Casting Shadows

This is the eighteenth day of #RPGaDAY2025 and our prompt today is sign. When I started to think about this prompt, my mind turned to the epic struggle between the Man in Black and the Giant in the Princess Bride where the Giant, when prompted, gives a kindly progress report about the state of their conflict.

Day 18: Sign

For our cosmic horror campaign, friendly giants and multi-talented representatives of True Love are unlikely to make an appearance, but reports, signs, and portents are a different matter. Given the type of campaign this pitch is shaping up to suggest, given the subject matter in general, and knowing myself, signs of one type or another for one thing or another will be essential.

As we mentioned yesterday, the troubled sleep of Tsathoggua is felt by his adherents and dupes, and so their activities ebb and flow in tune with his nightmares and visions of the surface world’s future. If seen, and the decreasing duration for cycle is determined, it could serve as the clearest of signs to the characters of when to expect new villainy. This could not give insight into what the Cult of the Sleeper in any of its guises is up to, but knowing when it will act is a powerful sign pointing to freedom of action on the part of the characters.

Likewise, the recorded ravings, dreams, and prophesies possibly found in fragments, revisions, translations, and faithful copies of the Cthonic Manuscript, not to mention the testimonies of any captured cultists could give shape and sense to the scattered parts of the cult’s plans that the characters cross paths with – helping to build the needed context for their reactions to become actions and an advantage for interaction. This type of sign, one indicating an outline or shape to the motives of the cult feeds freedom to act and to act in ways which might prevent, turn, or otherwise affect not just the activities of the cult, but its plans as well.

There is a temptation to make a sign too esoteric and obscure to be memorable or even of much help. If treated that way, they become more setting and situation description than actual information which can be turned into useful tools by the players. There is also a temptation to make seeing a sign and getting a sense of its significance something to roll to detect. That can also work, and help the reading of such portents as having been earned by play, but as rolls introduce the opportunity for failure, we should consider the nature of what might be gained by success or not gained in failure.

Very often, especially if we lose control of our imagination and start building from our sense of what will happen, we begin to plant clues, hints, signs, portents, and omens, which are clear signposts to that foregone conclusion, and if not found, their absence from play interferes with the players’ understanding of the world their characters are inhabiting. If such signs are to be rolled for, we should come to see them as bonus information which yields an advantage. If a sign or hint of something to come is essential information, but is potentially withheld by a dice roll, that dice roll is not contributing to variation in play – it still leads to the foregone conclusion. The roll is not the problem and not having a roll is not the solution.

What matters is that the information the sign points to matches its delivery in play. If it is essential to what is being conducted as play, then it must be given to the players. If it is a potential advantage or disadvantage, then it can be gained through luck, through surprise failures, through stunning successes, and so on.

Signs, of course, suggest the future and a future suggested makes us think of Day 19.

See you tomorrow for Day 19: Destiny