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.
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