Do Gods Dream of Digital Drugs? (神々は電⼦ドラッグの夢を⾒るか) by Byoushin (秒針) of the Victims of INT Table (INT の犠牲者卓), from the scenario pack Japonism (2021 Updated Version)
In-short:
An investigation-heavy scenario that involves networking your way through modern-day Tokyo to solve a Mythos-tinged musical techno thriller mystery. If your group is looking for a one or two session game full of social interaction, musical references, and lots of transit .around Japan’s capital, I fully recommend the unique and memorable Do Gods Dream of Digital Drugs – as long as the keeper is ready for some pregame preparation (and translation work).
Spoilers-lite for players and Keepers:
Do Gods Dream of Digital Drugs? (henceforth Digital Drugs) is the first scenario in the Japonism collection of tech-focused scenarios set in modern-day/near-future Japan. Digital Drugs a very unique little scenario, quite different from any others I’ve run so far, though I won’t get into any specifics until the below spoiler-full section. It is very much a social-investigation focused and free form scenario. There is a set and clear time limit, but the players are given free roam of Tokyo to poke around and tug on strings up until the end game.
With some extra game time and preparation on the Keeper’s part (though there is already a good bit of extra work they’ll need to do), it would be fun to emphasise the sense of place with some location pictures or train routes. The text suggests a three hour playtime, but my run took close to four hours, going pretty quick with plenty of time skips, but also with a substantial extra subplot added in. If I ran the game again, I’d do it without adding extra meat to keep the time down, but with more emphasis on pictures and sensory details.
There are no pre-generated investigators, but the scenario does have suggestions for what skills will be useful for investigators. For my group of four players, I prepared six characters, each with skills that would come in use, as well as having possible connections to locations/people/events in the scenario. The party ended up being a programmer, pianist, office worker, and police officer, with the unused characters being a doctor and a graduate student (with an occult specialty, of course). If you don’t feel like making investigators, here’s a Google Drive link to the ones I made.
Digital Drugs was overall a very neat scenario, and if your group is wanting something different from the usual 1920’s America Call of Cthulhu, modern Tokyo is certainly different, and the pace and themes of the scenario are also unique. I very much enjoyed it, and would like to give it another go someday. As long as you are looking for a social-interaction heavy game, I fully recommended it – assuming someone in your group can translate it, as Google Translate alone butchers it beyond recognition.
Japonism has now been translated (by me!) into English, and is available on DriveThruRPG.
Before you go, though, maybe you would be interested in reading some other scenario reviews?
MJRRG: Branches of Bone – Cthulhu Dark Ages, A Chill in Abashiri – A 1920s Taisho-Era Japan
Seeds of Terror: Series Overview, The Mummy of Pemberley Grange, Endless Light, One Less Grave, Hand of Glory, Tickets Please , Fish in a Barrel
Miskatonic Repository: Dossier 1 – The Maw
Chaosium: Amidst the Ancient Trees, Gateways to Terror Overview, The Necropolis, What’s in the Cellar?, The Dead Boarder
Japonism: Do Gods Dream of Digital Drugs?
Bibliothek 13: A Cup of Horror, Erich!
Spoilers for Keepers:
The basic structure of the scenario is fairly simple and traditional CoC. The investigators meet with an NPC acquaintance, the NPC leaves a few hints then promptly dies, leaving the investigators a day to find out what caused the death, then head into a final event to work out a plan to stop the thing from happening again on a wider scale. On paper, fairly straight forward, and follows the general structure of many Cthulhu scenarios, good or bad. But the details and play style of Digital Drugs really set it apart, and not just its modern-day Tokyo setting.
The NPC is killed by a rogue music-writing AI, that accidentally created a melody mimicking Tru’nembra, driving those that listen to it insane and suicidal. The NPC also invited the investigators to a music festival in two-days time, clearly setting up a time limit, even if the players don’t know exactly why yet. Following a digital-paper trail, the investigators bounce between companies, university labs, and a music-worshipping New Religion church in Tokyo, finding who was involved in creating the AI, learning that the song will be played and broadcast live over the internet at the festival, and hopefully how to stop it.
Besides featuring Tru’nembra, a rare feature in CoC scenarios, what really stands out in Digital Drugs is that there are no antagonists. There is absolutely no one out to deliberately subvert the investigators, much less try to do them harm. If the players go against all their natural urges and suspicions and are just honest with every NPC, they can learn everything they need to know, and any NPC that is able will volunteer their help in stopping the threat. The New Religion cult itself isn’t to blame for the Mythos God coming to ruin everyone’s day, as even they tried to stop the Tru’nembra song before the start of the game. And really, Tru’bembra itself isn’t involved unless the players bring it in, and even then its in an attempt to stop the AI’s song. And the song was created entirely by happenstance, no one is really trying to cover it up, and when revealed everyone will try to help out. Its a rare game when most NPCs are helpful, much less the cultists themselves being good guys!
Players being players, they’ll almost certainly be suspicious of everyone they meet, becoming their own worst enemies. The more they suspect the NPCs of being hostile, the more they’ll lie, making themselves look every more suspicious in the eyes of the NPCs. Pretty neat!
Digital Drugs requires a non-negligible amount of prep work (not counting translating, if needed). NPC details vary from some basic descriptions and stat blocks to nothing at all. Right from the get-go, the on boarding is completely up to the Keeper. The investigators go to a meet with a friend. Who the investigators are, how the know each other, how they know the friend, where and why they go to meet them, are all left up to the Keeper to prepare.
In my run, I had the player characters all be friends, drawn together by the doomed NPC, who I made an electronic music producer. He invites them to a small gig (I made it an electro-punk jazz band to be excessively niche) where he invites and gives them tickets to the upcoming Roppongi Hills Music Festival, while making vague hints that it’ll be a show they never forget, and not really answering their questions. All the while he’s listening to an earbud, and then he kills himself with a pen.
The scenario text afterwards is fairly detailed, giving five locations to investigate before the music festival. Not all of them are strictly necessary to go to in order to stop the song from playing at the festival, in particular the venture fund group Penture Co. doesn’t really lead to much, but going to every location does let the players piece together the full picture of what happened before the scenario started.
Going into the festival, the party may have the full support of every NPC they’ve come across beforehand, giving them easy access to sound equipment, and plenty of help with disabling the AI music. Easy. Assuming your players didn’t spook everyone they talked to, or didn’t accidentally listen to the song ahead of time and lose an investigator or two by accident. Or they didn’t figure out where and how to stop the song, or didn’t even show up at the festival. In general, the odds are pretty heavily in the players favour, but if they slip up, the consequences are dire, with a suicide-enducing song being unleashed not only on the live audience, not only on the Japanese TV audience, but on anyone watching the streaming broadcast online, and anyone who hears a recording in the future (that, by the way, would be a very cool follow-up scenario, hunting down internet-terrorists spreading a Ring-like suicide song).
While I really like the nonviolent, non-confrontational aspect of the scenario, when I ran it I added in a little bit of antagonism. It wasn’t at all required, and flies in the face of what the scenario is likely trying to do, but I felt like the group was expecting it to an extent, and might have been a little let down had it not been present. For our run, I found it worked out well and added a bit of excitement.
What I did was have the music cult, the Church of Serialism, splinter, with one group wanting to stop the song as per the scenario text, but a small splinter group latching on to the song, believing that the song would truly bring the God of music to Earth. The main bulk of the Church is arrested prior to the start of the game, and I had the splinter group be partly responsible for that. I also had the doomed friend NPC be a member of the splinter group. They aren’t present for most of the scenario, only coming up in an email, and later, thanks to one PC being a police officer, a short interrogation of a Church member.
In the final scene, my group did not have all the NPCs on their side, having kept the secret of what the song really was to themselves, and so had to disable the sound equipment on their own. As the programmer investigator tried to shut down the sound equipment, a number of splinter cultists in the crowd noticed something was happening and started closing in. The office worker investigator distracted them by whipping the crowd up into a frenzy. A cultists eventually slipped through, and as he closed in on the programmer racing to finish his work, the police officer investigator bashed him over the head with his Bokuto (the only person-on-person violence in our run). Just in time, the programmer shut off the music, and to fill the dead air, our pianist investigator improvised the show of their life.
I really liked how our ending turned out, though I really would have loved to see one of the other endings play out, where the investigators preform a counter song they found in the Church which summons the actual Tru’nembra, overwhelming the AI song and saving the audience from killing themselves, but also shattering every piece of glass in ear-shot, and causing anyone and everyone watching the broadcast to hear and witness a Mythos deity, causing wide spread insanity across Tokyo, Japan, and the wider world. Also very cool.
Do Gods Dream of Digital Drugs is overall a great social-investigation heavy scenario, and its focus on music and lack of antagonism also makes it stand out. If desired, it could fairly easily be transplanted out of Japan to any other modern or future setting. It does require a bit of extra work from the Keeper to get moving, but nothing that would take more than half an hour or so of thinking up an introduction. Well recommended.
You can also listen to my full replay here.
Once again, you can pick up Digital Drugs in the Japonism pack on DriveThruRPG.
Before you go, though, maybe you would be interested in reading some other scenario reviews?
MJRRG: Branches of Bone – Cthulhu Dark Ages, A Chill in Abashiri – A 1920s Taisho-Era Japan
Seeds of Terror: Series Overview, The Mummy of Pemberley Grange, Endless Light, One Less Grave, Hand of Glory, Tickets Please , Fish in a Barrel
Miskatonic Repository: Dossier 1 – The Maw
Chaosium: Amidst the Ancient Trees, Gateways to Terror Overview, The Necropolis, What’s in the Cellar?, The Dead Boarder
Japonism: Do Gods Dream of Digital Drugs?
Bibliothek 13: A Cup of Horror, Erich!
