Dealing from the Taroticum: Winter 1894

If you read my last blog, you'll know all about The Taroticum, a classic 1974 adventure for Kult 1st edition, written by the game's designers, Gunilla Jonsson and Michael Petersen. I'm currently on a project to revive and enjoy the various RPGs from my youth that never got played. Bushido never got played because teenaged-me simply didn't know enough about Japan to wrap my head round it - but that's working out fine now. Kult never got played because twenty-something me didn't know gamers with the sort of demented imaginations who would enjoy it - this too has changed.

The Taroticum has been widely praised for its imaginative story and widely panned for its linear plotting and railroading assumptions. To address thus, I spent far too long composing Taroticum Unbound, an expanded version of the scenario incorporating all the London-set plot hooks mentioned in the 1st edition and its supplements Metropolis and Legions of Darkness. The result is a big open-ended sandbox adventure.

You can download the PDF here:

taroticum_unbound.pdf
File Size:	9966 kb
File Type:	pdf

Download File

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The scenario features the titular magical deck of cards, and the new edition of the game has brought us an actual version of the Taroticum deck. I've incorporated the deck into the encounter tables for Taroticum Unbound and use it through the session to generate plot twists, spooky atmosphere, and background detail. 

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Old School RPG Sessions

There was a time, before the forging of the One Ring, when I used to meet up with friends at lunchtime and play RPGs through until the end of the evening - a good 10 or 12 hour marathon. When I was a schoolboy, this would be interrupted by my saintly mother bringing us tea and sandwiches. As a university student, it would be accompanied by beer and cigarettes and much else besides. Those days are long gone: a RPG session for me now occupies a tidy two hour slot, maybe two-and-a-half, from 7.30pm and over by 10pm. Admittedly, the games can be a bit intense and the plotting is pretty freewheeling, so I guess they're a bit more exhausting than the dungeoncrawling of my youth. Nevertheless, I worry that I've gotten too timid. I never cut loose any more. We don't commit to a game and go where it takes us, for as long as that takes.

I thought I'd celebrate Kult​ by returning to that old school format: the marathon RPG session. Since it's the school holidays, I have the day free anyway. I reached out to some players who were similarly on holiday or could arrange their work hours to attend. We were all at the table by 12.30pm on a glorious Spring day in April when everyone else was outside.

I must confess, I was a bit nervous. I'm an experienced GM, but I wondered, would I have the stamina for playing all day like this? more importantly, would I hold everyone else's interest? But I reminded myself, it wasn't that long ago I was GMing games for the RPG Student Nationals, and that was with strangers. It was going to be just fine.

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The Prologue: The Winter of 1894

The story begins in London, 1894, at Sandburn Gaol, a disease-ridden, overcrowded, and brutal Victorian prison, at which the PCs are staff. Things change with the arrival of a new Prison Governor, a man named Barkley who has unconventional methods. The regime becomes strict, then cruel, then demented in its excesses. Finally, in the depths of winter, Barkley recruits the PCs to carry out a dreadful ritual in the basement of the Gaol and things, quite literally, go to Hell as a result.

The players select pre-generated characters from a set of six; I ask that at least one of them plays a guard.

Rick Dorsleigh is the oldest of the prison guards, a veteran of 20 years at Sandburn. He was born in Harrow outside London and worked in the Docks at the Isle of Dogs before he came to the prison. He has built his entire life around the prison and rarely goes outside the walls. Rick is short but powerfully built. He is balding, and his face is usually covered with beard stubble. He wears the blue guard's uniform, and chews tobacco. He is played by Karl McMichael, who brings to the role his facility with accents (a convincing Cockney, in this case) and great attachment to quasi-military characters, with strong senses of procedure, duty, and making the hard decisions.

Michael Brown is a less intense character. He came to Sandburn four years ago from a prison in his home county of Cornwall. He became a prison guard when his small family farm could no longer support him. At Sandburn he was badly injured during a prison uprising in the summer of '93. He welcomes the new, harsher discipline. Brown is of medium height, with an incipient paunch. His skin is dark, and his hair is bushy. He wears a moustache and usually a few days of growth of beard. He is dressed in the blue uniform of the guards. He is played by Alec Turner, who excels at playing affable, even hapless, characters who can turn in an instant into assertive men of action.

Clive Wilson is a young social climber who sees Sandburn as a stepping stone to higher achievements. He tries to carry out his work to the letter in order to avoid any criticism. He is a quite small and reads a lot. He is around 30 years old, with thick, reddish hair and green eyes. Wilson has a high opinion of himself, and views Sandburn as a pit. Once things become chaotic, he completely loses his grip on reality and does anything he is told to do in hopes that the nightmare will end. He is played by Alex Tomlinson, who usually played empathetic, conscientious characters, but it extending his range with amoral or downright villainous characters this time.

The PCs settle easily into their roles in the prison, evincing a cheerful but callous enthusiasm for their duties. The two guards share banter, while Rev. Wilson stays aloof from their gambling and petty thefts. There's much humour about the repeated escape attempts of one prisoner, 'Dash' Grisham, and wariness about the rebellious efforts of another, Harry Baines. When Barkley takes over, everyone is enthused by the tough new regime

Things come to a head when a prisoner must be flogged to impress Barkley's guest, a gentleman named Faraday - and the sentence is 70 lashes, an unheard-of punishment. Barkley forces the clumsy Reverend to start the flogging, because the crime was dropping a spoon while he was reading Grace in the Refectory; after that each guard must deliver seven strokes.

We roleplay through each stroke, with rolls to handle the whip just so, and a focus on the changing reactions of the other prisoners to the spectacle, and the strain on the guards delivering the punishment. This is the point where the banter dries up.

Barkley promotes Dorsleigh and Brown to guard captains and has Dorsleigh clean out the Lower Basement, where poor 'Dash' has been left in sensory-deprived solitary confinement for months. He is now quite mad. The next day, the prisoner is dead, and Dorsleigh and Brown must take the corpse to the Reverend for burial: Wilson notices that the prisoner died of being drained of blood through knife wounds, before being impaled in the heart.

When the three PCs take no action, Barkley knows they are his men for the next task: a midnight ritual to summon and bind a hideous goddess and steal from her the set of occult cards, the Taroticum.

The next day, a black sun rises over Sandburn and events gather pace. The temperature drops below freezing but Barkley orders all furniture to be burned and rations to be halved. Beatings are replaced with torture, then with execution, but no one can truly die. NPC Superintendent Clarke tries to shoot Barkley, but Barkley is invulnerable and Clarke is locked in a torture cell. The new torturers arrive, and they are demonic Razides who turn the basement into a charnel house that no one can escape, not even by dying. Nor can the guards escape the Gaol: the gates open now onto an empty void: London has disappeared.

The PCs are now resolved to act. Rev. Wilson, who has been haunted by dreams of the imprisoned Goddess, steals a key to get into the Lower Basement and learns from the Goddess that Barkley is learning to use the Taroticum to master reality itself; to empower himself to do this, he has moved the entire Gaol to Inferno. Wilson learns how to overcome Barkley: first, weaken his authority over the Gaol, then bind the master card, named Demiurgos, to a powerless person, by shedding their blood on it.

Brown makes a deal with prisoner Baines to trigger a wholesale revolt during supper by leaving the cells unlocked. Dorsleigh sneaks past the Razides to free poor Superintendent Clarke from his cell: the man is a tattered mannequin of blood and scars, but Dorsleigh helps him upstairs to the Governor's Office where the Taroticum is laid out, hoping this powerless wretch's blood can steal the Taroticum's power away from Barkley.

The revolt is triggered. The unstoppable Barkley tears through the mass of prisoners opposing him, but the PCs manage to get Clarke to the Taroticum and he bleeds on the Demiurgos card.

Barkley smashes down the door, but the PCs notice he is bleeding from a cut: he is no longer invulnerable. Dorsleigh shoots him with Superintendent Clarke's old handgun. The walls of the Gaol collapse to reveal the Inferno. Hideous Nepharites arrive to claim Barkley's soul, but also the souls of the PCs, who must be punished in Purgatory for the ghastly things they have done.

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Reflection

It's 3pm and we pause to take stock - and to introduce the new characters for the main storyline, which occurs a century later.

A big criticism of the Taroticum Prologue is that certain events have to happen and the players have to respond to them in defined ways, otherwise the story can't even get started. The Refereeing & Reflection blog puts it like this:

"the PCs have to undertake a very specific series of tasks which they could quite conceivably fail to think of, or actually botch ... Consequently, as written it is decidedly possible for the campaign to be utterly derailed before the players even get to play their main PCs."

If you read through the Prologue, it can strike you as precariously railroaded. In actual play, it didn't feel that way at all. The players know they are taking part in a prologue, so they are constructively looking for the prompts and hooks that move the story on. Plus, the things they are expected to do are the things any sane person would want to do: find out what the hell is going on (and the Goddess is your only possible source here), then find a way to destroy Barkley (and the Goddess tells you how).

I was more worried that the Prologue would be an immensely passive experience: that the players are just listening to a story I'm telling them, that there are few occasions for them to make choices or be autonomous. The new event tables in Taroticum Unbound provided situations that afforded them choices (like the flogging scene), but the real issue was always 'How do you feel about what's just happened? How do you justify what you've just been a part of?"

The climax was certainly cathartic - and left everyone excited to bring on their 'proper' characters for Chapter 1, set at Christmas time in 1994.

​But to read about that, you'll have to wait for the next blog.