Pantheon Press Blog

I am feverishly writing Grimm Tales – a campaign supplement for Fortune’s Fool. As you can probably guess from the name, the campaign is inspired by the stories of the Brothers Grimm. I have also given myself creative permission to include Hans Christian Anderson and Mother Goose. Suddenly my writing is interrupted by an email from Rob Trimarco. He wants a blog post on making faery tales and nursery rhymes creepy.

Making faery tales and nursery rhymes creepy? What could I say? A week earlier, Rob’s character had watched Little Red Riding Hood’s Grandmother morph into a hideous wolf creature – which ultimately tore out his throat. Hmmm… maybe this assignment was revenge for losing a beloved character? Logical but not Rob’s style.

To me, Faery Tales work on a subconscious level. We are never so vulnerable as when we are at the mercy of our own darkest fears. We move to a place and comfort and safety, but we know something is wrong – creatures live in the basement of our childhood home, our mother is not to be trusted, and even our bedroom hides some black secret.

Faery Tales work like this. They lure us into womblike safety – then spring a trap. We are sitting on our tuffet about to tuck into our favorite meal when a spider springs. Our trusted old Grandmother is actually a wolf in a nightshift. We get home ready to crawl into our ‘just right’ cozy bed and find a man-eating bear!

Rob wants to know how to make faery tales and nursery rhymes creepy? With a witch in every inviting gingerbread house; a broken crown from an innocuous trip to the well; and our mother replaced by an endless procession of evil stepmothers? I don’t know how to make them NOT creepy…

Rob is the president of Pantheon Press. I have been good friends with him for almost a decade. He lets me park my motorcycle in the backyard of his house on Long Island. He hosts awesome all-day gaming sessions at his place. So why would I kill this paragon of the gaming world?

I had to.

We were playing Fortune’s Fool; an ongoing campaign I was running inspired by the Grimm Fairy Tales. We were in our 6th session. We had been averaging five players a session. And nobody had died. That’s 30 player character appearances without a death.

When it comes to PC death, there is no magic number, but I could tell the stakes were falling. Playing RPGs is serious business. We tell life and death stories. We have fun til somebody gets hurt. So when that 6th session started, I knew it had to get mean.

Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t target Rob. I didn’t cheat. I didn’t fudge. And it was entirely possible that everyone could have survived that night. But when his wounded halfling climbed out that window into the night with Little Led Riding Hood’s werewolf Grandma prowling around, I was the one licking my chops. And the cards were on my side!

We were all sad when Rob died. Connor (his halfling) was a cool character and had been with us from the beginning. I felt guilty, but I’ll tell you what. The next session, when Goldilock’s three bears showed up, you better believe folks at our table were sitting up a little straighter.

For mustache-twirling GMs out there reading this as permission for next week’s TPK, I say, “Easy mister! Put the extra trolls back in the box and take a breath.” What we are shooting for is high stakes, not broken spirits. Kill a character once in 5 adventures and everyone will take things seriously. Kill a character every day and nobody will care – they will not be able to invest.

Character death is a valuable GM tool, but it must be used sparingly. A little is good, but too much is worse than none at all… well… almost.

There's another round of Fortune's Fool errata! We've decided to take something that's been a bit of house rule for us and make it official. And it all revolves around how the Tower works. We thought it was slowing down the game a bit, so we decided to change it. The majority of the new errata revolves around that change.

Go ahead and check it out now!

Just the other day, we received an e-mail from Pete, a Pennsylvania teacher who uses gaming of all sorts in his classroom to motivate and excite his students. He's also in charge of the school's gaming club, and while they don't have a ton of money to spend on games, they aren't short on enthusiasm. We encourage all of you fellow game designers out there: if you've got a spare copy or two of your game lying around, contact Pete and send it to him! You can find his info, and read about all the great stuff he's doing at the Ruthless Diastema Games Blog.

The children are our future. I just made that up, right now.

From time to time, Fortune's Fool lead designer Jay Stratton will speak his mind here on this blog. Today, his thoughts on a Fortune's Fool house rule that he's recently implemented:

"The Premonition and Hunch Fate Twists include the text “Keep this information to yourself.” Now that my gaming group is half a dozen sessions into an FF campaign, I have no idea why I wrote that!! I mean, Fate Twists are supposed to be totally meta! And what a stupid personal challenge it puts on the player who now knows about the cards and can’t say anything, but can grunt, moan, hint, or whatever. In my game, I am house-ruling this away, and if it serves you, I encourage you to do likewise. After a Hunch or Premonition, the players should feel free to reveal what they saw!"