Esoteric Enterprises - Advancement, Scope, and "Domain Level" Play

I never thought I'd say it, but I'm actually interested in "Domain Level" play. And the game I want it for doesn't say anything about it. Esoteric Enterprises is a game about being a criminal in the occult underworld. In the current open table game I'm running, the players have clawed their way up through the underground to become serious players in the Coal City nightlife - partially through their fearsome reputation, and partially because they're some of the last wizards standing after months of gang warfare. Kaldron's Kimeras should be thinking about recruiting their own goons, setting up their own hustles. But the game has no rules for creating and running your own criminal gang. You can work for other factions, and you can fight other factions, but you can't be a faction.

This is unfortunate because the dungeon crawling loop (get mission, go under, fight things, grab money, map a new area, run away from things, limp back to the surface) is feeling a little stale. Shooting people in gang wars is feeling stale. The players keep showing up, but I'm running out of ways to mix things up. The gangs of Coal City are running out of bodies, and the dungeon is running out of unexplored rooms.

(Indie Game Reading Club had a post that mentioned this, which I can't find now. About how even games with really good procedural content generators will eventually run dry if there isn't something else to do besides burn through the randomly generated maps and encounters)

When I brought this up on the server, one of the players speculated that the PCs were never actually intended to be as powerful or relevant as Kaldron's Kimeras. I applied a 5X multiplier to experience, and most of the group is between level 2 and 4 after nine sessions. Without the multiplier, most of them would be just about at level 2.

But then, either the players are eventually supposed to achieve those positions, at which point we still come to the problem of running your own criminal enterprise. Or they aren't supposed to reach those heights, and the huge tables of XP advancement, power advancement, saving throw advancement, and nine levels of spells aren't actually intended for use.

I think it's the latter. I think the players are supposed to be magical hobos living on the edge of civilization, diving dungeons and getting into gritty magical underworld gunfights for gas money and child support payments. The best they can hope for is to be useful enough that the real players keep them around, or dangerous enough to not be worth bothering, or have a plan to escape when the powers-that-be finally get tired of them. Maybe someday if they prove their worth, they can join a faction, be granted safety and security and purpose, and move one or two concentric rings inward toward civilization. But being tough enough to start your own? Fuggedaboutit.

Except, if that's the case, why all the levels and spells and so on?

Esoteric Enterprise is cloned from Lamentations, which is cloned from B/X. My guess is the author did this to avoid the agony of developing a bespoke system, and get right to the meat of cranking out the actual content. All the huge XP tables, spell levels, and even the classes are reskinned from Lamentations.

I ran Lamentations for a few sessions in undergrad, way-back-when, and it suffered from the same problem. It still had mechanical support for character advancement, but the actual modules for it were all survival horror. There was little treasure to be had, certainly nothing like the windfall of the B/X treasure tables, and the characters were lucky if they made it out alive. More so if they avoided all the mutilations and mutations the scenarios had in store. It wasn't a game about advancement, it was about degeneration - more like Call of Cthulhu or Delta Green than the games it was cloned from.

A lot of game designers who make OSR stuff are in love with the first-level experience. Characters can't count on a cushion of HP, special powers, decent saving throws or damage output to protect them. Smart use of limited resources is essential to survival. The players are always paying attention because, like the man said, death waits for the slightest lapse in concentration.

Instead of cloning B/X, I encourage these designers to create their own game systems that take the things they like about first level play and stretch them out to cover the entire game. Instead of porting over thirty year old rules for XP advancement that clearly no longer reflect what their game is about.