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.

The Problem of Loot

Treasure used to be why adventurers did their thing. OSR games like ACKs try to reclaim this. See, back in 1e, your xp was linked almost directly to how much gold you were able to drag out of the specific necrotic hellhole you and your compatriots decided to go to. That's why you were adventurers. You dealt with kobolds, goblins and type VI demons because they had shiny gold, that you wanted to procure and spend on wenches, ale and strongholds.

This mercenary aspect faded away as time went on.

Folks like the RPG Pundit over at this link think that this is partially because of a change over to a more story or 'novel' approach to RPGs.

I kind of agree. I mean, 1e D&D gave the referee the express title of 'Dungeon Master' whereas modern games use a softer Games Master, or even Storyteller. A series of adventures in D&D was referred to as a "Campaign," Pathfinder RPG seems to prefer 'Chronicle.' However, the change from mercenary adventurers to story heroes, resulted in a problem.

That problem was loot.

See. Money can be exchanged for goods and services. When you want to procure it to spend on fortresses, nights with friendly company, buying off your father's house's mortgage or paying off gambling debts, that money is a pretty good motivator. The money is the end. Its what you're doing the stuff for.

In a story based campaign though, and most modern systems, money is a means. The hero in 1e who found 10,000gp in a chest had 'won' his adventure and would fill his pockets and run back home to spend it. The hero in pathfinder who finds 10,000gp likely spends it immediately on some item to use against the big bad, or to craft. These sound similar, but there's a major difference.

In 1e and OSR, you couldn't spend money on magic items, or stat boosters, or the like. Once you graduated past a certain point, money became something you horded up, or something you turned into businesses or castles, or the like. When you have 85k in the kitty, and a few beers and a night's company cost 100gp, you start thinking bigger and start buying land and saying 'to hell with spinning wheels.' ACKs actually made pissing your money away on stuff like lavish parties or fun trips a game mechanic for building up the xp of successor characters, making the point that gold is either used for something useful, or for xp even clearer.

Meanwhile, modern Pathfinder and D&D are mired by wealth by level. The idea that you should only be so rich at a certain level, because being able to buy magic items, devices, and the like results in you having a gear advantage over others. This causes problems because now things like truly impressive treasure hordes risk severely imbalacing the game.

In OSR if your party of adventurers took down a dragon and came to town with 250k each to their name, they'd either be parted with it by a collection of conmen, fritter it away, or discover that they had to find a good place to hide it. Or they'd retire.

So, our problem these days boils down to the fact that players want money, cool treasure and they want it in sufficient piles to justify their effforts, with the unfortunate irony that people don't seem to appreciate the glittering gold and precious baubles for what they are unless they can spend them to buy an upgrade to their magic armor.

We've got 17th level adventurers with zero liquidity these days. Its kind of weird. The OSR valued money above all else, modern adventuring seems to have no value for it at all unless its buying new weapons/armor/spells. On one hand, we have heroes who are only interested in the mercenary, and on the other we have ones who are walking poor except for having pants on that could bankrupt a small country.

I honestly have no idea how to 'fix' this though.