I Went Down To The Crossroad

Artists selling their souls for talent is the origin myth of rock and roll.

Tommy Johnson was said to have sold his soul at the crossroad before the story attached to Robert Johnson instead because he had songs about the subject and because he died young and badly.

It’s such a ubiquitous idea that I have a book about musicians misbehaving which opens with a fiction piece about Johnson offering the Devil his soul to be the greatest player ever and the Devil upping the ante to the souls of everyone who follows his example.

There’s a subset of occult-tinged rock bands getting into deals collectively, often with some of the band not knowing it: see American Satan and Paradise City, This Damned Band by Paul Cornell and Tony Parker, We Sold Our Souls by Grady Hendrix, and my early exposure through the Dark Forces book The Bargain by Rex Sparger.

The idea comes up in games as well. One of the PCs in my first Buffy game about a band stole her talent from an ex through magic. Vincent’s sire in Last Dance joked about being the origin of the story, and that reference goes back to Robert Johnson being the un-canon Prince of New Orleans in GURPS Vampire: The Masquerade.

Johnson’s world was lawless and chaotic enough that he could count as a wandering adventurer. Manly Wade Wellman’s Silver John stories have a travelling guitarist and magician as a hero.

Call Of Cthulhu has period sourcebooks for Harlem, Chicago and New Orleans if you want a base for a games about the Blues and all that followed. And who might be waiting at the crossroad?

Character Creation Challenge 2025 4: Call Of Cthulhu

Character Creation Challenge 2025

4: Call Of Cthulhu and family

There’s a lot of horror in music, and not just in Metal and Goth and the like that really lean into it. We have a whole lot of murder ballads, violent operas, blues singers going to the crossroads, and heroes like Silver John.

Call Of Cthulhu and relatives like Trail Of Cthulhu usually have groups of investigators chasing its mysteries to the bitter end, but the 1920s-30s base and other historical settings could allow for different kinds of groups getting caught up in the danger for other reasons.

Here picking up Harlem Unbound and looking to Lovecraft Country:

The Dev Longford Five

“There’s a hellhound on my trail...”

Concept

A Chicago jazz quintet with a side of the blues, whose members play ghoulish to show the monsters they do not fear them.

A toast to Tolkien

“His grief he will not forget; but it will not darken his heart, it will teach him wisdom.”

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

Character Creation Challenge 2025 3: Dungeons & Dragons

Character Creation Challenge 2025

3: Dungeons & Dragons & Such

Now one I haven’t actually run a game of, but anyways.

Strolling players with optional wagon are the medieval-ish fantasy equivalent of a band in a van, and D&D has Bard as one of the mainline PC options to the extent that Edgin leads the party in Honour Among Thieves. All-Bard parties are a popular one-shot gag idea but you sometimes hear about groups really going for it.

This would also work with similar setups like Warhammer Fantasy, where Kim Newman’s classic novel Drachenfels is about the Shakespeare of the setting putting on a play about a legendary undead sorcerer and you can guess how well that goes...

The Lambert Players

“When the battle is over...”

Concept

Strolling players who have a habit of getting in trouble on the road, sometimes play to grand and not-so-grand courts, once had to put on a show for a ruined castle full of restless spirits, and are always on the lookout for a catchy new tune.

Character Creation Challenge 2025 2: Vampire: The Masquerade

Character Creation Challenge 2025

2: Vampire: The Masquerade

Vampires and live music fit together well. Nightclubs are a vampire setting archetype and the dangerously alluring rock god translates really easily. David Bowie played a vampire before The Vampire Lestat became a megastar, and Vampire: The Masquerade suggested a band as a coterie in the original rulebook and had vampire-run clubs and a Kindred band in Chicago almost immediately.

I ran a game about one for friends recently:

Last Dance

“Just how deep do you believe will you bite the hand that feeds?”

Concept

A local alternative band fronted by vampires, with more established bands on the scene and some conflicts with other clubland Kindred. We could have gone famous but decided to stay street.

Nosferatu (2024)

Nosferatu (2024) is much what you might expect from a Nosferatu adaptation from Robert Eggers. Probably Eggers’s least interesting film to me because I know the playbook so well, but absolutely worth a look.

It adds a few interesting harsh dramatic beats and a way in I wasn’t fond of, though not compared to Werner Herzog’s miserabilist 1979 version, which it inevitably looks a lot like.

It makes Orlok more a pervasive force than a character until the end - it might have been interesting to go all in on this and not characterise him at all.

Orlok himself is unfortunately not that striking visually as Nosferatus go, although he sounds horrible, if rather like the Black Speech of Mordor.

Of course it looks fantastic if often rather gloomy. My main evil glee was in the castle sequence and the build-up to it. I particularly liked one small touch.

Character Creation Challenge 2025 1: Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Character Creation Challenge 2025

1: Buffy The Vampire Slayer

A band is one of the obvious side jobs for a bunch of kids in a van solving mysteries, hence it being one of my immediate Buffy The Vampire Slayer series ideas. (See at least one actual post-Buffy TV series.)

And has happened a few times, currently in a PBP, as well as a long time using it at the Nationals.

Hence a series outline of adventure hooks.

And a title sequence

Almost There

“It’s just me against the world and the world is winning”

Concept

College rock band who have to fight monsters. Expect some conflict about wishing they could just be a band and duty to save the world, episodes about haunted recordings and evil record companies and that kind of thing. On a metaphorical level it’s about how hard it can be to do what you want, and balancing it with what you need to do.

Character Creation Challenge 2025

Character Creation Challenge 2025: Bands

Since I regularly cycle around to games about bands, because it’s a classic reason for a party-sized group in a van getting involved in adventures...

So the idea is to create bands that would fit in various settings.

Series about bands are pretty common in TV, books and comics - not just media that actually have music. And there are some RPGs about bands and the like too.

Some of these could be playable series, and indeed some of them are...

Using Umläut: Game Of Metal where you create a band as your “character” and run them through a one-shot of their entire career.

While there are other games about playing members of bands, and you can play bands in other games and this is where the idea came from in the first place... I have Umläut!

(2021 CCC example)

Concept

Who are these people?

Members

Name at least one

Statistics. “Set each to 1, except Cash, which starts at zero.”

Hope is how happy your Band is

Ego is how angry they are

Fanbase is how popular they are

Cash is how much money and free time they have

Performance Traits. Assign 7, none of them can be less than 1 though. (I have definitely heard bands with less than 1 in these, but never mind.)

Technique is how skilled the musicians are

Power is how loud the Band can play

Stagecraft is how good they look on stage

Character Creation Challenge 2025 ideas

I’ve drawn a blank for the Character Creation Challenge this year.

After the first year of 31 systems, two years of PCs groups covering most games I might actually run and a year of Buffy The Vampire Slayer characters, what else?

I could probably manage Vampire: The Masquerade 5, I certainly have enough PC ideas I haven’t had a chance to use, but would that make for entertaining writing or reading? Maybe a city’s court, but I’ve done that as brief sketches on the level I could use as SPCs already.

Trinity Continuum sure, but too complex for me to do casually.

I could probably make 31 Relics for Relics but I used my best ideas for that for publication.

Star Trek Adventures, the thing I’ve actually played in the last year, too simple even without an online generator. And after some sensible Starfleet officers last time, what else? Maybe some Klingons as they have their own rulebook, and so on, but hey, I’ve never actually run Star Trek.

Star Wars sure, but the D6 system has templates aplenty. Maybe hopping to different systems for different feels? Hrm.

I could do that with supers too, though I already made two ICONS teams in 2022 and 2024.

The only new system I looked at it 2024 that could sustain that many characters baffles me.

Bands?

Hmm.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year, as and when applicable! May it be a good one.