The Watch House at twenty

The first session of my longest ever RPG series The Watch House was this evening in 2003.

Title sequence, season three edit, set to Evil Eye by Ash

Based on the then recently ended Buffy The Vampire Slayer which I cam to a new society looking to run the game of with one player guaranteed, and swiping its premise from a game called The Night Watch by Steve Dee, it was about trainee Watchers and other young people they had to keep an eye on studying at Cambridge - as opposed to Steve’s use of Oxford, so I got a few M. R. James jokes instead of Tolkien jokes.

I wasn’t expecting it to go much past a semester, as my games usually did, so I was a bit surprised when we got to season seven after five and a half years. I’d set the game starting in 1998 because the Watcher power structure got hit by the plot in Buffy season seven so I didn’t want to run it in the aftermath and I joked that we’d have to deal with that when we got there... and then we did. Of course the main effect of the period setting was knowing which songs we could reference when the characters were listening to music.

It ran so long because we had an enthusiastic group of players, the Buffy system didn’t get in the way, the setting let us do all kinds of weird ideas, and the series’ sense of humour meant that we could often have the kind of geeky referencing and undercutting of villains common to RPGs become in-character dialogue.

The college setting and children of Watchers expected to take up the family obligation and inheritors of other obligations too meant it developed an actual theme too, the freedom of student life versus the responsibilities and expectations of home.

And since I was running at uni and we were generally in our twenties when we started it also got a bit autobiographical at times for a lot of us. I apologise again to everybody who sustained my personal in-my-twenties as a result.

There are things in-game I’d do differently too – if I’d know he’d be playing the same character five and a half years later I would have let David make his own, Jamie’s character was revealed as a werewolf early because another player couldn’t let it lie out of character, and we really could have dialled down the attempt to recreate Buffy season two when Derek’s character became a vampire. But all things considered, not a lot.

The show’s season structure definitely helped for that long run, letting different characters take up more or less of the spotlight as they faced a variety of Big Bads. The session more-or-less as episode format gave us some focus as well. It sometimes led to long sessions that ended in the pub after we got shooed out of the student union, and sometimes to walking home and chatting through the night as we did. And to ‘plotting and scheming’ meetups between sessions, which for a while turned into taking the piss out of that week’s episode of Torchwood while sharing a bottle of wine.

And it let us get experimental and weird with the format at times too. We spent weeks planning the “behind the scenes” episode where most of the characters were revealed to be actors playing them on TV, with John and David playing the unaffected characters given only a small clue this might be an odd session. This is the kind of thing you can only do if you know the players will have fun with it, and Cat prepared a get-out in case it didn’t work.

And I got surprised as well - I dropped one of my possible plots because Stu had his character’s envy fuel a magic spell that meant we could no longer take the possible villain seriously. Wanting the crush to see the handsome confident guy making moves on her as he did while grumbling about how handsome and confident he was led to her instead seeing him as a superhero called “Captain Rugged - the man with the face!”

Which also led to one of several examples of using actors as visual references for player and non-player characters for the “show” that was either prescient or skill in typecasting - Captain Rugged! was “cast” with Henry Cavill after his first shot at playing Superman but years before he got the role.

(And don’t get me started on how many weird one-shot episodes Supernatural did after us. Okay, sure, we in turn swiped them from comics and other TV shows and realistically that’s where they stole them from, but still...)

It led to me making my first video edit for a game, a laborious but thrifty Christmas present for the group, as well as customising action figures which was laborious but also not thrifty, and miniatures for the final session in the spring of 2009.

Milli by Storn Cook

I also typed up Actual Play reports, back when you had to type that kind of thing, which led to us having fans!

Something else I’d do differently if I’d known we’d go so long, I would have recorded the sessions... though typing does mean you don’t get to hear how often I’d say “uh...”

Of course its biggest legacy is that it’s how Lucy and Doug met, so it’s the only game I’ve run that helped lead to a marriage and children.

The first photos I could find, Christmas 2004.
Me in the shirt Cat made me and Cat with the crossbow someone else gave her, not me, I swear!

Christmas 2006 and action figures

2007, by me

2007, by Malcolm, with me

Our natural environment, Teviot, probably 2008

And by the time it ended Buffy had come back in her first canon comic season. And yeah, that gave me ideas. But I would have needed an artist, ha ha. Well, never say never.

Also, 7000th post here!