subplotkudzu | The Second Prospectus

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campaign prospectus

The Second Prospectus

I branched out a little in this one, producing some very off beat campaign ideas but obviously didn't do a good enough job explaining them, which combined with the players gravitation to GM directed games with questions of "it sounds...interesting, but what would we do?"

I also did some, er, campaigning. I explained to one player that the Trek game was really based on the SF game I had toyed with a few years back that she had been really enthused about, and this time she gave a very similar description a much higher rating, which ultimately put it over the top.

The Russia Campaign Book 2: Pilgrimage for D&D (A2, S3, K3, J4 = 12)
Maksyn's worst winter in a generation is finally ending. Clues that Reuvin pulled from discovered texts indicate answers to the old Boyar's madness might be found in Constantinople. How hard can it be to reach the center of Eastern Orthodoxy, evade the besieging Turks, find what you need in the city's literally Byzantine bureaucracy, avoid the war and return to solve the mysteries beneath this unassuming Russian village?

An option for the Russia Campaign, this one leads you headlong into the defining war of the 15th century. Constantinople is still a city of vast knowledge and impressive magic. Heading there might make the resolution of the Apocalypse Tapestry easier. All you have to do is survive. Obviously, part of our ongoing D&D campaign.

The Russia Campaign Book 2: Descent for D&D (A2, S4, K3, J3 = 12)
Maksyn's worst winter in a generation is finally ending. Months of practice and strange new companions make opening the door in the seashell tower a possibility. The Reptoids have fled below, into the depths that drove the old Boyar mad and inspired the images on the Apocalypse Tapestry. Dare you follow? Dare you not? What waits below is known only to God and the Kindly Old Woman of the Forest, and neither reveals much.

This is the second of the two Russia options, which has you plunge directly into the caverns below the mines below the church below the Mad Boyar's basement. There are serious threats below, but you have stout hearts, strong limbs, nimble fingers and unshakeable faith. What's the worst that could happen? Again, this is our ongoing D&D setting.

Star Trek: Old Life, Old Civilizations for ST:RPG (A2, S4, K3, J3 =12)
The USS Carter, a Miranda class science vessel, navigates the ancient stars of the Alpha Quadrant, seeking out survivors of Earth's centuries old slowboats, exploring the ruins of vanished races and contacting new cultures that live amongst these shadows out of time. Archaeologists & explorers, diplomats & defenders, the they learn the galaxy's history so that the newborn Federation need not be doomed to repeat it.

Very early Trek, concurrent with Captain Pike on the Enterprise, with 4 main crew, a small secondary cast and a lot of red-shirted extras dealing with archeology and diplomacy in space. Each session is a discreet story tying into a short season, and combines both SF and Space Opera elements using the ST:RPG. If this is a success, we may return to it.

He Sang Real for Over the Edge(A3, S1, K1, J4 = 9)
The Green Nights are a hard rocking bar band with members from across the country staying one step ahead of their personal pasts. Life can get strange on that road; stuff happens that button-down men can't understand. You do the best you can, making a lot of music, doing a little good and grabbing some fun along the way. So set up the instruments, down the complimentary beer and get ready to rock.

It's the Monkees meets the Fugitive, as conceived and written by Tim Powers. Sure, it's strange, but it's a Tim Powers novel. It's *supposed* to be strange. The game engine is Over the Edge (which is both dirt simple and wonderfully weird), and it's a complete story in one arc.

Sterling's Game for FUDGE (A1, S2, K1, J3 = 7)
In the year 2009 the full promise of electronic connectivity & virtual reality are coming true for the EU. Pressure is building for England to finally abandon its beloved pound and buy into the Euro. That leaves a very small window for cunning group of thieves and con men to make a fortune in transition. Four thieves, nine figures, one sterling opportunity. Don't believe them when they say it can't be done.

Here's a con game inspired by The Sting, Oceans 11 and Entrapment. It's a complete story in one arc, starting with recruiting the team and ending with each getting either 30 million pounds or 30 to life. The game engine hasn't been built - FUDGE with cyber-tech, netrunning and Dramatic Editing included.

Voices in the Twilight for Godlike (A1, S2, K1, J3 = 7)
World War III wasn't so much a nuclear annihilation as it was a land slog in Eastern Europe with some radiation and bio-chem weapons. The reality is that you're cut off behind enemy lines in Poland and the USA has just decided to exit the war. The unreality is that something has happened to you...you can hear the future, see thoughts and taste the truth. For people who can move things without touch, is getting home really out of reach?

The "Twilight 2000/Psi-world crossover" idea I've played with for several years. While the setting might seem grim, I'll be using the slightly pulpier Godlike engine rather than T2K's bloody realism and the objectives are hopeful: can you get home, and how can your strange new gifts rebuild a shattered world? There is a potential sequel to this one.

This round of voting showed one of the weaknesses in my point system, in that three of the choices were tied with the same voting numbers. This means I got to pick my favorite of the three, but I still wish for a clearer mandate from the players. This might not be possible with such a small pool.

In any event, this one game a few new observations. The gratifying one is that Jason just likes every idea I put forward. The second is that by querying the players I can tailor ideas that didn't sell last time into ones that do sell, illustrated by the shift from 'the First generation' to 'Old Lives, Old Civilizations'. The third is that I can't trust that my players are going to share my pointless eccentric knowledge, as 3 of the 4 didn't catch the Arthurian Myth references in 'He Sang Real' - was trying to shroud it a little so there'd be some unfolding mystery in the setting, but in the pre Da Vinci Code days I was being a little too obscure.

The continuing observation is that the players again gravitated strongly to the GM-directed games: both of the D&Ds did well, and ST is very clearly GM directed, with either the problem planet of the week or orders from Starfleet. I broke in favor of ST and am very glad I did.

Trek was a shock for the players because while it was GM directed in what the problem was, it was entirely player directed in how to solve it. They had vast resources at their disposal, but no one to immediately turn to and no excuse to run away: out on the frontier, they were the Federation. The players really enjoyed the game, but ended each session feeling a wee bit wrung out.

Still, this experience left me thinking that if I were to give them a directed goal, I might be able to get them to take control of how to get there, freeing up some of the GM directed tendencies. And on to Prospectus 3.

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I don't think that the independant character creation had anything to do wtih the game going FUBAR. I do think that player inexperience with the genre, coupled with a bad reference point, played a major role, at least for two of us.

ashacat and I had not (and have not) read any of the X-Men comics. This left only the movies for reference, with the one that had come out just then featuring a massive goverment attack on the X-Men -- black helecopters and all.

So, Asha and I were primed for an "us vs. the government" game, and when the first interactions with the local opposition had government entanglements (even if it was just the Illinios department of child welfare), that just confirmed the expectation. With that loaded in mind, all of the other items (a prison camp, tech with out serial numbers, mystery drugs) just fell right in to the pattern we walked through the door with.

We (Asha and I) also shared a strong sense of being herded along much too fast. Our characters were nowhere near thinking that the next logical thing was to form a supers team and build a secret base. We were much more in line to be street-level supers for a while. This led to a situation where what we the players had our PCs doing was aligned with what we knew the GM expected us to do, and what the game system expected us not to do, rather than what we thought the PCs would actually do. Honestly, both of us thought that Roulette was the only person on the stage who had a clue as to what was going on, and we would have followed him had it not been abundantly clear that he was supposed to be THE VILLIAN.

I don't think that the independant character creation had anything to do wtih the game going FUBAR. I do think that player inexperience with the genre, coupled with a bad reference point, played a major role, at least for two of us. ashacat and I had not (and have not) read any of the X-Men comics. This left only the movies for reference, with the one that had come out just then featuring a massive goverment attack on the X-Men -- black helecopters and all.

Now that problem I understand. I once set out to run a campaign set in E. R. Eddison's Renaissance high fantasy world of Zimiamvia. One of the five players read the books and loved them; one was vaguely aware of them that had not read them; two tried to read them and couldn't get through the first one (they're written in very dense, archaic prose); one didn't even try. So what I got was a mix of swashbuckling adventure with Shakespearean comedy, ranging roughly from As You Like It to A Midsummer Night's Dream. Fun in its own way, but nothing like what I had planned on, and there was a fair bit of thrashing along the way.

And if I had committed to running the game for 2 years as you do, or decided to keep it going for the remaining 4 months, we probably would have done something similar -- thrashed out something that ultimately did not resemble any source material. I only recently realized that one main problem was that I was running a supers game but that two of the PCs were walking in with SF attitudes. Psis lean towards SF, the big government conspiracy is a staple of SF, and in SF technology and guns are useful. Not quite so true in Supers, but the two are close enough that early on you can miss the signs.

Independent character creation didn't help, and likely did hinder, if only because it prevented a focus of vision. All of you walked into this with different impressions of what these characters were supposed to do, and give them different backgrounds and skill sets from that. What could have been considerable overlap was turned into some helpful commonality, but a huge chunk of the first session was 'how the heck can we get these people together?' and even then it was a stretch. We stitched it up well -- the one good thought experiment from the game -- but it burned a lot of time and energy and diluted the focus.

As for the Massive Government attack and such, guilty as charged. I really should have loaned you a swath of X-Men comics to counterbalance things. I played into your other expectations in play, and the villains were as heinous as they were, because of a sheer lack of prep work on my part. I don't deny I'm bearing a lot of the brunt from this. lots of comic book stuff (the not killing, the fact that guns are sucky weapons, etc.) didn't translate, but are built right innto the mechanics. I have commented in A&E that one of the problems with the game was that I was setting up a supers game and at least 2 of the players were playing an SF one.

As for the herding too fast, I can understand how you might think that, but I did list that as part of the game: if this is the X-men from the movies, they have a large, fairly bucolic base. They deal with the large threats of renegade mutants and attempts to wipe out human kind. The X-men aren't street level heroes, so I wasn't expecting that and didn't think you had signed up for that. And if we had had a group character creation system, some of these expectations would have been a lot clearer.

Roulette didn't have a clue what was going on - his clue was entitled "they're trying to kill us so we should kill all of them", and he managed to be in the right place at the right time because he's a precog, not because he has good data. Yes, he was sympathetic and helpful and charming to you, you're other Psis. You're his people. And one of the points of a player directed game is to not turn to the NPC who seems to have a clue what's going on and follow his lead. Once I had the revelation that forced Roulette off the stage you guys did have some thoughts on how to get your own accurate information, but at that point the stress fractures from the other disconnects were starting to show.

But all told, yes, there were huge group communication issues here, and getting back to my contention I think one reason for those is a group leaning towards GM directed games. We didn't naturally fall into a player directed one, and I suspect that had Karen not been present the voting wouldn't have produced one, even with that player-directed slate.

As for the herding too fast, I can understand how you might think that, but I did list that as part of the game: if this is the X-men from the movies, they have a large, fairly bucolic base. They deal with the large threats of renegade mutants and attempts to wipe out human kind. The X-men aren't street level heroes, so I wasn't expecting that and didn't think you had signed up for that. And if we had had a group character creation system, some of these expectations would have been a lot clearer.

I have two thoughts on how this might have been made to flow better.

First, is to run with the fact that we were starting with raw origins ... let the group rummage around for two or three sessions, and realize that they need to get organized. Then do a two to five year time-slip and pick up after the bucolic institution has been built...

Second, it may have flowed better to start in media res, with all of the infrastructure already in place. If we look at the Aquarius game (Brian's 'once in a while' aquatic supers game), all of the pieces were there already -- the sup, the labs, the corporation -- and it made a natural transition to being Super Eco Defenders when we got our powers.

2¢l

... let the group rummage around for two or three sessions, and realize that they need to get organized. Then do a two to five year time-slip and pick up after the bucolic institution has been built...

I did something vaguely related with my campaign set in Middle-Earth after Sauron caught Frodo and took the Ring back: The first two sessions were prologue, showing where each character was in Middle-Earth, how they experienced the impact of Sauron's victory (one of Elrond's sons regaining consciousness near Cirith Ungol with no memory of who he was; a Gondorian noblewoman taking her younger brother North for safety two days ahead of Sauron's hordes coming in; a hobbit escaping from slavery in the conquered Shire), and how they came to be together. I guaranteed the players that their character would live through the prologue and start play with unmodified character sheets. That meant that I could spend those sessions on graphic exposition, with a panorama of Sauron's Victory.

That sounds like quite the game. :-)

"First, is to run with the fact that we were starting with raw origins ... let the group rummage around for two or three sessions, and realize that they need to get organized. Then do a two to five year time-slip and pick up after the bucolic institution has been built..."

Well, given that we were at the end of session 2 I thought we might have done that, but I see your point. You had actually dealt the Firebrands a considerable blow at that point so there wasn't much else to do in Chicago, but giving you another session to figure that out might have helped -- but not without a discussion like the one we're having now.

"Second, it may have flowed better to start in media res, with all of the infrastructure already in place. If we look at the Aquarius game (Brian's 'once in a while' aquatic supers game), all of the pieces were there already -- the sup, the labs, the corporation -- and it made a natural transition to being Super Eco Defenders when we got our powers."

That would have been purpose defeating to my goal of having a player-driven game where you built something, however. The goal of the Aquarius Odyssey was for a high Wonder supers game that might introduce some of the genre rules (and you still outright nixed secret IDs and costumes!). The pre-existence of EMS Exploration was a vehicle for that sort of story; the building of the Micah Foundation was the stated goal for the Psi-Men game. (Or at least, I thought I had stated it; in retrospect, maybe not.)

Now I'm getting all nostalgic about it! I was all set to have my character be a reluctant and internally conflicted director of the whole thing ... maybe I can rework that notion for some other game, some time.

Yeah, because nothing makes sure the game moves forward smoothly like the director bing reluctant and conflicted! The more we has this out the more I think it might be possible to chainsaw off the end of the second session (or maybe even leave it) and come back to this with a better set of mechanics and mission statements. After all, we did leave the game at a point of partial resolution.

I have already engaged some of the A&E crew to see if I could make Hero suit the purpose, or if I can gt Jim to run something in GURPS so I can internalize the system it might serve. One thing that's clear is that the Marvel system's hard coded 4 color morality and neutered conventional weapons is not going to serve.

Yeah, because nothing makes sure the game moves forward smoothly like the director bing reluctant and conflicted!

Hey, it's not as bad as all that! Damara's only just, you know, had to rearrange her ENTIRE LIFE because of all this. Sure, in a way it's partly the same charitable stuff she was doing before, and she's got plenty to keep her busy, but still. And then there's the GUILT. Since she's just not a naturally violent person, any need for violence will always cause her trouble - and she'll avoid it if at all possible. Plenty of room for conflict within the group over that, I suspect ...

the building of the Micah Foundation was the stated goal for the Psi-Men game.

The problem wasn't so much the goal; we got lost in the getting there.

This has happened to games I've played in where the GM's vision just hasn't translated into the players actions or vice versa. Sometimes the situation allows the game to just move in a different direction but in situations where the disconnect is severe we have pulled the rug. I think the most important thing is to have a very clear shared vision from the outset but how often does that happen realistically?

Your post mortem is very healthy as it allows you all, players and GM, to air what went wrong from your own perspective and to try to learn from it and avoid it happening again.

I'm getting the impression that the game is salvageable as none of the players are screaming 'No, no never again!'in which case I hope you have fun.

This so went over my head. Since, this was my first jaunt into your gaming world, I will admit that I was to some extent following everybody elses lead.

player-directed vs. GM directed - I would have needed a big lesson on that. My previous experiences would not have begun to have let that notion enter in to my head.

I was on board with the "Conspiracy" theory also. I found it particularly had to wrap my brain around not killing people. Which sounds weird when typing it. My point is that role-playing for me is fantasy based and when you see the enemy you kill it.

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The Second Prospectus

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