The Retrospective Campaign: Its Not As Bad As It Seems

Another major take away from the campaign I learned, or rather relearned is that well.. The players don’t see the flaws, just the product.

There was a part where my players were racing through the darkened corridors of an ancient starship, forced to fight through legions of evil weapon-ghosts while pursued by a being of pure hate and needing to contend against technological horrors before finally coming to grips against the dueteroantagonist and the worse-than-demon evil creature that was assisting her.

In my head I was picturing the dark corridors, a mixture of agoraphobically open and surrounded by the press of enemies and the necrotic flesh of the betrayed dreamers of ages past, or racing through narrow corridors fighting the corpse lit atrocities of past weapon wielders in tiny, dark chambers.

And it turned into well..

Me having to make maps using the Dark Omen set from Chrono Trigger, a few odd tokens here and there, and people making Ultima references when one of the opponents (A Pathfinder Gray Goo) was construed as them being attacked by THE FLOOR.

The battles were tough, but overcome. And when the bad guy was defeated through a mixture of weathering her nonsense and making appropriate conversation checks and I felt defeated. I was worried I hadn’t properly conveyed what I wanted to. My reach exceeded my grasp! My animation budget ran out and I had to use quick shots of Japanese kanji and have two of my characters stand on an elevator for two minutes without a frame change.

The players loved it though. Unironically. They loved the fight with the floor. They loved being chased up an elevator shaft by a Nightshade. They liked the pressure of a certain number of turns ‘til disaster.

They felt the final battle was climactic and awesome.

And the reason for this came from one of my players. They weren’t inside my head. They didn’t see what I failed to accomplish. They only saw what was actually there.

The important take away on this is that while you shouldn’t cut corners, the players will appreciate what you do give them. You want to give them the Michellin star treatment, but you’re not that good. Not everyone has the time, budget and like to give the Hollywood D&D experience. You need, as a DM, to learn to not only incite, but also trust in your players’ imaginations.

The Retrospective Campaign And Where Spook's Been

Well there’s been a lot going on  in my life in the last six months. Work, that thing that provides the money that I use to buy things to eat and such, has been a bear. Also, all of my work for SKM it seems is going for naught as the players have moved on to other stuff.

I still plan on finishing the rule set and trying again eventually. I put this much work into it, and I’d feel bad about trying to sell it since I don’t want to step on people’s proprietary toes.

However, as I want to have actual content for people to read.. So I’m going to unpack my experiences a bit in this and a few other posts..

Firstly, the background though and a full summary of the campaign.

The game started a few years ago, it was a Pathfinder game that started shortly after the Advanced Class Guide came out. We started with, what’s honestly, too many players. About eight of them.

I’ve previously detailed the total party composition back in the post ‘Campaigns I have Run’ back..well..last year. Yeesh, it’s been that long?

Anyway, the premise of the campaign was the heroes having to deal with two primary threats, defeating them, and in so doing progressing the story of my campaign setting a bit more.

As this is the first post I plan to make about this, I want to unpack the concept of how to plan a narrative campaign. I bring this up because well, a lot of people these days are focusing on a return to the sweet wonder that is the OSR and its purely emergent storytelling. Some players still want the narrative planning experience. And the trick to that is to figure out what your main themes are.

Themes, you see, are more important than events. You end up riding the plot train a bit too thoroughly if you decide to have your players re-enact your badly written fiction instead of letting them play and get engaged on their own.

Themes also assist you in determining how events play out, what will ‘happen next’ and so on.

A guiding set of themes I built this campaign around were ‘The Importance of Letting Things Go,’ ‘Death Is Not The End,’ ‘Change,’ ‘Things Passing Away’ and ‘There Is No Such Thing As Being Neutral Between Good and Evil.’ Almost all of the villains, in one way or another, were focused on trying to hold onto things they shouldn’t have, control, power, love, and so forth, and the misapprehension of a lesser good for a greater one, is one of the classics for making a villain who’s an utter jerkass but who you can still understand.

The beauty of building from themes (as opposed to from a map, or a plot) is that it lets you roll with the punches quite well, and you can adapt to a lot more possible events (player caused and emergent) while still knowing what you want to get across.  A course correction to make sure a given NPC stays alive, or dies, or has a big noble last stand, are generally jarring to a player, but if you’ve done your work on consistently theming, then when events seem to keep resulting in consistent occurrences based on those themes, it’ll actually reinforce the importance of player agency.

The theme will also help you when it comes to dungeon designs, objectives, and so forth. In a long campaign you’re going to have to make stuff on the fly. It’s just how it works.

To the Courts: On the witness stand

A major problem that DMs have with mystery and intrigue situations, is the question of liars.

Players tend to believe information NPCs tell them, even when its bad guys, because all of the information being provided by the NPCs, in a way, comes from the DM. As the DM is the one who provides the world for them, it’s understandable that they have trouble taking into account that a mouthpiece of the guy who basically is their eyes and ears, might be totally BSing them.

In my experience, I’ve noticed that players have a binary approach to the prospect of lying NPCs as a result. Some decide if a guy is trustworthy or not, some think that evil people always lie, and some just assume whatever information they hear is somehow correct. What a lot of players really have trouble with, is inconsistencies.

The Innkeeper’s daughter from our prior scenario, she might genuinely not know where the Accused was while she was being visited by the town guard who claimed to see him. She might lie and say the guard was at his post, not wanting him to get in trouble or reveal their relationship. She thinks she saw the accused sneaking around outside at 7am (it was actually someone else). She’s entirely certain that the accused isn’t guilty though because she saw him in a situation where he could’ve used the supposedly stolen item. She does however think he was under a charm spell.

 She might be entirely ignorant about some details, lie about one topic, be wrong about another, be entirely forthright with a third, and be honest but mislead on a fourth.

This is because information is a webwork. Especially in a court case scenario where you have to figure out the holes in people’s stories and prove them. The daughter’s statement that she saw the accused at 7am for example might be grabbed onto by the party as a lifeline (tying in with the timeline stuff I mentioned before) only to have it organically yanked out from under their feet by the king’s prosecutor. This might wrongly lead the party to believe the character is lying about everything though, and that’s again, where the problem comes up.

The DM really, really needs to try to make it clear that characters know what characters know, and their personalities, worries, and relationships effect how they convey and interpret information they see. It’s important to get a handle on this because this is where the real meat of a mystery, intrigue or court scenario is.

In your notes, it’s helpful to make entries about characters indicating what they do know, don’t know, and what they’ll say or lie about. This is because players may interrogate on topics besides what you planned for, and those topics, unexpectedly, may in fact give the players the edge they’re looking for.