The GLOW 1996: Psychic Eustace Delmont

Going Back Over the Posts
The First Five Episodes, The Story That Was
Magnus Odinson and the Story That Would Become
The Death of Eustace Delmont and the Third Pivot
And the Rest of It

Going Back Over the Posts

As I sort through the brain space to sum up this quite long campaign — the longest by word count and episode count, though Bleak + Pearl will quite soon over take both titles since it is maybe half finished at best — I figured I'd go back some episodes and discuss some notes and ideas that occur to me. And while doing that, I'll fix a few minor errors while leaving the larger ones in place. It's a living, fairly organic game. Stuff shifts. Let's blame the Witches Three.

Also, this won't be a complete list of every episode and interlude. More just a few highlights as things come to mind.

Then, after this I'll do a general debrief. With the more philosophical and technical stuff.

The First Five Episodes, the Story That Was

Looking at episodes 1 (Psychic Boy Meets Hacker Girl) and 2 (Gathering Supplies), the very first thing that comes to mind is just how much it breaks my heart at how fast I could play and write these things. Pre-Wegovy, I mean. Don't get me wrong. Weight loss is bigly important (pun intended) and likely will save my life, but the brain drain I get from consuming roughly 1200-1400 calories a day is most obvious from how I could write out episodes of that length in roughly a day where I'd play for an hour or two and then spend another hour or two cleaning it up and tweaking it.

When I started the series, I had roughly a two-week gap between playing and the post showing up. Meaning I played so much and so quickly that I could generate enough content to extend that far into the future. A few episodes in, I had less than a week. Eventually, I swapped to one episode per week (as opposed to three). And I still was "falling behind."

Not a complaint. I play these games because I like them. I don't advertise them. Don't get paid. Don't get endorsements. Nothing like that. It just amazes me how much 2500-3000+ calorie a day Doug could absolutely explode words and content into the screen without trying that hard.

BACK TO THE FIRST TWO EPISODES: The first ep has some really fun world building because at the time I didn't have to focus at all on lore building. We have deadly exo-suit game shows, legalized pot smoking, semi-self-driving rental bikes. Soulburn sickness. We have the whole Citadel infrastructure. There could be an entire The GLOW arc that takes place in the mall. Eustace's voice got killed somewhere around the half-way mark in the series as he was being consumed by the Witches, but a few jabs here or there were fun. Also just his hyper-awareness of other people. "I appreciate the severity of this question, but are you ok?" Asked right after slaughtering a group of people nearby.

Hitomi's personality also felt a bit stronger. It's a bit weird in that I have a pretty clear vision of her mindset but sometimes its hard to keep it really clear when writing it out for myself and others to read. Lines like, "Please. I used the magic word you will note. Please. Explain," did a lot of work.

At the end of "Carving Out a Plan" we get a glance at the original plan for the plot: nearly immediately going to get Amy Patel. That got seriously sidetracked by the "real plot" showing up. Which feels appropriate for the genre.

The second scene of episode 2 (which was basically two scenes in one because, again, I used to write with gusto) is the first time I recall actively going back and redoing something. The original version of the scene had Eustace killing Hitomi's landlords for betraying her. I changed it to him just reasoning with them to help protect her. That went a long way with saving his character, really. He is not necessarily the person who kills. He is the person who reasons but is willing to kill.

The character of Mischa (from "Holy Revenge") was potentially a side story that never happened. Before Dave Akari became a major part of the bad-guy plot, making Mischa's rebellion a lot more reasonable, I had the idea of doing something like a short, violent Cy_Borg one-shot with her.

Episode 2 also introduced the GLOW random chart/map that got a lot of use throughout the series.

EPISODE 4 ("Against Ouroboros") helped to clench Juan Uno as a major anchor of the series, something that continued up to nearly the end. A funny "glitch" here is that we see a holographic vision of Magnus Odinson. Later it a bit of a "twist" that a person with a very Nordic name is actually a black businessman play-acting as a folksy cult leader. However, they would have already seen him. I made it more obvious there and noted his appearance right off in a later edit.

There were quite a few aspects that didn't quite get carried over. The Brainwaves as a body-morphed gang could have been useful later. The fact that some of the Fallen Knives were working with Oro. The fact that Marius's people wear rooster masks.

EPISODE 5 (Terminal Issues) introduces Genny who quickly becomes a major character and pretty equal to Hitomi and Eustace in the series. At first, he was just an asshole getting in their way. One missed chance from here is the biker gang that playfully challenges Eustace to a race. I had plans to bring them back at some point to actually help out — back when I figured Eustace on the bike would be a major element — but kind of forgot them in the gathering of allies. Ah, well.

Around this time I remember feeling increased brain fog because making the the fight scenes actually started to feel stressful instead of joyful.

Magnus Odinson and the Story That Would Become

The biggest shift in the story happened right after.

EPISODE 6 ("Knives Out"): Genny gets kidnapped and we meet the "Siblings". I'll be honest, I don't remember if they were intended to be siblings — adopted or otherwise — but it remained funny to me to skip over a lack of remembering my own lore by always putting it in quotes and having people ask. They ended up becoming, essentially, the boss fight so it's nice to see them grow with the player characters.

Generally, Episode 6 is the pivot in the way that Johnny Blue becoming a werecat was the pivot for his story. Even more so in this case. By establishing the Cabal as a group of businessmen trying to create their own GLOW it enabled me to deal with the chief problem with both stories in general: the GLOW is terrible. It consumes people and their misery to self-sustain and grow itself and some folks are getting absolutely rich from it. Most are left behind. Tourists flock in and film it like funny home videos. It can be fun to engage in a sort of jokesy-Dystopian-nightmare but I either need to deal up the surreality or find a way to break from it. The break in this case is that the GLOW could be fixed if the people who pushed hardest to keep it a terrible place were more neutralized. By adding in the whole meta-plot of Cthulhu and his allies being resurrected by alien infestations in the GLOW, it helped to keep the story more Doug but also make it grander, more fantasy-grounded, and a more hard-scrabble-vs-the-world.

On the more negative side, by EPISODE 8 ("Odin's Favorite Son"), the brain fog was in full effect. It took me 5 days to play that one episode across three sessions. Sure, it's long, but it's only about the same length as the first episode of the series. I think the fact that the fight with Odinson ended up just being a kind of quick "yeet" over the bridge and it ends abruptly without me working out a lot of details on how to handle it says a lot.

Sometimes adapting to your own situation can open some freedom, though. Because mentally it was becoming harder to rely on the full stack of random tables I had been using, and harder to really balance fights, I came up with some unique situations and combats that broke or tweaked the Outgunned standards. Like the camo guards who had a stronger defense than attack. I had started using the "chase mechanics" to create some unique timing on encounters.

I just also kind of wish that I could see an alternate world where Doug wasn't running at half-steam while writing. Where the rest of the campaign might have taken a month instead of three.

The Death of Eustace Delmont and the Third Pivot

I'll talk about this more in the full debrief (which should be next) so won't really go much into these episodes here, but here's some behind the scenes for you. As I'm playing, I have a rough scaffold. Very rough. Not very "scaffold." In gamemaster terms, it would be like having a rough area map with a few keywords. More than that, and your players will wonder off and you'll never get to use it. Less than that, and you are stuck coming up with a bunch of random content as the female barbarian's player asks what color the flowers are in the field. You can cheese it and just have five encounters that you make happen no matter what the players do, but it's good to have a lot of player agency in traditional games. In solo games, though, player agency gets tricky. There's nothing wrong with just writing five or six set encounters and playing them out. It's a fair way to do it. However, I like there to be shocks that I have to try to absorb.

Still, it's nice to have a kind of gravity that the story can be pulled towards if I get stuck. "There is a bomb that will explode." That way, if nothing else, if I get stuck coming up with a scene, I can return to that bomb. If I come up with something better, the bomb can be handled offstage and no harm, no foul.

The rough scaffolding for this entire campaign arc was (1) Eustace Delmont was secretly a witch [not even he really knew but it was obvious from the beginning] and (2) at some point in time he was going to have to use his witch powers and (3) he would end up having to fight against the Order/GLOW itself, possibly at great personal sacrifice.

As I was ramping up the "Eustace the Witch" portion, something occurred. I rolled a few terrible rolls in a row and Eustace died. I decided to go with it. Ramp it up a bit. A whole new scaffolding slammed down — the battle of Yuggoth, the real driver behind the cabal, the death of humanity in less than a century — and I had a lot of fun with that.

Around here is where Roman, not Roger, fully became the bad seed. Prior posts still talk about Roger being the main villain even in the "gamemaster" sections and commentary, but oh well. People (including me) just had it wrong, see.

And the Rest of It

EPISODE 11 ("Gathering New Allies") is clearly a strong-spark episode for me. Re-reading it was a pleasure. The slight shifts to make Genny's grumpy-asshole nature into more of an uber-team-player who is used to seeing people dying — quite a few at his own hands — and wanting to protect people worked so well. Jones was made out of nowhere and the first scene with him — along with his 1990's era racism of claiming the two Japanese characters looks like father and daughter — just fit the vibe of the series. Varvara got a bit left behind, story wise, but I tried making up for that at the end.

There is a humor in that Jones was brought on to fly a helicopter to the Moonblink and then to the Rambler and essentially struggled to handle the first because of a mechanical failure and couldn't handle the second because stuff kept going wrong with the helicopter.

I think it would have been fun to have a Jones, Genny, and Varvara crew from the get-go even though five-people crews tend to be a bit rough for me to solo.

"Scrap in the Scrapyard" (EPISODE 12) was another strong spark for me even though length wise it was pretty tiny. It was a good, meaty scene. The fight was fun. Going from a junkyard brawl to a legit fight. I like it when people punching each other start working together. I liked how Varvara was shaping up. Jones was becoming a bit too much comic-relief but it was fun.

Eustace's return to Antioch was one of those scenes I had to carefully craft. I had imagined, for some time — more of that scaffolding/gravity — that such a scene would occur. I had even thought about making Bel a potential side character, but I eventually just got elements established. The healing of the punished psychics was one of those moments where I was trying to fix some of the inherent cruelness in my own creation. The "Witch-King" moment was definitely of the same vibe of Arden Ulet becoming The Storm Crow in The Bloody Hands. Only Eustace himself severed that connection to retain some part of himself. A fact that did not play out into the final episode when he was able to escape the choices the Witches were laying out for him.

With EPISODE 14 (Crow Boy Meets Hacker Girl (Again)), it is probably the most obvious that I was struggling to play and write. I did a very smart thing, I changed up the formatting of the blog to make it easier to just stream stuff out without having to insert foot notes or break stuff down so much. That helped. We got one episode (Moonblink) split into 2 with the second half being pretty short. I also was unsure how to handle this new Eustace. I eventually reshaped him into a plot point and made Hitomi (and Genny) the main focus. At this point, I was trying to think of how to handle his and Hitomi's relationship. I also set up a plot-line — the breakdown of Dave Akari — and kind of forgot it. It would have been nice to look a little more at it, I think. I do kind of explain it in a few episodes but that's the kind of thing that might have been good to actually dwell on.

One of the best and one of the worst decisions for the campaign arc both exist in EPISODE 15 (Meetings). The best decision was to go and bring back plotlines from the Johnny Blue series and help this feel like the second two-thirds of a single novel instead of two completely separate stories. Taking my rough draft of an opening scene for "Neon Foster and the Spaceman" storyline and bringing it back to life worked super well to add some weight and narrative to the whole The GLOW. It felt like a proper arc and foreshadowed twist rather than a simple odd oracle result. Giving Detective Aurora Hernandez more screentime was a great idea, especially since it was becoming harder and harder to explain why MUNI wasn't more present. Luca and Sofia are good characters and Sofia was one of the few to be able to see Eustace as he really was. Luca was one of the few that trusted Eustace entirely just because of his friendship with Jani.

Unfortunately, I violated the central rule of this entire campaign arc: Hitomi became a prop in her own story. She just tags along, there. Hitomi should have had a much bigger role in those scenes. She did manage a few things, here or there, but her voice should have been better heard.

The "Outfoxed" scene of EPISODE 18 was a bit more of the scaffolding left over from original plans. I was hoping we could have at least one scene of Eustace vs the Order and this is the closest we got. It was also maybe the roughest fight in the game. Eustace tossing the dude from a good height was fun. It was a little sad that Amy — intended to be the third character — essentially got only a scene or two and that her mantis was left behind [and the Green Lady]. Still, it was nice to have that.

My favorite three scenes from the last three episodes were "The Battle of the Rambler" (Episode 19), "The Past Is a Foreign Country" (Episode 20), "NOT the GLOW 1999: Transporter Jani Blum" (Episode 21). Partially because each of the three represented me just putting down the Outgunned rulebook and doing my own thing. The first was a Chase scene that was also a fight. The second was a fight scene where the fight was something else (ala Gareth Hendrix). The third was just a lore scene that both implies a happy ending but also a possibly scary one: Eustace has transcended and is willing to change reality to fit his version of truth and justice. We know he is a good man, but he is also a violent man at times and not always in control of where the latter meets the former.

The final fight was...ok. I think it worked out. One thing I still lack is knowing if I am hitting the right difficulty until stuff happens. But, that and more thoughts about the ending will need to wait for the debrief. Next time, Space Pilgrims. I'm back to moving boxes around.

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