The Broken Road.

[matt_doyle]

THE BROKEN ROAD

 

So, this fall, after my now-epic-level Eberron game concludes, I'm starting up a new campaign. It's set in the Allotment, because I have had a lot of success before running games in worlds I have written about. On the one hand, the setting gets a lot of passion put into it, a lot of logistical detail that often escapes game settings, because the world-building has already been set up to support a narrative. There seems to be a kind of verisimilitude that players relate to very well. On the other hand, if there are holes in my world-building, a group of four or five dedicated, inquisitive, exploitative characters are almost sure to find them, which is a great help to the writing and to fleshing out odd details and twitches of setting.

 

The trick, of course, is chronology. When do you set such a game, to be certain that it doesn't interfere with the demands of your story? The two choices are after the novel or novels reach conclusion, and the story is safely finished... or far enough in the past that novel characters are unlikely to think or chat about campaign events, and the weight of history can shove any egregious hero-inspired changes back the way the author wants them.

 

I tend to choose the latter, both because I am then not left with the feeling that my PCs are fiddling with things just when I got them sorted out, and because it's a more concrete help to world-building to explore the past than it is to explore the future. In this case, my upcoming campaign, The Broken Road, is set two centuries before The Hellion Prince, during the long, prosperous, and decadent reign of a King whose subjects jokingly call him The King of Oats and Honey, for he is a major political force to be reckoned with, as autocratic as the Sun King, but immensely fat in his old age, and has sired children (in Antarion, all magically gifted children are automatically legitimized if their parentage is known) across the kingdom.

 

The party will be a patrol unit of newly-minted Royal Guardsmen. The Royal Guard is one of the few egalitarian, meritocratic institutions in the nation, permitting enrollment and advancement by both commoners and mage-lords . As the game begins, the party is about to embark on their first Long Circuit patrol, a sink-or-swim tradition that takes them out of the comfortable capital on a nine month tour of Outer Baronies, spreading the uneasy influence of central judicial authority to arbitrate legal problems and catch criminals that the local Barons and Baronesses cannot handle.

 

Given that The Hellion Prince is an England-analog with a roughly early-Georgian society (or if you prefer, since I always joke about it being a “regency romance,” Regence France), rolling it back 200 years gives me the England of Shakespeare and Queen Eilzabeth to work with, which pleases me to no end. One of the most important things for me in the Allotment is to have proportional world-building when it comes to my history – if the Allotment was settled 800 years before Hellion Prince by what were essentially exiled Roman rebels with sorcery, the society at time of settlement should resemble 1000 AD European cultures, and their development should have rational reasons for running along vaguely parallel lines and giving me an 18th-century Britain-doppleganger to work with. Obviously some handwaving is required, but I prefer to actually patch my history together as plausibly as I can, piece by piece, and so it will be interesting to explore the happenings of “The Elizabethan Allotment,” since that's a period of British history that interests me greatly. I'm not sure that I can get my players to declaim their dialogue in Shakespearean blank verse, but I can certainly dress them in period fashions and draw in tropes and situations from Elizabethan romance and drama, and I intend to.

 

Generally, though, this campaign is an attempt for me to take what I have learned about running a game, and apply it in new ways – hopefully both telling a more organic, character-driven story, and allowing me to learn something new. While I have a very vague outline, I do not yet have anything resembling a full plot for this game – nor do I want one before my four players have created their characters and back-stories, a process which we will all do together, exploring their psychology, their motivation, how and why they will mesh as a team, and making certain they have fully realized 'lives' outside the demands of plot. The Allotment setting has a lot of potential darkness and horror that I want to exploit, and to do that I want a party who values role-playing above expedient, mechanical triumphs, and who can act as a support system when other characters are dealt serious emotional wounds. I also want to know what the players most want out of a game, so that I have a better chance of delivering it to them. Politics or action? Crime-busting or creature-slaying? Faeries or Unfallen? Not that the options are binary by any means, but the more I know their goals and their kinks, the deeper I can draw them in, the more thoroughly I can satisfy them.

 

Originally I was also planning a lot of blather about the technical tomfoolery necessary to make third-ed D & D mechanics adapt themselves to the demands of the world, but I figured that post was more likely to bore my readership, so unless someone expresses an interest, consider it omitted. 

For that matter, is this game in general, as my players create their alter egos and as the story unfolds, something people would want to hear more about?

As always, I'm eager to hear from you.

Comments

[ankaret]

I would really like to read the D&D mechanics noodling, please.

I pretty much never have anything beyond the skeleton of a plot before I have players - so much of it needs to be worked round their backgrounds and what story they want to tell, that it just feels like making extra work for myself to decide anything more than 'OK, they're finding the bits of the magical doohickey and putting them together' or 'There's a Brujah/Gangrel war that's acting as a smokescreen for the real war under the surface' beforehand.

I'm fascinated by your reasons for using players to kind of beta-test a world you write in, because I always keep writing-worlds and RPG worlds very separate - I think it's because I keep fiddling about with the worldbuilding and changing names of places and dynasties all the way through the writing process, whereas if you tell the players that Vorn the Seventh is reigning in Aukentok, they've got a right to be a bit miffed when they discover that the capital's moved twenty miles north and is now ruled by Vorn the Fourth.

[matt_doyle]

Although I have DMed at least two games constantly for the last 9 years, my plots tend to be planned too far in advance, be improvised on the spot, or nonexistent. In part, this is because I actually have not run that many games -- but people tend to enjoy my games enough to stick with them from 1st level to 20th+, so they often run for 2-3 years.

My first game was far too overplanned, and then whenever there was a hole in the worldbuilding, I let my players railroad me into buying their interpretation of it without thinking through the ramifications. Despite everything, this worked out amazingly well, but it should not have.

My current epic game, which for most of its run consisted of two separate parties on parallel adventures, is wrapping up a three-year plot arc I improvised overnight -- an old friend had recently moved back into town, but was feeling left out of gaming, so I slapped together a campaign he could play in. Two weeks in, his work schedule changed so that there was no day that worked for both him and the existing party. Not wanting to dump them, I assembled a second party, riffing off my original improvised plot

My current Star Wars game, which I regularly recap, is infamous for having no DM-generated plot whatsoever. From the first session onward, I have asked the players what they wanted to do next week, and made sure there were plenty of available adventure hooks and setting details to choose from, but there is no plan beyond the vague ambitions and urgent whims of the party.

Other, shorter-lived games have had a mix of traditional narrative, character-generated motivation, and arc-planning, but it's a balance I am constantly tinkering with and restructuring.

I tend to approach novel-building and game-building in much the same way, in part because I post most of my fiction regularly online, and therefore there is some implied loyalty to draft continuity even in my fiction. And I definitely name most NPCs in advance -- back when I ran a Vampire: The Masquerade game set in the Twin Cities, I had a name and character sheet for every last Kindred in the metro area -- all 87 of them.

This was, obviously, overkill, but I definitely have an instinct to overbuild and contingency-plan too far in advance.

I'll get to work on the mechanics analysis later this week.

[ankaret]

You can get from 1st level to 20th in 2-3 years? I am most impressed. I'm... either two or three all-day sessions from wrapping up a D&D 3.5 campaign that borrows a lot from the Eberron setting after six years, and I have one seventeenth-level player and the rest are sixteenth. And I'm running a Pendragon on Tuesday nights which is coming up on its fifth anniversary and has so far covered sixty-five in-game years when the rules say you ought to be aiming for one adventure a year - my player group prefer more in-depth adventures, so I tend to give them a mixture of short adventures and longer ones.

I like having two games going at once, because it balances me - if one goes dramatically off the rails, at least I've got the other one.

I think on my feet reasonably fast, but I don't think I could do what you're doing with the Star Wars game - I need a bit of a structure in case I'm feeling off-form on the day and not up to generating NPCs on the fly.

Also, this post is making me realise how much I miss Vampire: The Masquerade. The group I regularly play with consists of people who overdosed on V:tM in the 90s and people who don't do horror, which isn't very promising, but I have recently been meeting a whole bunch of new blood via a Firefly LARP, so there's possibilities there. (Do you LARP, by the way?)

How did the 'two parallel parties' thing work out for you? I've never met anyone who managed to make that work for so long, but clearly you manage to do it, so I'm really intrigued.

[matt_doyle]

As for the timing: we gamed weekly, and sessions tended to run long, and I awarded roleplaying XP liberally... but yes, we legitimately went 1-20 in 3.5 years. This Eberron game will be the second time we have done so.

I do indeed LARP. I even, on occasion, Vampire LARP. Actually, about as often as not these days, I write and run the local LARP at conventions -- check out the tab in my sidebar called "Lightning Age" -- I'm currently writing the third part of a trilogy of steampunk LARPs for next year's Concordia Game-a-thon.

As for the parallel parties, I have seen it go well, and seen it go poorly. For me, it mostly went well, although as one partly was thorough and methodical and the other was slapdash and hurried, I almost never managed to match them chronologically so that they could interact. Both were investigating the same problem, but in different nations, with different methods, for different patrons... this lasted from level 1 until level 17, when I completed an arc with one of the parties right about when the players started leaving town, and wrapped up that half of the story. The remaining player migrated over to the other game... a change the players accepted without question, forgetting the timeline woes, so it took them four months to figure out that Mike was playing a deep-cover spy who had been surgically altered and implanted with the memories of his character, rather than the same character.

That was a deeply satisfying moment.

[matt_doyle]

Sidenote: looks like for some reason I have more things tagged as Lightning Age on LJ than I do here. I don't have the time at the moment to go back and tag 'em, but none of the posts are locked, so:

http://matt-doyle.livejournal.com/tag/lightning%20age

[matt_doyle]

Further sidenote: game mechanics post is up!