buckyball

I thought of a way to introduce Lesley May into my campaign game. The party are supposed to be infiltrating the Paternoster Society to get information about the past activities of Martin Chorley and John Chapman. While talking to Paternosters Paul Jenkins and Clifford Chance they learn about a woman who calls herself Anne Anybody. Anne is of course Lesley May. There is a connection between Anne and the cat people from the 'stip club of Doctor Moreau'. She brought Chimera cat people to a Paternoster Bacchanalia to help the English solicitors get over their inhibitions. Peter and Nightingale become concerned about having cat people unaccounted for, so they ask the PCs if they could go with Dani to re-check the club for vestigia and or any clues that might lead them to the remaining Chimera. Lesley is well ahead of them an shows up at the club/crime scene ahead of them disguising as a Metropolitan police officer. Her goal is to learn more about demon traps. She knows that Nightingale found and disarmed one here (Moon over Soho) and she wants to trick the party into helping her find out more about them

Lesley is indeed a fantastic antagonist. In my game one of the players is already starting to sympathize with her. I think her key motivator isn't the damage done to her face. It was the toddler that was thrown from the window and subsequently died. In the first book she had been the one who had tried to resuscitate the infant. In a later story she pretty much tells Peter this. She accusingly asks him if he remembers the child's name, and she says she is haunted by her memories of the murder every day So one idea I was thinking of exploring, was to have Lesley try to steal a book on how to make a demon trap. She isn't interested in making one herself, she wants to know how they are made, because the manufacture of such a device traditionally involves torturing someone to death. Since the True Knot also torture their victims to death she believes there is a connection between powering a magical booby trap and feeding on steam. Because the True Knot choose children as their victims she can't let it go on. And she is willing to go to pretty extreme lengths to stop them. She is also willing to take some big risks, to get what she needs to stop them. Grant and Nightingale will see this as a potential avenue to capture her. They might even bait a trap with a cryptic reference to German books in the Black Library. We will have to see if the party members are willing to go along with that since they will most likely want to help her take down the True Knot

The jewelry does something magical. When her grandfather owned it he kept it under lock and key. It might be assumed that he did this because it was valuable and he didn't want it stolen, and he never wore it because it was ladies jewelry. But it is also dangerous or attracts the attention of dangerous folk. So after she inherited it and went around wearing it she put herself in harms way. The police might get involved because the leading theory was that she met with foul play by a mundane thief who wanted to steal the jewelry and sell it

In my game the player characters have been warned about Lesley May; about how she murdered Martin Chorley in very cold blood and right in front of Peter Grant and everything. But that has made her somewhat of a hero and potential ally to them. They totally are on her side when it comes to wanting to end Mr. Punch. And they see the pragmatism of shooting the faceless dude to protect Peter and the Folly. So with that in mind I had a couple of ideas for working Lesley into the game as an NPC plot device. The first is that she could be trying to track down an evil cabal of revenant spirits based on the 'True Knot' from the Stephen King novel Dr. Sleep. In that story the cabal members hunt for psychic children, whom they torture to death in order to feed on the psychic steam (or shining) the children have. Their leader is a lady person called Rose the Hat, and she has zero remorse for what she does. Lesley still carries the emotional scars of seeing the baby Mr. Punch killed, and she in no way will let the true knot feed on innocent children. The other idea I had was that Lesley gets it into her head that Nightingale is a revenant spirit and Peter needs to get away from him. Her basis for this idea is that he died at Ettersberg. David Mellenby took his seat on the Charlie company flight home because they saw him die. Lesley is worried that Nightingale is prolonging his life and reverse aging because he can feed off of the lives of the people around him in much the same way that the 'jazz vampires' could in the second book. The implication would also be that Varvara is also a revenant. She also died in a rear guard action in WW2 to protect her fellow soldiers. An alternate explanation would be that both Nightingale and Varvara used magic to kill other people in the war, and that somehow created a tactus vitae which they subconsciously access to reverse age. I am not sure how far to push the Lesley May story line. I feel it could take over the game if we let it. But I think she is like the most intriguing character. Oh and in the game she doesn't go by the name Lesley May. She calls herself Anne Anybody; I stole that from a different urban fantasy story buciyball

Are the players already familiar with the book series? It will make a difference if they are new new players or just new to the system players. buckyball

I ran RoL at Bubonicon this past Summer, and I started my online campaign with the convention scenario I had made. A key consideration for running the game with new players is that many, if not all of them, may not have read the books. Even though Bubonicon is a literary sci-fi/fantasy convention, not a single player had read the books. I did have a player who was familiar with Ben Aaronovitch because he was a Dr. Who fan. So what I did was have the players take the roles of members of the public who were brought to the Folly as part of Peter Grant's Vestigia Awareness Outreach program. The big benefit here is that by starting the characters off with zero knowledge of magic you may roleplay explaining magic/vestigia in character as Peter Grant or Thomas Nightingale. Now if you end up with like 4 players who have never read the books and one player who has read and memorized every book, graphic novel, short story and online fiction, you might have to make some sort accommodation for the more familiar player. The part of the system you should not include is character creation. Create a wide selection of pregenerated characters for the players to choose from. Don't make any of them practitioners. Make them gender neutral and let the players give them names. This will save loads of time. Also since it is likely that the players will not have read the books, they will have an easier time playing a firefighter or a nurse than trying to create a Folly wizard. If you get a player who is familiar with the game and they have their own character, you can always allow that player to bring that character in instead of having to take a pregen. In my online campaign the pcs are, an art therapist, a nurse, a barrister, a professional driver, a boxer, and a wealthy dilettante. They had started with the same selection of pregens I used at the convention. After about 6 sessions into the campaign, the dilettante and the driver both decided to train as wizards and the boxer plans to learn the mystic art of fighting. I think this is better than trying to start them off as practitioners. It also helps me scale their power level as the game advances. The players had little expectation of a RoL case file, since none of them had read the books. The convention players mostly related the game to Call of Cthulhu. I had two players in my game who were Call of Cthulhu gms. They signed up for the game because it was published by Chaosium. This worked in my favor since the idea for my game came from an older urban fantasy book called Monday begins on Saturday instead of the RoL series. The players all enjoyed it. They did have some difficulty adjusting to the narrative structure of the game instead of a more conventional turn based structure. I had to walk them through that part. They were also really intrigued by Molly. One of the players called her 'Silent Molly'; and I thought that was kind of cool. One of the things that helped make my game accessible to newer players was that it had several pop culture references. In the scenario there were several cosplayers who had become sequestrated into the characters they were cosplaying. So even though the players were unfamiliar with Peter Grant and Thomas Nightingale they did recognize Harley Quinn, Judge Dredd and Dr Who. I hope that helps. Good luck at Con-Tingency

In my game the player's characters have been tasked with investigating the Paternoster Society. The Folly is interested in finding out more about the group but they don't have the investigators to spare. They specifically want to know about John Chapman. I am unsure about where to take this. Chapman was a Little Crocodile at Oxford. I think it is fairly established that Martin Chorley had him killed because he wanted to keep people from finding out about the magic sword that he planned to kill Mr. Punch with. I need to go back over the end of the book Lies Sleeping I guess. Does anybody have any ideas? buckyball

I don't know if anyone mentioned this before but, Joolz Guides is a series of short youtube videos about different locations throughout London. The guide Jules McDonall presents the videos as short walking tours of the areas. I believe there is one that goes past Russell Square. Here is the link: https://joolzguides.com/london-guides-about-joolz/ Another pretty much indispensable resource is the Follypedia. It is a Fandom wiki for the Rivers of London book series. I think my group consults it more than the rpg game book. Here is the link: https://follypedia.fandom.com/wiki/The_Follypedia_Wiki buckyball

One consequence of this approach is that the players are as confused about magic and the Demi Monde as the characters in the books. In my game Peter Grant has tried to explain how magic works by comparing it to objects in an object oriented programing language. So conjuring a formi is like declaring an instance of a class. And adding modifiers to the form or additional forms, is like accessing methods in the class or creating an instance of a new object that inherits methods from different classes. And just like programing a computer you have to do this correctly or you run the risk of crashing the system; which in the case of magic may be your brain. Varvara has a more pragmatic description of magic formi; they are machines made of thought or ideas that run on very very high wattage. So high that it might kill you if you fail to operate the machine safely. Consequently the player characters run around trying to work out how the magic machinery works based on what they were told and have seen, instead of the way the game says it works. They will eventually run into Dr Walid and Dr Vaughn who can drive the point home with numerous brain scans of people who had suffered hyperthaumaturgical degradation. Then we will see if they decide to pursue the forms and wisdoms of Newtonian magic

When I first planed to start running a Rivers of London campaign, I was a little worried that there would be some players who be much more familiar with the source material than I am. Those concerns turned out to be mostly unfounded. The Rivers of London series is like a best kept secret of urban fantasy stories. In my games all the players are unfamiliar with the book series. So consequently they are clueless about the game. So instead to plunging right in with player characters that are practitioners and members of the demi-monde, I started the games with the characters playing members of the public who have been invited to the Folly to participate in Peter Grant's vestigium awareness outreach program. I believe it was mentioned in book 7. The idea is that members of the public who may have come into contact with magic recently will receive training from the Folly to prepare them in the event that they might encounter it again. And of course this happens. The characters I have had so far include: an art therapist who had a child client that witnessed a child abduction by 'the pale lady', a nurse who had a patient that was attacked by the same pale lady, a driver who's great aunt told him her first husband had served in WW2 with Thomas Nightingale, a professional boxer who had an encounter with a Celtic genuis loci, an American tech industry leader who had helped FBI agent Kimberly Reynolds in the past, and a French law student who was recommended by someone at the Temple Inn bar association. The main advantage of starting the games this way is, that it is natural that the player characters are uninformed about magic and the demi-monde, so I play the role of the members of the Folly informing the characters about magic in character. It gives the players motivation to learn about magic and whats going on in London. The only downside of this is that, there have to be gaps in the timeline so that the players who wish to become practitioners will have had sufficient time to learn magic without damaging their characters with hyperthalmaturgical degradation. Has anyone else had a similar experience? buckyball

I have found that players wishing to be the 'ship's doctor' in sci-fi games similarly have a role that keeps them out of the main action of the scenario. Have you asked the players why they chose crime scene investigators? What are their expectations? Can you accommodate those expectations within the games you plan to run? buckyball

I want to write a scenario that involves stealing youth. The investigators will find people who have been artificially aged by magic. Since there are no laws on the books about taking youth it will fall into Falcon jurisdiction. The RoL tie-in will be, that it is like the opposite of what happened with Nightingale and Varvara. I still need to flesh my idea out. It could be that there is a Elizabeth Bathroy type character who can steal youth for purely selfish reasons. Or it could involve a wish gone wrong. Alternatively it could be directly associated with Nightingale's reverse aging buckyball

My first Rivers of London character is named Ffion Wynn. Originally from Newport Wales, he studied law at Durham and became a London barrister. He has recently been assigned to the Folly. His role is to assess the legality of modern day magic; Not an easy task. He is skilled at research and has excellent social skills. His advantages are: Silver tongued and Steadfast. I am hoping that he may keep our intrepid investigators from running afoul of the law. Or failing that, helping to extricate them when they do. He tends to say things like " Boot yoor Onner, Dim a sympl cowntry Lawher" when he wants to appear easy going and kindly. And he says things like ' We must accord rights to privacy of individuals, who may be distinguishable in the course of an initial vestigia assessment ' when he wishes to be taken more seriously

Harry Dresden exists in an alternate reality version of Chicago that is really Toronto

Many of the books and all of the graphic novels are available online either from Hoopla or Overdrive. But I gotta warn you; Do NOT read the graphic novels ahead of the books (like I did). There is a major plot twist in the books that is spoiled if you read too far ahead in the graphic novels. I believe there is a reading order posted somewhere. It should keep you out of spoiler territory buckyball