Table Tales: Breaking the Curse of the Empty Table

By Mark Morrison

It’s been far too long between tales!

Partly because I’ve had my head down working on the RuneQuest Revised Rulebook for next year (so exciting), but mostly because my group has had a winter of gaming discontent. With one life reason after another we have cancelled far more sessions than we have convened. You know how it goes.

But, everything finally worked last Thursday when Rhiannon, Scott and Mark were free to join me for an absolutely cracking playtest of “The Mouth of Chaos”, the brand new short adventure by Brian Holland which will be included in the new RuneQuest rulebook. No spoilers from me, but it’s designed to introduce new players to both the thrill of Glorantha and the core mechanics of RuneQuest.

It was a particular thrill to throw down the new adventurers that Brian has designed, with wonderful art from Ossi Hiekkala, and see who caught their imagination. The players selected Titus the Minotaur, Marmar the Duck, and Attia the Healer. Their mix of completely different cults, cultures, skills and magic turned out to be perfect for the adventure at hand.

RuneQuest adventurers for the playtest for “The Mouth of Chaos”

It was a fantastic playtest; a validation of how much fun the adventure is, how easy the new streamlined rules text is to access in play, how simple the pre-generated adventurers are to pick up, and most of all, how wonderful it is to finally beat the spirits of scheduling and get everyone to the table. All in all a great night in, and I made a few notes to fine tune the final edit after the player’s feedback.

There have been some quiet nights before this though, which raises the question: what do you do when you don’t got game? In my case the answer is, of course, plan for the next one.

Later this year I’ll be at both Chaosium Con Europe in October and Chaosium Con New Zealand in November, and I always like to have a new scenario on board. Most of my convention scenarios aren’t intended for print, but exist in a liminal space between my imagination, a small pocketbook, and what happens at the table when I run them. So, I needed something else for 2026, to go with my RuneQuest unicorn rider scenario “Star in Darkness”.

Running in Star in Darkness at Scryglass Studio in Melbourne for Chaosium colleagues and friends

Walking around in winter, I got to thinking about Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in 1812.

As you do.

Chaosium Con EU is being held in late October in Gdansk in Poland, and in my Australian hubris I do like to run a Call of Cthulhu scenario featuring Polish investigators whenever I go there*. The beginnings of a scenario leapt straight into my mildly chilled brain, and I won’t lie to you, my first ideas were so off the hook that I started doing creepy NPC dialogue for the dog. He didn’t care, but any passersby might have had concerns.

I got home and the idea stayed with me. At this stage of the process, I like to immerse myself in some inspirational source material. So, I sat down read through the background sections of Regency Cthulhu to check in on rules for muskets and more. I watched the extended cut of Ridley Scott’s Napoleon (so that you don’t have to), and started reading Adam Zamoyski’s 1812 Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow for history, and Jasper Kent’s vampire novel Twelve for horror. (In truth, the history book is the more horrific of the two, as is often the case.) All the while I’ve been listening on repeat to the somber tones of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony, written in 1812, as well as the soundtrack to Bram Stoker’s Dracula by Polish composer Wojciech Kilar.

Scenario fuel

Between what I’m reading and what I’m hearing, the most horrible scenes are starting to play out in my imagination. I’m waiting on my last piece of reference material to create the investigators: an Osprey book on Napoleon’s Polish Troops. Given that historically Napoleon promised the country everything and then abandoned them, I just hope that these five soldiers can survive what the Russian winter has in store for them and make it home alive. We’ll find out in Gdansk.

The point of all this is not to boast that I’m a clever clogs. Like others in this day and age, I’ve had to claw my way back to reading from the dread clutch of doomscrolling, and when I did, I wondered why on earth I had let it slide. The point is rather to say that if you’re looking for ideas to bring to the table, diving into books, films and music works for me, and might work for you too.

Spring is nearly here in Australia, and the dice are rolling again. If your table has also been empty of late, I hope that the clatter of dice soon echoes throughout.

* I’ve been to Poland a few times and am absolutely floored by the creativity and energy blasting out of the country. I mean, you already know how on the Poles are if have played our new Horror on the Orient Express boardgame by Nemesis designer Adam Kwapiński, or if you have ever rolled a Q-Workshop dice. And let’s not ignore The Witcher in the room. (Fun fact: when Barack Obama visited Poland in 2011, the prime minister gave him a copy of The Witcher 2. I presume he’s still grinding it.)