Lacuna with the in-laws

Few things are cooler than having a gamer girlfriend, but having a gamer girlfriend and gamer in-laws is one of them. After several tabletop roleplaying games with her as GM for the postmodern Unknown Armies and as fellow player for the transhumanist Eclipse Phase, I finally volunteered to GM an intro to Lacuna Part I.: the Creation of the Mystery and the Girl from Blue City. Lacuna, for short, is a badass experimental game by Jared Sorensen. Player characters are Mystery Agents, FBI-style operatives who are drugged up next to a sleeping criminal and enter Blue City, an urban representation of the collective unconscious to search and destroy his/her Hostile Personality, the monster behind his/her criminal acts. Search is managed through investigation in a Dark City/Inception-style environment and destruction consists in pinning a badge with a question mark on it called the lacuna device, resulting in the annihilation of the HP and the «curing» of the criminal in the real world. Throughout the mission, they can talk to their colleagues in the real world by calling «Control» using Blue City phones, and can request information or equipment, Matrix-style. Character creation is very administrative and fun, down to rolling names on a pre-set list of Company-approved pseudonyms and uses a scantron-style character sheet. Saturday night’s team consisted in:

• Agent Granger, an intuitive tough hitwoman in her 40s with a magic wallet to always show proper ID
• Agent Fowler. a bright red-haired geeky 30 something female information expert who could actually read the mysterious printed material in Blue City
• Agent Heard, a 30-something male expert at navigating the City with a direct line to Control, and as such was named Chief Agent (he was later demoted during the mission).

Dispatch in 3, 2, 1...

The mission

The Agents were sent to find the Hostile Personality of Neil Chisolm, a family man who had raped his daughter Coralie and killed his wife Victoria when she intervened. Agent Heard materialized as the expected tram stop on Diamond Square, Agent Fowler inside a tram car at rush hour near a different station and Agent Granger landed on the roof of the same tram car. The team finally regrouped and investigation ensued. It started at the greyhound race track where a time loop enabled them to make money (and increase the general level of weirdness or «static»in the game), followed by workplace fake finance inspection when only one inspector was carrying proper ID (Granger) but only another one could read the accounts ledger (Fowler). The team obtained the target’s home address and interrogated the neighbor, who revealed that in Blue City, Chisolm was still living with his daughter (but not his wife) and they proceeded to a stakeout near the criminal’s friendly neighborhood semi-detached house. They searched the place and spotted a weird spider person in a soviet army uniform spying on the house, but it left when confronted. Chisolm came home bringing Coralie from school, and when the old lady who ratted on her neighbor also ratted on the PCs, a mad chase ensued. Agents Granger and Fowler got rid of the father, i.e. mission was just accomplished, when three men looking like dock workers arrived in a Cadillac, guns in hand, asking the PCs to stand back and let go off Coralie. On a hunch, Agent Fowler used her lacuna device and dispatched the girl, who proved to also be an HP. The three men were higher ranked (and plain clothes) Mystery Agents who had been sent to investigate the occurrence of a newly born HP without any specific criminal having been identified beforehand. After ejection of both teams from Blue City, the tension and near Mexican standoff resumed in the real world, when the senior agents confronted the noobs for fucking up their mission. The whole thing was stopped by shouts from another part of the building. The real-world Coralie, who was being watched over by a psychiatrist to both help her with the trauma and prepare her for her «cured» father, had ripped the psychiatrist’s throat hours ago, and was crying next to her corpse, covered in clotted blood. So her HP was indeed not spontaneous but connected by to an actual crime. The case was solved, but the girl -and the PCs- were not exactly intact.

Beer ranged from Blanche de Namur to Super Bock

Lessons learned

Roleplaying the «we need guns, lots of guns» aspect of the game is just as fun as a GM as I remembered as a player. The Matrix / Dark City dreamscape environment allows for general weirdness as anything can happen, and playing characters who cannot read in a modern setting makes for interesting scenes. The mechanism for generating «static» means things will only get weirder as the game goes by, and the heart rate mechanism means things will only get more stressful for the PCs and their players (as you roll dice, you keep adding the results to your PC’s heart rate until they stop and relax, or they die of a heart attack). Furthermore, the moment PCs are out of their target heart rate and one stat stat drops to 1, they are basically powerless. Due to these mechanics, Lacuna is really well suited for short games: otherwise, after a while, players may want to stop doing anything just to avoid increasing their heart rate. Due to this, as a GM I also need to stop asking for random rolls but let the players decide more when they want to roll.

We did a barebones character creation but Lacuna could also work with deeper characters, complex back stories etc. I was mainly shooting for an intro game with a quick and dirty scenario and it worked well but would love to do a more refined story.

Finally, playing dictatorial administrative aspect of the game, reminiscent of the Paranoia RPG, was quite fun, especially when Control becomes really weird, aggressive or just plain nonsensical. Mission games take on a whole new flavor when your employer becomes unreliable. So all in all Lacuna confirmed to be really fun, I showed I was decent GM-brother-in-law, and after a few tweaks I am looking forward to the next game!