A Table For Three: Part 5 – Mitigation

Right, so far I’m doing a great job of dissuading you from even considering the Dracula Dossier as your next campaign, which is as far removed from my intention as it’s possible to be.  So, please allow me to redress this by offering some motes of advice that will twinkle in the gloom and lead you to conclude that this superb campaign is not beyond the ability of any GM.

Your new best friend

First off, the Director’s Handbook is your best friend, if employed sensibly.  My advice is that you don’t read this thing from cover to cover because you will likely feel dismayed at the astonishing amount of material contained within its pages, some of which you may never use.  Instead, read the sections that outline the campaign and explain how to go about running it.  Then, skip forward approximately 300 pages and read through the suggested campaign framework.  When I was first reading the Handbook, the question that repeatedly arose was, “How the hell do I start off this campaign?”  Bear in mind that I’ll be starting this as a fresh game, with newly created PCs.  Undoubtedly some groups will use established characters and the Dossier will be inserted into an ongoing campaign, and there is some excellent guidance in the Handbook for taking this approach.  Equally excellent is the proposed outline of your first two sessions, which I will be using as the springboard for our campaign.

If you’re interested in adopting a different spine for the campaign as a whole, there are a handful of well-developed alternative options towards the back of the Handbook.  I enjoyed reading through these, but none of them rubbed my Buddha sufficiently hard to make me want to use them.  That hideous image aside, material like this is always worth a scan for any juicy morsels you may want to drop into your game, even if you don’t want to use the entire concept.

The point at which the Handbook becomes your ‘Bestest Friend Ever in the History of Everything’ (TM), and buys you beer all night along, becomes apparent in the very final few pages, wherein you are provided with a complete list of every annotation in Dracula Unredacted.  This list tells you which particular EDOM agent made the note, and directs you to all relevant entries in the Handbook that are connected to the annotation.  What this means in practical terms is that you can always be one step ahead of your players throughout their investigation.  For example, you know that the players are currently obsessed with annotation #123.  Looking up that annotation in the Handbook provides you with references to two locations.  Reading the entries for these locations provides you with some NPCs that may be encountered, along with any artefacts that may be found.  Following up the entries for the NPCs and artefacts provides you with a range of options for creating an exciting session of play.

You see, the Handbook is essentially a 300+ page toolkit for the GM.  As long as you pay close attention to your players and take note of which threads they are following in Dracula Unredacted, you can plan your sessions in advance, although don’t plan too far ahead because, as Iron Mike said, “Everyone has a plan until they’re punched in the face.”  Players in any game will derail the most meticulously prepared plans of a GM, but this applies twice over when running investigative games.  Don’t say I haven’t warned you. 

Your second new best friend

Dracula Unredacted will provide the roadmap for your campaign, via the responses of the players to its contents, which is why I advise you to not read the Handbook in the same way you would an adventure for almost any other RPG.  The players will dictate the course of the game by deciding which elements of the dossier they find most compelling.  As leads are developed and investigated, the game will gather a momentum of its own, but the pacing is still a matter for the GM.  For example, if you feel the game is bogging down whilst the players debate the minutiae of a particular annotation, you can employ one of the response-escalation models provided in the Handbook to fire a not-necessarily metaphorical TBG-29V up their poop-chute.  An additional consideration for pacing regards how frequently you play.  Depending on the richness of the lead chosen, you will need varying amounts of time to prepare a session.  A lead that reveals a minor artefact will likely require less work than the lead that produces one or more locations to explore, as per my example earlier in this post.

So, as I said at the beginning of this ramble, have no fear of this campaign because you will be more than equipped to handle anything your players come up with.  To support my confidence in this assertion, I’ll begin a series of ramblings to run alongside our version of the Dracula Dossier campaign and hopefully provide some practical advice direct from the table.  For now, I’m wrapping up my ramblings on game preparation and I hope you’ve been entertained, if not enlightened.

Game on.