Cavcari's Last Invocation

I was recently reminded of one of those "Campaigns That Never Were". In this case, it was a Forgotten Realms campaign that lasted all of two sessions before crashing and burning. And, if I'm honest, I was glad of it - I just didn't have the time or inspiration to give the campaign my full attention, and I didn't want to just run something substandard. (Incidentally, it's worth noting that there was very little about the campaign that meant it had to be Forgotten Realms - I only used that setting because one player was particularly keen to do so. That said, I did make sure to throw in one or two Realms-y bits to ground it.)

The campaign kicked off with something that had very little to do with the main plot. The initial setting was a trading post at an oasis in the desert, a city of tents, where a murder most horrid had occurred. Obviously, with the desert being a hostile environment, anything that breaks social cohesion cannot be tolerated, and so 'justice' was swift and decisive. So when the wrong man was identified as the murderer, the PCs were compelled to step in and try to keep their friend alive. That then led to an expedition into the desert to a downed Netherese sky citadel (one of those Realms-y bits - in another setting it would have been an abandoned dwarven fortress), and then the campaign died.

But the ultimate ending for the campaign that I had conceived was the discovery and manipulation of "Cavcari's Last Invocation". Cavcari was set to be an ancient archmage who, way back in the mists of time, had laid down various enchantments that had actually come to define the reality of the world. And his Last Invocation was a simple but profound edict: everything that is born must eventually die. Which of course meant that true immortality, even through undeath, became impossible... but in the Realms it would also mean that at least some of the deities (Midnight/Mystra, Kelemvor, and Cyric among others) who were previously mortals would also be finite. (Of course, this was before Mystra got killed off again, and other shenanigans.)

I hadn't quite worked out all the details, of course - there's no point in plotting the end-point of a campaign months or years in advance if you don't have to - but the final conceit was that the players would eventually have some means to adjust or apply the Invocation in order to change their world: they could use it to compel the end of some Big Bad perhaps, or they could revoke the Invocation, or... something.

Which, by this point, is largely irrelevant. I mean, who cares about a campaign I didn't manage to get off the ground a decade ago?

But the campaign does illustrate something that I think is important, especially with a game like D&D: by the time the PCs near the top of the level range, they are amongst the most powerful beings in the world. And as such, their effect on the world should be equivalently powerful. That's something I've tried to emphasise in campaigns I've run since then: in "The Eberron Code", the PCs eventually cleansed the taint from the Silver Flame; in "The Company of the Black Hand" they liberated the home town Denberg from the tyranny of Lady Aum and her allies; and if "Eberron: Dust to Dust" runs to its completion then that campaign will also leave a mark on the world - and a mark that will then carry over into any future campaigns I run in the setting (whether in 5e, 3.5e, or some other edition or game entirely).

Adventure Design: Talking to the DM

I've been embroiled in a discussion of late about a published adventure in which a particular group are accused of some crimes. A whole bunch of villagers proceed to accuse them, indicating that it's typical of members of that group, while one particular NPC suggests that perhaps there's more going on here than meets the eye.

And, sure enough, it emerges that there is indeed more going on - the group in question are responsible for the crimes they're accused of, but they have a motive beyond the standard "we're evil; it's what we do".

Leaving aside all of the other stuff that surrounds the adventure, it does highlight something that a lot of adventures do... or rather something that too many adventures don't do enough - talk to the DM.

An awful lot of adventures are written and plotted like novels - they're telling a story where you are introduced to a bunch of characters, those characters tell you a bunch of things, and later on it turns out that some of those things aren't entirely true. Which is okay, I guess.

But published adventures aren't novels. They're game products that the DM is supposed to be presenting to his players. And as such, the DM really needs to be briefed on what's really going on. If the villagers are not being objective because they're being racist then the adventure should say that to the DM. Don't leave it to be implied, and don't leave it as a revelation to be discovered on page 32. Likewise for a mystery adventure, the players should perhaps be surprised by the big reveal of the bad guy at the end, but the DM should not.

And, actually, it's pretty much as simple as that: at the start of the adventure text, and potentially at key points later on, the DM should be comprehensively briefed about what's going on and why.

Cuckolds & Coquettes

This was originally going to be a rather longer post, but I've realised that I don't really have time to assemble the whole together, and it's one of the lessons from "The Man in the Iron Mask" that I want to capture before my memory fades.

One of the things that is quite evident throughout the Musketeers saga, but most especially from "Louise de la Valliere" and "The Man in the Iron Mask", is just how much of the storyline is driven by characters being involved in various sexual relations. (It's actually impressive just how extensive this is, given that at no time does Dumas describe any actual sexual activity - it's all implied. And when compared against the reality of Louis XIV and Louise de la Valliere, even the implied stuff is positively tame.)

And yet, that's something that tends to be missing entirely from RPGs - even if there is a romance in place, it tends to be the only such romance to feature in the campaign, it tends to be of the generic "rescued princess and her hero" variety, it happens almost entirely off-screen, and it tends also to proceed in a fairly idealised manner. Part of which is entirely appropriate - a sixteen stone bearded Scotsman tends to do a poor line in rescued princesses!

Yet I think the game misses a trick here, especially as regards "courtly intrigue" games - the interplay of personalities in the novels makes for some really intriguing plotting, and can add an entirely wealthy dimension to events in a campaign. The PCs may not be able to approach the King directly, but if they know that his mistress is partial to a particular type of chocolates...

(Where this post was going to be longer was that I was thinking of proposing some sort of construct for such a game. But, as I said, I haven't had time to work on it. However, one thing I would suggest is that each PC and each major NPC should probably have some sort of record of three key connections - Patron, Spouse, and Lover. Obviously, one or all of these could be empty. But the key is that each of these connects the character to one other NPC, serving to build a network of such. But that's as far as I got.)

Anyway, it's something to consider.

You Should Play This Character If...

A "GM trick" I've seen recently (though not for the first time), and one I really wish I'd thought of myself, comes from a one-shot game being run with pre-generated characters. In addition to the brief two-sentence background for the character, each has a three-point list of reasons why a player should want to play that character. Thus, without needing the player to understand anything about the mechanics of the game, it becomes easy for the players to select their character from the list provided. Very neat.

And that's all, really. Sometimes, everything that needs said can be said quickly!

Cancelled Before Its Time

I've placed my "Firefly: the Lost Episodes" game on an indefinite hiatus due to lack of interest in the upcoming session. This probably (though not definitely) means that it's at an end - it won't resume until after the house move, and after the house move I suspect that I'll be less keen to hold the game due to the travel involved.

Which in some ways is a perfectly appropriate end - just as Firefly itself was cancelled before its time, so too has my Firefly campaign come to an end. And, actually, I'm a little glad that it happened now, and not in two episodes time when we're deeper in the Westlake arc - I wouldn't want to start that and then drop the game.

Still, it's a shame. I actually really enjoyed the last session and I was just hitting my stride as far as building episodes for the game was concerned. But never mind - I can just add the remaining ideas back into my recycling pool.

Sequels, Adaptations, Remakes, and Star Vehicles

I'm not sure if it's really a new thing, but Hollywood films really seem to have become very conservative - almost every big film seems to either be a sequel ("Fast & Furious 7"), an adaptation ("Captain America: Civil War"), a remake ("Ghostbusters"), or occasionally a star vehicle (whatever the latest thing starring Johnny Depp or Tom Cruise is). You get the occasional exception, but if it's going to have the big bucks behind it, it seems it's going to be one of those four.

But are RPGs really any different? For a supposedly creative industry, there seems to be a remarkable lack of new things coming. And we most certainly have our share of sequels ("Shadowrun"), adaptations ("Firefly"), remakes ("Curse of Strahd"), and star vehicles (whatever the latest thing done by Monte Cook or John Wick is). Thinking back, I'm hard pressed to recall the most recent big-name game that wasn't one of those four - was it really as long ago as "Mutants & Masterminds"?

I suppose it has always been thus: in the early days the market was dominated by the "fantasy heartbreaker" - a D&D near-clone of one sort or another that basically had one good idea that set it apart. Later, it was d20 material that proliferated. And there have been plenty of sequels and adaptations along the way. I guess the star names are somewhat new... it wasn't until Gary Gygax left TSR and started making games for other people that that was even possible.

But is this it? Where's the new newness? Or is the industry now coming to an end, where innovation basically amounts to doing the same old things in slightly different ways, leading to inevitable stagnation and the end of days?

Also: get off my lawn!

Episodic Play

I was talking to Captain Ric at the weekend, and he asked if it had become normal for RPG campaigns to be structured more like TV series, with distinct episodes, and story arcs, and the like. Well, I don't know if it's the norm in RPGs in general, but it is true that I tend to structure my RPGs more in this vein these days.

There's a reason for that.

Back in the day, I used to play pretty much every week, generally on a Saturday afternoon for 6-8 hours at a stretch. (I suspect the length of the session is less important than the frequency and regularity of the sessions.) Campaigns would last for six to twelve months, or until we either suffered a TPK or rebelled against the concept.

What this meant in terms of game-play was that we'd sit down, play for a bit, and whenever the allocated time came to an end we'd just stop. (Actually, I'd time it so we'd stop either right before or just after an encounter - our stop times were somewhat flexible, so that was easy enough to arrange.) Then we'd pack up, and the next week we'd just pick up where we left off.

Needless to say, times have changed. These days, I play for 3 hours once every four weeks (in any given campaign). This means that I'm now both more conscious of the pressures of time on the game, and I'm also aware that events carrying on from one session to the next are much more likely to be forgotten in the meantime.

My solution to this has indeed been to adopt a much more episodic structure to game sessions, complete with breaking each session down into four loosely-defined acts. (Obviously, it doesn't always neatly follow that structure, and I retain a significant degree of flexibility, but I at least start with a baseline.)

It was then a short step from adopting a TV-like episodic structure to looking also at the way modern TV series link episodes. In particular, in shows like "Star Wars: the Clone Wars" and "24", there are very distinct three- or sometimes four-episode arcs: a plotline will be introduced in one episode, which then ends on a cliffhanger; it is then followed up in the next one or two episodes, which end on cliffhangers; and then it is concluded in a final episode. Which actually works particularly well in level-based games, because three sessions is an almost ideal length of time to stick at a single level - players get to try out most or all of their new goodies, get used to the new power level, and then the move on before they start to get bored.

Likewise, I now tend to very distinctly group sessions into "seasons" or "volumes", each with their own character. Which, again, rather neatly fits in with the tiers build in to D&D-like games in recent versions (either explicitly in 4e or 5e, or implicitly as in 3e or SWSE). And so the first volume covers the Apprentice tier (1-4), concluding with the PCs reaching 5th level. At which point the story moves on to a distinctly new phase for a second volume in the Heroic tier (5-10), and so on. (Though so far only "The Eberron Code" completed all three planned volumes, so it remains to be seen if that's really a winner, or if it was just a lucky outcome.)

(Incidentally, the pressure of time now means that I have little tolerance for in-build "time-waste" activities. Whereas once upon a time I would have been fine with R poring over the DMG for an hour to pick out just the right magic item for his character, I now want to streamline this as far as possible - if you want a particular item for your character, just assume he finds time to go to the market to buy it; don't expect me to roleplay the encounter! Likewise, if you can do levelling-up between sessions, that's much appreciated. Now that game sessions are compressed, I'd like to cram as much into them as possible!)

Anyway, that's where things stand at the time of writing. It obviously remains to be seen how, or if, things will change in the near future.