I'll remember this one as "The Cedarwood Campaign" moving forward. It's a place I've wanted to explore for a long, long time, and one that's been in the background in a couple of the campaigns I've run recently. I pitched it as "The Black Company meets the end of the world" and I think we hit the high notes of that theme. Some of it went really well and we were able to end it on a high note. Most importantly, folks had fun, myself included, which is all you can really ask for. We played 22 sessions with two session 0s at an average of 6 hours per session. That puts us at about 144 hours which is more than Star Trek: The Next Generation.
I didn't need to draw the whole city, but I'm really glad I did! From the opening sessions, the map of the city was front and center and it continued to be a fantastic gaming aid up until the end. In fact, the end of the campaign centered on the city, specifically, defending it from the Forces of Darkness(TM). One of my biggest takeaways right now is that having this kind of prop is extremely useful when you need to improvise up an encounter at a moment's notice. The neighborhood maps also ended up being super useful as a worldbuilding exercise. Lots of the flavor of the game arose out of this exercise.
I'm not a film buff but there's a lot to learn from film in terms of framing scenes. I picked this up from the great Adam Koebel whose shows I watch regularly. This campaign was the first where I really tried to lean into that. It didn't all work out since I'm still learning the techniques and lingo but overall I think it made the campaign better. Also, I love saying shit like "this is where the special effects budget was blown for the episode," and "viewers who watched the first season would recognize...," which is aimed at the players who played in both. Nearing the end I used it to end scenes which otherwise may have overstayed their welcome. I think this is a thing I've been missing and I think it's improving my GMing. I do this in my online campaign, too, so I'm getting a lot of practice.
Along for the ride with the cinematics came a lot of "meta-gaming knowledge" which allowed me to present a lot more information than just what the PCs saw. I did a lot of lingering shots and internal monologues of NPCs which I think is a fun way to reflect the PCs' actions back to their players. I like showing things this way. It's making me think through visuals with a lot more clarity which in turn helps me describe what's going on. Most importantly: my players seem to enjoy the game being presented as a TV show complete with intro and end credit shenanigans.
The large cast of NPCs was a mixed blessing. I had plans and interesting pieces for each of them but we only really interacted with about a third of them and not all of the interesting NPCs were from this exercise. The ones that stuck were quite memorable (more below) but there were many that had almost no speaking lines at all. When you embark on these things you don't get to be sad when you don't use material you spent a lot of time on but didn't get screen time but I like to think that these characters added to the perceived pastiche of Cedarwood, The Company, and its members.
We will remember Throam Greybreaker as the greatest of these both in imagined size and in character. He had a great voice and speech pattern, basically me speaking as slowly as I can stand at the very bottom of my vocal range--it's a thing, and it's cool. A "business troll" from the start, Throam was a mob boss running a particularly sketchy piece of the city. I didn't intend for Throam to be a likable character but the players liked him well enough. It started with running jobs for him against a common enemy and ended up in formal alliance. When I narrated him out of the story in the epilogue, he had become a respected leader of the city--a voice of reason and stability as the world rebuilt from the war.
Two other standouts were Heofar the Mountain, a Kezhor Hand of Ilmar, a larger than life drunkard with a similarly sized personality and Reinwald the Unsteady, an elderly Word of Ilmar scholar with a bad limp. Both of them had fun voices and the places where I played Reinwald well, I think were some of my best acting moments in the campaign. Heofar was plain fun to play between heavily drinking most of the time to his dark humor, to narrating the graphic ways in which he dispatched his enemies. Apparently I'm good for a handful of memorable NPCs per campaign.
There were too many great moments in our not quite 150 hours but I'll leave a few of these here. Goodhands wrestled a sewer croc while zapping it with an electric damage shield. The meat of the croc was served as a stew in the PCs' adopted home: the Skylight Inn and Tavern. Despite the fact that I got shade thrown on my youtube channel, the PCs loved making dex and then reflex checks to catch the mugs of kobba slid across the bartop by Meat, an NPC who started as a PC. Wings named his rooftop scouts the "Up top division" which at one point resulted in a hilarious conversation between him and a former Ork skorcher named Rider. Goodhands once went on a serious bender which resulted in the infamous line: "I took a nap in the bacon."
I've run many campaigns and successfully ended six. I think I'll remember this one fondly and right now I think it's the best I've managed so far. Part of it was undoubtedly digging into the things I do and why I do them for youtube. Some of it was listening critically to Koebel working his magic. Some of it was shifting the game system around to a thing that does what I want better, but most of it was due to the awesome players I've gamed with over the last fifteen months or so. Thanks, guys!
No comments:
Post a Comment