Thinking Ahead

[subplotkudzu]

 I know I still owe myself a GURPS character, but prep work for yesterday's Hufflepuff & Ravenclaw gave plus some crises at work took up too much time. I have noodled around with it, making some attempt to merge the Techo and Kinetic templates from GURPS Supers under the "where No Man Has Gone Before" lens, but GURPS is always so damn intimidating because of the breadth of unique options making me afraid I'll miss something vital. 

This post isn't about that, however. I just want to share a campaign concept for my next prospectus, which is still some long time away (I already know that after I finish the current six month stint it's back to Emirikol and, quite probably, Old Lives, Old Civilizations). But after reading the disappointing Two O'Clock Eastern Wartime I wanted to steal the setting, but no aspect of the story: 

Gone To Soldiers, Every One: It's a hard time for WBG, the coastal Maine radio station, but in 1942 it's a hard time for everyone. All the men of combat age have joined the army and the station is struggling to get by with a staff of older men, teens and women. It's a hardship that is crushing some but letting others blossom, and the station owner is audaciously trying to expand its offerings to keep creditors at bay. News has to be broken, radio dramas written and performed, and the airtime filled. Lurking in the background are spies and saboteurs, gangsters and gunmen, and the every present threats of a country at war. 

I love the idea on a conceptual level, but I'm not sure I have enough to really fill a 6 -9 episode arc. Part of it is that it's just not a story that is usually told in an RPG. I have a strong suspicion that it will take no more than a session or so for it to turn into a nazi-agent hunting expedition with little to no radio content, just because that's a more standard adventure/mystery format. 

Has anyone had real luck with smaller, more personal stories of business and personal growth as the core of a campaign rather than the frosting on an adventure/mystery cake? And if not, why is it that such stories work so well for other serial fiction but are tackled so seldom in this one? 

Comments

[doc-mystery.livejournal.com]

I think that there is real need for such lower-level or personal adventure stories in RPGs, where the bad guys aren't in the same league as a mad-man with a word-shaking threat.

I'm thinking of the villains in the old Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew or Rick Brant stories, where the bad guys are small fry industrial spies or gem smugglers or counterfeiters. Stories where you don't need someone of the caliber of Doc Savage or The Shadow to thwart, but still need to be dealt with with someone who can use their brains better than bullets.

In the movies you have A-list and then B-movies, films without the biggest budgets for scripts or actors or writers. Maybe there's room for B-adventures, where Joe Anybody can be the hero? This was one of the charms of Call of Cthulhu where even mundane scientists or cops or librarians, none with a lot of fancy combat skills or gadgets, could be the heroes.

As for your 'Radio Station at War" idea (I have the Dunning book but I haven't read it; why does it suck?) you may want to throw in such fun as the other players have to come up with some of the radio scripts by improving furiously (making it a game inside a game).

In the hokey but fun modern B-movie "The Radioland Murders" there's death afoot in another 1940's radio station on opening broadcast night you may want to check out for possible ideas. "Lady of Burlesque", while not set in a radio show but a Burlesque show, had a similar theme of death haunting a public venue where performances were going on, and some of the performers had to turn amateur detective to save their own necks.

I've also included some ideas you may find worth borrowing from my "Radio Heroes" pulp campaign write-up, listed at the bottom of my Pulp Avengers essay (http://www.fantasylibrary.com/lounge/pulpavengers.htm).

FREX, one idea from the above "Radio Heroes" campaign skeleton that I've always wanted to use was a radio show airing a blood and thunder radio serial pretending to be real. Unfortunately some folks in the listening audience in real trouble converge on the studio headquarters of the radio show begging for help from the very surprised persons airing the show. Naive villains thinking that the fictious radio hero(es) are also real and a possible threat to their plans would make preemptive strikes against the show, and as a result drag the PC heroes into bizarre plots that they would otherwise remain happily ignorant of.

::B::

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I definitely had that as the dominant theme of my recent campaign Manse. It wasn't quite the dominant theme of Oak and Ash and Thorn, but it was at least one side of the dominant theme; when I plunged five British teenagers into Faerie, I envisioned Faerie as a real of wild passions with little balance, much like adolescence, and the personal changes the five characters went through were as much the core of the story as the external events that catalyzed them.

For a different non-adventure/mystery campaign, my First Contact focused on diplomatic negotiations with a technologically advanced alien race that showed up in the solar system in the 1930s.

I've got campaign logs for all three of them; drop an e-mail if you'd like to read them.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, if you decide to pursue this, I suggest taking a glance at Marge Piercy's novel, Gone to Soldiers. Despite the title, it gives a fair bit of attention to civilian life; years ago I came up with the slightly inaccurate tagline "World War II as seen by twelve Jews and a lesbian." It may give you a helpful fictional model.

[(Anonymous)]

A couple of thought responses, bulleted because I haven't time to work them into something more coherent.

- AFAIK, you are the only gamer I have met who thinks of RPGs as "serial fiction."

- Role-playing how someone gets through a day at their ordinary job means knowing a lot more about the setting and the character than role-playing a fight (usually) does. That means a lot of work on the part of a player, unlike reading something similar, where the author has kindly done it all for us.

- I suspect that most of us just don't get off on such cerebral pleasures as observing the inner growth of a character we're rping. (Or don't think we would, at any rate, as I am sure relatively few even try.) Most of us would rather waste bad guys and save the world; while such entertainment may be relatively gross, the rewards are at least familiar.

OK, maybe that's a bit cynical....

Bec