Prepping for The Pool: Hogwarts Class of ’79 (long)
Frank Tarcikowski:
Over in this thread there was a question about prepping for The Pool. As I’m in the middle of prepping for an ambitious game of The Pool which I’ll be running on Saturday, I thought I’d share (and maybe I’ll even get some useful advice).
1) GENERAL IDEA
The general idea was that I wanted to run a game of The Pool set in the Potterverse. I’ll assume that you have read the novels by J.K. Rowlings or at least watched the movies. If you haven’t, it will probably be hard to follow. Anyhow, I did some research and refreshed my memory using the fantastic German Harry Potter Wiki. It was important to me to stay as close to the canon as possible and draw from the rich background provided by the novels.
I decided that the game would be set in 1979: Lord Voldemort and his Death Eaters are already pretty active but open war is not yet going on. Thus the mood will be somewhat dark like in “The Order of the Phoenix” but there will be plenty of room for the “school stuff” and “personal stuff” as opposed to “just the war” (obviously the PCs will be Hogwarts students, what else). I checked for canonical characters around and found that most teachers known from the novels will already be there. Slughorn will be teaching potions and be Slytherin house teacher. I get to make up the Defence against Dark Arts teacher (d’oh) and the divination teacher.
As Trelawney becomes divination teacher in 1980, the divination teacher is about to retire. I decide it’s a grumpy but funny old wizard and house teacher of Hufflepuff. For DaDA, I decide on more or less a female version of Snape. I summarize all this and a little more in a little funny teaser I post to the players. Moreover, I request that all characters be from a little wizard village by the name of Nymphsfart (don’t ask), or the neighbouring muggle town. Furthermore, I ask that the characters are all childhood friends and have forged a pact before they went to Hogwarts to always stay friends, no matter what houses they will be in and no matter what happens.
2) PLAYER CHARACTERS
Then character ideas get tossed around and we discuss them as a group. Two players have very similar concepts of an ambigous Slytherin guy in mind, but one of them decides to leave it to the other and go for something else. I suggest that the characters are in their 5th grade (fitting the “Order of the Phoenix” mood), thus they’re already apt wizards and it’s OWL year. In the end, we get:
[*]Skip, the rebel/leader type, muggle born ne’er-do-well and Quidditch team captain (Gryffindor).
[*]Abigail, the dedicated, a little too earnest auror’s daughter who lost her mother to some dark arts scheme and has nothing on her mind but becoming an auror herself (Gryffindor).
[*]Sheamus, the highly ambitious guy who keeps his Squib family a secret (Slytherin).
[*]Poppy, a talented daughter of the most ancient and noble house Black and a bitter disappointment to her family for all her nonsense daydreams and lack of ambition (Hufflepuff).
[*]Seanán, a little genius whose mother is the Nymph-blooded mayor of Nymphsfart, who appears arrogant for lack of social skills and has a secret love affair with astronomy teacher Professor Sinistra (Ravenclaw).
[/list]
In addition to the 50 words, I borrowed a little from Dread (the one with the Jenga tower) and asked the players a few leading questions, like “what’s your position on the Quidditch team” or “which is your most hated subject at school” or “whom do you have a crush on”. We’re ending up with some heavy potential teenage romance. Also, the ambiguity of house Slytherin will be a theme, with Sheamus in that house and Abigail who who was almost put there by the Sorting Hat, too.
3) OTHER CHARACTERS
I do have a vague idea of a backstory but I start by prepping the NPCs. I check out the relevant canonical characters, deciding that Barty Crouch jr. will be in 7th grade and that Bellatrix Lestrange and Frank and Alice Longbottom may make an appearance. Then I write a few paragraphs about each of my own NPCs.
[*]Professor Nicodemus Noggle is the old Hufflepuff guy. He is a pretty generic queer old wizard which is just fine, I’ll be using him for some comic relief. He is also from Nymphsfart and will play a major role in the Death Eaters’ scheme, but I’ll figure that out later. (Of course there will be a Death Eaters’ scheme, what did you expect?)
[*]Professor Cynthia Mantis-Black is the new DaDA teacher (yep, the job is already cursed). For story purposes, she is going take the Snape role, so she’ll be a female Snape, but less bitter and more self complacent. She’s very proud of her own achievement, which is why she did not take on the name Black. She runs a business with her husband specialising on magical security, I’ll be emphasising how she is still running the business from her Hogwarts office. Like Snape, she is not a villain but will seem like one.
[*]Xenobus Black, who just happened into existence while I made up Cynthia, is kind of a weak man who does everything Cynthia says. He adores Cynthia, to his family’s chagrin. One should not underestimate him, though, for he is a capable wizard. The other woman in his life is his dear sister Bellatrix Lestrange. Bellatrix has convinced him to join the Death Eaters and manipulated him into accepting that it would be to Cynthia’s best to put her under an Imperius curse so she will do the Dark Lord’s bidding.
[*]The Nymph Theladris is inhabiting a stream in the forbidden forest and the characters have helped her in previous years (I’ll leave the “how” up to the players).
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Now I have a bunch of easy-to-grasp NPCs that I’ll much enjoy playing. I also jot down a few more names with a few prompts, like the Quidditch team captains and some other notable students.
4) TIME LINE
Of course we will be playing through a whole year, like a Harry Potter novel. We have all Saturday, I hope that’ll be sufficient. The novels, at least up to the 5th one, always follow a certain pattern of how events evolve. I cannot and will not railroad events to fit that pattern, but there are a lot of things that are still GM-driven, like the Quidditch schedule, the Christmas Ball and holidays, Slug Club meetings, OWL exams, and stuff the Death Eaters do. I jot that down in a table with two columns, one of them “school stuff” and one of them “Death Eater stuff”. This is a bit like the “what would happen if the Dogs never came” part in Dogs in the Vineyard.
There will be some hints to the Death Eater scheme at some points, there will be some new magical creature introduced and some magical plant, too. Also, a formerly unknown defensive spell. The time line gets more detailed as I proceed with the prep, so the steps 4-6 are really happening at the same time.
5) BACK STORY
I write up some stuff about Nymphs and Nymphsfart (like the Nymph’s Dance Inn with the table Quidditch game in one corner). I decide early on there will be some McGuffin given to Prof. Noggle by the Nymphs, but what it actually is gets decided pretty late (it happens to be about the Nymph’s version of the floo network, called the vortex network, which is below the radar for most wizards and which the Death Eaters want to use for their strike at the Ministry of Magic. The control center of this network is located at Nymphsfart and well protected, but Prof. Noggle has a port key that takes you there, which he hides at Hogwarts).
In the novels there is always some stuff the protagonists learn in their lessons that gets important later. As I’m not railroading, I cannot plan this ahead, but I can give the players some ammo, like a new defensive spell or the Wolpertingers they’ll be taking care of which are capable of a threatening squeal that will send anyone running head over heels. I’m sure that the players know their Potter well enough to look out for an opportunity to use this, and they will find it. I mean, this is a safe bet. The Wolpertinger will save the day.
I also want to prepare a vision that one of the PCs has in divination class that will give some clues to the Death Eaters’ plans and the role the PCs may play. Note that as I’m not railroading, I’m trusting the players to make that vision come true (so kind of a self-fulfulling prophecy). I’m still working on the vision, though. I also have to figure out how that vision gets transformed into a little crystal ball stored away at the Department of Mysteries because the novels do not explain that.
6) BANGS
This will not be a very bang-driven scenario. There will be time dedicated to e.g. just acting out some lesson at Hogwarts, or a Quidditch match. Knowing my players, I’m also expecting them to drive play with their own goals and actions, so I won’t be needing a whole lot of bangs. Still, I’ll try to have a few at hand in case of need. Like:
[*]Skip has to pick a new seeker for Gryffindor. The only moderately talented applicants are (a) a Skip groupie and (b) a mean bully. Abigail would be a better seeker, of course, but she doesn’t have time for Quidditch because she has to prepare for her OWL exams (note that this last bit came from the player, not from me).
[*]Sheamus is approached my some fellow Slytherins and asked to join a wannabe Death Eater meeting in the forbidden forest.
[*]Seanán receives an anonymous letter by someone who knows about him and Prof. Sinistra.
[*]Poppy learns that her parents are Death Eaters.
[*]Abigail must choose between her friends and her grades as one of the teachers keeps picking on her friends.
[/list]
I probably won’t even need these. I especially like the first one, though, so it’s pretty much set.
I’ll be aiming to strike a balance between the more personal stuff (what would be “character scenes” in Primetime Adventures) and the more global stuff (what would be “plot scenes”). But when push comes to shove, the character stuff is much more important. I mean, it’s pretty much a given that the characters will thwart the Death Eaters’ plan (though it’s not impossible for one of them to die, if they want to). But romance isn’t a given and I expect the Christmas Ball to be the real climax of the story. However, these things cannot really be planned and I’ll be relying on my NPCs and backstory to see me through.
Questions and comments are welcome. I’ll let you know how it goes.
- Frank
charles ferguson:
Frank, very cool. Thanks for posting this in such depth, it gives valuable insights.
I'm very much looking forward to seeing how the gameplay goes!
Much appreciated.
Charles
Frédéric (Demiurge):
Hi, Frank !
I would like to know how you'd use magic mechanics with The Pool system.
I'm slowly working on a dedicated system to play Harry Potter RPG and I think The Pool is an excellent basis.
While reading your post, I was really surprised, because my reflections about an adaptation of these books are the same as yours.
It would be cool if we could pool our work together, if you're interested, you can mail me or discuss it here.
Frank Tarcikowski:
Hi Frédéric,
We did not use any magic mechanic. We had a list with spell names and descriptions to give us some guidance. Be sure we were shouting “Stupor” and “Protego” and “Expelliarmus” all the time, but the only mechanics we needed were Traits, Dice Pool, Rolls and MoVs.
The game was huge, we played 13 hours. The players did some fantastic in-character play and my NPCs clicked pretty well (Noggle better than Mantis-Black; Skip’s groupie Amanda Watkins and evil-badass Slytherin captain Redgy Bane emerging as other feature NPCs in play). Loads of drama and comedy evolved from the personal relationships alone, but you could be sure that the sense of danger and being terrified would instantly kick in when the plot came knocking in the guise of masked Death Eaters, Bellatrix Lestrange or an image of the Dark Lord Himself.
As I expected, the players really embraced all the conventions of the novels, all the while joking OOC about “Potter logic”, and thus followed the plot hooks I introduced effortlessly. I could just run down my time line of events and the players’ reactions wove into them to create a story that was almost ominously alike to a Harry Potter novel. At some point I decided to leave out the prophecy, but everything else worked out smoothly, including Abigail’s player choking when I told her about the two Aurors who were staying with her family for Christmas and to keep watch over Nymphsfart, who were introduced as Frank and Alice. Gryffindor won the Quidditch cup, Slytherin won the House cup, the Death Eaters’ scheme was thwarted and the brave Wolpertinger was killed by an Avada Kedavra in the final battle. All this was wonderful and well deserves mention, but the really important player choices and role-playing were all about family, friendship and romance, which took up at least 75% of net game time.
The game was a blast and The Pool was a perfect choice for a system. Sometimes we’d play for hours without a single roll, but when we reached for the dice, it always felt right and it always provided for good suspense. We had three failed rolls as well. At two points I called for Pool refreshment because I felt that 13 hours of play deserved to be treated as three sessions…
- Frank
Frank Tarcikowski:
Quote from: Frank Tarcikowski on August 03, 2008, 09:55:31 AM
(...) Abigail’s player choking when I told her about the two Aurors who were staying with her family for Christmas and to keep watch over Nymphsfart, who were introduced as Frank and Alice.
Um, actually that should read "Abigails player getting choked up", not "choking", in case you were wondering...
- Frank
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