Casting Shadows

This is the twenty-first day of #RPGaDAY2025 and today the prompt that leaps on us from surprise on the shelf is the word unexpected. The more experienced a group becomes, the less common it can be to encounter the unexpected. Often a group moves over time from a harmonious unity between character and player surprise toward a conscious handling of what the player knows versus what the character does. It can affect satisfaction. When we are planning a pitch that we hope will lead to long-term, open-ended play, this is a detail we should consider.

Day 21: Unexpected

We have already talked about the nature of the Cult of the Sleeper and its layers of hidden mysteries. Exploring how to represent the major logical and mystical changes which represent the shifts of enlightenment from rank to rank within the cult will contribute to maintaining an air of discovery and the lure of the unexpected, but we should remember that figuring out how a gang, organization, or cult works is an activity which might get repeated fairly often in this sort of play. To be different, it might need to be very different. That is one of the other major reasons why I chose Tsathoggua for this campaign.

We have also talked about how the members of the cult will be having transformative and dehumanizing experiences as they progress in their work for and service to the Sleeper. Another potential trap of sameness to be wary of is lurking in simply making the members of the cult grow in power and fervor. With this campaign, it is probably better to have the strangeness and growing fluidity of form work directly on misdirecting and refuting player expectation, while the horrific otherness of their rhetoric seeks to undermine their understanding of what even is real around them. It should be progressively surreal and we should not be afraid to revise what was taken as fact earlier as new revelations as higher levels of initiation in the cult are exposed.

One additional element which can make a feature of the unexpected is the corruption and betrayal of friends and family. There is no telling at the start of the campaign who might be vulnerable to the propaganda and allure of the Cult of the Sleeper, and given its secretive nature, there might be no reason to suspect involvement until… well, until a character comes face to “face” with a loved one in the thick of villainy.

We can get more into this in future entries~

See you tomorrow for Day 22: Ally