Campaign Planning: Summer 2014

Originally published August 8, 2014

So many things are changing. My local groups are on hiatus as my wife and I acclimate to our new family member. Sleep comes fitfully and in 2 hour blocks (if I'm lucky). But I still love to write and game so I'm enacting my long prepared parental gaming group protocol.

Okay Sebastian we have a lot of reading to do.

I started my online gaming group for many reasons. To collect my favorite roleplayers over the past decade. To ensure I had a gaming group wherever I moved. And as a plan for when I would be less able to have people over to game (or go to their places). In other words once I had a child.

As you can guess, I like to plan ahead.

Prospecti

As I have on many previous occasions, I gave my players a pair of campaign prospecti to consider. This time around there were two games I was interested in: a lengthy Apocalypse World game and a variant Trail of Cthulhu game. I asked my players to rate them on a -5 to 5 scale where -5 is loathing and 5 is wanting to play it right now.

Since these were pitches for the systems themselves, both take a bit from the introductory text of each game. Hope you enjoy:

Apocalypse World

Time counts and keeps countin', and we knows now finding the trick of what's been and lost ain't no easy ride. But that's our trek, we gotta' travel it. And there ain't nobody knows where it's gonna' lead. Still in all, every night we does the tell, so that we 'member who we was and where we came from... but most of all we 'members the man that finded us, him that came the salvage. And we lights the city, not just for him, but for all of them that are still out there. 'Cause we knows there come a night, when they sees the distant light, and they'll be comin' home. ~ Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome

Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint. Give me two and they'll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing we call 'society'. Give me four and they'll build a pyramid. Give me five and they'll make one an outcast. Give me six and they'll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they'll reinvent warfare. ~ Stephen King, The Stand

Nobody remembers how or why. Maybe nobody ever knew. The oldest living survivors have childhood memories of it: cities burning, society in chaos then collapse, families set to panicked flight, the weird nights when the smoldering sky made midnight into a blood-colored half-day.

Now the world is not what it was. Look around you: evidently, certainly, not what it was. But also close your eyes, open your brain: something is wrong. At the limits of perception, something howling, ever-present, full of hate and terror. From this, the world’s psychic maelstrom, we none of us have shelter.

In Apocalypse World, we collaboratively build a world brought to ruin. Things remain unsettled and the world is ever-changing. You characters comprise some of the most powerful and interesting people of this world. You might be the Hardholder, running the local community to an iron fist. You might be the Savvyhead, fixing the relics of the Golden Age and building new wonders to explore this strange world. You might be a simple Operator, doing odd jobs for barter or cash and struggling to keep your head above water. Perhaps you are the Skinner, keeper of some of the last bits of beauty in an ugly world. Or you might be the Brainer, gifted or cursed with psychic abilities and trusted by none. These and many other options are possible.

Your choices will determine the nature of what destroyed the world, how it is today, and the problems you will face. This would be a fairly long game, perhaps 20 sessions of more, which for Apocalypse World, with its rapid advancement and action, is a figurative lifetime (or two) for the characters. I want to really dig into the world we create, see what makes it tick, and explore what sort of society the survivors have carved out for themselves.

System: Apocalypse World
Inspirations: The Mad Max series, The Day After Tomorrow, The Stand, Divergence, Waterworld, Aeon Flux, The Book of Eli, Life After People

The concept of this game is one part Apocalypse World (AW) and one part Saga of the Icelanders. I want to know what kind of world these characters live in and I want to do it collaboratively. So the game is an experiment in collaborative world building.

At the same time AW deals with a chronic problem in my group: late or absent players. It allows me to focus on the action of the other PCs instead. The others can be caught up with Love Letters. Even better the game is low prep thus allowing me to maximize my gaming time.

Trail of Cthulhu

Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos. ~ From Beyond

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. ~ The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories

There exists a hidden prehistory, aeons where alien gods and monsters colonized the Earth and warred over our planet, unleashing cosmic science and inconceivable powers until continents sank and seas boiled. They lie eternal in submerged tombs, resting but not dead. Deranged cults and horrific bloodlines pay them homage, hoping to use their powers to their own ends.

You are among the few who suspect the truth – about the mad gods at the center of the universe, about the Great Old Ones who dream of clearing off the Earth, about the extraterrestrials who use mankind in their experiments, about the ancient legends of undying evil that are all coming true. You have to keep the doors to the Outside from swinging open – no matter what the cost in life or sanity. You have to piece together the clues from books bound in human skin, from eviscerated corpses covered in ichor, and from inscriptions carved on walls built before humanity evolved. You have to go wherever the answers are, and do what needs to be done.

But do you dare to follow ... the trail of Cthulhu?

This game would follow a group of investigators as they unravel the secret horrors of the world. Perhaps you are book-hunters retrieving occult books for unscrupulous cultists. Alternatively you might be heirs to a dark legacy called to your ancestral home to some unknown end. Or you may be tweedy academics involved in a series of scientific expeditions in Greenland. Unlike a standard Cthulhu Mythos game, I will not be using much of Lovecraft's established mythology. Instead I intend to build new monsters and gods for the game, filling in descriptions and connecting the dots with your input during play.

System: Trail of Cthulhu.
Inspirations: Lovecraft.

I love Lovecraft. I read almost everything he wrote when I was in 8th grade. But he's a bit dated and more to the point he is so overused that his monsters have lost their strangeness. Trail of Cthulhu provides some great advice for dealing with that but I want to do something more ambitious.

I want to build a horror mythology with my players.

Can it be done? Can horror be built collaboratively? I think so. I have a plan of leading questions, character filled details, and madness sparked connections. But I need to playtest it.

Results

Both pitches were well liked, helped I believe by being fairly different from my previous games with that group. Apocalypse World was a bit more popular so it won. It seems the idea of defining a society was the little bit extra needed to push it over the edge.

I'm excited. By the time this is posted we will have played our first session. As with my game the The Price, I'll be doing an Actual Play. Tune in two weeks from now to hear more.