Revelations post-Trembling (Dark Carnival 2025, Now in the Rear View)

Like I wrote about originally on 9/26 and updated about on 10/28, today was RTR’s Dark Carnival 2025 spooky game day.

In the four(ish) hours since returning from the game day and from running Darquehaven Manor now for the fourth(ish) time*, my brain immediately started working. I didn’t want to forget any of it, so I’ve been conducting a brain dump by typing. I had thoughts on the adventure specifically, which I won’t discuss because (1) spoilers and (2) I’m just a humble GM who didn’t write the adventure, is just delivering it.

*two four-hour version and two two-hour versions

• In tonight's playing of the Darquehaven Manor adventure, there was a point where the party encountered something and the Airedale’s player (Rose) said "I want to see if any of the children are twins" and I said "you can but you'll open yourself up to being power challenged by Parnell" which she accepted for Val (her Airedale character’s name). I want more opportunities like this to model failing forward have a meaningful impact on the emergent flow of the narrative,

• The pacing of the adventure can be regulated by how long the PCCs (player-controlled characters) are in and out of encounters. Every time tension lightens and a moment's no longer aggravating a scene into an encounter, immediate recovery happens. Maybe immediate recovery only clears one of the three vitality types at a time, so tension lightens, but in stages. Someone would have to have an enhancement or preternae that lets them trigger immediate recovery if an encounter is extended/prolonged.,

• I'm kind of okay with everyone having three actions per turn, and letting them use all three, possibly, to challenge all three times and possibly inflicting injury three times. However, I think I want to put a spin on it: if you fail or even if you glance away from failure (I'll get to that), you're out of actions. So you start with three, but you might lose them. Leaning strongly toward "you have a number of actions on your turn in encounters equal to your Potential Threshold",

• Having multiple actions, and maybe losing one or two of them after the first, opens up what could be done with combining actions (either your own or others), and maybe I just figured out how assisting an ally be giving your actions away to allies because (a) there's a chance that failing means losing actions and (b) giving your allies actions means they can combine actions, and combining actions can mean something also (this might be where I distinguish between assisting an ally and "concerted effort", have the former be an opportunity cost between acting and steering away from failure/toward success, the latter be the giving of actions from one PCC to another).,

• This can be the key difference between subsequent and follow-up challenges: I might have to juggle the terms between the concepts, but if there's a chance that you can lose actions beyond the first then follow-up challenges become more potent because they let each die rolled in a follow-up challenge accomplish what an action do without the chance that you'll lose the action. Typically 1 action <-> 1 challenge.

(I told you I'd get to this) A five-band success/failure outcome array:

• Actor's challenge greater than opponent's response on the highest result (a result > b result): achieves clear success (marks a success toward achieving next development point).,

• Actor's challenge equals opponent's response after both actor and opponent yield any dice until no dice remain: glance toward success (doesn't mark a success towards next development point): aka partial success, success with cost or consequence.,

• Actor's challenge doesn't equal opponent's response after both actor and opponent yield any dice until no dice remain: glance towards failure (you don't succeed, but it's not as bad as it could've been, aka "the soft move").,

• Actor's challenge less than opponent's response on the highest result (a result < b result): fails to succeed, aka "the hard move", aka an outcome that might trigger a reaction, might inflict injury to any vitality type—also, mark a failure towards accomplishing next development point.

• Actor's challenge greater than opponent's response on the highest result (a result > b result) and the highest result is a unmodified 10 (natural 10, or "nat ten"): actor achieves clear success and banks 1 critical.

Scenes, Encounters, Monitoring Pulse, Ebb and Flow of Moments Scenes that have moments of heightening tension (rising, ratcheting upwards) aggravate to an encounter. Encounters that get progressively more violent escalate. Encounters can be de-escalated. The ebb and flow comes in where the decision lies to continue inflicting injury: if you are challenged, respond successfully, then inflict injury in return, then the scene is aggravated. Scenes where moments have lightening tension (lessening, ratcheting downwards) de-aggravate from an encounter to a scene. Immediate recovery happens in that moment of lightening tension, but only one vitality type per moment. 

Maybe you need to reduce a character with vitality to zero in two out of three vitality types before they go into shock.

Two out of three adjacent because they have to be one after the other: savvy followed by obstinance, obstinance followed by resilience

The only way to possibly inflict injury is to challenge. When you challenge, you can choose whether to inflict injury. If you successfully respond, but turn around and challenge in retaliation, you've introduced a moment that aggravates a scene into an encounter and you must inflict injury until a moment occurs that de-aggravates from an encounter back to a scene.