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Overall Feel

Shadows in the Fog sometimes feels as though it has a glacial pace. There’s not a lot of rapid action, and events just sort of tick along slowly. Inter-character discussions can take up large blocks of a session. So long as everyone’s engaged, this isn’t a problem by itself.

Where things speed up drastically is in Magical Resolution. Magic in many respects will act like combat scenes in a lot of other RPG’s. A lot happens, it feels like a lot is on the line, and when things get slow or dull people will want another magical scene to happen. If you find that magic is happening constantly, the non-magical part is too slow or even dull. If magic never happens, the game may be very intellectually intense but may in time burn itself out.

Shadows in the Fog tends to feel very intellectual as it runs along. That’s not for everyone. Some people want a more beer-and-pretzels affair; this game won’t do that readily. A lot happens in the interstices between scenes, between players behind the scenes, and out of the session entirely. Over time, a Shadows in the Fog campaign tends to develop its own momentum and is hard to deflect. You may find people using deliberately silly humor, out of character, to break the icy tension of the game itself. This is all good, so long as people aren’t dreading sessions or something.

The biggest trick to running Shadows in the Fog is to make the players do all the work. If everything is running wonderfully, the Host may become actually unnecessary, and can join in as a regular player. But usually the Host has a lot of background material that ensures a steady supply of historically-based strangeness to play with. Once the campaign is running well, the Host may find himself with relatively little to do, and may feel a certain inclination to seize the reins just to be more involved. If this happens, resist the temptation and bring in a PC of your own.

In a perfect world, players will find themselves wanting to do research in order to have aces up their sleeves. This is good. Such an “ace” from research should be taken with some fanfare, as a brilliant move. This then encourages others to get in on the act. Eventually you will have more weird details about London stuck in your head than you’d imagine possible.

Ideally, a Shadows in the Fog game should feel a little claustrophobic, a little incestuous. It’s as though the PC’s spend all their time dealing with each other and with a few major NPC’s rather than dealing with what most folks think of as the real world. This makes people more and more eccentric and apparently obsessed with trivia. They become less and less normal, less able to “pass” among their peers. Their masks start to slip as they drift deeper into the abyss.

One thing that ought to happen, but which doesn’t need to be pushed—let it happen by itself rather than engineering things—is that the characters will slowly become what they least like about the occult world. People who play in the shadows are creepy freaks, un-British, abnormal. Their interests and obsessions damage their regular lives, and they become increasingly unable to maintain normal relations with ordinary people. Marriages break up, children distance themselves, and so on. The true shadow-player notices all this but somehow thinks if he can just do this one more thing, he will make it all right again. He is convinced that he serves the Empire, or whatever he holds to be good, and truly believes that somehow everyone who counts will one day recognize this.

This specifically patriotic intent isn’t necessary, but the point is that these people are not really hypocrites in their own minds. This is one reason playing a Satanist is so difficult: it’s hard to reconcile with the notion that really you’re doing good.

{Running the Shadows <--> Running a Session}

-- ChrisLehrich^? - 24 Dec 2004

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