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subplotkudzu
Well, that was a lot of work. Worth it, but a lot of work. As always, it’s interesting to see where the players diverged from my planning and what that did to the plot. For example, here’s the view from 5000 feet for book 1
Hearts & Minds and the Monster of Amristar: a group of adventurous first year students (aided and abetted by a Prefect) discover a that two old allies of Grindelwald intend to perform a ceremony at Hogwarts that will extend one of their lives and keep him hidden - the other one has already done so, and could be anyone at the school! The ceremony involves replacing, perhaps evicting, the soul set to inhabit the body of their Muggle Studies teacher's impending child, due at the end of the term. An innocent soul is at stake!
In researching their enemies, the students learn of a defunct secret club on campus - the Hearts and Minds - dedicated to protecting the safety and dignity of the British Wizarding Empire and its subjects. Its members very often became Aurors, politicians and diplomats. After assisting in the capture of the fugitive, the PCs are able to form the Hearts & Minds for a new generation.
This more or less conforms to what happened, with one glaring exception: the players didn’t give two hoots about the old club or the origins of the enmity between Slaughter & Kettleburn. They never questioned 19-year-old Kettleburn chasing Slaughter in the 1940’s. They never learned that Sprout, Kettleburn & Flitwick were parts of a world spanning secret club, as was Professor Fogherty (the Hufflepuff door painting). They never discovered that study rooms in both Hufflepuff & Ravenclaw’s dorms held mirrors enchanted to lead to the mirrored greenhouse, where the club once met, and that the mirrors held the club’s journals. They just ignored every clue and hint that such a thing was going on. And with that my driving operational paradigm for the campaign – the reason why the PCs would work together on such mysteries – never appeared.
And clearly was never needed. With the sibling bonds between the PCs and the limited number of Hufflepuffs (1.17 when you account for Lachlan’s only being in one session) I didn’t need the contrivance to connect the two houses. The players were all more than willing to let the general bond of PC’s friendship keep them all together. Just as well, really. Here are my notes to myself before the start of session 3
Chapter 9 3/4: Reworking: This chapter is the one where we discuss how the GM has to pivot away from his old plans and replace them with something better. It's pretty clear now that the Hearts and Minds club is something that I'm not going to be able to fit into this book, and I clearly need a better name for it. But in any event, the players are ticking along just fine on their own and I have several things I need to force in to their investigations this session already. With only 5 hours around the table I just don't have the time to get into it.
That actually frees me up some for the second book, as the mystery of the old club parallels the 50 year old problems of the Chamber of Secrets. Add that to the Mandrake Root and the Centaur romance and we have enough, I suspect, for the book. This means that chapters 10+ will have some things excised out of them, and I might come back to this spot to add more comments as they come to me.
In any event, I have 5 hours of game time and 5 major things to get across – the monster in the library; serving detention or otherwise discovering the kobolds; Easter Break (this might overlap with kobold discovery if there isn’t a detention) and the siege of Panama; the Importance of Being Earnest; the big wrap up. Anything that doesn’t actively advance that is out the door (unless it’s something I need to introduce Jason).
As was discussed earlier, session 3 had problems with the players vastly over thinking the problem with the library beast and trying to tie it to the other plot. It was intended to be a Norbert analogue – something that ate up book time with neat color that was only tangentially related – but they dithered on it forever. Fortunately Jasmyn quite properly got herself a detention so I was safe on that score.
It’s clear from my notes that I was still in love with the Hearts and Minds concept at that point, and I didn’t give up on it until a week before session 4 and the start of book 2. Indeed, you can see that the whole serial picture concept of book 2 wasn’t even a gleam in my eye, but I was putting in the clues for the mandrake root as the monster & preparing for the Daisy-Firenze romance. I really wanted to use a mandrake as a monster since their appearance in Chamber of Secrets – I loved Rowling’s anthropomorphizing of the roots, especially Sprout’s reference to being able to tell that they were mature when they started climbing into one another’s pots. Such mandrakes would clearly grow to mobile human-oids if left to their own devices, and could be dangerous.
As late as a week before session 4 I had settled on using Varney the Vampire as DADA teacher, so he might be accused of being the vampire that stalked the grounds. But it never quite fit in my head. As I mentioned to Josh it was reading about Daniel Day Louis’ obsessive preparation for a role that suddenly crystallized Professor Louis Night to me, and with that everything else fell into place: the serial pictures concept and how it worked with Goblin property law, and how that tied in with the ownership of the school now that the last heir of Slytherin was dead. It got in an ancient Slytherin conspiracy, and gave me a DADA teacher who was as much a photonegative of Lockheart as the competent, passionate Chrysalis Briar was of Quirrell. Pushing the end of year 1 into session 4 let me drop hints about goblin property rights into Daisy’s OWLs with no one being the wiser. It also meant killing my baby in Hearts and Minds. Ah well.
and the Root of All Evil: A group of adventurous second year students (aided & abetted by a Prefect) discover that the school is threatened by a millennia old Goblin plot, dating back to the school’s founding. In the midst of this students begin experiencing lethargy and finally collapse as an apparent Vampire stalks the grounds – possibly even striking down one our heroes! Still, they are able to persevere, finding the clues they need in the notes of Professor Binns, the advice of the oldest of Centaurs and trivia memorized for the Witches Bowl.
I’m gathering that my synopsis predates Night as it doesn’t mention the serial picture plot at all. But the rest of my pre-session notes have him. I mention all this just because I’m amazed at how the plotting mind works, playing with and abandoning ideas as new ones come along, modifying things on the fly. And the longer you run games the more adept you are at that sort of planning.
If the HP books have a beat structure it is this: the first quarter of the book is Harry’s “Hideous Roald Dahl Family Life”, with some minor foreshadowing. The next quarter is Diagon Alley, the trip to the school and the introduction of a DADA professor, with the outside edge of the problem. The next quarter brings the threat into the open and shows the PCs wasting time on side adventures (such as Norbert) false assumptions (Draco is the Heir of Slytherin!) and bad plans. The final quarter starts with an infodump of key data and a relatively rapid resolution of the plotline. It varies a little bit, but that’s the core of it – the misinformation quarter can take up as much time as needed to have the book end with the school year (CF book 6). Add quidditch matches to taste. For my purposes I just ignored the first quarter of each book, as none of the PCs had a HRDFL. I was happy to see it gone. The other quarters each worked into a nice structure for a 3 session per book game.
I provide all this information by way of showing you how my players threw me off stride in …Root of all Evil. In my planning for the fifth session I had expected the players to spend much more time trying to figure out what Peri was up to in regards to the vamp, likely culminating with them somehow sneaking into Slytherin dorm. I had introduced two new methods – oniermancy to dream into Peri’s dreams or astral project, the Svivoimlo’s Bane potion to reduce size and sneak in through the air vents – in addition to another argusato use, but instead they didn’t try that at all. Daisy sent Regan in instead, which was bound to not work on the general rule that you don’t send an NPC to do a PC’s job. Daisy knew she had gotten bad information, but let it drop. They weren’t pursuing a pointless side quest!
This is not to say that the PCs didn’t find things to do in the 5th session – they just weren’t plot directed as such. They were spreading out into the world more, the sort of thing that Tom would have preferred and that would have happened if I had dedicated all 6 sessions to a single year.
Chapter 7 ¾: Time for my reassessment of events for the final session. Here’s the short form of where things stand: They have done next to nothing to find out what Peri and Luci are up to. They know they’re up to something, but their investigation has been limited to sending in Rowan (who promptly got memory charmed by the two younger students). They know that someone is masquerading as Juliet, but have not yet determined that it is a Homunculus. In fact, they have no evidence in this direction. Pollux is looking into ways to completely map the castle so that he might locate where the mystery orders came from. This is as good a plan as any to move things forward on that front. Pollux’s research into alternate magic, including African ones, will reveal that Goblins don’t have ghosts, and can’t readily distinguish ghosts from living wizards, a key plot point. I never did get to discuss the lack of funds for the students over Christmas break. This needs to be stressed. Daisy is writing to Owen to get more info on this issue.
I want to stress the two other points in which the players diverged from my plans. First, they never put together my preferred solution to the Goblin’s plot. Did you? It was, of course, that the Goblin claim to the school was predicated on the belief that with Voldemort’s death the last heir of the four founders was dead and hence the building reverted to its Goblin builders. However, Scotog was unaware until the arrival of his agent, Knarlhump, at the school that the Grey Lady was the ghost Helena Ravenclaw, daughter a founder and goblins can’t discern the difference between a live wizard and a ghost. Hence the Grey Lady’s comment “No one is really dead if they can still speak their mind.” This explains why Knarlhump sent the mandrake to kill the Grey Lady – an action that the players did not investigate, or even wonder what the cry was, why it registered danger to Juliet’s warning charm, or how the ‘vampire’ might have incapacitated a ghost. The players clearly remembered the ghost fact for use in the final battle, and knew about the school origins, but never questioned the attack on the Grey Lady to connect the dots. Thus we had to fall back on the alternate plan of Owen & Alyssa finding the books to implicate Scotog. I was happy with this as well, as it made the two returning NPCs heroic in their own way.
The second, and more noticeable, was that they turned a villain into a party member. I had pictured Rowan as being both put upon and vicious, lashing out with the mandrake to secure her goal of the part in the play, then being found out by Knarlhump, who would make her stop until he directed her to attack the Grey Lady. She would use that connection to weasel out of the consequences of her earlier actions, both using the Chamber of Secrets plot of a student controlling the monster and turning it on its head. I introduced her at the start of session 4/end of book 2, then revisited her in Diagon Alley, and to my amazement Castor decided that it was his master plan to…get Rowan the part in the movie. He was going to give her support, friendship & facilitate her exact goal in a way that would prevent her from becoming evil.
She made her attacks anyway, but rather than appearing cunning in not killing her targets to allay suspicion she came across as doing minimal harm. Rather than being discovered and converted by the true villain she could come out the victor in a crisis of will, abandoning her monster in favor of embracing her friends! And Knarlhump could still get the talisman from one of the house elves under his control! The players had unknowingly saved her soul! Her shyness and fear of losing her friends let me push off her revelation though several players told me they got suspicious with her stressing for total absolution early on.
Since the PCs hadn’t dealt with Peri that became another thread for session 6; the failure to resolve that unconnected mystery made the main one appear more complicated. It did give me the opportunity to again mirror the book, with the school thinking that the monster had stolen a student when it had done nothing of the kind. Here’s the advantage of prep work & advance plotting – the players did something that should have forced me off the rails and I was still able to turn it back to mirror the source.
Finally, I just grooved on Night inhabiting the Crypt Raider role for the main battle. Rachel told me that as it happened she felt that his strapping on a second wand should be silly, but somehow wasn’t. My initial image of the heroes falling into formation behind him was the end credits of Buckaroo Banzai; players not familiar with that movie likened it to the heroes riding into town in Silverado. Still cool.
