Casting Shadows

This is day twelve of #RPGaDAY2025 and we have come to the word path as our prompt today. One common way to run mysteries and horror in RPGs is to think of a path from some crime or troubling past event and link it in stages via clues to some future ending point. In scenarios the clues tend to point quite strongly toward an actionable idea which will advance the investigation along this path a certain amount and numerous opportunities to find each clue, or ones like them are salted about to guide those who have gone astray back on to the path toward that final destination. It’s a controlled release of useful and coordinated pieces of information to focus attention, guide deduction, and speed play by narrowing options.

Day 12: Path

This came to be common, I find, largely due to the process of play being imagined on a scenario scale. When we ask the designer of Call of Cthulhu, for example, we learn that campaign play with it was not a serious consideration, and when we look at how cosmic horror tends to manifest in the hobby at large we tend to find single scenarios, Hallowe’en one-shots, and the infrequent ambitious stab at the famous clue and story heavy campaigns like Masks of Nyarlathotep.

In this campaign, we could look at it from the point of view that ultimately and objectively, Tsathoggua’s fitful slumber is drawing to a close in the darkness of N’Kai. From a certain point of view, N’Kai could be seen as a location for some sort of grand confrontation with and even, for truly elegant play, abjuration of the Cult of the Sleeper. It could be a destination. A destination needs a route and when a route is not known, but exists and must be found, there will come a time when cues, clues, and signposts must lead the searchers to it. We could then build links from the Nationalist politics among the people to the cult behind it, to the initiated behind them, to the true cult underground, to the initiated among them, to the ruins of temples deep underground, to the lost civilization of Yoth, to the isolationists of K’n-Yan, and then on through shunned passages to N’Kai. It could be epic in scope.

If we increase our scale of imagination from the onset to one of campaign length, meaning a start with no end in sight, but probable cause to care about something, then the notion of a path can stop needing to be one to impart, and can instead become one which the characters blaze as the players absorb information naturally in play, as they make their own value judgements about the people their characters meet and what happens around and because of them, and as they grow in connection to the world and how it works. Fragments of overheard conversation or interrogation lead to research, research leads to the piecing together of fragments, discussion of these ideas leads to debate and debate to understanding of the threat – or part of it. This leads to further action, further research, further interrogation, and then more of who is doing what is slowly being recognized as what is being done comes into focus. By this point, it is the characters who need to act, to discover, and to put an end to the threat that they have begun to perceive.

How they decide to do that, is where the magic happens for me.

The path won’t be held out in front of them, pulling them along.

It will be behind them, as evidence of their choices, their successes, draws, and failures as they contend with the horrors and villains who try to stay out of the cleansing light the characters hold aloft.

See you tomorrow for Day 13: Darkness