Graham Walmsley is a writer, game designer and actor who is active in the indie and story games community. His book Play Unsafe, which introduces gamers to improv theater concepts as pioneered by Keith Johnstone, was very influential in my own liberation from spending more hours preparing for a game than the length of the game that was actually played. It's filled with pages of priceless advice for the time-strapped Game Master and the player who wants to take his role-playing skills to the next level.
Walmsley has recently published a purist scenario for Trail of Cthulhu titled The Dying of St. Margaret's, and is in the process of laying out his murder mystery role-playing game, A Taste for Murder. A Taste for Murder is a perfect gateway for non-gamers into role-playing because it requires no preparation, has no Game Master, and plays out like an Agatha Christie novel, or a movie like The Cat and the Canary.
Thanks to the magic of Google Wave, Graham and I were able to have a nice transatlantic conversation about ancient alien gods, obscure improvising innovators, and Chekov (not the guy from Star Trek).
Brennen: Like me, you're on the wrong side of being a young man. What relationships and responsibilities demand the most of your time, and how has that affected your gaming?
Graham: It works the other way round for me. I'm an actor, so my work hours are very strange, and I often find myself with free days. So I can occasionally take a day to, say, write a Cthulhu scenario. It's rather pleasant.
Brennen: You've written two so far. One of them is in playtest now. How is that going?
Graham: Cthulhu adventures are a joy to write. They're so bleak: at least, the ones I write are, with no hope of winning against the Mythos. The first one, The Dying of St. Margaret's, went very well.
The second one is called The Watchers in the Sky. It borrows from Hitchcock as well as Lovecraft. It's got great feedback from playtesters and we'll put it out soon. I don't want to tell you about the monsters in it, because it'll spoil it, but if you ask questions, I'll answer them.
Brennen: When will it be available? And how much?
Graham: Oh, you'd better ask Simon that. Before Christmas, perhaps? We're releasing them as PDFs, which seems to work well, so we can get them out quickly.
Brennen: Do you have any more in the works?
Graham: Yes! And I'm excited about them. This week, we're doing a second playtest of a post-apocalyptic Cthulhu adventure. Well, actually, it's a post-apocalyptic campaign, and this is the first adventure in which the apocalypse happens.
It's really epic stuff and it's a pleasure to write on that scale. One of the nice things about writing apocalyptic stuff is that you can do anything. You can have a city of Deep Ones, rising out the sea. It's hard to do that in a normal Cthulhu adventure, because, you know, what happens to it afterwards? Why isn't it around today? But if it's the end of the world, you can do anything.
Brennen: Is the apocalypse brought about by the Old Ones?
Graham: That'd be telling.
Well, let me answer the question obliquely. Firstly, I think Old Ones, as used in many Cthulhu games, lose much of their horror. They have become a standard: we know where they are (beneath the earth); we know what they're called; we know what they look like, more or less; we know what to do about them (some sort of ritual). So they're not very horrific, because we know everything about them and we've seen them hundreds of times before.
So, I tend not to use Old Ones in Cthulhu scenarios: or, when I do, I don't call them Old Ones. Instead, I tend to describe something as immense, ancient and terrible: so it might be an Old One, but it might be something like Dagon, a great and old monster. So the players don't know what it is. And why should they? It's Lovecraft. These creatures are unknowable.
So, yes, in this scenario, there are great and ancient things, and they rise up, and that's part of the apocalypse.
But I'm also incorporating other bits of science fiction and horror, particularly British stuff. So there are touches of H. G. Wells: you remember the bit in War of the Worlds, where the martian tripods stalk the sea? There's something like that. There's a big, big influence from John Wyndham.
By the way, when I say "influences", I don't just mean "I'm using their monsters". I don't mean that the Triffids take over Cornwall, while the Morlocks take over Milton Keynes, and meanwhile the Kraken and Cthulhu battle in the sea. I hate all that. It's...well, you'll see...the imagery and the story structure is heavily influenced by John Wyndham.
And it's a campaign. So there are various Mythos and alien entities to deal with. And then there's one Big Enemy that grows, over the course of the campaign, until it takes over Britain.
Brennen: Have you had much experience playing in Trail of Cthuhu games with players who are used to having their characters kick ass in games like D&D? How do they handle this particular manifestation of the Lovecraftian philosophy of human insignificance and despair?
Graham: I've heard of games like that but haven't played them. Before playing my scenarios, I tell people there's no combat. That usually sorts out the people that want to play.
Brennen: How would you suggest that Average-Joe-Gamer get into improv? How can he use it in his game?
Graham: Well, I wouldn't suggest he got into improv itself, unless he wanted to.
Brennen: Assuming he did, and he had no real experience in acting or other forms of improv?
Graham: So here's the thing. I wouldn't suggest...tell you what, let's change the gender...I wouldn't suggest she got into improv just to improve gaming. But there's lots of improv techniques she could use in her game.
So, reincorporation is the big one. It's such a cute trick, but it's so effective. Take something from earlier in the game and bring it back: for example, the key that you found at the start of the adventure opens the chest at the end of it. It's so simple, almost just a trick, but it gives a remarkable sense of closure.
Brennen: It also gives a bit of structure to the story that emerges from the game. It's like using foreshadowing when writing a short story.
I was listening to a podcast today, The Writer's Show, I think, and the lady being interviewed mentioned that if you mention something in a story and don't reincorporate, it's sloppy writing. Everything you include should be a question that gets answered later.
Graham: Yes, absolutely. It's the Chekhov thing: if you introduce a gun in the first act, it must go off in the last. And you can use that. Introduce weird things in the game like a scroll in the first scene. At the time, you won't understand what that scroll does. But, at the end, you can decide what it does, and it'll be really satisfying.
Brennen: What about Oracles? And things like Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies?
Graham: Throwing random things in to spice up gameplay? I love that sort of thing. There's a game called Sign in Stranger, where you let random words inspire bits of the story. It's great. It stops you planning ahead and sends the story in weird, unpredictable directions.
Brennen: I played the playtest version of Sign in Stranger a few months ago. I understand it is inspired by the old surrealist parlor game "exquisite corpse." The planet and its inhabitants were incredibly strange and compelling.
Brennen: Are there any downsides to relying on improv rather than more traditional methods of Game Master preparation.
Graham: There's something really great about traditional preparation. I've sat down at cons with GMs who had obviously prepared really, really well: they knew their setting backwards. For example, there was a Call of Cthulhu GM who had obviously researched tramps and circuses in the 1920s.
So, one downside of improvising is that you lose that feeling. Preparation can make an adventure feel really solid, as though you're entering someone's world, and all the details are there.
Really, though, the two are different sorts of pleasure. Sometimes, it's good to improvise, and nothing's written in stone. Sometimes, it's good to have the planning, and everything feels very real.
Brennen: I'd imagine there is some sort of spectrum where the extremes are pure preparation and pure improvisation, but most people fall somewhere in the middle.
Brennen: What about preparing for improvisation?
Graham: That's about getting yourself in a creative state of mind. I think that's something we probably neglect in gaming. If you can, it's good to take the time to get yourself in the right frame of mind to play a game.
Brennen: Tell me a bit about your book Play Unsafe.
Graham: Play Unsafe is a book about storytelling, for players as well as GMs. It's a lot of tips and techniques to make games more fun. They all come from improvisation and they fall in a few categories: being high status and low status; little techniques to make stories more satisfying; working with the other players at the table.
Brennen: Who is Keith Johnstone?
Graham: He's an improv guru. There's something incredibly childish about him, in a good way: he wants you to forget all the rules and constraints you've been given and just play. There's something great about that.
He wrote the book Impro, which is superb.
Brennen: Have you read his book Impro for Storytellers?
Graham: Yes, that's a wonderful book. It's different from Impro and, perhaps, less use for gaming. You get the feeling that Impro was written as a result of teaching drama, whereas Impro for Storytellers was written after performing improvisation as its own thing. So Impro for Storytellers has some very practical storytelling advice together with some advice on how to perform stage improvisation. Some useful stuff, some not so useful.
Brennen: How has gaming influenced other areas of your professional life, like acting and writing?
Graham: Oh, man. Well, it hasn't, really. Questions like this are difficult: someone once asked how improvisation had affected my Cthulhu writing and, really, it just hasn't.
There's been some influence the other way. Acting has affected the way I game: so my acting training, for example, has taught me to use my voice, and that's immensely useful at the gaming table. There's techniques like "holding the stage": using your voice in a way so that people listen to you. I keep thinking I ought to write another book about applying acting to gaming.
Brennen: That's a great idea. I'd buy that book.
Brennen: What's your current gaming life like? Do you have a regular group?
Graham: Yes, we play once a week in Clapham. It's a nice group. We go through phases, so we often play Trail of Cthulhu. More recently, we've started playing indie games again, so we recently played Sign in Stranger, Misspent Youth, and Ganakagok.
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