Blood in the Bayou Keeper Notes and Untold Secrets

Hey everyone! Charlie here, and here are my UNEDITED Keeper notes for Blood in the Bayou! I will spare you my billion pages of insane phone notes, these were the main ones used in the sessions. You will notice.... A LOT OF THINGS CHANGED. I love the idea that nothing is canon until the players see it, so I moved, changed, and rewrote things to better fit the narrative they/you saw all of the time. I am a little bit of an imposter myself. 

Some thoughts on running this game/secrets behind the screen:

- Monsters are inherently unbalanced as fuck, I grabbed a different statspread from the book for each unit and just ran with that. Sometimes I randomly picked another one, I never wanted anyone getting too comfortable with the monster's capabilities.

- THIS GAME WAS NOT MEANT TO BE RUN LIKE THIS. I think it's meant to take place over weeks and months as investigators stew in their madness and make slow progress, but honestly fuck that, it didn't fit the kind of story I wanted to run. Don't be afraid to tweak the game or just ignore things you and your table don't like, aspiring DMs! The great thing about tabletop RPGs, at least in my opinion, is that the rules are just a way to facilitate the fun. If part of them isn't fun, kill it with fire.

- This is my favorite system I've ever run, and we never really got caught up in the annoying mechanical intricacies like we do in Mutants and Masterminds or Dungeons and Dragons. It felt very good to do things like sanity checks as they felt narratively interesting instead of like every "turn" or whatever. I think it's important to consider that as soon as a "horror" game starts being about numbers, it is no longer scary... as terrifying as math is.

- The Rolan twist was not planned until episode 2/3, but it was so fun looking back and seeing how much fit. The first thing he sees in Galloway is a "hallucination" of ants under his skin, and it's revealed he was not even high.

- Kian originally did not pick the resurrection spell. Grizzly originally picked the Dominate spell, but we collectively decided the inevitable ending of Kian Bug asking the other two to just kind of explode was not as compelling. I let him re-choose his spell with the knowledge of his demise, and the narrative reason I let this happen is because the high-risk high-reward potential of the ending and the other characters being in danger due to him being greedy and wanting Kian back were too good.

Things to reflect on or that I wish I did a bit differently:

- This whole series has left me wanting to run a longer, player-driven mystery campaign. It's a bit harder to incite that "eureka!" moment from players when you have a narrative clock that needs to be followed to keep the story within 4 episodes.

- I straight up forgot about barcode I am literally so sorry

- I wish I did a better job of making the players feel like they had OPTIONS to deal with this threat, it came up in the rolled but I would have loved nothing more than for them to make a plan and follow it through.

- I honestly had a massive protective net under their characters, especially for Call of Cthulu. I think that our crew is such a roleplay heavy group, and will frequently make the dumbest choices because they are in character. I fudged more rolls then I will admit to the boys.

- I realized that narrative and worldbuilding are my favorite and strongest elements as a game master, and NPCs are my weakest. I definitely struggled in a realistic setting to make unique interesting NPCs that weren't a joke, and want to improve on this in the next thing I run. I wish I met the player's expectations for their background characters, I think I fell short here.

- I want to give the players more room to roleplay, but also to take action. I'm not too sure how to facilitate this, but I felt like I was pushing the party out of rooms more than pulling them into them. Would honestly love some advice on this, our table is pretty slow and reactive so I want to get better at inciting action from the characters. The background infection clock and so many timers and countdowns were my way of doing this during this campaign, but I'm not sure if I'm 100% satisfied with the results.

- I wish they were able to stew in "who can we trust?" for a bit longer and create more bonds and allegiances, might've just been another time constraint issue honestly. 

References/my headcanon for the MONSTERS (Left unnamed if they wanted to name them but now I wish I canonized something cool like Imposter Bugs or Fleshspinners): 

Typical drone/worker unit:

Queen's body:

Larva Attendant: 

Warrior (Officer Dudes was one of these):

Final thoughts: 

I am so proud of this series and its reception, thank you all so much for the wonderful kind words, fanart, and nightmares!

This was the most fun I've ever had on the show, and one of my favorite projects. I can't wait to run another game. Stay tuned on the Patron goals! ;)