Writing Berlin: The Wicked City
Don't call them Designer's Notes
I recently read an online exchange that on the one hand called my scenarios from Berlin: The Wicked City a toss-up for the greatest Call of Cthulhu campaign ever (alongside Masks of Nyarlathotep), and on the other hand opined the scenarios are the weakest part of the book.
It got me thinking: I don’t believe I’ve ever gotten into the genesis of B:tWC and why it’s structured like it is, nor how I went about writing the “rambly” (ahem) scenarios. So here’s a kinda-sorta-not-really designer’s notes post on how I did it, what my intentions were, how those intentions interacted with reality, and what I’d change now that I have more RPG writing under my hat.
It all started circa 1990. My second RPG after the D&D Basic and Expert sets was GURPS. Not long after I picked up the Basic Set rulebook, I grabbed GURPS Horror from my local mall bookstore, egged on by my horror-loving friend Phil (RIP). I was just discovering the illicit joys of the genre, and the book’s guide to all things horror-trope related and how to bring them to your table proved endlessly fascinating to me.
(How green was I? My introduction to Lovecraftian horror came from GURPS Horror’s chapter on “Things Man Was Not Meant to Know”—and I remember being a little confused why they were talking about this genre of horror that, for all I knew, they had invented themselves!)
The book also included extensive coverage for setting horror games in the three classic eras of Gaslight, the Jazz Age, and Now. (Hmmm, wonder where they got that idea…) In the Twenties chapter, there was a sidebar on how Weimar Germany was an “underutilized” setting for horror campaigns.
I don’t know why that stuck in my brain the way it did, but it did.
Flash forward about 20 years, and I’m finding myself running Call of Cthulhu more and more (having previously mostly reserved it for seasonal one-shots). In planning a campaign that never came to fruition, I started doing research with an eye towards setting it in Berlin—and the rest is history!
Well, not quite, but we don’t need to dwell on the boring details of how a rough campaign idea eventually morphed into a full-fledged sourcebook, including a couple false starts. By 2016, I’d inked the contract and set to work.
And rather unexpectedly found myself writing the bulk of the manuscript, including three big scenarios!
I can only blame naïveté for my ambition. If you’ve been a fan of the game as long as I have (or longer), you’ll recall the old Secrets of… series of city/regional sourcebooks. These were of variable quality, but they tended to follow the same basic structure of first presenting details on the place in question followed by a collection of standalone scenarios.
That was the structure I set out to emulate, but I had some ideas for varying it up a little bit. My main goal was to actually provide a sourcebook people could use to build their own home campaigns. The scenarios are there as much to provide additional background and detail on the setting as they are meant to be played straight. But Jeff Richard, Mike Mason, and I all agreed we could provide some fun Easter eggs and tenuous links between the three big scenarios for people who played more than one. Little did I know that would become the seeming de facto approach.
Writing RPG materials is always an interesting exercise. You try to be as objective as possible, but your own subjective preferences are bound to creep in. Something that seems perfectly obvious to you (and even your playtesters!) might be missed or misinterpreted by the consumer. Thus, perhaps my biggest surprise has been the realization that most people run all three scenarios in the book, viewing them as a campaign! For folks who find the scenarios tenuously linked…well, yes. I never really intended for that to be the default approach, as I’d never attempted that when running campaigns with the old Secrets of… books. Rather, I’d pick maybe a couple of the scenarios (these were generally shorter than the ones in Berlin), throw in scenarios from other sources, and call it good.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m happy people are using the book to run three-scenario campaigns. Far more people seem to enjoy it in that form than are disappointed. They’re meaty enough, taken together, to provide about 10 sessions of play or so, based on actual-plays and my own playtests. But I really do hope people use the book for more than just its scenarios.
To that end, one of my unrealized goals with the book was to make the front half into more of a “city crawl” system, with random tables for sights, sounds, architecture, and places of business. You can see a bit of this DNA in the random cabaret table, or my idiosyncratic system for breaking the city up into zones. The problem was there was just too much real-world goodness to pack in to allow for extensive tables.
A big part of that goodness went into the aforementioned monster scenarios (as well as the little scenario seeds that Mike Mason, Lynne Hardy, and I developed). Although I might quibble with people doing a one-and-done run of the scenarios, I can admit to the scenarios being on the wordy side.
This was partly a function of of the richness of the setting, as mentioned, but it also comes down to the book being my first major RPG project (and one that had been percolating in my brain for a quarter-century!). Nowadays, I’m apt to write shorter scenarios (and not try to write all of them, either…). That being said, the size of the three main scenarios perhaps makes more sense if you consider them as tentpoles to hold up a campaign in their own right.
That’s how I’d approach running a Berlin campaign: decide on which “vibe” of the city is most interesting (early, mid-, or late 20s), create the investigators and their organization to match the mini-era, and run a few short scenarios (either taken from the seeds in the book or of your own devising) leading up to the big one for that era. And if you want more, plan on starting again from scratch (perhaps with one or two investigators from the previous campaign, at most) in the next era. Hop around—run a late-Twenties campaign first, then go back 10 years to the time of hyperinflation. The Easter eggs work regardless of the order you run the scenarios.
But most importantly: make Berlin your home. Return to it as often as you’d like, particularly if you’re interested in running Call of Cthulhu campaigns centered on LGBT+ investigators or like your horror filtered through a dilettantish, decadent lens.
And if you do write your own scenarios, consider putting them up on the Miskatonic Repository! I never intended Berlin: The Wicked City to be the final word on horror gaming in Weimar Germany. But at least I rectified that ancient wrong—you can’t really say it’s an “underutilized” setting for horror gaming anymore!