Ashcan Lantern: Original Sparks
Most mornings I write in a notebook. It’s not journaling, not really. What comes out is too chaotic and disconnected to be considered a journal. But I write in there a lot. I write about whatever comes to mind. At the moment, I’m not really working on any ttrpg things. I’ve got a play in the works, and that gets most of my writing time. But I haven’t quite hit exactly what I want to work on next. Below are some of my mad scrawling's from that notebook that I’ve tidied up (a little).
I’m 8 years old and I’m sitting on my brother's bed. His friends are there. They’re teenagers, but older teenagers who’ve finished school and haven’t got jobs yet. They all have perms, or mohawks, or dirty homemade dreads. The room smells like cheap cologne and the cigarettes they keep going out for. On the little coffee table in front of us are books filled with monsters and words and numbers. There are funny looking dice and paper and pencils lying around the place. Usually I can follow what my brother and his friends are saying, sort of, but tonight I do not know what they’re doing. My brother said they are playing a game, but it doesn’t look like any game I’ve ever seen.
Mum told my brother he has to let me be in the room until my bedtime. But I have strict rules. I have to sit on the bed and I can only look at the books no one is using. I have a strange magazine that has a woolly mammoth on it. Inside its head are these dudes with bows and arrows. I look through the book, but nothing makes sense to me. One of my brother's friends gives a Minty and then I have to go to bed.*
I’m 17 years old and I’ve just returned to my old high school. I was asked to leave 18 months prior because of prolonged scallywag behaviour. I had spent that time at a senior finishing school, hanging out with other delinquents like me. But I’m back at the old stomping grounds and repeating my final year.
I stand on the edge of the oval and look for the plume of smoke that usually hovers above the other misfits. The Smokers Crew had been a staple of my high school experience, and now it is gone.
I make my way upstairs to the senior study space and sit by myself. I listen to a group of kids talking about vampires who live in the area. They’ve been busy, apparently, but busy in the same ways that gangsters are busy. Not in the way Dracula is. I sit in the same spot for a week and listen to their stories. I am confused and intrigued. I listen for another week and then ask them what they are talking about.
It’s Friday night and I have a piece of people in my hand with Sakhr: Follower of Set, written at the top.
My new friend's older brother is in his second year at uni and is in some Vampire club. I don’t know its official title, but based on what he says, it’s a big deal. He says he’s been playing for a year and now he wants to run games.
Our game is set in the local area and he’s leaning into local legends, local gossip. Our haven is the abandoned house on the seafront. The place has been empty for 30 years. Now it’s ours. Tomorrow, we have to go there and scout it out for real.
I’m 31 years old and my old brother is running a game of AD&D for me and my two nephews. We investigate the giants, kill a farmer, and save the town. Sort of. I go online to buy the latest edition of this game and read it back to front. I think that it’s going to be my new teaching resource.
I’m 34 years old and I am running Fifth Edition for my four closest friends on our podcast.
I’m 37 years old and I am running the best games of my life in the west marches.
I am 40 years old and I am too tired to run games.
That’s me now: part-time teacher, part-time business owner, full-time dad. I dream of running games that ignite the passion I had for games in the past. I am dreaming of a game I can play with my tired friends. We all have kids now and we all want to play games, but by 8 o’clock we have enough energy to laugh at the horror, have a beer, and go to sleep. No one has the juice for planning or prep. No one can remember what happened last time we played.
I want something fast and light that can be played on holidays. Something I can play with my kids when they're older. Something that uses inspiration from the real world.
I’ve had a few months of any creative work related to ttrpgs and I am getting the urge to start on something new. I’ve had a few ideas, a few little sparks. But it’s all just fragments and tumble weeds spinning around in there. This is how most of my ideas start. I’ll tease most of them out a little to see where they go.
What’s the big idea?
My first experience with playing RPGs was Vampire the Masquerade, and it was set in our neighbourhood. Friday afternoons, we would ride our bikes around to the place we were playing in that night. We would stake out warehouses and abandoned buildings and find the best escape routes. We would play all night, sleep on the couch, and play over breakfast. The thing that stuck with me the most was the imagined world we had laid over the top of the real world. It made the game and the world feel more alive.
I am also at a point in my life where a holiday away is usually with another family. It’s somewhere cheap and usually has a table, and the only time for real socialising is once the little people are asleep. The last time we went on a holiday like this it was with some of my old gaming friends. We’d booked a seaside Air BnB during winter because it was cheap. Very cheap. We had a lot of inside time and in the evenings we tried to game… but it didn’t really work. Nothing prepared, not a lot of drive, and we were tired.
Since then, I’ve been thinking about how we might incorporate our game into the entire trip. It would be excellent if our outings during the day fed directly into the game we played in the evening. My experience with Vampire has never been matched. The West Marches game came close, but being out in the real world and then playing in that world at home was glorious.
I want to make something that builds that into play.
Where to next?
I’m unsure how often Ashcan Lantern will be posted, at least until the play is written. I have some notes down for another post. My design process for this game, I think, will start with that I want to do and what I want to use and then move to mechanics and settings. There is a particular approach to play and preparation I want to explore with this game that I don’t need to go system first. Once I have a better understanding of what I want this game to do, I can then work on a system.
I highly doubt I will make my own system.
My brain doesn’t work that way and I already like a bunch of other systems that have SRDs. I would much rather pick something simple and build on it.
*I have recently discovered that this adventure is called Where Chaos Reigns by Graeme Morris. It is my pick for Between 2 Cairns. Someone tell Brad and Yochai.