Actual Play: Per Fischer’s Crossroads

Today we played Per Fischer’s scenario Crossroads:

http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/99256/Crossroads

Crossroads is a scenario in which characters come to see the man at the Crossroads cafe who can give them what they desire, but who will ask them to do something in return.

*SPOILER WARNING FOR CROSSROADS; IF YOU READ ON, YOU WILL BE SPOILED ABOUT SOMETHING THAT WILL BE REVEALED TO YOU IN THE FIRST SCENE*

*Content warning: this actual play will discuss some dark topics, including child abuse, drug overdoses, dementia, and terrorism targeting a house of worship.*

I deviated from the scenario in the following ways:

• We had three players, so I chose NOT to play David Shucks. I also pre-assigned characters to players rather than let them choose.
• I replaced one of the tasks: instead of “blow up a shop” I used “blow up a place of worship”.
• I chose to use “blow up a place of worship”, “get a child addicted” (I specified “to a serious drug”), and “kill a person”. Again I assigned them in the way I thought suited the players and characters best.
• I replaced the Impact cards of the original scenario with a somewhat different system. I wrote out three cards each for +1, +2, and +3 and told players that they had to use the cards in that order and that they either had to introduce the element from the card into the fiction or use a cross to unlock their next card.
• This worked medium-well. Introducing the element in the fiction worked really well for some of my players; crosses didn’t work as well. Bribing players to include crosses does not seem to be useful. There were some crosses, but they happened very late in the game.
• I decided to give the three cards an arc: +1s were to describe generally who they were as people and be broadly applicable, +2s were to describe a colorful resource at their disposal, and +3s were to illustrate what they were truly made of when pushed to the brink. Here’s the cards I wrote out:
• +1s:
• I am very charming
• I can be very cruel
• I am strong-willed
• +2s:
• I have friends who would do anything for me
• I have a powerful weapon
• I have a specific set of skills
• +3s:
• I am prepared to do bodily harm
• I am prepared to risk everything
• I am prepared to sell my soul

Some of these were pretty on the nose, but they worked VERY well to give players a more suggestive image of their characters. Whether or not this is an improvement over being entirely play to find out I’m not sure, but it certainly made it easier for my players to dive in. We ended up with the following combos:

Deborah Niebaum, the 72-year-old pensioner who wants her terminally ill husband to pass on:

• I can be very cruel
• I have a powerful weapon
• I am prepared to do bodily harm

(I swear we randomly drew cards!)

Patricia Highgate, the 54-year-old novelist who wants to be famous:

• I am very charming
• I have a specific set of skills
• I am prepared to risk everything

Sandy Ness, the 37-year-old unemployed man who wants to find the love of his life and start a family:

• I am strong-willed
• I have friends who would do anything for me
• I am prepared to sell my soul

I instructed my players to keep these cards secret until used or revealed explicitly by bringing them into the fiction, but to play the character with these cards in mind always. They did so brilliantly. Here is the actual play, broken up into character arcs, with thoughts on system in between scenes:

Naomi played Deborah Niebaum as a has-been socialite nouveau riche wife of the owner of a pharmaceuticals company. Naomi invented this last fact after her introduction, where she was assigned the job of getting a child addicted to a dangerous drug. She established that she thought this was some sort of punishment for how she had acquired her riches, and also assumed (I did not correct her one way or the other) that she had to use a drug her husband’s company manufactures.

Rules aside: While cutting at the most impactful moment is generally good practice, I fucked up by cutting away from both Naomi’s and Zoey’s introductions right after the man gave them their talks without giving them space to react one way or another. Naomi played around this brilliantly by bringing it back in her next scene, apologizing for losing her temper last time. Zoey picked up the narrative thread in her next scene, rejecting the task outright, making the audience assume she was doubtful at least in the actual introduction. While Naomi and Zoey salvaged this, I think it’s important in the introduction scene to give the characters room to react: to reject or accept the deal, to ask questions, to be incredulous, whatever. Knowing when to cut is hard, man.

Naomi described in her first scene how Deborah tried to delegate the job to one of her husband’s odd-job men, Jacob. Naomi came into the scene with this tidbit ready for me to push back on, and I pushed back in order to establish the man’s rules more precisely. You must do it yourself, it has to be for real. The scene had a wonderful core at that moment because she tried to weasel her way out and I pinned her down. Given this limitation (we know that she was planning to make someone else do it) we knew we could only take this scene so far. She mentioned trying to get Jacob to find a child for her, to try and rope him into this scheme of hers, and we went to the dice. Naomi rolled a partial success, but only after using her “I can be very cruel” card, where she pulled rank on Jacob and made him remember his place when he was hesitant at first. We then had the conversation about how the man expects her to do the thing herself, and left it there for the first scene.

Rules aside: there are some interesting limitations to the flashback nature paired with now-time narration in this game. In this instance, Naomi established that her character misunderstood the rules of the game in the beginning of the now-time scene, and this limited how much we could do in the past. I briefly considered flashing forward to the next time Deborah and the man spoke, but that felt too much like a do-over, like Naomi had screwed up, which she hadn’t. We still rung some progress from it and got a dice roll in too. Naomi had revealed Deborah’s cruelty previously in the scene and thus was allowed to use the card. The one thing I didn’t like was that the partial success here meant Jacob was SUSPICIOUS, but this never again came up in the narrative. It’s good to remember to make your partial successes partial in the moment, and not just announce some future badness. That’s a different game altogether.

Next time we met Deborah, she had way more to report. Jacob had found her a homeless girl named Sam and brought her to Deborah’s estate, where Deborah fed her and befriended her. She mixed the drug into the food she gave the child, and when we rolled the dice to see if Sam would eat the drugged food offered to her, Naomi got a 7. I decided that Sam refused to eat any meal Deborah didn’t share with her. Previously in the scene we’d established that Sam was a flighty, scared 12 year old girl out on her own and that her mother had died from a drug overdose. Her reaction when Deborah brought up “medicine” was extremely negative. This didn’t dissuade Deborah from going forward with the plan. She decided to share Sam’s meal. I described how she immediately felt better. Less in constant pain, more relaxed, happier, more positive. We left the scene there.

Rules aside: this was a fun and vague one. Did Deborah just fulfill her task? Was the one meal enough? Was the one meal a suggestion that there would be more to follow? We left it up in the air to be decided in the third scene. It actually ended up hurting us somewhat, as I’m about to describe.

We meet Deborah again a few weeks later. There are changes: she has odd tics and seems a lot more absent-minded and confused. Angry, but in a much more diffuse way. She asked repeatedly when she’d get her part of the deal. She talked about how she skipped giving Sam a meal one time and got the expected/hoped for addiction/withdrawal reaction, but how she still had to keep increasing the dosage (it wasn’t clear if this was to get Sam more addicted or because she needed a higher dose herself; the latter was strongly implied). The man said a few things that seemed to suggest Deborah had already received what she asked for, but this only confused her further. She asked about her children again, and we decided to play out a phone call between her and her son Rick, in which she was pleading with him to come see her and bring her grandchild. We went to the dice a last time, and Naomi rolled an 11: an unmitigated success. We played out a very tearful scene where Rick kept talking about how Deborah should meet his friend Stash, a “very high-end live-in nurse, really the best money can buy”, and how she could afford this now, and how she needed someone to take care of her now that she was alone. Deborah asked in terror if Rick was thinking of putting her into one of those places, but Rick assured her that wasn’t his plan at all. He asked if he could come this Saturday, to which she replied she didn’t know what day of the week it was. She kept pushing back on what Rick meant by her being alone, until Rick tearfully yelled at her “Mom, Dad passed away last week!” The man then told her that her husband had indeed died a week ago, but that she kept forgetting. The man told her that her kids were taken care of, the estate safe, and that she had a choice to make: did she want to live with the memory that her husband was dead and how this came to be, or did she want to forget and live in the past instead? She asked again if her children would be okay, and the man assured her they would be. “The past is a nice place.” she said, and we faded out on that.

Rules aside: this scene was almost off to a false start. Again I’m not sure what Naomi’s intentions were, but I felt her pulling the narrative in a direction where further steps were to be taken to get Sam fully addicted, and I didn’t feel this would add anything cool to the narrative. In my mind, Deborah had succeeded in her second scene and paid the price, too: between the addiction to the powerful narcotic and the shock of her husband passing, her mind had started to slip away for good. We ended up turning this initial confusion into a wonderful denouement with Rick saying the line of “Dad died a week ago” and Deborah refusing to believe, at which point I cut back to the Crossroads cafe and had the man offer her the final choice (an inter-game cross from our recent game of Penny for my Thoughts, where you also get to choose in the end if you want to remember or forget). I was very pleased with how the arc turned out. In the end the acerbic, controlling, judging Deborah was revealed to have a heart of gold. The dementia was a tough blow, but Naomi seemed happy with how the story wrapped up. We ended never having brought in either the weapon or the bodily harm, but I feel they shaped how brutally Naomi played the character.

Next up we had Zoey play Patricia Highgate. Zoey decided that Patricia’s day job was that she was a local politician, but she really wanted to be recognized and revered for her writing. The man asked her to blow up a place of worship. Zoey’s first scene was pretty clear: she had given it some thought, and she wasn’t going to do it. When the man asked Patricia if she’d been making progress, meaning the task he’d set her to, she replied that yes, she had just finished writing another chapter. She was feeling very hopeful for this one. This might finally be the book that gets her recognized. The man was extremely sympathetic and very much cheered her on. That’s great! Maybe that was the lesson you were meant to take away from this. You have such an exceptional gift! Clearly this will work. Do me a favour, though: if you have the time, come see me again and tell me how it went. I now have a vested interest in your life.

Rules aside: It felt weird not going to the dice at all in the first scene. Zoey revealed “I am very charming” about Patricia, describing how easy being a politician came to her, but she very clearly said I will not do the thing you asked me to do. I don’t know what Zoey expected, but the man isn’t bothered one way or the other. He really is on your side and just wants you to do well. He’s your friend. I enjoy this character so much. I also love how the scene structure of Crossroads allows you to subvert a character’s refusal very naturally. The next time they have a scene you just asked them how long it has been (which, by the way, I love doing as a ritual in the beginning of a scene because of the way it echoes a confession) (when I play the man he’s a cross between a priest in a confession, a therapist in a session, and a good friend cheering you on). Of course the player may say “my character never returned to the Crossroads cafe”, and that’s a fine way to end a story, but generally they will default to giving you a time, and that is often very suggestive.

Patricia’s second scene was set 6 months later, during Christmas time. She started the scene by saying that she had stopped going to church. “Every time I do it reminds me of you.” She described how she found it unbearable to sit in the pews and wonder what it would take to blow the church up. So she started doing some research. We flashed back to Patricia awkwardly typing and erasing search terms into a google textbox: homemade bombs — DELETE DELETE DELETE. Improvised explosives — DELETE DELETE DELETE. Landscaping tree stump removal explosives — RETURN. We rolled for her finding the information she needed and she got a partial success. We played it like this: she found a forum of “landscaping enthusiasts” that had the info she was looking for, but she posted a few questions and requests for clarification, and a man named Trevor started private messaging her, and oh look, he knows roughly where she lives (“near Detroit”). He’s also VERY interested in helping out. We then played out a scene of Patricia buying what she needed at a local hardware store. We rolled for her keeping her cool when the cashier asked her if she had a big project. A 6, which Zoey modified to a 7 with her “I am very charming” card. We played the partial success as a political rival noticing her and overhearing her overly embellished explanations to the cashier. The man sort of cornered her but then let her go. He was suspicious.

Rules aside: Again with the suspicious! It’s almost like I didn’t learn from Deborah’s scene with Jacob. Of course the rival politician never re-appeared and the partial success was meaningless as such. I guess it added some tension to the scene, but it never being re-incorporated felt weak. I also loved how Zoey supplied her own answer as to why she came back.

Patricia’s third and last scene began with Zoey bending narrative authority in a very interesting way that I decided to incorporate with a slight change. She narrated how Patricia sat down, the man asked how she was doing, she said great, and then the church across the street blew up. I loved that invention, making the church visible from the cafe, but I couldn’t quite jump to the conclusion like that. In hindsight maybe I should have? Instead, I talked about what was just established using the metaphor of a TV show or film: I described how we see the church blowing up, but then footage rapidly rewinds, showing us having a longer conversation before that moment. Now it was established that at the end of this scene the church would blow up, which meant that come hell or high water, Patricia had to get there somehow. We established that this was the new year, and the man kept saying “new year, new opportunities, new beginnings”, which Patricia latched onto quite a bit. We talked about how she tried building her first bomb in her writer’s shed (Zoeys rolled quite poorly — a 3 or something like that) but ended up burning down the shed with her current manuscript in it. “Maybe it was a sign” the man suggested. Patricia then traveled to meet with Trevor and built the bomb at his place. We rolled for seeing whether or not Patricia could recruit him for her cause. We used her “I have a specific set of skills” card to mean her people manipulation as a politician, and she succeeded handily with a 10. We described how they built the bombs and then skipped forward to this morning, after mass at the church. Patricia talked to the pastor about starting a funding drive to renovate the church (hah!) and then excused herself to go to the bathroom while the pastor said goodbye to the other congregants. Again we rolled for her placing the devices. Zoey used up her last card: “I am prepared to risk it all” to describe how she planted the two explosive devices with the church still slowly emptying out. The man then asked her how she was planning to set off the devices. Patricia said “timer”, and just at that instant, the church across the street blew up. We quickly flashed forward to Patricia being in prison, but having written a massively successful true crime book about her journey from politician to crime author to criminal. She also narrated that she paid for the rebuilding of the church out of her own pocket.

Rules aside: This is the *THIRD* time that a Patricia I played with ended up finding fame from inside a prison’s walls. Makes you think. Writers. They’re a criminal bunch. I loved Zoey’s invention to narrate the church being across the street and blowing up, and we ended up re-incorporating this into Sandy’s final act. Zoey going through all her impact cards felt great too, but “I am very charming” and “I have a specific set of skills” felt too similar in practice here. I realize that won’t always be the case, but it felt a little samey in this case.

Finally, we had Terry playing the role of Sandy Ness. Terry played Sandy very flighty, unconvinced, doubtful. Where Deborah bought into the deal right away and Patricia refused it while still believing that it might be legit, Sandy was like, uhhh, what’s your deal? What are you playing at? Terry helpfully established that he had a friend Nick who previously dealt with the man and vouched for him. In a later scene we established that Nick had been in some kind of accident and the doctors told him he would never walk again, but that after dealing with the man Nick had been posting pictures of his skiing trip on Facebook. We never established what was asked of him (it was strongly implied that this is a very intimate thing between the man and the person), but the man said that Nick had “done a very nice thing” for him. The man asked Sandy to kill a person. Any person would do. In his first scene Sandy probed for loopholes. How sick could the person be? Could he just go to a hospice? Happen across a roadside accident and push someone the last bit? Terry brought this up I believe to have the rules made sharper and more meaningful and I was happy to do it. The man made very clear that it would have to be a kill, and they both knew what that meant. In a later scene the man also warned Sandy that while he liked stories a lot, he didn’t care for fiction (a cross to the scene previous to that where the man had one of Patricia’s 17 previous novels in his lap, showing her a personalized signature to him she had no memory of making), and that he could tell fiction from non-fiction. Sandy then established that he had a neighbour he really didn’t care for, Peter, who was cheating on his wife and generally being a scumbag. In his first scene, Sandy tried to befriend the neighbor’s wife after the neighbour had been in a noisy argument with self-same wife and had walked out. He clumsily invited her over to his place for a glass of wine and rolled a 2. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”, and *bang* she closed the door in his face.

Rules aside: In all three first scenes I had a really hard time getting my players to go to actual scenes rather than discuss the shape of the deal, talk about plans they were making, thoughts and concerns they had etc. I asked “so what did you do?” a number of times, but still players stayed in “and then I made this plan” mode. It’s REALLY hard to switch into the actual flashback scenes at the core of Crossroads. I sometimes made it very explicit — ”okay, let’s go into the flashback” — but that removed the meta-level of the man talking to character in now-time. Per specifically asks for flashback scenes to be played out in past tense, which makes very good sense: it anchors the act of narrating the flashback scenes in the present, where the man is having a nice conversation. I ended up having my cake and eating it too: I forced flashback moments, often in present tense when it seemed to make more sense, but then switched back to the man asking clarifying questions about the scene in past tense. I hope my mannerisms and different voice (calmer, softer, friendlier, slower) as the man made this switch clear, but I’m not sure how confusing it was for my players. In this case we really struggled to find a good moment of action. Sandy kept talking about his neighbour and how he knew his comings and goings, how he was planning maybe to sabotage his bicycle; none of it suggested a clear moment of decision. We ended up going for the awkward wife thing without a strong notion of where it would lead. I think it was for the best that he failed so hard. It further enforced Sandy’s character as someone who is just not a ladies’ man.

In Sandy’s second scene we talked about how Sandy had a friend tail his neighbour around the city (revealing his second card, “I have friends who would do anything for me”). Interestingly enough the neighbour came to the Crossroads cafe to meet with yet another mistress. Sandy described how he went outside to Peter’s bike to mess with the brakes. I made him roll and once again we got a failure. A meter maid from across the street saw him mess with the bike and scared him off. In the present the man returned to a common theme of the session, that of certain coincidences being signs. Maybe this was a sign that a cowardly sabotage of a bike’s brakes would not be personal enough. Oh yeah, Sandy said, he was to get much more hands-on. We cut forward to Sandy ambushing Peter in the stairwell up to his third floor apartment, with Peter carrying his bike up on his shoulder. Sandy cornered him and talked to him incoherently for a really long time, until Peter decided to push past, at which point Sandy opined that sometimes good things didn’t just happen but needed a little push. We rolled and Terry rolled an 11, succeeding flawlessly without even needing to use a card. I described Peter falling down the stairs and breaking his neck, with his bike hitting his unresponsive body half a second later. Back in the present Sandy asked the man what now. The man thanked him for doing what he had asked him to do, and told him to check his phone. There was a friend request on his Facebook from a Cecilia he had met at work years ago, looking to reconnect. “How do I know she’s the one? How do I know something won’t be wrong?” Sandy asked. “The only way to know for sure is to take it one day at a time and live your life.” the man replied. We ended Sandy’s second scene there.

Rules aside: It felt quite natural to have Sandy succeed here, and it also made it clear for everyone else that success before the last scene is quite possible. This was after Deborah had shared a drug-laced meal with Sam, and to me it further reinforced the possibility that she, too, had succeeded. Sometimes stories comment on each other without explicit crosses. I briefly considered leaving the payoff for the last scene, but I felt that if I gave him nothing here, it would be a cop out. Not sure that’s true. Certainly I could have played it as “go home and see what happens; come back to me when you know”. As it happened, I did tell him after the Cecilia thing had been established (and she had asked him out) to return to me one day to tell me how it all ended up.

Sandy’s last scene was set 20 years in the future. Sandy, now a middle-aged man, had built a family with Cecilia and moved to upstate Massachusetts with her. I asked him to describe how their date went, and he described Cecilia asking him to go on a bike ride, with him suggesting a visit to the arcade instead. It turns out Cecilia is a DDR freak. She said she’d give him a second date if he beat her at DDR. Terry rolled a 7, and I decided the actual question at hand was “do you get a second date” and not “do you defeat her at DDR”. So I described her triple-S’ing a ten blue song, which I hoped meant what I thought it meant. He tried the same song at the same difficulty, and 10 seconds into the attempt broke an ankle. Cecilia got him to the hospital and visited him a number of times during his recovery. This ended up being their meet-cute. Sandy then revealed that he lived the next 20 years waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it never did. He expected there to be a catch. Knowing that his +3 card had to be “I am prepared to sell my soul”, I decided to have the man say, very subtly, that there was no catch, and that Sandy had become a close friend of his when he killed another man, and that some day in the future they would meet again, and that Sandy would sit with him “for quite a while”. “How long is quite a while?” “Very long.” “As long as you’re bringing the booze.”

Rules aside: I loved how this scene wrapped up the whole game for us. We got closer than ever to suggesting the man is the devil, without really getting into it. I also loved that nothing bad ever happened to Sandy. He did simply and clearly what was asked of him, and he got exactly what he wanted. Whether or not his soul is forfeit was not for us to say. Going to the dice post task fulfillment also felt great; even though we knew that Sandy and Cecilia would end up together, we didn’t know how their first date would go, and so there was some tension. I would have hated a clean success in that last check, but fortunately 10+ is very rare on 2d6. We also reincorporated the church explosion: Sandy pointed out that he avoided the area for a while after that whole thing with the attack on the church. We described the new, much shinier church, built in place with the money the fame associated with Patricia’s book had brought in.

Overall, I’m not sure why there were fewer crosses in this game than usually. Maybe my expanded impact card mechanic took up that mind-space? I didn’t mind that not everyone got to use all their cards — Deborah and Sandy only ever used their first card, with Patricia burning them all — and I was very happy with how these cards suggested great character frames for my players to fill out. All in all, while this game was light on crosses, it was also one of the most memorable games of crossroads I’ve played, with the outcomes ranging from the expected (prison + fame), to the very sad (got everything she wanted but can’t remember it), to the oddly and unsettlingly positive.

Crossroads remains a joy to play, and the man remains my absolute favourite character to play. Today we established that he never laughs. In one scene Sandy opened with “so after we last spoke I walked out and killed a policeman”, to which the man replied with an empty smile and silence. “That was a joke,” added Sandy. “Yes,” the man agreed, “it was very funny.”