil and the period Dee spent in Europe seeking to secure weapons of mysticism and devilry.

Elizabeth prevails… but for how long faced with the threat of Church, Spain and foul sorcery alike.

I realise this is nothing new, but I needed to remind myself that The Dee Sanction remains very much in progress and worthy of my time and attention.

This time of year hangs heavy with convention-based commitments. The opportunity to sit and tinker with stories, plots and mechanics seem to dry up.

However, I have been pondering the greatest concern for myself around The Dee Sanction – the mechanism for handling conflict and competition. As of yet, I have not settled on a single means of resolving situations in doubt – but, I feel I’m on the cusp.

I plan to run the game at a couple of cons over the next few months and continue to aspire to run an online game or two.

Until now most adventures have been one-off sessions or convention slots. The adventures have been run to a 3 – 4-hour timeframe. The one game I have run with my local gaming group took a couple of sessions to complete, but that comes down to only really getting 2.5 hours of gaming time in a single evening.

Last night we kicked off around 20.30 and ran through to around 22.30 – or whenever the last orders bell rang.

The pub environment we play in is not ideal. While we managed to negotiate switching off the speakers in our area of the pub during the match between West Brom and Chelsea, after the match someone cranked them up again. I fail to understand the logic behind the playing of loud music in a small local pub. If we didn’t attend on Mondays like this, they’d have less than a dozen patrons filling a space that could accommodate 100+. Is the music intended to dampen the sense of despondency and loss that haunts their poetic souls?

While I had intended to run Thunder and Steel, the adventure I previously ran at Seven Hills last month, in the end, I came up with a new adventure. The characters arrive in Stettin, the capital of Pomerania, and a member of the Hanseatic League. They have arrived two days later than the ship carrying John Dee and his entourage and discover the good Doctor has already moved on without them. He has left them paid lodgings and a note with a nervous messenger boy called Andreas. They should follow on once they have handled the matter with the child, as he has pressed on along the road following the River Ober toward Moravia.

But what child…?

The only other thing the players had to go on was a flashback. A boy awoke from a nightmare, his face slick with sweat, abed in the dormitory of a school in Chelmsford, circa 1535. The boy had found himself lost and alone in a cloying darkness. He felt pursued by something or someone close on his heels. When he finally felt the hot breath of the beast on his neck, a light flared. A severed hand, with pointed fingers, surrounded by a halo of flame. The middle finger, pale and bloodless; the little finger, blackened as if burnt; the thumb, red like gore. After the boy woke, he didn’t speak and hardly ate for three days until he finally found his senses while studying Euclid in the school library. He had received some incite or experienced some revelation. This was John Dee.

And the flashback didn’t really help throw any light on their situation.

Giving the characters – a messenger, a courtier, a horse-trader, and a painter-stainer – just this to go on, they seemed a little lost. Perhaps I offered too little. I sort of thought that if you find yourself in an unfamiliar town with a message and little else, you’d at least put yourself about in the hope of finding something. Maybe I need to offer something more – I can adjust! Maybe fatigue, the loud music, or my lengthy exposition on the background of the game numbed their senses.

We will not play again for at least two weeks, so I have time to mull on the adventure. I must spend some more time on creating a  condensed background summary for the game, as when improvising I go on too long. In a convention game, I don’t have the luxury of an hour for character generation and discussion on the nature of The Dee Sanction. I did draft something punchy in an earlier post on this blog – and I should likely stick to that in future, or some variant thereof.

Running an adventure without using half the system – and finding it works well – might prove worthy food for thought.

I ran a new adventure – Thunder and Steel – at the Seven Hills gaming event in Sheffield.

The characters only recently made the trip to Europe with Dee and Kelley, and the call of angels in Edward’s ear seemed to be making the trip a long-winded one. Halfway through Moravia, Dee heard rumours of a young girl with prescient dreams who had foreseen the assassination of the Virgin Queen, so sent the characters off to investigate. The trail started in a hamlet nestled in the Little Carpathians and led them on a trail of lies, deceit, bad weather, and unfurnished accommodation.

One way or another, the game system element of this session never kicked in – but, the story felt fairly satisfying.

I had good comments about the atmosphere and background of the tale, and a chat with players afterwards gave positive comment on the snappy three-card character generation process. Interesting also to have players asking about the history itself and explaining the seeds of truth behind the setting and the adventure itself.

I have now played three adventures and many sessions of the system and I’m seeing a leaning away from the fiddly token approach and more toward something that drives and supports the interaction and character.

The character cards offer a view of who the character is and what they’ve got themselves into. Between the three cards, everyone has a clear idea of where their strengths lie and the sort of personality they might have. Perhaps I still could so with a relationship mechanic, but it didn’t feel necessary in this session. I actually choose to reamble my games with a few statements about playing characters as a team, giving each other a chance to speak and contribute, and engaging in the adventure with energy and a splash of derring-do.

I suspect I’ll ruminate on the feedback and my own experience – and then see what I can tweak before I run the adventure again at UK Games Expo at the end of May.

Anyway, one piece of feedback from the games at Concrete Cow came from professional Angel Summoner, Steve Ellis:

Good fun, reasonable system with a bit of token fiddliness (and no real use for Penance).

I’m happy to break that sentence down, as it holds considerable feedback for such a scant array of words.

Good Fun: On the very plus side, the adventure itself provided enough entertainment to keep five players engaged for a 3-hour slot. I have now run The Holy Wax Infant of Prague on two occasions, and I’ve touched on it before – a nice little sandbox where the actions of the player characters determine the course of the adventure.

Reasonable System: I like any feedback on the system that doesn’t entirely slate it! I know that it needs work, so if I can get from A to B without too many slips, I can say “Good.” I have been listening to all the feedback, although it will always take time for me to take it onboard and do something constructive with it.

I want to find a better system, for example, to handle occasional combat. The game isn’t about fights, but they will happen – and right now the system really doesn’t do anything. The focus on narrative means that I can tell you how or why things go for or against you, but the outcome can get a bit fuzzy. I’m inclined to opt for some kind of vaguely realistic injury system. But, I did say, “occasional combat” – and the fact it doesn’t happen often means I’m inclined to work on it later when I’m trying to fill out the gaps.

A Bit of Token Fiddliness: I used narrow character sheets for this event, rather than whole pages. The counters pooled above the line, the character cards below. I’m increasingly feeling that I can find a better way to handle the counters. I think I may experiment with both a team pool mechanic or something finite and personal, but singular. By that, I mean one pool of tokens per character, rather than the current three.

Right now, we have Power, Prestige, and Penance for The Dee Sanction. These represent your ability to drive toward success through personal ability, association with influential organisations, and engaging in beneficent teamwork, respectively. You draw on the first two pools to directly tweak dice rolls, while the third pool starts with tokens and loses them whenever you selflessly help someone else.

Adjusting other people’s rolls costs 2-for-1 on Prestige, 1-for-1 on Power – because it’s easier to assist with success yourself than expect your contacts to help others.

Adjusting your own roll costs 2-for-1 on Power and 1-for-1 on Prestige – because the roll represents your best effort, so applying more personal expertise proves a lot harder than drawing on the good will and influence of your contacts and associations.

The tokens represent a resource to allow you to drive success when it matters, help team members when they need it, and allow you to look good helping them out. It could well work with a single pool, but, in a way, I wanted to stay away from something that just looked like another Fate / Hero / Force / Whatever mechanic. The single pool of tokens to be heroic when it matters has been done – a lot. I wanted something a little different.

I will have to ponder on this one.

No Real Use for Penance: Well, there is – but some games it comes across strong and others it doesn’t. Penance gives you a reason to help the team. Oddly enough, some groups of players require a carrot on a stick to get them to work co-operatively. In Penance, the characters have cause to assist their companions both to drive success and to look good in the face of critical outsiders. They can redeem their sins and show a willingness to improve in pursuit of a goal of personal freedom.

Possibly, a dozen tokens of three different colours might be overkill. It could be resolved by doing away with the tokens and just have markers on a character sheet to cross out. On the other hand, I might find resolution in a revelation over the pool mechanic.

I might need to take a shower…