Strange Tales of Songling is a great RPG. The designer, Brendan Davis of Bedrock Games, has a new RPG soon to be available using the same game system but set in New England and called Strange Tales of New England. Brendan was kind enough to give me some background on his upcoming newest RPG and talk more about it with me.
Strange Tales of New England is set in a modern day New England, drawing on history and local legends. Player characters can be a Charlatan, Exorcist, Spirit Medium, Combatant, or Expert. PCs face vampires, cults, cryptids, the ghost of Cotton Mather, and more.
Charlie Dunwoody (CD): Thanks for talking with me, Brendan! How did you develop the idea of SToNE and how did the design change and/or evolve to match your initial vision?
Brendan Davis (BD): Happy to do so. I appreciate you taking the time to interview me. It originated with an experience I had following surgeries about twelve years ago, which I get into in the book. The short version of it is, I began to doubt if I had survived the surgery and grew apprehensive to discover the truth. I was worried if I asked anyone around me if I was dead, they would say yes. It may sound crazy, but surgeries do a number on you, and this was a real fear I lived with for some time. The game and setting became about exploring this through spiritual and personal horror. However, the setting and game changed tremendously from when I started until now. Initially it was a very different project. There were really two steps, the first was an attempt to create a weird setting in the style of The Lost Continent, the 1968 Hammer Films movie. I was a big Ravenloft fan and always toyed with the idea of doing my own version of that type of setting. I also wanted to open the Strange Tales of Songling system to other styles of fantasy adventure. I was basically interested in doing a gothic fantasy setting suited to exploring the experiences I had after the surgeries. I started by making a bunch of paths that would fit that world, basically seeing how I could rework the existing ones from Strange Tales of Songling. Then I began working on a world document. It was shaping up to be something like the aforementioned Hammer movie with a bunch of gothic influences and heavily inspired by the New England I grew up in. But at that time, I had also been contemplating doing a game about exorcists, as I have long been a fan of Blatty’s book and the movie. I realized that was really what the focus should be. And I started connecting the dots to other influences on my mind, so it eventually led to what I have now. It ended up as modern New England. Even that shifted a lot as I developed things more. At that point I started from scratch and most of the core elements of the game itself were created in about a month. After that the work of playtesting and developing the setting began (from 2021 to now). And my approach there was just to run things as much as I could, with as little preparation as I possible (I like testing stuff in high pressure conditions). In terms of mechanics, I originally envisioned it mirroring the structure of Strange Tales of Songling. And while the games are compatible this ended up being a larger book with an entirely different structure. It has paths, many of the path abilities follow similar logic but it isn’t simply the New England lore equivalent of Strange Tales of Songling. As with Strange Tales of Songling, the mechanics and paths were all refined over the course of playtesting quite a bit. Because it is set in New England, I was able to make it even more personal. I live in New England, close to Salem, so it really became more about setting adventures in my own backyard (which I also encourage people to do with the system once they have a handle on game). A lot of the development involved me making day trips to places in the region I live in.
CD: What tone do you tend to have as author for an RPG like SToNE and is that tone meant to invoke a certain flavor or direction to the game?
BD: The tone is pretty dark, I think. There are other moods, it isn’t uniformly bleak, but I strove for horror dealing with religious themes and the terrors hidden in the New England landscape. For inspiration I delved into works like the Divine Comedy, Poe, Lovecraft, Blatty, Frankenstein, New England History, books on cryptids, exorcisms and lore, etc. I think whatever tone I struck flowed from these influences. It is a game that deals with demons, the spirit world, madness and sin. So, I tried to take that all very seriously as I wrote it. I kept going back to Dante again and again. I was interested in one part of the Divine Comedy in particular so that was my focus. I can’t make any great claim to understand Dante, but I tried to keep revisiting him and listening to lectures on chapters as I read them so I understood as much as I could. And that contributed to tone and direction a lot. It also served as heavy inspiration whenever I worked on the setting. I watched a lot of horror as well. Blatty’s Faith Trilogy was influential but so were movies like The Howling and Bird with the Crystal Plumage. The Faith Trilogy is a kind of informal alternative Exorcist trilogy built more on theme, and includes The Exorcist, The Ninth Configuration and Exorcist III. All three left a stamp on the game’s direction. The Ninth Configuration played a big role in shaping the setting. I wasn’t strict about sources of inspiration needing to be New England (though I did make a point of reading a lot of New England horror writers and revisiting people like Melville). When I started out, I told everyone it is a horror game set in New England, not a New England Horror game. But I think over time, New England took over. One of my gaming inspirations was the Ravenloft black boxed set, Realm of Terror. That has long been my favorite horror setting, and I adore the tone of it. But my writing isn’t quite at that level of intensity. The Esoterrorists was another game that was on my mind while working on SToNE. I have always been impressed with how Laws approached horror in that book. I don’t know that I can compare my result with Laws’, as I had very different aims here than he did but I was often thinking of aspects of that game when making design decisions.
CD: SToS focused on a monster of a week approach to campaign building. What advice would you give a GM eager to kick of a new campaign using SToNE as far as campaign prep and adventure creation?
BD: There isn’t one right way, but I would say the book is set up so you can drop the map of New England before the players and let them pick a scenario to explore. That is a good way to begin. I developed an approach where the players might pick a location they want to investigate, and then I would use local newspapers to pepper in other interesting elements minutes before play (so half prepped material, half stuff I came up with on the fly based on scanning headlines). For me the fun was connecting the dots between those headlines and the location they had selected. I was a big believer in creative prompts like this while working on adventures. So that is another general piece of advice I would give: find something that inspires you and use that to spark creativity. For example, running a series of adventures, each inspired by one chapter of Paradise Lost. Working with creative prompts were an important part of how I designed the book. The other advice I give is draw on local history and lore; have fun with it. Taking something that really happened and putting your own twist on it is exciting. The most important advice with monster of the week is begin with your monster. In terms of preparation, you want to start there and treat the monster as something to investigate. Starting with a villain or monster is always a really easy way to find focus when working on an adventure. It is one of the reasons I like monster of the week: you basically know what you need to do between sessions. When you do monster hunts customization is also important. Creatures in the book usually have specific weaknesses and figuring those out are an important part of the adventure. So, if the GM is designing a ghost, they want to think about its past, how its past relates to its powers and how it can be overcome. Also, this is game where the focus is more on overcoming than destroying monsters. It is a better outcome if you can lay a ghost to rest rather than obliterate it from existence.
CD: How do you hope GMs will use SToNE and what style do you hope will spring out of ongoing adventures and campaigns?
BD: My modest hope is they use it to run things like Halloween adventures or periodic horror campaigns. My more lofty hope is they use this as a spark to create their own Strange Tales set in their backyard and it leads to years long play. I also think there is a lot they can do with the core premise to put their own stamp on it. It is the kind of setting that can connect to other settings easily for example. I would like readers to glimpse New England from a slightly different point of view as well. The game has things in it that are what you would think of when you imagine New England, but it also includes details that only locals would know about (and every local is going to see things from a different angle depending on where they are from in New England). I see New England from this one vantage point and that is what the game reflects. It showcases the aspects of New England that interest me. Hopefully the game also sparks curiosity about some of the history that is behind many of the threats and lead GMs to do their own research into New England’s past.
CD: What is your favorite part of SToNE rules, setting, or otherwise?
BD: The prayers are my favorite. Exorcists have prayer abilities and enjoyed working on those. They were tricky to figure out mechanically. In terms of setting there is a location based on John Murray Spear and his electric Messiah (the new motive power). This was of personal interest to me because I learned about it interning at a local history society during college. I was shown a clipping by the society’s librarian describing this construct put together by a spiritualist and allegedly brought to life, but it was then torn apart by a mob (there are different accounts of this but that is the account I remember reading and her explaining to me). It sounded like a cross-between the wicker man and Frankenstein. I was fascinated by it. I also used to live right around the corner from where it happened. So, it was something I wanted to bring to the game. Another favorite is our Danvers State Hospital entry. It was a psychiatric hospital with beautiful red brick neogothic architecture in Danvers (which is old Salem Village) that was turned into apartments not so long ago. It probably served as the inspiration for Arkham Asylum. So, it has a Lovecraft connection as well (he was very interested in Salem and the surrounding communities). I wanted to showcase the hospital in the game.
CD: Do you have anecdotes to share of adventures and/or a campaign you have run for SToNE?
BD: Yes, there were a number that stood out. We had a lot of the standard shenanigans you get in these kinds of campaigns: baseball bats dipped in holy water, special silver electroplated threads to contend with werewolves, etc. I remember running an adventure centered around the characters past sins. They were following the trail of a killer and the case led them to The Danvers State Hospital. One of the players slowly realized that he was the murderer and in fact an inmate of the hospital as he was interviewing the suspect. The other players saw through the window that he was talking to himself, alone: that the player character and the suspect were one and the same. We had another adventure where the group were dealing with a cult of witches operating near the Hockomock Swamp who were using spells from a grimoire by John Selee. The party captured one of the witches, a woman named Myrna. To turn her to their cause one of the players, who was playing a Charlatan, lied that he led a coven using AI generated grimoires that contained magic superior to her spells. In his attempt to prove his point, he succeeded in making a functional AI magic spell by hiring a talented programmer. And this enabled them to deal with the rest of the cult, with Myrna’s help.
CD: When will Strange Tales of New England be available and where can gamers pick it up?
BD: Right now, it is just about done with edits and then it goes to layout. I don’t know what the release date will be yet, but when it comes out it will be available in print and in PDF (the links will be up on our website). It shouldn’t be too long though.
CD: Anything else you would like to share with the readers of EN World?
BD: Just that they can check out The Bedrock Blog or the Bedrock Podcast for updates and information. The blog also has a ton of resources for our games. And that anyone finding this interesting might want to check out Strange Tales of Songling (a horror game inspired by Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio by Pu Songling).
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