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Lucien-matt-alasdair mcwilliams
How do I create variety, tension and so forth when I run adventures in Metropolis? I know the Metropolis sourcebook, but I haven't got the book, so help me out here, will you! Anyone!
First off: don't expect the Metropolis sourcebook to provide you with much. It's a terrible book; you'd think its authors decided Kult wasn't worthwhile unless it was more like D&D"A monster attacks from the shadows." "I shoot it."
Variety & tension? Well, first I'm not sure what you mean when you say that you run adventures in Metropolis. When I GM, there are at most brief excursions to the place; players spend weeks in intense but slow investigation, followed by a half-hour of reality cracking all around them; when they're safely back in the Illusion, they have to ask themselves, "What the hell just happened?"
GMing advice: make your players feel like someone just slipped them a tab of acid, keep it going for as long as you can without losing their interest, then deposit them back in their living rooms, dining rooms, kitchens. No explanations.
However, keep in mind that continuity is important. I ran Richard Fichera's "Yesterday's Memories, Tomorrow's Premonitions," as a one-shot adventure, and i made some minor adjustments to keep them symbolism continuous. So here's how the game turned out:
The character, a nurse, is watching TV at home. When she gets up it's morning--not the following morning, even; four days have passed! Whenever she sees a TV time shifts for her; she goes a few days back in time or a few days ahead. She tries all kind of things to avoid this, and finally confronts it, by turning on the TV and staring at it. Every time she does this, her knowledge of the Lore of Time and Space increases; until she finds herself drawn to a place in Metropolis called the Clockworks. She watches everything--herself included--speed up as the gears begin to operate too quickly; then the guards throw someone into the gears and time slows down. Exploring further, she sees that the building is manufacturing parasites that look like wristwatches and stuffing them in boxes marked "Timex," "Rolex," etc. She looks at her wrist and realizes that her own watch is one of these things; disgusted, she tears it off. A guard hears her stifle a shout from the pain and begins to pursue her; she begins running through labyrinthine alleys, always hearing the guard behind her, when suddenly she emerges onto a street near where she lives. She looks dazed and her hand is bleeding; a passerby stops to ask if she's all right. Whatever she tells people, they don't believe it.
Okay, got a little long-winded there. My point is this: the adventure's theme was time, the visit to Metropolis dealt with time. By keeping these aligned, you create a good story, if a bizarre and alienating one.
I agree completely. Brief glimpses of something too huge to be grasped by the unawakened psyche are best. In a recent adventure I had the room of one of the players turn into a padded cell. She freaked out after her character watched a home movie of BNP related activities, the rest of the group opened her bedroom door to let her crash out there and lo and behold its a padded cell with a door at the far side. Just try and get a group of paranoid banking clerks and computer programmers to look through an observation slot into a dark corridor, they just haven't got the nerve. Its not even necessary to have anything really dramatic happen. Like the man said, too many people think it has to be AD&D, its best just to screw with their heads a bit.