Dove City – Alex Drummond
So far we’ve been featuring fantasy heroes in this series, but of equal important, in my opinion, are the startling vistas of fantasy.
Alex Drummond‘s conception of a place called Dove City draws my eye into the misty depths of forgotten antiquity. I yearn to cross those bridges of stone and explore the byzantine chambers which lie behind those intricate walls of bas relief.
What do you think lies within?
A missing aspect from Technoir’s scenario structure is the scenario hook: The plot map will tell you what’s happening, but it won’t tell you how to get the PCs involved in it.
(To be clear: I’m not holding this against Technoir. The game actually provides quite a bit of guidance on how to motivate noir characters and includes a nascent structure by which the players will actually prompt you to give them the scenario hook. This is more than most RPGs do.)
But as you stare at your mission seed – madly brainstorming possible hooks – here’s my playtest tip: Set the PCs into immediate opposition with each other.
Here are some genericized examples of how I’ve done that:
As the PCs start fighting with each other, they’ll start generating strongly-motivated drama without you ever needing to lift a finger. Simultaneously, they’ll start spending push dice on each other, allowing you to build up a stockpile to hurt them with when the bad guys make their move.
A couple of things to watch out for with this technique:
First, the push dice economy of the game requires that the GM spend his push dice to get them back into the hands of the players. If the PCs are just fighting each other, this can be difficult to accomplish and the game will flounder as the push dice all become concentrated in the GM’s hands. You have to look for your opportunities (the bar patron who gets angry that his drink was spilled; the cops who don’t like having their time wasted; etc.) and try to find the moment when you can get them turned back to the main plot and introduce some threats to antagonize them.
Second, when the PCs go to their contacts asking for leads on each other, it can be tempting to think of this as being a “special case” that somehow doesn’t apply to your plot map. Don’t do that. Stick with the rules for generating your plot map: A lead can point them in the direction of the PC and be connected to the conspiracy.
The flip-side of that is that the PCs — occupied with each other — may not hit up their contacts for leads or information. If that happens your plot map can stagnate. In this scenario, a friend of mine with experience GMing Technoir recommends randomly generating a threat, figuring out what their agenda is, and then essentially running them in the background as an independent PC: This allows you to develop your plot map and figure out what’s going on. Once you’ve got enough pieces in play, you should be able to start using those to hook the PCs back into the conspiracy. (I’ll be giving this a try in the near future.)
The Barbarian – Viktor Fetsch
There is a very specific aesthetic I want to achieve with the art for Legends & Labyrinths. To keep myself on task, I drew up a list of artistic guidelines for the project. As guidelines, all of these would end up getting violated at one time or another, but for the most part they helped keep me on track.
Goal #1: No posing.
A lot of recent fantasy art has trended towards people posing for the imaginary camera. This has occasionally been used to good effect, but more often it results in flat and contrived imagery. It’s my belief that showing people in action — actually living in a land of fantasy and adventure — is not only more interesting, but also more effective at capturing the imagination of players and drawing them into the game world.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that every picture needs to be action-packed, but the fluid motion and sheer power captured in this painting by Viktor Fetsch immediately excited me.
IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE
SESSION 2A: WELCOME TO PTOLUS
March 18th, 2007
The 16th Day of Amseyl in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty
IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE
In which the darker side of Ptolus proves to be an addicting experience and the services of many are divided across shopping trips both past and present…
At the beginning of the campaign journal for this session, Tee shares the revelations she gleaned from reading through the Delver’s Guild membership papers. This is actually something that was resolved between sessions. In fact, I’ve still got the original e-mail from Tee’s player:
One thing that should probably be added to the journal is the matter of the ID papers. Everyone took their set that says they are members of Ptolus (I’d imagine that Tee would either keep Agnarr’s for him, or explain to him what it means so he can hold it himself) and the rest of the papers were placed in the secret compartment of Tee’s trunk, and the trunk was then locked (Tee now carrying the key with her instead of leaving it in her room).
I’m not sure what happened with the Delver’s Guild papers officially, though I would imagine that they were distributed and not locked up with the ID papers, as presumably they are not falsified. On a side note – Tee would have read through her set of Delver’s papers (you said there was a packet of information) and probably gone through the ID papers that night, to see all of the things we were “members” of, to try to keep a mental list in case they were needed later, and to see if we were all members of the same things.
I’ve found it can often be quite useful to end a session at the point just before the players are going to engage in a lot of “down time” activities. These activities can then be resolved at length, in detail, and at leisure through e-mail or other means. This conserves table time, allows for more detailed explorations of certain aspects of the campaign, and can also keep the players engaged in the campaign between sessions.
This particular e-mail from the player was prompted by an e-mail in which I sent out the campaign journal for session 1 and asked all of the players to, “Please take a look through it and let me know if you feel anything was misrepresented
or anything important left out.”
This is another aspect of keeping a detailed campaign journal: The process of review not only helps to keep the record accurate, it also helps to reinforce the players’ memories of the session for future reference.
Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to convince the players to actually read the campaign journal. So I’ve taken to secretly docking their XP by 50% whenever they don’t do it.
(No, not really. That’s just my way of seeing whether or not any of them are reading these essays. I’ve found that if players don’t want to engage in a campaign, you can’t force them to do so through punishments. You need to keep adding carrots and trying different techniques to see what will stick. And what sticks will often change over time.)
